CHAPTER 30
More people should spend a day in jail, Luke thought, his wrists still stinging from the handcuffs. It was scary and humbling. If he’d ever been tempted to break the law, this would definitely have scared him off. He’d only been there a few hours, as far as he could tell. They’d taken him in, processed him, taken fingerprints and a mug shot, performed a humiliating strip search, and given him a drug test and health screening. After four hours of increasingly invasive procedures, Luke was finally put in a holding cell. He’d be arraigned in the morning for . . . well, he wasn’t sure, but he could guess that it’d at least be drug possession and intent to distribute.
After trying to deny any knowledge of the pills found in his car, Luke finally wised up and shut his mouth. No one believed him. He needed a lawyer, and he wanted to know Jessie’s status and let everyone know he was okay. That meant calling Terry.
It was painful to have to ask Terry for help. He tried to explain the few details he understood and asked her to find a lawyer, no matter the cost. They could use Natalie’s life insurance for a defense, might even have enough for bail. He hadn’t spent a penny of it yet, but getting out of jail had to be his first priority. Terry definitely didn’t believe Luke’s side of the story, but she was literally the only person he could call for help. He hoped she’d find someone—fast.
The only good news was that Jessie had made it to the hospital and had been stabilized. Terry only had two minutes to give him information before they were cut off on the ancient precinct pay phone. What he did get out of that two minutes was that Jessie had been in total renal failure like the paramedics had predicted. She’d been going for dialysis three times a week for the past month and had been going downhill fast. May was supposed to go and visit her at the hospital tomorrow. The last thing the kids needed to deal with was worrying about Luke being in jail, so the plan was to keep his arrest a secret for as long as possible. Hopefully forever. For now the fairly weak excuse was an emergency work trip, but Will wouldn’t buy that story for long.
When the phone cut out, a uniformed officer escorted Luke to a holding cell at the back of the station. At least it was empty, a row of benches bolted to the wall and a urinal in the corner. There were bars, though, cold, metal, and painted off-white. He wasn’t sure why they painted them since it seemed like there were at least twenty coats in spots where the paint continued to peel. He was sore and exhausted.
The small, rectangular windows on the other side of the room gave him the only hint to the time. It was black outside, yellow lights from the parking lot filling the room with eerie shadows. It was hard to keep track of time without a watch or a phone, but it must be near midnight by now. He should sleep, but the cell was undoubtedly not made for relaxing, the painted-green benches his only option for stretching out besides the floor. He briefly contemplated taking off his shoes to help him unwind, but then the idea of what might be on the floor made his toes curl.
Luke threw himself on the bench that lined the back wall. The shadows from the bars of the cell made patterns on the ceiling, and soon his mind was turning them into images like when he’d watch the clouds with Will and May. However, these weren’t happy bunnies or silly Santas; these images were much darker. In the corner, the shadows clustered together over a watermark in the ceiling, making it look like the face of an old woman was looking back at him. Over by the door to the cell was a splash of black shadow that reminded him of a pool of blood.
He tossed his arm over his eyes, pressing down hard, trying to keep the panic from taking over. What was he going to do? There had to be some way of proving he hadn’t done this. He could lose his job, his house, and his kids—everything he had left.
As far as he could tell, being arrested was good for one thing—bringing into focus the most important parts of your life. On a day when he thought discovering Dr. Neal and Jessie’s connection was the worst moment he could imagine, sitting in a cell, rubbing his chafed wrists and dreaming up horrors on the wall, made him feel like a fool for ever being obsessed with Neal and those letters.
If Neal had helped cover up the adoption and the death of Luke and Natalie’s child, if they had a deep connection because of it, or even if they had planted Neal’s daughter into his home as a spy, Luke didn’t care. Natalie was dead and he was alive. One more reason he should be living for his kids, not for some dead woman, even if that woman was the one person he’d ever felt loved him unconditionally. The kids were worth more than his pain.
On the last night of Natalie’s life, Luke pushed the fancy white couch in the living room up right next to her hospital bed. He had spent large portions of the past several nights sleeping in a chair, but it made Natalie feel so guilty. When he let his body settle into the stiff cushions of the pristine fabric, Natalie put out her hand.
“Will you hold my hand tonight?” she asked. Luke took her frail hand in his, counting the bones on the back of her hand through her skin. “Ah, that’s nice.” She sighed and one tear slipped out of the corner of her lashless eyes. It followed one of her new wrinkles, the ones that came once she lost the protective layers of fat under her skin. He loved kissing those wrinkles and pretending they’d grown old together.
“You’re too far away; get up here.” She tugged at his arm, and Luke cautiously crawled up into her bed. Weakly, she tried to shift over to the other side of the bed but stopped, out of breath after her first attempt.
“I’ve got you,” Luke whispered in her ear, letting his lips brush her cheek as he moved her over the last few inches.
