The Last Breath (27 page)

36

THERE IS AN
immeasurable gulf between what donors think humanitarian aid is capable of, and what it delivers. What our websites and brochures will never tell you is that your twenty dollar donation won’t fix poverty or end hunger, in fact won’t even come close. We won’t reveal that places that sucked before the disaster will still suck three years later. We’ll neglect to mention that relief organizations screw up, frequently and spectacularly, because by definition disasters are chaotic and unpredictable and humans are...well, human.

We’ll never say any of these things, because aid organizations do make a difference. By providing food and water and medicine, we are making things a little more bearable, a little less awful, for a short period of time. Even if we’re doing it all wrong, we’re at least doing something, and that’s one step closer than doing nothing at all.

Which is what I tell myself as I sneak down the stairs in my sweats and bare feet. That by going to confront my father in the middle of the night with what I think I know, I’m at least doing something.

Like every night, Fannie’s left the oven light burning in the kitchen before disappearing up to her room. Its golden glow works its way across the living room floor, falling into shadows halfway to Dad’s bed, blanketing the rest of the room in splotches of black and gray. I stop in the doorway a moment in order to allow my eyes to adjust to the inky darkness.

A breathy but rhythmic rattle tells me my father is the lumpy form on the hospital bed, sound asleep. I go to him, tugging on the elastic holding my hair, letting my curls fall loose and free all around my shoulders. A niggle of guilt pushes at the lining of my belly but I ignore it, reaching for Dad’s arm instead. It takes a few shakes, but then Dad opens his eyes with a snort.

“Huh?” He whips his head up and swivels it back and forth, searching for me in the dark. “Who’s there?”

“It’s just me.” I wrap a palm around his forearm and grip until he stills. I want him to be paying close attention when I say my next words: “Ella Mae.”

He jerks back as though I just poked him with a live wire, and then his dying muscles give out. His limbs, his head, his jaw all go slack. Only his eyes move, the lids blinking rapidly at me. “What?”

“It’s me. Ella Mae.”

Dad’s mouth snaps shut and his nostrils flare. The sound of his heavy breathing fills the room. He shakes his head violently. “You can’t be here. You’re dead.”

“No, Ray, it’s real.” I pick up his hand, hold it in mine. “I’m real.”

He snatches his hand away, his lip curling in either horror or disgust. “Are you here for revenge? ’Cause I’m already dyin’.”

My heart heaves and cracks at the mean edge to both his mouth and his tone, aimed at the woman I loved like my mother. I choke back my tears, dipping my chin and cocking my head a tiny bit to the right the way she used to do, and I disguise my lie in a Tennessee drawl. “I know the truth, Ray.”

His eyes go wide, and they stare dry and unblinking into mine. “You can’t know. Nobody knows but me and Cal. I was so careful.”

“Not careful enough. I saw you.”

“Liar! You couldn’t have seen me. I had on different clothes. I was wearing a ski mask. You never knew it was me!”

Just because I was expecting a confession doesn’t make it any easier to hear. I sway, and sixteen years’ worth of suspicion and sorrow slides down my cheeks. I open my mouth to tell him that I hate him for stealing Ella Mae from me. That he deserved every one of those sixteen years in prison, and I wish he would live to see at least sixteen more. That he is going to burn in hell for what he did.

And then his face curls inward and he reaches for me with both hands, his fists latching on to the hem of my sweatshirt, and the words die in my throat.

“I loved you, Ella Mae.” Her name catches in his chest, emerges on the tail end of a sob. “I would’ve stayed with you forever if only you’d loved me back. Why couldn’t you love me back?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer, just hauls air into his lungs and wails loud enough to wake the whole house. “Why didn’t you love me back?”

He breaks down then, his body racked with sobs his lungs are too weak to fuel with much more than wheezy rattles. My father asked me to talk about forgiveness, but the only thing I feel now is a bone-deep sorrow—for Ella Mae, for me and Bo and Lexi, for Cal and Jake. But mostly, for my father. For the daddy I once knew and the murderer he’d become. For the man who lost a woman’s love, and the man I’m about to lose all over again.

“Tell me you forgive me.” His grip on my shirt tightens, and his muscles give a weak squeeze to pull me closer. “I’m begging you. Let me die in peace.”

I watch him for a long moment, thinking he doesn’t deserve an ounce of peace. But I’m not going to be like Lexi. I won’t let my bitterness and anger and hatred eat me alive. I won’t let it pull me under.

Every single decision I’ve made in the past sixteen years has been motivated by an attempt to escape my past. I meant my words to Jake, though. I’m done running.

But in order to stay put anywhere—in order to still the gypsy in my soul—I have to scrounge up a teeny tiny scrap of forgiveness for my father, even if I will never be able to forgive his action.

