Sam sat on a wooden bench in a large garden behind the hospital building. She took off her glasses. She closed her eyes. She tilted her face toward the sun. She breathed in the fresh air. The bench was in a walled-off area, a water fountain trickling by the gated entrance, a sign reading SERENITY GARDEN – ALL WELCOME mounted directly above another sign showing a cell phone with a red line through it.
Apparently, the second sign was enough to keep the garden empty. Sam alone sat in serenity. Or at least in an attempt to regain her serenity.
A mere thirty-six minutes had passed between Stanislav abandoning her at the front doors and Sam abandoning Rusty in his room. Another thirty minutes had passed since she had found the Serenity Garden. Sam had no qualms about interrupting her driver’s lunch, but she needed time to compose herself. Her hands would not stop shaking. She did not trust herself to speak. Her head ached in a way that it had not in years.
She had left her migraine medication at home.
Home.
She thought of Fosco stretching his back into a reversed C as he lolled on the floor. The sun streaming through the windows. The warmth of the swimming pool. The comfort of her bed.
And Anton.
She allowed herself a moment to think about her husband. His big, strong hands. His laughter. His delight in new foods, new experiences, new cultures.
She could not let him go.
Not when it mattered. Not when he had asked her, pleaded with her, begged her to help him end the misery of his existence.
Initially, the fight was one that they had taken on together. They had traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, back to Sloan Kettering in New York. Each specialist, each world-renowned expert, had given Anton anywhere from a seventeen to twenty percent chance of survival.
Sam was determined he would best those percentages.
Photodynamic therapy. Chemotherapy. Radiation therapy. Endoscopy with dilation. Endoscopy with stent placement. Electrocoagulation. Anti-angiogenesis therapy. They removed his esophagus, raising his stomach and attaching it to the top of his throat. They removed lymph nodes. They performed more reconstructive surgery. A feeding tube was placed. A colostomy bag. Clinical trials. Experimental treatments. Nutritional support. Palliative surgery. More experimental treatments.
At what point had Anton given up?
When he had lost his voice, his actual ability to speak? When his mobility was so reduced that he lacked the strength to shift his frail legs in the hospital bed? Sam could not recall the occasion of his surrender, did not take notice of the change. He had told her once that he had fallen in love with her because she was a fighter, but in the end, her inability to quit had prolonged his suffering.
Sam opened her eyes. She put on her glasses. A wave of blue and white hovered just beyond the reaches of her narrowed right peripheral.
She told Charlie, “Stop doing that.”
Charlie came into her line of sight. Her arms were crossed again. “Why are you out here?”
“Why would I be in there?”
“Good question.” Charlie sat on the bench opposite her. She looked up into the trees as a light wind rustled the leaves.
Sam had always known she had inherited Gamma’s striking features, that obtuse coldness that chilled so many people. Charlie’s affable countenance stood in direct opposition to their mother’s line. Her face, even with the bruises, was clearly still beautiful. She had always been so clever in the way that made people laugh rather than recoil. Relentlessly happy, Gamma had said. The kind of person people just like.
Not today, though. There was something different about Charlie, an almost palpable melancholy that seemed to have nothing to do with Rusty’s condition.
Why did she really ask Ben to email Sam?
Charlie leaned back on the bench. “You’re staring at me.”
“Do you remember when Mama brought you here? You broke your arm trying to save that cat.”
“It wasn’t a cat,” Charlie said. “I was trying to get my BB gun off the roof.”
“Gamma threw it up there so you couldn’t play with it anymore.”
“Exactly.” Charlie rolled her eyes as she slumped down onto the bench. She was forty-one years old, but she might as well have been thirteen again. “Don’t let him talk you into staying.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.” Sam looked for her cup. She had purchased some hot water at the cafeteria along with a sandwich she’d been unable to finish. She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside.
Charlie said, “We have tea here.”
