Sam sat in the back seat of a black Mercedes, clenching and unclenching her hand around her phone as the driver merged onto Interstate 575.
Two decades of progress had done its damage to the North Georgia landscape. Nothing had been left untouched. Shopping centers had sprung up like weeds. Billboards peppered the landscape. Even the once-lush, wildflower-lined medians were gone. A massive, reversible toll lane cut through the center of the interstate, catering to all the pickup-driving John Boys who drove down to Atlanta every day to make money, then drove back at night and railed against the godless liberals who lined their pockets and subsidized their utilities, their healthcare, their children’s lunches and their schools.
“We be another hour, maybe,” Stanislav, the driver, relayed in his thick Croatian accent. “This construction—” He made a wide shrugging gesture. “Who knows?”
“That’s fine.” Sam stared out the window. She always requested Stanislav when she was in Atlanta. He was the rare driver who understood her need for silence. Or perhaps he assumed that she was a nervous passenger. He had no way of knowing that Sam was so used to being in the back seat of a black sedan that she seldom noticed the road.
Sam had never properly learned how to drive a car. When she had turned fifteen, Rusty had taken her out in Gamma’s station wagon, but as with most family-oriented tasks, he had soon inundated her with work excuses that permanently forestalled Sam’s lessons. Gamma had tried to take up the slack, but she was an incessantly picky driver, and an outright caustic passenger. Add to the mix that both Gamma and Sam were explosive, corrosive arguers, and in the end, they had agreed that Sam should start driver’s ed during her fall semester in high school.
But then the Culpepper brothers had shown up in the kitchen.
While other girls Sam’s age were studying for their learner’s permit, she was busy trying to re-establish the connections between her toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, buttocks and hips with the hope of learning how to walk again.
Not that mobility was her only obstacle. The damage done to her eyes by Zachariah Culpepper was, to use that word again, mostly superficial. Her lingering sensitivity to light was an easily solvable issue. Her tattered eyelids had been stitched back together by a plastic surgeon. Zachariah’s short, jagged fingernails had pierced the sclera, but not the choroid or the optic nerve, the retina or the cornea.
The thief of sight was a hemorrhagic stroke, subsequent to a congenital cerebral aneurysm rupturing during surgery, that had damaged some of the fibers responsible for transmitting visual information from Sam’s eyes to her brain. Her vision corrected to 20/40, a threshold for driving in most states, but the peripheral vision in her right eye fell below twenty degrees of vision.
For legal purposes, Sam was considered blind.
Fortunately, there never seemed to be a need for Sam to drive herself. She took cars to and from the airport. She walked to work, or to the market, or to various appointments and social gatherings in her immediate neighborhood. If she needed to go uptown, she could hail a cab or ask Eldrin to book a car. She had never been one of those New Yorkers who claimed to love the city but couldn’t wait to escape to the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard the moment they were able to buy a second home. Sam and Anton had never even discussed the possibility. If they wanted to see open water, they could go to Palioxori or Korčula, not trap themselves in the cloistered equivalent of a Manhattan Disney beach vacation.
Sam’s phone vibrated. She hadn’t realized she was holding it so tightly until she saw her own sweat on the margins of the screen.
Ben had been sporadically updating her since Sam had emailed back last night. First, Rusty was in surgery, then he was out of surgery and in the ICU, then he was back in surgery for a bleed that had been missed, then he was back in the ICU again.
The latest update was the same she’d seen before the plane had taken off:
No change.
Sam looked at the time. Ben had tracked the Delta flight number that Sam had provided him. His email came ten minutes after the scheduled landing time. He had no idea that Sam had lied about the flight number as well as the flight itself. Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had a corporate jet that was kept available for partners by level of seniority. Sam’s name was not yet on the stainless steel sign opposite the elevator doors, but the contracts had been signed, her buy-in had been wired, and the jet was made ready the moment she’d had Eldrin place the call.
But Sam had not left last night.
She had looked up the number of the early Delta flight to send to Ben. She had packed a bag. She had emailed the cat sitter. She had sat at her kitchen counter. She had listened to Fosco snore and grunt as he settled on the chair beside her, and she had cried.
What was she giving up to return to Pikeville?
Sam had promised Gamma she would never return.
Though if her mother had lived, if Gamma was still inhabiting the higgledy-piggledy farmhouse, surely Sam would have returned at Christmastime, perhaps even holidays in between. Gamma would have driven down for dinners in Atlanta when Sam had business in the city. Sam would have taken her mother to Brazil or New Zealand or wherever Gamma wanted to go. The break with Charlie would not have happened. Sam would have been a proper sister, sister-in-law, perhaps even an aunt.
Sam’s relationship with Rusty would likely be the same, if not worse, because she would have to see him, but Rusty thrived on that type of adversity. Maybe Sam would have too—in that other life, the one she would have lived had she not been shot in the head.
Sam would be able-bodied.