“Thank you,” she whispered, always grateful for anything Luke did. You don’t have to thank me, he wanted to shout, but he wasn’t mad at Natalie. He was mad she was in pain and that soon she’d be gone.
“I love you, Nat,” Luke said, nuzzling his nose into her neck and wrapping an arm over her torso.
“I know, I know.” She patted his back, like she was comforting one of their kids. He cried a lot back then, even though he tried not to. It was his intention to make those last moments with Natalie happy ones, to leave the kids with thoughts of a cheerful farewell. But that night, he didn’t want to pretend to be happy. Sometimes Luke wondered if some ancient instinct told him his wife was that close to death.
“This reminds me of what it was like when we were kids. All we’re missing is pop and Twizzlers.” She took a labored breath, and Luke picked up his arm.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No.” She grabbed his arm and pressed it back down on her stomach. “I like feeling you. I miss your touch, I miss kissing you, I miss . . . everything.” She kissed his forehead again. “I want to go back and do it all over again. Can we start over? Is that a thing?”
Luke tried to turn a sob into a laugh, but it came out sounding like he was choking. “You want a do-over? If this was a video game, I could erase the memory, and we could start at the beginning.” He curled his body around hers, trying to touch her in as many places at the same time as possible. “But we’d lose everything, all the levels we’d beat and coins we’d won. I’d do it; would you?”
She was silent for a moment, and Luke wondered if maybe she’d fallen asleep. Every night she took a sleeping pill to help her sleep through the pain, and it was probably kicking in.
“No,” she answered suddenly. “I wouldn’t start over, not if it meant giving up our memories.” Her breath hitched in her chest, and he watched her collarbone go up and down with each cry. “That’s all you’ll have left of me, memories.”
Luke couldn’t talk. If it hurt to think about losing her while she still lay in his arms, he didn’t know how he could even breathe once she was buried under six feet of dirt. “We won’t forget,” he finally forced out. “I could never forget . . .”
“I hope you’re wrong”—her tone turned suddenly hard—“about death. I want you to tell me I’ll see you again, that our years together weren’t a waste.” She pushed Luke’s head back with her chin, and he looked up at her eyes. Still deep and blue, they were the only thing unchanged by chemo and cancer and impending death. He didn’t believe, he hadn’t for a long, long time, but when he saw those sparkling eyes, the ones he’d first noticed as a boy and saw every day when May asked for pancakes or Clayton giggled at a television show, he couldn’t tell her that. He loved her enough to lie.
“I’ll see you again. I promise . . .” He pulled her limp hand up to his lips and kissed her fingertips. “I promise.”
“Mmmm, thank you, Luke.” She closed her eyes, her body falling asleep part by part. “I’ll see you soon . . .” She breathed out before succumbing to her medication and exhaustion. He waited until he was certain she was asleep and then rolled off the hospital bed, pulled her favorite fleece blanket up to her shoulders, and then settled back into the couch, where he got his first full night’s sleep in weeks. When he woke up in the morning to the sun shining in from behind the front window curtains, Natalie was dead. He’d slept through her last breaths.
“Hey! You have a visitor; get up!” A loud voice shattered Luke’s memory. He wiped at his eyes, not wanting anyone in this place to think he’d been crying. Squinting through the poorly lit room, Luke tried to make out who could possibly be visiting him in a holding cell in the middle of the night. An officer, dressed in his street uniform, stood at the door to the cell. Luke rubbed his eyes, and the man came into focus. It was Brian Gurrella.
“Luke, you okay?” Brian held a tray of food, a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel, an apple, and something that looked like a juice box lying on its side. “I have your dinner. Made it myself.”
Luke wasn’t hungry even though he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Still, he crossed the cell and took the steel tray from Brian’s hands.
“Thanks.” He placed the tray on a bench without inspecting it further, only caring about how to get out of that cell and back home to his family. He returned to the door and Brian, who was watching him carefully.
“You want to tell me what happened?” Brian asked, his thumbs looped through the belt loops on his pants. There was none of the usual humor in his face. No, he looked like a cop ready to interrogate a “perp.”
“I have no idea. Really. I guess I had a busted taillight and got pulled over, but after that . . . I don’t know what happened.” Luke approached the door, wrapping his hands around the bars. “What did they tell you?”
Brian stepped back, like Luke was too close or potentially dangerous. “I’m not really supposed to discuss charges with you. I heard you have a lawyer coming. This isn’t official. I just wanted to talk to you, man-to-man.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I have nothing to hide.” Luke pressed his face between the bars. “Please, what did they say?”
“Fine,” he said, brushing out a wrinkle on the front of his uniform. “They said you had drugs in your car, pills. That you had them in bottles, ready for distribution.”
