Fidelity (30 page)

“He’s twentyfour.”

“Twentyfour?”

“Born two years before you were married.”

“I didn’t know that Phil was his father. I didn’t suspect until a few days ago. Dewey was the one who came to see me, and saved me from that … the man who broke into my house. And while I was watching him check the doors and windows, it just hit me. He had some of the same mannerisms. I had the feeling I was looking at Phil. It was like a switch turning on. I couldn’t see before, but all of a sudden I could.” There was a silence that made both women uncomfortable. Emily spoke to fill it. “So you were with Phil at least two years before I met him.”

“About three and a half years.” Lee Anne Burns sat primly in her chair for a few breaths. “I should explain something. I know the things that you want me to tell you. And in a way, I think you have a rightor at least a legitimate wish-to know. But at the same time, you don’t. And I’m sitting here thinking that I’m probably about to tell you some things that I’ve never even told Dewey. He has a better claim to a right to know than you do. But maybe he knows everything already, just from having lived with me, and from whatever Phil told him, and from the other ways of knowing that he had. He was always that kind of boy, even when he was little. He seemed to figure out everything by himself, as though he could look at one tiny detail and grow the rest of it in his mind. There have been lots of times when I found out that what I thought he was too young to know he had known for years, or what I thought had been hidden was plain to him.”

“The others all say he has the gift for being a detective,” Emily agreed. “But he also has a gift for secrets. I can’t tell you what he knows because he never told me anything. And I didn’t come here to claim some right to know things. Maybe I already know everything about Phil that I ought to.”

“I loved him,” Lee Anne said. “That’s the main thing, I guess. It wasn’t some kind of fling or something. I was living at home with my parents up in Oakland while I went to nursing school. My older brother Eldon was in the marines. He always had an orderly plan for his life. Even when he was young, he knew he was going to graduate from high school, go into the marines, then go to college. To me it always seemed like an invitation to fate, a sure way to have a disaster just to teach you that things aren’t that simple. When he went in the marines, I was terrified because that seemed to me to be the time for it, but it didn’t happen. Eldon served his enlistment, had a good tour, and made some good friends. One time he came home from a big navy base in the Philippines, and he brought a close friend home with him on leave.”

“Phil?”

“Phil. It was an odd situation. I think about it a lot, even now. It was as though my brother Eldon brought something into the house that I would never have run into otherwise-some substance, like a drug-and it was something that I had no immunity against.”

“You were attracted to Phil right away?”

“It caught me by surprise. I had a guy I was interested in at the time, and I was busy with nursing school, working long hours and studying. But I came home one evening, and there he was.” Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, as though she were seeing it again, and then they sharpened and returned to Emily. “I don’t need to tell you. He had that sense of humor that made you start laughing when you knew you shouldn’t, and then you would remember afterward and start laughing again, and people would look at you and wonder.”

“I know,” Emily said. “You would want to tell him, and wanting to tell him something was the same as missing him, and then you could hardly wait to see him.”

“I wasn’t on my guard because he started out being just some marine, one of Eldon’s friends, not somebody who was there to see me at all, just a guy sleeping over on his way to spend the rest of his leave at his own home. But I started to like him. When they got their orders, he and Eldon were both transferred to Camp Pendleton next, and I found that as soon as I had a break in nursing school, I had an irresistible urge to fly down to San Diego and visit Eldon. I spent most of my time with Phil. One night after a couple of evenings out, we found ourselves in my hotel room in Oceanside, and the obvious happened.”

“And you got pregnant?”

“Oh, no. Didn’t I tell you that it wasn’t that simple? This part of it was simple-that night. Neither of us planned it. I needed a ride, and he walked me to my hotel room. After that night, everything sped up and changed. I was in love with Phil.”

“Was he in love with you?”