She could be running every morning rather than swimming her lackadaisical laps. She could walk without pain. Raise her hand in the air without wondering how high it would reach that day. She could trust her mouth to clearly articulate the words in her head. She could drive herself up the interstate. She could relish the freedom of knowing that her body, her mind, her brain, were whole.
Sam swallowed back the grief that sat at the base of her throat. She had not indulged herself in these what-if scenarios since leaving the Shepherd Spinal Center. If she allowed herself the luxury of sadness now, she would become paralyzed.
She looked down at her phone, skimmed up to Ben’s first email.
Charlie needs you.
He had found the one phrase that would make Sam respond.
But not quickly. Not without considerable equivocation.
Last night, after finally reading the email, Sam had hesitated. She had paced the apartment, her leg so weak that she had started to limp. She had taken a hot shower. She had steeped tea in her mug, tried to do her stretches, attempted to meditate, but a niggling inquisitiveness had chewed at the margins of all her procrastinations.
Charlie had never needed Sam before.
Instead of texting Ben the obvious questions—Why? What’s wrong?—Sam had turned on the news. Half an hour had passed before MSNBC reported the stabbing. They had very little information to offer. Rusty had been found by a neighbor. He was lying prone at the end of the driveway. Mail was scattered on the ground. The neighbor had called the police. The police had called an ambulance. The ambulance had called a helicopter, and now, Sam was returning to the one place to which she had promised her mother she would never return.
Sam reminded herself that, technically, she was not going to be in Pikeville. The Dickerson County Hospital was thirty minutes away, in a town called Bridge Gap. When Sam was a teenager, Bridge Gap was the big city, the place you’d go to if your boyfriend or a friend had a car and your parents were lenient.
Perhaps, when Charlie was younger, she had gone to Bridge Gap with a boy or a group of friends. Rusty had certainly been lenient; Gamma had always been the disciplinarian. Sam knew that without Gamma’s balancing check, Charlie had turned wild. College saw the worst of it. There had been several late-night calls from Athens, where Charlie was doing her undergrad at UGA. She needed money for food, for rent, for the health clinic, and once, for what had turned out to be a false pregnancy scare.
“Are you going to help me or not?” Charlie had demanded, her aggressive tone cutting off Sam’s as yet unuttered recriminations.
Judging by Ben, Charlie had managed to right herself. The transition would not have been an actual change so much as a reversion to type. Charlie had never been a rebel. She was one of those easy-going, popular girls, the sort who got invited to everything, who effortlessly mixed with the crowd. She had a kind of natural affability that had always eluded Sam, even before the accident.
What was Charlie’s life like now?
Sam didn’t even know if her sister had children. She assumed so. Charlie had always loved babies. She had babysat for half the neighborhood before the red-brick house had burned down. She was always taking care of stray animals, leaving pecans outside for the squirrels, building bird feeders at Brownie meetings and once erecting a rabbit hutch in the backyard, though, to Charlie’s utter disappointment, the rabbits seemed to prefer the neighbor’s abandoned doghouse.
What did Charlie look like now? Was her hair gray like Sam’s? Was she still thin, muscular, from the perpetual motion of her life? Would Sam even recognize her own sister if she saw her?
When she saw her.
A sign welcoming them to Dickerson County flashed outside the window.
She should have told Stanislav to drive more slowly.
Sam thumbed to the browser on her phone. She re-loaded the MSNBC homepage and found an updated story about Rusty. Guarded condition. Sam, even after a lifetime in and out of hospitals, had no idea what that meant. Better than critical? Worse than stable?
At the end of Anton’s life, when he was finally hospitalized, there had been no updates on his condition, just the understanding that he was comfortable today, that he was in discomfort the next day, and then the solemn, unspoken understanding between them all that there would be no tomorrow.
Sam swiped up the Huffington Post in her browser to see if they had more details. Her breath caught in surprise when a recent photograph of Rusty appeared.
For reasons unknown, whenever she listened to her father’s voicemails, Sam conjured an image of Burl Ives from the Luzianne Tea commercials: a robust, round man in a white hat and suit, a black string tie held together by some sort of gaudy silver medallion.
Her father was nothing like that. Not before, and certainly not today.
Rusty’s thick black hair was mostly gray. His face had the texture if not color of beef jerky. He still had that lean look about him, as if he’d finally made his way out of a jungle. His cheeks were hollow. His eyes sunken. Photos had never done Rusty justice. In person, he was perpetually in motion, always fidgeting, gesturing with his hands like a Great Oz, so that you did not see the weak, old man behind the curtain.
Sam wondered if he was still with Lenore. Even as a teenager, Sam had understood why Gamma had taken such a dislike to the woman with whom Rusty spent most of his time. Had he given into the cliché and married his secretary after an appropriate period of mourning? Lenore had been a young woman when Gamma was murdered. Would there be a half sister or brother waiting at the hospital?
Sam dropped her phone back into her purse.
“Okay,” Stanislav said. “We got one more mile, according to the Wave.” He indicated his iPad. “You say two hours, then we go back?”
“Approximately,” Sam said. “Maybe less.”