“I’ve never seen those before, damn it,” Luke growled, squeezing the metal bars until he was sure he could break them.
“I have to tell you, Luke, that’s what they all say.” Brian shook his head like he didn’t know what to think. “No one sits in that cell, looks back at me, and says, ‘Yeah, I did it. I sold drugs.’ So you can see why it’s hard to believe you.”
“Hard to believe me? You’ve got to be kidding. We’ve been friends for ten years. I barely even drink, much less use illegal drugs. Please tell me you can do something.” Being accused by a stranger was one thing, but to be accused by Brian, wife-beating, drug-abusing Brian, was nauseating.
“Wait, let me get this right.” Brian took a large step toward the bars, making them face-to-face, minus the metal barrier. “You want someone who knows you, who you’ve been friends with for a long time, to put in a good word for you? Is that what you’d like to happen here?”
A dark hole formed inside Luke, sucking out any hope he’d been holding on to. Brian knew he’d called Bormet. He released the bars and took a step back. Is this what Annie was talking about when she said that if Luke helped her, Brian would come after him too? Those pills weren’t Natalie’s after all. Brian put them there.
“It wasn’t really that hard to figure out. I find Annie at your house; she’s gone and told you all kinds of stories, and you believed her.” Brian put his arms through the bars this time and clasped them on the other side. “Then, a week later, I fly to DC, only to find out my orientation has been canceled and they gave the job to someone else. I might not be an engineer, but I can put those pieces together—you screwed my wife, and then you screwed me.”
“I can’t believe you’d do this to me. I tried to help you. I gave you a recommendation, but . . .” Luke grabbed handfuls of hair in his fists, unable to look at Brian. “You’d been hitting her.”
“No, no, no, that’s ridiculous.” He kicked at the gate. “She’s not stable; you’ve got to know that by now.”
“Not stable? You are the least stable person I know.”
“That’s not what my twenty years of service shows,” Brian explained, still infuriatingly calm. “No one here would believe your story. Why do you think Annie told you instead of someone who could actually help her, like the police?”
“I know you did this.” Luke squinted at Brian through the darkness. There was a smug confidence about the way he leaned against the bars, how much he seemed to enjoy Luke’s outburst instead of being incensed by it. “You broke my taillight, put drugs in my car, called in an anonymous tip, and got me arrested.”
Luke grabbed the tray next to him, rushed to the horizontal opening in the cell door, and crammed it through, almost hitting Brian in the gut. “I’m not hungry.” Brian stepped aside, and the metal tray clattered to the ground. Silent, he watched the apple roll until it came to a stop short of hitting the cement wall.
The briefest of smiles rippled across his lips before he stood and sniffed loudly. “That’s an unfounded and bold-faced lie. You sound desperate.”
“How could you?” Luke shook with half-restrained anger. “I could lose . . . everything.”
“Maybe you should’ve thought of that earlier,” Brian scolded, sounding like a “scared straight” officer from a TV show. Bending one knee, he collected the tray and other items off the floor. Standing, he unwrapped a corner of the plastic around the mangled sandwich and took a bite. “Mmmm,” he mumbled, mouth full, “not bad.”
“You son of a bitch,” Luke growled, lunging at Brian, arms straining through the bars until the metal cut into his armpits. Brian sucked his teeth and shook his head.
“Now, now. If you wanted some, why didn’t you say so?” He rewrapped the sandwich and tossed it into the cell like he was playing catch with a dog. “You do seem to like my messy leftovers.” Dusting a few crumbs off the otherwise immaculate uniform, he wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger, still holding the tray in his other hand. “Hope you enjoy your stay.”
“No!” Luke shouted. “Come back! You can’t do this. You can’t!” The sound of Brian’s quiet chuckle and slam of the holding cell’s outer door reverberated through his bones. He collapsed on his knees and fell backward. This was it. Tomorrow he was going to die, or at least what was left of his life would end and he’d lose everything he still cared about. With Natalie, he could blame cancer, but this . . . this death was his own fault.
Luke slapped the cold cement floor. Once, then again, then over and over until pain sliced through his palm, fingers, wrist. There was no way out of this trap. Even though he’d spent his whole life trying to not turn out like his father, Luke still ended up in the same place—jail. He slapped the floor again, expecting another dose of pain, but instead . . . nothing. No more pain, just numb.
Good, Luke thought. If he was going to get through tomorrow and whatever domino effect his arrest caused, he had to be numb. Laying his numb hand across his chest, Luke let the chill from the floor soak through the skin on his other hand. Lying there in the silent blackness, he let the feelings of hopelessness and fury build up inside him again. Images of his mom, his sister, Natalie flashed in vivid detail. When the turmoil rolled inside him, growing uncontrollable, painful even, he slapped at the floor. Once, then again and again, waiting for the pain to turn to nothingness.