“I think he was, but you have to see that love was what I wanted it to be at the time, and later on, what it had to be to make my life a tragedy and not just a sad little story about a stupid girl who didn’t know how to behave and got what you’d expect. He said he loved me, and he acted as though he did. But Phil was a man who kept a lot to himself.”

Emily said, “What happened?”

“I kept going down to visit Eldon in Oceanside. Only I would come a couple of days early, then pretend to leave for home, and spend a few days in Escondido or Capistrano with Phil before I actually left for Oakland. My mother and Eldon would talk on the phone now and then, and she would say something like, `Did you and Lee Anne have a nice visit?’ It was never `Did Lee Anne come to visit you?’ because that would have meant she was checking up on me. I think that even if Eldon had suspected something, he would not have said anything to her. We were so close, and he knew what it was like to be living at home and trying never to disappoint our parents. Sometimes Phil would get time off and show up at my school in San Francisco. I would come out of class or out of the hospital, and he would be there waiting for me. It went on for a long timeabout a year and a half-and then I missed a period. I didn’t need a test, but I went out and got one.”

“Did you tell Phil right away?”

“Not exactly. I had to have some time to think. Then I waited until the next week, when I was going to see him in person. I drove down to Oceanside.”

“What did he say?”

“It was as though we both had been in a dream-a soft, beautiful one-and we woke up on the same day. I had been in college in San Francisco, maybe the most tolerant city in the country, and I was in medicine, where there are lots of people of every shade from every country-patients, nurses, doctors, technicians. When I went down to Oceanside, everybody we knew or saw was a marine or the family of a marine. One of the things about the military is that racism doesn’t play. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many black people. If you’re a gunnery sergeant you’re treated like every other gunnery sergeant-better than a corporal, but not as good as a lieutenant. Phil and I had both been in places where people were people, and nobody had much time or reason to think about color. But as I said, when I got pregnant, we woke up and everything looked different.”

“How?”

“Race. I told my mother, and it nearly killed her. She begged me to break up with him. The thought of having a white man in the family and a half-white baby just made her sick. She cried so hard, rocking back and forth, with her arms wrapped around herself. From the morning when I told her until nearly five in the afternoon, she didn’t stop. Then, at quarter to five, she stopped, took a bath, and pulled herself together so my father wouldn’t know anything was wrong.”

“Did it work?”

“It did. She was afraid my father would hurt somebody-maybe me, maybe Phil, maybe himself-and that would be the end of our family. That meant everything to her. When he went off to work again, she started in on me again. She wanted me to get an abortion, which I could have done practically that day at the hospital. Nobody would have asked any questions or anything.”

“Did you consider it?”

“Not at first. I was a nurse, so I wasn’t intimidated or anything. I just resented the idea that my own mother would think I wasn’t strong enough to handle my own problems.”

“Which ones?”

“Any of them. Being the wife of an active-duty marine stationed five hundred miles from my home. Taking care of my baby while I went through the hardest parts of the nursing program. Working to pay back my loans while my husband got shipped away somewhere. I was tough, and I told her so. I’d get through the hard time, and things would get better. But it was the story that bothered her.”

“The story?”

“The story everybody has heard a million times. The smart, pretty black girl has a big future ahead. She gets through nursing school, and maybe after she works a few years she’ll try to get through medical school, too. But something happens. She ends up with a baby-in this case, a white man’s baby-and there’s no way for her to have her future.”

“Did you want to go to medical school?”

“I had thought about it. The main thing was that she and I saw what I was doing differently. I thought I was considering getting married and having a family. She thought I was setting myself up to be just another black girl with no money raising a child alone. I said it wasn’t that way. She said I was living in a dreamworld. It wasn’t that easy to be the black wife of a white man. I said I was strong enough. She said, But is he?”’ Lee Anne stopped and held Emily with her eyes, and all at once, Emily knew.