“I get some lunch from a restaurant. The hospital cafeteria, that food’s no good.” He handed her a business card. “You text me. Five minutes, then I meet you out front.”
Sam resisted the desire to tell him to wait in the car, engine running, wheels turned back toward Atlanta, and instead responded, “Okay.”
Stanislav engaged the turn signal. He ran the butt of his palm along the steering wheel, taking a wide turn into the winding drive of the hospital.
Sam felt her stomach clench.
The Dickerson County Hospital was much larger than she remembered, or maybe the building had been added onto in the last thirty years. The Quinn family had been to the emergency room only once before the Culpeppers entered their lives. Charlie had fallen from a tree and broken her arm. This had happened for typical Charlie reasons; she had been trying to rescue a cat. Sam could recall Gamma lecturing over Charlie’s screams during the car ride to the hospital—not about the idiocy of rescuing a creature whose every bundle of nerve and sinew equipped it with the ability to climb down a tree on its own—but about anatomical structure:
“The bone running from the shoulder to the elbow is the humerus. This we call the upper arm, or, simply, the arm. The humerus connects with two bones at the elbow: the radius and the ulna, which are regarded as the forearm.”
None of this information had abated the screaming. For once, Sam could not accuse Charlie of overreacting. Her broken humerus, or arm, as Gamma had called it, jutted up like a shark’s fin from Charlie’s torn flesh.
Stanislav pulled the Mercedes under the wide concrete canopy at the main entrance. He was a large man. The car shook as he hefted his frame from behind the wheel. He walked around the back of the car and opened the door for Sam. She had to lift her right leg to get out. She was using her cane today because there was no one she would meet who would not know what had happened.
“You text me, I come five minutes,” Stanislav said, then got back into the car.
Sam watched him drive away, a peculiar tightness in her throat. She had to remind herself that she had his number in her purse, that she could call him back, that she had a credit card with no limit, a jet at her disposal, the ability to flee whenever she wanted.
And yet, she felt as if a straitjacket was tightening around her arms as the car moved farther away.
Sam turned. She looked at the hospital. Two reporters were on a bench beside the door, their press credentials hanging on lanyards around their necks, cameras at their feet. They looked up at Sam, then back down at their phones, as she made her way inside the building.
She scanned the area for Ben, half expecting to find him waiting. She only saw patients and visitors idling around the lobby. There was a help desk, but the color-coded arrows on the floor were clear enough to Sam. She followed the green line to the elevators. She ran her finger along the directory until she found the words ADULT ICU.
Sam rode up alone. She felt as if she had spent most of her life riding up or down in elevators while others took the stairs. The intercom dinged as she passed each floor. The car was clean, but smelled vaguely of sickness.
She stared straight ahead, forcing herself not to count the floors. The backs of the elevator doors were polished satin to hide fingerprints, but she could see the anamorphic outline of her lone figure: an aloof presence, quick blue eyes, short white hair, skin as pale as an envelope, and with a sharp tongue just as prone to inflicting tiny, painful cuts in inconvenient places. Even with the distortion, Sam could make out the thin line of her own disapproving lips. This was the angry, bitter woman who had never left Pikeville.
The doors opened.
There was a black line on the floor, much like the line on the bottom of the pool, that led to the closed doors of the Intensive Care Unit.
To Rusty.
To her sister.
To her brother-in-law.
To the unknown.
The stinging of a thousand hornets ran up and down her leg as Sam made her way down the long, forlorn hallway. The sound of her shoes slapping hospital tiles bongoed along with the slow thumps of her heart. Sweat had glued her hair to the nape of her neck. The twigs of delicate bones inside her wrist and ankle felt ready to snap.
Sam kept walking, choking down the antiseptic air, leaning into the pain.
The automatic doors opened before she reached them.
A woman blocked the way. Tall, athletic, long dark hair, light blue eyes. Her nose appeared to have been recently broken. Two dark bruises rimmed beneath each eye.
Sam pushed herself to move faster. The tendons cording through her leg sent out a high-pitched wail. The hornets moved into her chest. The handle of the cane was slippery in her hand.
She felt so nervous. Why was she nervous?
Charlie said, “You look like Mama.”
“Do I?” Sam’s voice shook in her chest.
“Except her hair was black.”
“Because she went to the beauty parlor.” Sam ran her hand through her hair. Her fingertips tripped over the furrow where the bullet had gone in. She said, “There was a Latin American study conducted by the University College of London that isolated the gene that causes gray hair. IRF4.”
“Fascinating,” Charlie said. Her arms were crossed. Should they hug? Should they shake hands? Should they stand here staring at one another until Sam’s leg fell out from under her?
Sam asked, “What happened to your face?”
“What indeed?”
Sam waited for Charlie to acknowledge the bruises around her eyes, the nasty bump in her nose, but as usual, her sister did not seem inclined to explain herself.
“Sam?” Ben broke the awkward moment. He threw his arms around Sam, his hands firm on her back in a way that no one had held her since Anton had died.