And if I can’t do either of those things just yet, the least I can do is give him peace.

“Go back to sleep.” I untangle my shirt from his fists and place both his palms gently on his chest. “I forgive you.”

* * *

“That was one hell of a performance.”

Cal’s voice doesn’t startle me. Though I didn’t notice him sitting in the corner of the living room when I confronted my father, I heard his movement, and shortly after, his footsteps, as I stumbled into the kitchen. So though I’m not particularly surprised he followed me, it’s his tone—impressed, almost reverent—that shocks me. I mop up my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and turn to face my uncle.

“I figured it was worth a try.” My voice comes out far calmer than I feel. I lift a shoulder and look straight into Cal’s eyes. “I was tired of waiting around for someone to volunteer the truth.”

“Well, like I said, bravo.” The dim light in the kitchen paints angry purple shadows under his eyes, across his forehead, around his mouth, where worry and grief have etched new lines in his face. He reaches past me, flicking on the water boiler with a knuckle. “I sure could use a whiskey toddy. How ’bout you?”

He takes my silence as a yes, because he pulls two mugs from the drainer by the sink, rummages around in a cabinet for honey, gives both mugs a generous squirt.

“I tell you what, though, baby girl. You certainly had the element of surprise on your side, ’cause your father and I never saw that one coming. Not in a million years. And I’m not being the least bit facetious when I say I don’t think I could have done any better myself.”

“How long have you known?”

What I don’t say is that my question is a test. If Cal lies to me now, I will march out of this kitchen and this house, and I will never, ever speak to him again. Not even to give him my condolences at his brother’s death. He must detect something in either my tone or my stance, because he adds an extra glug of Jack Daniel’s to both mugs, tops them with boiling water and drops in two spoons.

And then he picks them up by the handles and gestures to the kitchen table. “Let’s sit, shall we? My knees aren’t what they used to be.”

We settle in at the kitchen table, and Cal pushes a steaming mug across its surface to me. “You know I’m breaching attorney-client privilege if I tell you.”

“You know I’m walking out of here and never speaking to you again if you don’t.”

Cal smiles. “Touché, baby girl.” He gives the spoon a spin, watching the milky mixture swirl around and around in his mug. “I was the first phone call your father made that night. He was barely making any sense he was so hysterical, going on and on about how Ella Mae was making a fool of him, that she was a cheatin’ whore, that he had to do it. When I asked him what, what did he have to do? he said, calm as could be, ‘I killed her, Cal.’”

Even though I knew it was coming, I suck in a breath.

“My reaction was a little more colorful. After I was through cussin’ him out, I told him to call 9-1-1 and turn himself in. That’s when he hung up on me.”

Cal pauses to take a sip of his toddy. I grip the handle of mine hard enough to snap the ceramic in two.

“By the time I made it to Rogersville, the police were already here. Your father was being treated for shock and a head injury. He’d rammed himself into the doorpost hard enough to give himself a mild concussion, but of course the police didn’t know that. By then he’d already fed them the story about intruders, and I have to give it to him, he did a damn good job. Breakin’ into his own door, clearin’ any evidence he was the one to drag Ella Mae down the stairs. If Dean Sullivan hadn’t been looking out his living room window at two in the morning your father would’ve gotten away with it.”

“And yet you still defended him.” Though the words may be accusatory, my tone is not. I’m suddenly exhausted by all the bitterness and blame. I only want to understand.

Cal doesn’t seem to take offense. “I didn’t have a choice, baby girl. Your daddy taught me how to pitch a baseball and shoot a BB gun and skin a rabbit with a Swiss Army knife. He bought me my first beer, and when the time came, my first pack of Trojan condoms. Up until that very night, I’d spent my entire life worshipping that man. What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to let justice take care of him.”

Only, as I say the words, I realize that is exactly what Cal’s done. My father went to prison for murder despite having the Tennessee Tiger by his side. His appeals stalled after only one attempt. Cal’s defense wasn’t accidentally shoddy. He threw the most prominent, the most important case of his life on purpose.

“You should have told us. Bo and Lexi and me. We deserved to know the truth.”

“You think I don’t know that? But telling you kids was the one thing your father wouldn’t budge on. He cried and carried on like a mule in heat. So your father and I made a deal. He agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison for what he’d done, and I agreed to not tell the police or you kids what I knew.”

Whoever said the worst thing about the wait is not knowing was right. For sixteen years I’d waited for the truth. Now that I know, something inside of me breaks open, lets go. Of the anger, the fear, the bitterness. I let go of it all.

“What ever happened to the baby?”

Cal shrugs. “Your father never knew about a baby until the letter.”

I don’t believe him, not for a second.