“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water. She had a quiet moment of panic when she saw her bare ring finger. Then she remembered that she had left her wedding ring at home.
Charlie did not miss much. “What is it?”
Sam shook her head. “Do you have children?”
“No.” Charlie did not return the question. “I didn’t bring you here to kill Rusty. He’s going to do that to himself eventually. His heart isn’t good. The cardiologist basically said he’s one strained bowel movement away from death. But he won’t stop smoking. He won’t cut back on the drinking. You know what a stubborn jackass he is. He won’t listen to anybody.”
“I can’t believe he hasn’t done you the courtesy of drawing up a will.”
“Are you happy?”
Sam found the question both odd and abrupt. “Some days are better than others.”
Charlie tapped her foot lightly against the ground. “Sometimes, I think about you all alone in that shitty, cramped apartment, and I just get sad.”
Sam didn’t tell her that the shitty apartment had sold for $3.2 million. Instead, she quoted, “‘Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy.’”
“Flannery O’Connor.” Charlie had always been good with quotes. “Gamma was reading The Habit of Being, wasn’t she? I had forgotten all about it.”
Sam had not. She could still recall her surprise when her mother had checked out the collection of essays from the library. Gamma had openly disdained religious symbolism, which ruled out most of the English canon.
“Dad says she was trying to be happy before she died,” Charlie said. “Maybe because she knew she was sick.”
Sam looked down at her tea. During Gamma’s autopsy, the medical examiner had discovered that her lungs were riddled with cancer. Had she not been murdered, she likely would have been dead within the year.
Zachariah Culpepper had used this as part of his defense, as if a few more precious months with Gamma would have meant nothing.
“She told me to look after you,” Sam said. “In the bathroom that day. She sounded so strident.”
“She always sounded strident.”
“Well.” Sam let the string from the sachet hang over the edge of the cup.
Charlie said, “I remember how you used to argue with her. I could barely understand what either of you were saying.” She made talking motions with her hands. “Dad said you were both like two magnets, always charging against each other.”
“Magnets don’t charge; they either attract or repel depending on the alignment of their north/south polarity. North to south, or south to north, attracts, whereas north to north or south to south repels.” She explained, “If you charge them, I am assuming he meant with some type of electric current, you’re only strengthening the magnet’s polarity.”
“Wow, you really proved your point.”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“Don’t be a dumbass.”
Sam caught her eye. They both smiled.
Charlie said, “Fermilab is working on neutron therapy protocols for cancer treatment.”
Sam was surprised her sister followed that sort of thing. “I have some of her papers. Articles, I mean. They were published.”
“Articles she wrote?”
“They’re very old, from the 1960s. I could find references to her work in footnotes, but never the original material. There are two I was able to download from the International Database of Modern Physics.” She opened her purse and found a thick stack of pages she had printed out this morning at Teterboro airport. “I don’t know why I brought these,” Sam said, the most honest words she had uttered to her sister since she’d arrived. “I thought you might want to have them since—” Sam stopped there. They both knew that everything else had been lost in the fire. Old home movies. Ancient report cards. Scrapbooks. Baby teeth. Vacation photos.
There was only one picture of Gamma that had survived, a candid shot of her standing in a field. She was looking back over her shoulder, staring not at the camera, but at someone standing off to the side. Three-quarters of her face was visible. A dark eyebrow was raised. Her lips were parted. The photo had been on Rusty’s desk at his downtown office when the red-brick house was consumed by flames.
Charlie read the title of the first article. “‘Photo-transmutative Enrichment of the Interstellar Medium: Observational Studies of the Tarantula Nebula.’” She made a snoring sound, then thumbed to the second article. “‘Dominant P-Process Pathways in Supernova Envelopes.’”
Sam realized her mistake. “Maybe you can’t understand them, but they’re nice to have.”
“They are nice. Thank you.” Charlie’s eyes scanned back and forth as she tried to decipher some meaning. “I only ever feel stupid when I realize how smart she was.”