She felt tears in her eyes. She saw Charlie watching and looked away.
“Rusty’s condition is stable,” Charlie said. “He’s been in and out of it all morning, but they think he’ll wake up soon.”
Ben kept his hand at Sam’s back. He told her, “You look exactly the same.”
“Thank you,” Sam mumbled, self-conscious.
“The sheriff’s supposed to come by,” Charlie said. “Keith Coin. You remember that dipshit?”
Sam did.
“They made some bullshit statement about using all their resources to find whoever stabbed Rusty, but don’t hold your breath.” She kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest. Same prickly, cocksure Charlie. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of his deputies.”
“He’s representing this girl,” Sam said. “The school shooter.”
“Kelly Wilson,” Charlie said. “I’ll spare you the long, tedious story.”
Sam wondered at her choice of adjectives. Two people had been shot dead. Rusty had been stabbed. There did not seem to be an aspect to the story that was either too long or in any way tedious, but Sam reminded herself that she was not here to find out details.
She was here because of the email.
Sam asked Ben, “Could you give us a moment?”
“Of course.” Ben’s hand lingered at her back, and she realized that the gesture was because of her handicap, not out of a particular affection.
Sam stiffened. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“I know.” Ben rubbed her back. “I’ve gotta go to work. I’m around if you need me.”
Charlie reached for his hand, but Ben had already turned to leave.
The automatic doors swung closed behind him. Sam watched his easy, loping gait through the windows. She waited for him to turn the corner. She hooked the cane on her arm. She motioned for Charlie to continue up the hallway to a row of plastic chairs.
Charlie went first, her feet pushing off from the floor with her usual physical confidence. Sam’s stride was more tenuous. Without the cane, she felt as if she was walking the slanted floor of a fun house. Still, she made it to the chair. She put her hand flat to the seat and eased herself down.
She said, “What Rusty this cause.”
Sam’s eyes closed as the jumbled words reached her ears.
She said, “I mean—”
“They think it’s because he’s representing Kelly Wilson,” Charlie said. “Someone in town isn’t happy about it. We can rule out Judith Heller. She was here all night. She married Mr. Pinkman twenty-five years ago. Weird, right?”
Sam only trusted herself to nod.
“So, that leaves the Alexander family.” Charlie quietly tapped her foot on the floor. Sam had forgotten that her sister could be as fidgety as Rusty. “There’s no relation to Peter. You remember Peter from high school, right?”
Sam nodded again, trying not to chastise Charlie for falling back into her old habit of ending every sentence with the word “right,” as if she wanted to eradicate the linguistic burden of Sam having to provide anything other than a nod or shake of the head.
Charlie said, “Peter moved to Atlanta, but he was hit by a car a few years ago. I read it on somebody’s Facebook page. Sad, right?”
Sam nodded a third time, feeling an unexpected pang of loss at the news.
Charlie said, “There’s another case Daddy was working on. I’m not sure who it involves, but he’s been late more than usual. Lenore won’t tell me. He annoys the shit out of her as much as anybody, but she keeps his secrets.”
Sam’s eyebrows went up.
“I know, right? How has she worked with him this long without killing him?” She gave a sudden laugh. “In case you’re wondering, she was at home when Daddy was stabbed.”
“Where?” Sam asked. She meant where was home for Lenore, but Charlie took the question differently.
“Mr. Thomas, the guy who lives down the street, found him at the end of the driveway. There wasn’t a lot of visible blood except for a cut on his leg and some on his shirt. He bled mostly inside his abdomen. I guess that’s how it is with those types of wounds.” She pointed to her own belly. “Here, here and here. Like they shiv you in prison—pop-pop-pop—which is why I think it might be related to this other case. Daddy has a way of pissing off convicts.”
“No shit,” Sam said, a crude but accurate consilience.
“Maybe you can get some information out of her?” Charlie stood up as the doors opened. She had obviously seen Lenore through the windows.
Sam saw her, too. She felt her mouth gape open.
“Samantha,” Lenore said, her husky voice as familiar from Sam’s childhood as the ringing of the kitchen phone announcing that Rusty would be late. “I’m sure your father will appreciate your being here. Was the flight okay?”
Sam was again reduced to nodding, this time by shock.
Lenore said, “I’m assuming you two are talking as if nothing ever happened and everything is fine?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll go check on your father.”
She squeezed Charlie’s shoulder before continuing up the hall. Sam watched Lenore tuck a dark blue clutch under her arm as she approached the nurses’ station. She was wearing navy heels and a short matching skirt that hit too far above her knee.
Charlie said, “You didn’t know, did you?”
“That she was—” Sam struggled for the correct words. “That—I mean, that she was—”
Charlie had her hand over her mouth. She shook with laughter.
“This isn’t funny,” Sam said.
Trapped air sputtered around Charlie’s hand.
“Stop it. You’re being disrespectful.”
“Only to you,” Charlie said.
“I can’t believe—” Sam couldn’t finish the thought.