Cal must read the doubt on my expression, because he says, “Now that you know the truth, I don’t have any more reasons to lie. Your father didn’t know, and it didn’t come up in the autopsy, so I’ve always assumed nature cleaned up its own mess.” He reaches across the table, drapes a palm over my hand. “I know I should’ve told you, baby girl, and I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know. I just pray one day you kids’ll be able to move past all this tragedy and be happy.”

I think about my siblings sleeping upstairs, clueless to the drama unfolding beneath them, and my heart gives a painful squeeze. They’ve just gotten their father back, and now they’re about to lose him all over again.

“Somebody has to tell Bo and Lexi.”

“I know.” Cal’s words come out on a sigh. “But I can’t tell them what I just told you. I’ve already said too much.”

“Fine. Tell them Dad confessed to me. That’s all they need to know.”

He drops his head in a nod, studies the table. “I’ll tell them in the morning.”

“Tell them now.”

Cal raises his head, and I hold his gaze, daring him to disagree. Finally, after a long moment, he winces, then nods.

And then I think of someone else who deserves to know, and my heart flops around like one of those bluegill Bo used to fish out of the Holston River when we were little. I push back my chair and stand, looking around for wherever I left my keys. I find them on top of the microwave.

“Where are you going?”

“To town.” I stuff my feet into my boots, on the mat by the kitchen door. “Because there’s only one person on the planet who can tell Jake who murdered his mother, and that’s me.”

37

WHEN YOU’RE IN
a hurry, one point seven miles can feel like a million, and the time it takes to drive there an eternity. Tonight, the trip to Roadkill feels almost instant, like I blink my eyes and I’m there, parked in front of Jake’s door two seconds later.

If I were thinking straight, I might be surprised to see the lights are still on behind the thick etched windows, even more surprised to see a solitary Jake, hunched over a glass of amber liquid at his bar. Instead, I pocket my keys and breeze through the door like it isn’t rapidly approaching dawn.

Jake looks up and I try to ignore the shiver rippling up my arms. The late hour and bourbon have slowed his reactions, and it takes a few seconds for his eyes to focus on whoever just walked through his door, a few more to recognize that it’s me. And then eyes so dark brown they’re almost black bore into mine with not pleasure to see me, but resignation.

He thunks down his glass with a heavy arm. “If you’re coming to tell me we’re through, you don’t have to bother. I already got the message, at least three times now.”

“That’s not why I’m here.” He blinks at me, and I catch a brief glimmer of hope before I shake my head. “That’s not why, either.”

Jake gives me a disappointed nod, then returns to his bourbon and takes a long, slow pull. There’s only an inch or two left in the bottle on the bar next to him, and I wonder how much of that he’s drunk tonight. Judging by his glassy, red eyes and sloppy movements, I suspect most of it.

“Are you drunk? Because I have something to say, and I need you to remember it in the morning.”

He drains his glass with one hand, reaches for the bottle with the other. “Well then, you better hang on, ’cause I’m not nearly drunk enough.” He turns the bottle upside down over his glass until it’s empty, then drops it behind the bar where it falls to the rubber mat with a dull thunk.

“Never mind.” I turn for the door. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“No.” For someone with a bottle of bourbon in his system, Jake is fast. He’s off his stool and across the room faster than I can reach for the handle. “Don’t leave. Please. I’m listening.”

I drop the handle, suck in a breath, force myself to meet his gaze. “I figured it out, Jake.”

He tries to pull up that smile I love so much, but it doesn’t quite make it up his cheeks. “Seeing as my veins are currently filled with more booze than blood, you’re going to have to be a little more specific. Figured what out?”

I look up at him and my heart whimpers. Why does he make me want to laugh instead of cry, why does he have to stand so close, and why do I want to jump in his arms and bury my face in his neck and forget the words I came here to say?

The weight of the past few days hits me, and a sob bursts up my throat. Jake doesn’t hesitate. He pulls me into his arms and holds me upright while I fall apart, wiping my tears with his thumbs and murmuring comforting words into my curls. His gentleness breaks my heart even more, and it’s a long time before I can do anything other than lean into him and cry.

“Is it your father? Did he...?”

I shake my head into his chest, and then I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe by now...” His arms tighten around me in response, and I know I have to tell him right this instant, before I lose whatever’s left of my nerve. I breathe deep, taking in as much as I can of his scent and his strength, untangle myself from his arms, step back far enough to look into his eyes and force myself to say the words. “Dean Sullivan didn’t kill Ella Mae.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“He has an alibi, Jake. He couldn’t have murdered her.”

Jake shakes his head, thrusts a hand through his hair. “Then what about all those things he told us? That he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to do it. What was that all about?”

“Who knows? The man’s been a raging alcoholic for almost two decades now. He’s probably got all of twelve brain cells left in his pickled head.” Fresh tears well in my eyes, and my voice drops to barely a whisper. “But he’s not who killed Ella Mae.”