Sam had not remembered until this moment that she had felt that way her entire childhood. They might have been magnets, but they were of unequal power. Everything Sam knew, Gamma knew more.
“Ha,” Charlie laughed. She must have read through a particularly dense line.
Sam laughed in turn.
Was this what she had missed over the years? These memories? These stories? This easiness with Charlie that Sam had thought died along with Gamma?
Charlie said, “You really do look like her.” She folded the pages and put them beside her on the bench. “Dad still has the photo on his desk.”
The photo.
Sam had always wanted a copy, but she was too proud to give Rusty the pleasure of doing her the favor.
She asked, “Does he really think I’ll stand up and defend someone who shot two people with a gun?”
“Yes, but Rusty thinks he can talk anybody into anything.”
“Do you think I should do it?”
Charlie considered her answer before speaking. “Would the Sam I grew up with do it? Maybe, though not out of any affinity for Rusty. She would be angry the same way I get angry when something isn’t fair. And I guess it’s not fair, because there’s not another lawyer in a hundred miles who will treat Kelly Wilson like a human being rather than a burden. But what would the Sam you are now do?” She shrugged. “The truth is that I don’t know you anymore. Just like you don’t know me.”
Sam felt a sting from the words, though they were all true. “That’s fair.”
“Was it fair to ask you to come?”
Sam was unaccustomed to not having a ready answer. “Why did you really want me here?”
Charlie shook her head. She didn’t respond immediately. She picked at a loose thread on her jeans. She let out a heavy breath that whistled through her broken nose.
She said, “Last night, Melissa asked if I wanted her to take extraordinary measures. Which basically means, ‘Let him die? Don’t let him die? Tell me right now, this minute.’ I panicked, but not from fear or indecision, but because it felt like I didn’t have the right to decide on my own.” She looked up at Sam. “The heart attacks felt like something that I had to fight against. I know he did it to himself with the smoking and drinking, but it was a situation where I felt there was an internal struggle, something organic, from within, and I had to help him fight it.”
Sam recognized the feeling from Anton. “I think I understand.”
Charlie’s tight smile was disbelieving. “I guess if it comes down to the wire again, I’ll lock you in a room with him and you can take him out with your purse.”
Sam was not proud of that moment. “I used to tell myself that the one redeeming feature of my temper is that I have never struck anyone in anger.”
“It’s just Dad. I hit him all the time. He can take it.”
“I’m serious.”
“You almost hit me.” Charlie’s voice went up, a sign that she was forcing lightness into something dark. She was referring to the last time they had seen each other. Sam could remember the terror in Ben’s eyes as he had stood between her and Charlie.
Sam said, “I’m sorry about that. I was out of control. I could have hit you if you stayed. I can’t honestly say that wasn’t a possibility, and I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry.” Charlie didn’t say the words in a cruel way, which somehow made them more hurtful.
“I’m not like that anymore,” Sam said. “I know it’s hard to believe, given my earlier behavior, but there’s something about being here that brings out the meanness in me.”
“Then you should go back to New York.”
Sam knew that her sister was right, but for now, just right now, in this scant moment of time with Charlie, she did not want to leave.
She took a sip of her tea. The water had gone cold. She poured it out on the grass behind the bench. “Tell me why you were at the school yesterday morning when the shooting started.”
Charlie pressed together her lips. “Are you staying or going?”
“Neither should affect what you tell me. The truth is the truth.”
“There are no sides. There’s only right and wrong.”
“That’s a very neat logic.”
“It is.”
“Are you going to tell me about the bruises on your face?”
“Am I?” Charlie posed the question as a philosophical exercise. She crossed her arms again. She looked back up at the trees. Her jaw was tight. Sam could see the muscles cording through her neck. There was something so remarkably sad about her sister in that moment that Sam wanted to move to the bench beside her and hold her until Charlie told her what was wrong.