“You were always too smart to know how stupid you are.” Charlie could not stop smiling. “You really never put it together that Lenore’s transgender?”
Sam returned to shaking her head. Her life in Pikeville had been sheltered, but Lenore’s gender identity seemed self-evident. How had Sam missed that Lenore had been born a man? The woman was at least six-three. Her voice was deeper than Rusty’s.
“Leonard,” Charlie said. “He was Dad’s best friend in college.”
“Gamma hated her.” Sam turned to Charlie, alarmed by a thought. “Was Mom transphobic?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. She dated Lenny first. They almost got married. I think she was mad about the …” Charlie’s voice trailed off, because the blanks were easy to fill in. She said, “Gamma found out that Lenore was wearing some of her clothes. She wouldn’t say which, but you know the first thing that came to mind when she told me was that it was her underwear. Lenore told me, I mean. Gamma never talked about it with me. You really didn’t figure it out?”
Again, Sam could only shake her head. “I thought that Gamma thought they were having an affair.”
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Charlie said. “Rusty, I mean. I wouldn’t wish—”
“Girls?” Lenore’s heels clicked against the tiles as she walked back toward them. “He’s lucid, at least for Rusty. They say only two visitors at a time.”
Charlie stood up quickly. She offered her arm to Sam.
Sam leaned heavily on her cane and pushed herself up. She was not going to let these people treat her like an invalid. “When will we be able to speak with his doctors?”
“They make their rounds in another hour,” Lenore said. “Do you remember Melissa LaMarche from Mr. Pendleton’s class?”
“Yes,” Sam said, though she didn’t know why Lenore remembered the names of one of Sam’s friends and a teacher from high school.
“She’s Dr. LaMarche now. She operated on Rusty last night.”
Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Father.
She had not attached that word to Rusty in years.
“You go first,” Charlie told Lenore. Her eagerness to see Rusty had visibly dissipated. She stopped in front of a row of large windows. “Sam and I will go in after.”
Lenore left them in silence.
At first, Charlie let the silence linger. She walked to the windows. She looked down at the parking lot. “Now’s your chance.”
To leave, she meant. Before Rusty had seen her. Before Sam got sucked back into this world again.
Sam asked, “Did you really need me here? Or was that Ben?”
“It was me, and Ben was nice enough to reach out because I couldn’t, or couldn’t bring myself to, but I thought that Dad was going to die.” She leaned her forehead against the glass. “He had a heart attack two years ago. The one before that was mild, but this last one, he needed bypass surgery, and there were complications.”
Sam said nothing. She had been left in the dark about Rusty’s apparent heart condition. He had never missed a phone call. For all Sam knew, he had remained healthy all these years.
“I had to make a decision,” Charlie said. “At one point, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and I had to make the decision whether or not to put him on life support.”
“He doesn’t have a DNR?” Sam asked. The Do Not Resuscitate form, which specified whether or not a person wanted a natural death or CPR and cardiac support, was commonly drawn up alongside a will.
Sam saw the problem before Charlie could answer. “Rusty doesn’t have a will.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Charlie turned around, her back against the window. “I made the right choice, obviously. I mean, it’s obvious now, because he lived and he was fine, but this time, when Melissa came out during surgery and said that they were having trouble getting the bleeding under control, and that his heartbeat was erratic, and that I might have to make the decision whether or not to take life-saving—”
“You wanted me here to kill him.”
Charlie looked alarmed, but not because of Sam’s bluntness. It was her tone, the hint of anger bubbling up around the words. She told Sam, “If you’re going to get mad about this, we should go outside.”
“So the reporters can hear?”
“Sam.” Charlie looked anxious, as if she was watching the clock on a nuclear warhead start to tick down. “Let’s go outside.”
Sam squeezed her hands into fists. She could feel the longforgotten darkness stirring inside of her. She took a deep breath, then another, then another until it folded itself back into a tight ball inside her chest.
She told her sister, “You have no idea, Charlotte, how wrong you are about my willingness or capacity to end someone’s life.”
Sam tilted against her cane as she walked toward the nurses’ station. She glanced at the whiteboard behind the empty desk and located Rusty’s room. She raised her hand to knock on the door, but Lenore opened it before her knuckles touched wood.
Lenore said, “I told him you were here. Wouldn’t want him to have a heart attack.”
“You mean another one,” Sam said. She did not give Lenore time to respond.
Instead, she walked into her father’s hospital room.
The air seemed too thin.
The lights were too bright.
She blinked against the headache that chewed at the back of her eyes.
Rusty’s room in the ICU was a familiar, if more economized version of the private hospital suite in which Anton had died. There was no wood paneling or deep couch or flat-screen television or private desk where Sam could work, but the machines were all the same: the beeping heart monitor, the hissing oxygen supply, the grinding sound that the blood pressure cuff made as it inflated around Rusty’s arm.
He looked much like his photograph, absent any color in his face. The camera had never been able to capture the devil’s glint in his eyes, the dimples in his rubbery cheeks.