“That’s right. While my mother was talking to me, his family and friends were talking to him. He was trying to imagine the future, just as I was. And when he was through thinking, he had a different answer than I had. I remember so clearly the day when he told me. He had the foresight to have the conversation with me in Oakland, so I would be two miles from my family, at my apartment, near school. All I had to do was shut the door when he left, lie down on my own bed, and cry. If I had been nine or ten hours from home, among strangers in a cheap hotel in Oceanside, I don’t know what I would have done. By then my brother Eldon had been promoted and shipped to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for some kind of special training, so I couldn’t have gone to him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emily said. “I’m ashamed for him. I want you to know I never knew any of this.”

“Of course not. Oh, he wasn’t so bad. Over the next twenty years or so, I came to understand him better, and maybe to see his point of view wasn’t entirely selfish and cowardly. He contributed money to Dewey’s support from that time until Dewey grew up and went in the marines. And even after that, he sent checks to me, in case I wanted to send money to Dewey. He sometimes made it here for Dewey’s birthday, and he always made it on Christmas.”

Emily was stunned. “It seemed as though he always was out on Christmas. He had me convinced that it was the best time to find out about the subjects of investigations. They all stopped looking over their shoulders.”

“Well, now you know. Some of the time he was here.”

“And the other times?”

“Honestly, Emily, I don’t know. I was never his confidante. He may really have worked some or all of those times. After we broke up over twentyfour years ago, I wouldn’t have that kind of relationship with him anymore. I was polite to him, but I didn’t ask him for anything or try to be his friend. All we had in common was Dewey. That was for Dewey’s sake, and not his.”

Emily’s head had sunk into her hands. The tension that had been keeping her erect and active had simply left her. She said, “I’m sorry I bothered you. I wasn’t trying to pry into your personal life so I could live with mine. Believe me, nothing I’ve learned has made me happy.” She raised her head. “I assume Dewey told you about the man in the ski mask?”

“Yes. It must have been horrible.”

“Dewey saved my life. The man was in the process of dragging me off when Dewey got there. Today I had some faint hope that you might know the answer to the man’s questions.”

“That I would?”

“You were Phil’s secret. Nobody knew that you and he had been … close. You would be the ideal person to keep something for him. It would have been a box, like stationery comes in.”

Lee Anne stood up, suddenly agitated. She paced to the other side of the room, and back. “Oh, my God. I didn’t know.”

“What?”

“He left it with me.”

“Where-here?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell Dewey?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anything to do with his secrets. But he said all he wanted me to do was take a big padded envelope and put it in the bottom of a drawer. He opened it to show me it wasn’t drugs or money or anything that could get me in trouble. All that was in the box was a file-thick-an envelope with some snapshots, all people I had never seen before, and a couple of cassette audiotapes.”

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t have it anymore.”

“What happened to it?”

Lee Anne didn’t avoid her stare. “You think I should have given it to you. You think that because he married you, everything he left anywhere is for you. I don’t blame you. It should have been for you. But he had postage stamps on it, and a mailing label. He said that if anyone asked about it, or anything happened to him, I should put it in the mail. When Dewey called me that day and told me that Phil was dead, I remembered the box. I thought about sending it to you, but I didn’t want to. Maybe it was because all I could do for Phil was perform the favor exactly as he asked. His death naturally made me think about what had become of my own life, and maybe I was resenting you a little. So I took it to the post office and mailed it.”

“Please, Lee Anne. The man with the mask-the one who was kidnapping me-is looking for it. I think that if I don’t get it first, he’ll eventually kill me. It’s evidence against the man who had Phil murdered. Did you look at the address? Do you know where it was going?”

“Seattle. The address was in Seattle.”

“Was the name Sam Bowen?”

“I think maybe that was the name. Who is he?”

Emily was up, clutching her purse. “He’s an old detective who used to work with Phil years ago.” She moved closer to Lee Anne. “I’m terribly sorry for the way Phil treated you.”

Lee Anne said, “I’m sorry for what happened to all of us.”

“You have a wonderful son,” Emily said, then looked away. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Thanks for helping me.”