Charlie would be more likely to push her away.
Sam repeated her earlier question. “What were you doing at the school yesterday morning?” She didn’t have children. There was no need for her to be there, especially before eight in the morning. “Charlie?”
Charlie’s shoulder went up in a half-shrug. “Most of my cases are in juvenile court. I was at the middle school asking for a letter of recommendation from a teacher.”
That sounded exactly like the kind of thing Charlie would do for a client, and yet, her tone had an edge of deception.
Charlie said, “We were in his room when we heard gunfire, and then we heard a woman screaming for help, so I ran to help.”
“Who was the woman?”
“Miss Heller, if you can believe it. She was with the little girl by the time I got there. We watched her die. Lucy Alexander. I held her hand. It was cold. Not when I got there, but when she died. You know how quickly they turn cold.”
Sam did.
“So.” Charlie took a breath and held it for a moment. “Huck got the gun away from Kelly—a revolver. He talked her into giving it to him.”
For no reason, Sam felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck straighten. “Who’s Huck?”
“Mr. Huckabee. He was the teacher I was seeing. For the client. He taught Kelly—”
“Mason Huckabee?”
“I didn’t catch his first name. Why?”
Sam could feel a shaking sensation churn through her body. “What does he look like?”
Charlie shook her head, oblivious. “Does it matter?”
“He’s about your height, sandy brown hair, a little older than me, grew up in Pikeville?” Sam could tell from her sister’s expression that she was correct. “Oh, Charlie. Stay away from him. Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Mason’s sister was Mary-Lynne Huckabee. She was raped by that guy—what was his name?” Sam tried to remember. “Somebody Mitchell from Bridge Gap. Kevin Mitchell?”
Charlie kept shaking her head. “Why does everyone know this but me?”
“He raped her, and she hanged herself in the barn, and Dad got him off.”
Charlie’s shocked expression revealed a sudden awareness. “He told me to call Dad. Huck, Mason, whatever he’s called. When Kelly was arrested, the police were being, well, the police. And Huck told me to call Dad to represent Kelly.”
“I guess Mason Huckabee knows what kind of lawyer Rusty is.”
Charlie looked visibly shaken. “I had forgotten about that case. His sister was in college.”
“She was home for summer break. She drove down to Bridge Gap with friends to see a movie. She went to the bathroom, and Kevin Mitchell attacked her.”
Charlie looked down at her hands. “I saw the pictures in Daddy’s files.”
Sam had seen them, too. “Did Mason recognize you? I mean, when you asked him for help with your juvenile offender?”
“We didn’t talk much.” Again, she gave a half-shrug. “A lot was going on. It happened really fast.”
“I’m sorry that you had to see that. The little girl. With Miss Heller there, it must have brought back memories.”
Charlie kept staring down at her hands, one thumb rubbing the joint of the other. “It was hard.”
“I’m glad you have Ben to lean on.” Sam waited for her to say something about Ben, to explain the awkward moment between them.
Charlie kept working the joint of her thumb. “That was funny, what you said to Dad, about another hole in your head.”
Sam studied her sister. Charlie was a master at skirting around a topic. “I’m not usually given to crude language, but it seemed to sum up the mood.”
“You sound so much like her. Look like her. Even stand like her.” Charlie’s voice got softer. “I felt this weird kind of thing in my chest when I saw you in the hall. For a split second, I thought you were Gamma.”
“I do that sometimes,” Sam admitted. “I’ll see myself in the mirror and—” There was a reason she did not often look in the mirror. “I’m her age now.”
“Oh, yeah. Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
Still, Charlie did not look up. She kept wringing her hands.
Their adult selves might very well be strangers, but there were certain things that age, no matter how cunning, could not wear away. The slope to Charlie’s shoulders. The softness in her voice. The quiver in her lip as she fought back emotion. Her nose had been broken. There were bruises under her eyes. The easiness she had shared with Ben had become noticeably discordant. She was plainly hiding something, perhaps a lot of somethings, but just as plainly she had her reasons.