“Sammy-Sam!” he bellowed, hacking out a cough at the end. “Come here, gal. Lemme see you up close.”
Sam did not move closer. She felt her nose wrinkle. He reeked of cigarette smoke and Old Spice, two scents that had remained blissfully absent in her everyday life.
“Damn if you don’t look like your mama.” He gave a delighted laugh. “To what does your old pappy owe this pleasure?”
Charlie suddenly appeared on Sam’s right. She knew this was Sam’s blind side. There was no telling how long she had been there. She said, “Dad, we thought that you were going to die.”
“I remain a constant disappointment to the women in my life.” Rusty scratched his chin. Under the covers, his foot tapped out a silent beat. “I am happy to see that no fresh slings and arrows have been exchanged.”
“Not so you can see.” Charlie walked around to the other side of the bed. Her arms were crossed. She did not take his hand. “Are you okay?”
“Well.” Rusty seemed to think about it. “I was stabbed. Or, in the vernacular of the streets, cut.”
“The unkindest kind.”
“Thrice in the belly, once in the leg.”
“You don’t say.”
Sam tuned out their banter. She had always been a reluctant spectator of the Rusty and Charlie show. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to eat it up. He clearly still delighted in Charlie, a literal twinkle flashing in his eye when she engaged him.
Sam looked at her watch. She could not believe only sixteen minutes had passed since she had gotten out of the car. She raised her voice over the din, asking, “Rusty, what happened?”
“What do you mean what—” He looked at his stomach. Surgical drains hung from either side of his torso. He looked back at Sam, feigning shock. “‘Oh, I am slain!’”
For once, Charlie didn’t egg him on. “Daddy, Sam has a flight back this afternoon.”
Sam was startled by the reminder. Somehow, she had momentarily let herself forget that she could leave.
Charlie said, “Come on, Dad. Tell us what happened.”
“All right, all right.” Rusty let out a low groan as he tried to sit up in bed. Sam realized that this was the first sign her father had given that he had been wounded.
“Well—” He coughed, a wet rattle shaking inside his chest. He winced from the exertion, then coughed again, then winced again, then waited to make sure it had passed.
When he was finally able, he directed his words toward Charlie, his most receptive audience. “After you dropped me at ye olde homestead, I had a bite to eat, maybe a little to drink, and then I realized that I hadn’t checked the mail.”
Sam could not think of the last time she had received mail at her home. It seemed like a ritual from another century.
Rusty continued, “I put on my walkin’ shoes and headed out. Beautiful night, last night. Partly cloudy, chance of rain this morning. Oh—” he seemed to remember that morning had passed. “Did it rain?”
“Yes.” Charlie made a rolling motion with her hand, indicating he should speed up the story. “Did you see who did it?”
Rusty coughed again. “That is a complicated question with an equally complicated answer.”
Charlie waited. They both waited.
Rusty said, “All right, so, I walked to the mailbox to check my mail. Beautiful night. Moon high up in the sky. The driveway was giving off warmth saved up from the sun. Paints a picture, don’t it?”
Sam felt herself nodding along with Charlie, as if thirty years had not passed and they were both little girls listening to one of their father’s stories.
He seemed to relish the attention. Some color came back into his cheeks. “I came around the bend, and I heard something up above me, so I was looking up for that bird. Remember I told you about the hawk, Charlotte?”
Charlie nodded.
“Thought the old fella got himself a chipmunk again, but then—Shazam!” He clapped together his hands. “I feel this hot pain in my leg.”
Sam felt her cheeks redden. Like Charlie, she had jumped at the clap.
Rusty said, “I look down, and I have to twist around to see what’s wrong, and that’s when I spot it. There’s a big ol’ hunting knife sticking out of the back of my thigh.”
Sam put her hand to her mouth.
Rusty said, “So there’s me hitting the ground like a rock dropping into the water, because it hurts to have a knife stuck in the back of your thigh. And then I see this fella comes up, and he starts kicking me. Just kicking me and kicking me—in the arm, the ribs, the head. And mail is everywhere, but the point is, I’m trying to stand up, and I still got this knife in the back of my thigh. So the fella, he makes this one last kick at my head and I grab onto his leg with both arms and punch him in the hokey-pokey.”
Sam felt her heart pounding in her throat. She knew what it was like to fight for your life.
“Then we struggle a little bit more, him hopping around ’cause I’ve got his leg, me trying to stay upright, and the fella seems to remember that knife’s in my leg. So he grabs it, just yanks it out, and starts stabbing me in my belly.” Rusty made a stabbing, twisting motion with his hand. “We’re both tired out after this. Plumb tuckered. I’m limping away from him, holding in my own guts. He’s standing there. I’m wondering can I make it back to the house, call the police, and then I see him pull out a gun.”
“A gun?” Sam asked. Had he been shot, too?
“A pistol,” Rusty confirmed. “One of those foreign models.”
“For fucksakes, Dad,” Charlie muttered. “Then did you drop a shipping container on his head?”
“Well—”
“That’s how Lethal Weapon 2 ends. You told me you watched it the other night.”
“Did I?” Rusty seemed blameless, which meant there was much to blame.
And that Sam was an idiot.
“You asshole.” Charlie stuck her hand on her hip. “What really happened?”
Sam felt her mouth start to move, but she could not speak.
Rusty said, “I was stabbed. It was dark. I didn’t see him.” He shrugged. “Forgive a man for trying to exploit the meager attentions of his two demanding daughters.”
“That was all a lie?” Sam seized her purse between her hands. “All of it, pulled from a stupid movie?” Before she knew what she was doing, Sam swung the bag at her father’s head. “You asshole,” she hissed, echoing Charlie’s words. “Why would you do that?”
Rusty laughed even as he held up his hands to block the blow.
“Asshole,” she repeated, hitting him again.
Rusty flinched. His hand went to his stomach. “Don’t make sense: you raise your arms and your belly hurts.”
Sam said, “They cut through your abdominal muscles, you lying imbecile. It’s called your core because it is the central, innermost foundation of your body’s musculature.”
“My God,” he said. “It’s like hearing Gamma.”
Sam dropped her purse onto the floor before she hit him again. Her hands were shaking. She felt besieged by acrimony and acerbity and indignation and all of the other tumultuous feelings that had kept her away from her family for so long. “Good Christ in heaven,” she practically screamed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Rusty listed on his fingers, “I was stabbed several times. I have a heart condition. I have a filthy mouth that I apparently passed onto my daughters. I guess the smoking and the drinking are two separate things, but—”
“Shut up,” Charlie interrupted, her anger seemingly reignited by Sam’s outburst. “Do you realize the kind of night we’ve all had? I slept in a God damn chair. Lenore was about ready to pull out her hair. Ben is—well, Ben will tell you he’s fine, but he’s not, Dad. He was really upset, and he had to tell me that you were hurt, and you know how shitty that was, and then he had to email Sam, and sure as fuck Sam doesn’t want to be here ever, as in never.” She finally stopped for breath. Tears filled her eyes. “We thought that you were going to die, you selfish old shit.”
Rusty remained unmoved. “Death snickers at us all, my dear. The eternal footman will not hold my coat forever.”
“Don’t fucking Prufrock me.” Charlie wiped her eyes with her fingers. She turned to Sam. “I can probably go online and try to change your flight to an earlier one.” She told Rusty, “You’re going to be in the hospital for at least another week. I’ll have Lenore notify your clients. I can get continuances on—”
“No.” Rusty sat up, his humor quickly retreating. “I need you to handle Kelly Wilson’s arraignment tomorrow.”
“What the—” Charlie threw her hands into the air, clearly exasperated. “Rusty, we’ve been over this. I can’t be—”
“He means me,” Sam said, because Rusty had not stopped looking at her since he had made the request. “He wants me to handle the arraignment.”
A flash of jealousy lit up Charlie’s eyes, though she had refused the task.
Rusty shrugged at Sam. “Tomorrow at nine. Easy peasy. In and out, maybe ten minutes.”
“She’s not licensed with the state bar,” Charlie pointed out. “She can’t—”
“She’s licensed.” Rusty winked at Sam. “Tell her I’m right.”
Sam didn’t ask her father how he knew she had passed the Georgia bar exam. Instead, she looked at her watch. “My flight is already booked for later today.”
“Plans can be altered.”
“Delta will charge a change fee and—”
“I can float you a loan to cover it.”
Sam brushed some imaginary lint off the sleeve of her six-hundred-dollar blouse.
They all knew this wasn’t about the money.
Rusty said, “I just need a few days to get back on my feet, then I can jump into the case. It’s a deep dive, my girl. There’s a lot going on there. What say you help your old daddy make sure the big wheels keep on turnin’?”
Sam shook her head, though she knew that Rusty was probably Kelly Wilson’s only chance at a zealous defense. Even if the standard was lowered to an obligatory defense, it would likely be impossible to find someone to take the job on short notice, especially given that her current lawyer had been stabbed.
Still, that was a Rusty problem.
Sam said, “I have work to do back in New York. I’ve got my own cases. Very important cases. We’ll be at trial within the next three weeks.”
Neither of them spoke. They both stared at her.
“What?”
Charlie said, quietly, “Sam, sit down.”
“I don’t need to sit down.”
“You’re slurring your words.”
Sam knew that she was right. She also knew that she would be damned if she sat down over a simple case of exhaustion-induced dysarthria.
She just needed a moment.
She took off her glasses. She pulled a tissue from the box by Rusty’s bed. She cleaned the lenses, as if the problem was a spot that could be easily wiped away.
Rusty said, “Baby, why don’t you go downstairs with your sister, let her get some food in you, then we can talk about it when you feel better.”
Sam shook her head. “I’m—”
“Nuh-uh,” Charlie interrupted. “Not my job, mister. You tell her about your unicorn.”
“Come on,” he tutted. “She doesn’t need to know that part right now.”