Yesterday morning, Charlie had held a dying little girl, and before midnight, she had learned that her father might die—not for the first time, undoubtedly not the last time—but this time, this one time in particular, she had gotten Ben to email Sam.
Charlie had not asked Sam here to help make a decision that she had already made once before.
And Charlie had not reached out to Sam directly, because even as a child, she was always asking for things that she wanted, never for the things that she needed.
Sam turned her face up to the sun again. She closed her eyes. She saw herself standing at the mirror inside the downstairs bathroom at the farmhouse. Gamma behind her. Their reflections echoing back from the glass.
“You have to put that baton firmly in her hand every time, no matter where she is. You find her. Don’t expect her to find you.”
Charlie said, “You should probably go.”
Sam opened her eyes.
“You don’t want to miss your flight.”
Sam asked, “Did you talk to this Wilson girl?”
“No.” Charlie sat up. She wiped her eyes. “Huck said that she’s low functioning. Rusty puts her IQ in the low seventy range.” She leaned toward Sam, elbows on her knees. “I’ve met the mother. She’s not bright, either. Just good country people, since we’re doing Flannery O’Connor today. Lenore put them up in a hotel last night. Inmates aren’t allowed to have visitors until after they’re arraigned. They must be frantic to see her.”
“So it’s at least diminished capacity,” Sam said. “Her defense, I mean.”
Again, Charlie shrugged with one shoulder. “That’s really the only strategy in any of these mass shooting cases. Why else would someone do that if they weren’t crazy?”
“Where is she being held?”
“Probably the city jail in Pikeville.”
Pikeville.
The name felt like a shard of glass in her chest.
Charlie said, “I can’t take the arraignment because I’m a witness. Not that Dad had any ethical qualms, but—” Charlie shook her head. “Anyway, Dad has this old law school professor, Carter Grail. He retired up here a few years ago. He’s ninety, an alcoholic, hates everybody. He can fill in tomorrow.”
Sam forced herself up from the bench. “I’ll do it.”
Charlie stood up, too. “No, you won’t.”
Sam found Stanislav’s card in her purse. She retrieved her phone. She texted him: Meet me out front.
“Sam, you can’t do this.” Charlie nipped at her heels like a puppy. “I won’t let you do this. Go home. Live your life. Be that less mean person.”
Sam looked at her sister. “Charlotte, do you really think I’ve changed so much that I’m going to let my little sister tell me what to do?”
Charlie groaned at her obstinacy. “Don’t listen to me. Listen to your gut. You can’t let Rusty win.”
Stanislav texted back: FIVE MINUTES.
“This isn’t about Rusty.” Sam put her purse on her arm. She found her cane.
“What are you doing?”
“My overnight bag is in the car.” Sam had planned to stay at the Four Seasons and visit the Atlanta office tomorrow morning before heading back to New York. “I can have my driver take me to the police station or I can go with you. Your choice.”
“What’s the point of this?” Charlie followed her to the gate. “I mean, seriously. Why would you do anything for that stupid asshole?”
“You said it before. It’s not fair that Kelly Wilson doesn’t have someone on her side.” Sam opened the gate. “I still don’t like it when things aren’t fair.”
“Sam, stop. Please.”
Sam turned to face her sister.
Charlie said, “I know that this is hard for you, that being back is like drowning in quicksand.”
“I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.” Charlie put her hand on Sam’s arm. “I would’ve never let Ben send that email if I had known how much this would affect you.”
“You mean because of a few slurred words?” Sam looked at the winding, paved path that led back to the hospital. “If I had listened to the doctors about my limitations, I would’ve died in that hospital bed.”
“I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m asking if you should.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind.” Sam could think of only one way to end this conversation. She closed the gate on Charlie, telling her, “Last word.”