“She’s not an idiot, Rusty. She’s going to ask eventually, and I’m not going to be the one to tell her.”
“I’m right here.” Sam put on her glasses. “Could you both stop talking as if I’m in another room?”
Charlie slumped against the wall. Her arms were crossed again. “If you do the arraignment, you’re going to have to enter a plea of not guilty.”
“And?” Sam asked. Seldom was a plea of guilty entered at an arraignment.
“I don’t mean pro forma. Dad really thinks Kelly Wilson is not guilty.”
“Not guilty?” Now Sam’s auditory processing was shot. They had finally managed to short-circuit the last meaningful parts of her brain. “Of course she’s guilty.”
Charlie said, “Tell that to Foghorn Leghorn, JD, over there. He thinks Kelly is innocent.”
“But—”
Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “Preacher/choir.”
Sam turned to Rusty. If she was unable to ask the obvious question, it wasn’t because of her injury. Her father had finally lost his mind.
He said, “Talk to Kelly Wilson yourself. Go to the police station after you eat. Tell them you’re my co-counsel. Get Kelly alone in a room and talk with her. Five minutes, tops. You’ll see what I mean.”
“See what?” Charlie asked. “She murdered a grown man and a little girl in cold blood. You want to talk about seeing? I was there less than a minute after it happened. I saw Kelly literally—literally—holding the smoking gun. I watched that little girl die. But Ironside over here thinks that she’s innocent.”
Sam had to take a moment to let the shock of Charlie’s involvement sink in before she could ask her sister, “What were you doing there? At the shooting? How did you—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Charlie kept her focus on Rusty. “Think about what you’re asking, Dad. What it means for her to get involved in this. You want Sam to get attacked by some revenge-driven maniac, too?” She snorted a derisive laugh. “Again?”
Rusty was immune to low blows. “Sammy-Sam, lookit, just talk to the girl. It’d help me to get a second opinion anyway. Even the great man you see before you is not infallible. I’d value your input as a colleague.”
His flattery only annoyed her. “Do mass shootings fall under the purview of intellectual property?” she asked. “Or have you forgotten the kind of law that I practice?”
Rusty winked at her. “The Portland district attorney’s office was a hotbed of patent infringement, was it?”
“Portland was a long time ago.”
“And now you’re too busy helping Bullshit, Incorporated, sue Bullshit, Limited, over some bullshit?”
“Everyone is entitled to their own bullshit.” Sam did not let him move her off the point. “I’m not the sort of lawyer Kelly Wilson needs. Not anymore. Actually, not ever. I could be of more service to the prosecution, because that’s the side on which I have always stood.”
“Prosecution, defense—what matters is understanding the beats of a courtroom, and you’ve got that in your blood.” Rusty pushed himself up again. He coughed into his hand. “Honey, I know you came all the way down here expecting to find me on my deathbed, and I promise you, on my life, that it’ll get to that point eventually, but for now, I’m gonna say something to you that I have never said to you in your forty-four beautiful years on this earth: I need you to do this for me.”
Sam shook her head, more out of frustration than disagreement. She did not want to be here. Her brain was exhausted. She could hear the sibilant slithering out of her mouth like a snake.
She said, “I’m going to leave.”
“Sure, but tomorrow,” Rusty said. “Baby, no one else is going to take care of Kelly Wilson. She’s alone in the world. Her parents don’t have the capacity to understand the trouble that she’s in. She cannot help herself. She cannot aid in her own defense, and no one cares. Not the police. Not the investigators. Not Ken Coin.” Rusty reached out to Sam. His nicotine-stained fingertips brushed the sleeve of her blouse. “They’re going to kill her. They are going to jam a needle in her arm, and they are going to end that eighteen-year-old girl’s life.”
Sam said, “Her life was over the minute she decided to take a loaded gun to school and murder two people.”
“Samantha, I do not disagree with you,” Rusty said. “But, please, will you just listen to the girl? Give her a chance to be heard. Be her voice. With me laid up like this, you’re the only person on earth I trust to serve as her counsel.”
Sam closed her eyes. Her head was throbbing. The sound of machines grated. The lights overhead were too intense.
“Talk to her,” Rusty begged. “I mean it when I say that I trust you to be her counsel. If you don’t agree with the not-guilty plea, then go into the arraignment and throw down a flag for diminished capacity. That, at least, we can all agree on.”
Charlie said, “That’s a false choice, Sam. Either way, he gets you in court.”
“Yes, Charlie, I am familiar with rhetological fallacies.” Sam’s stomach churned. She had not eaten in fifteen hours. She had not slept for longer than that. She was slurring her words—that is, when she could speak in complete sentences. She could not move without her cane. She felt angry, really angry, like she had not felt in years. And she was listening to Rusty as if he was her father rather than a man who would do anything, sacrifice anyone, for a client.
Even his family.
She picked up her purse from the floor.
Charlie asked, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” Sam said. “I need this shit like I need another hole in my head.”
Rusty’s bark of laughter followed her out the door.