Understanding flashes across his expression and then is wiped away, like he hears the message behind my words yet refuses to accept it as truth. I don’t blame him. Like Jake, I can almost see our life. I would find a job at a nearby nonprofit and plan Sunday-afternoon dinners with Bo and Lexi. At night, Jake and I would sneak upstairs with a pan of that night’s special and a bottle of Bordeaux to share in his bed. Afterward, we’d make love to the thumps of music and laughter coming from the bar beneath us. His love could heal my grief at my father’s betrayal, teach me to find peace in this place.

If only Jake wasn’t Ella Mae’s son. If only Dean was Ella Mae’s killer. If only, if only, if only.

Jake leads me to a bar stool, the very same bar stool where we started. He picks me up—literally wraps his hands around my waist and lifts me off the ground—and settles me onto it. He points to his glass, still half full, on the bar between us. When I don’t go to pick it up, he pushes it into my hand and waits until I down a good gulp.

Jake gives the liquid courage time to hit my stomach, warm my blood, loosen my tongue. And then he says, “Start at the beginning.”

“Allison Sullivan told Jeffrey that Dean was with her.” Bile swirls in my throat but I swallow it down, force myself to look him in the eyes. “From ten until after one the night Ella Mae was murdered. She remembers exactly, because that’s how long Dean beat and raped her.”

Jake sobers in an instant. His body, his expression, the flicker of hope in his eyes, all go dead. He shakes his head and leans back. “Don’t say it.”

“I have to. There have already been too many secrets.”

“I mean it, Gia.” His face is so ferocious, I have to remind myself his rage is not directed at me. Not really. “Do not tell me his name.”

“But I don’t have to say the name, do I?” I whisper, smiling sadly through my tears. “You’ve already figured it out.” When he doesn’t respond, I whisper, “He admitted it to me tonight. Cal confirmed it. Ray Andrews murdered Ella Mae.”

I watch as every emotion I feared most competes on Jake’s face. Grief, disgust, hatred, despair. He snatches the glass from my hand and goes to lift it to his mouth, then reconsiders halfway there. Rearing back with a roar, he pitches the tumbler clear across the room, leaving a trail of liquid down his jeans and across the floor. The glass hits the far wall and explodes in a cloud of bourbon fumes and crystal shards. And then he swipes a hand down his chin, not quite looking at me.

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice is desperate in a way that is more, I think, to convince himself than to sway me. “What’s done is done.”

“Get real, Jake. I saw your face just now. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering when you’ll decide you hate me more than you love me.”

“I could never hate you.”

“For a second or two, you just did,” I whisper, and my heart breaks in two when he doesn’t deny it.

He shakes his head. “We can figure this out. We can get past this.”

I push to a stand. “You were right, you know. Those millions of decisions we make every day—coffee or tea, buy or rent, love me or don’t?—in the end they’re all irrelevant. You could have told me the truth about who you were that very first second we met or the next day or the next, and maybe I would’ve gotten over it, maybe I wouldn’t have. It doesn’t matter, because all of our choices are irrelevant.”

He grabs for me, but I step back and he swipes air. He tries again and ends up clutching a handful of my sweatshirt in his fist, tugging me toward him.

“Don’t you see, Jake? Our fates had already been decided for us long before we met. Not by God or the universe or whatever higher power you choose to believe in, but by our parents. When your mother decided to sleep with the neighbor, and my father decided to kill her for it, you and I were destined to pay for something neither of us had a hand in.”

“Gia...”

I wait for whatever he’s about to say next, but it doesn’t come. Maybe because of the alcohol, maybe because he’s still trying to figure out what, exactly, there is left to say.

Gently, I peel his fingers away from the fabric of my shirt and he lets me. Jake doesn’t reach for me again. His hands hang limp at his sides. When I turn and head for the door, when I step onto the sidewalk and into my car, no one stops me. When I gun the gas and head for home, no one chases me. Jake doesn’t follow.

* * *

By the time I push through the door at home, two things have happened. First of all, Dad has died, judging by the look of compassion Fannie gives me and the unabashed tears on Cal’s cheeks when I step into the living room.

Cal’s also made good on his promise to tell the truth. I deduce this mainly from my siblings—Bo in a sobbing, crumpled heap at the foot of the couch and Lexi, who almost mows me down in her hurry to get out the door.

“Where are you going?”

She gives me a get-real look. “I told you so. All these years I knew with every ounce inside me he was guilty. I don’t know why I let you talk me into coming.”

Bo lifts his head, blinks at me through bloodshot eyes. “So it’s true? He really did confess to killing Ella Mae?”

“Of course he did.” Lexi puts everything she’s got in her voice. Fury, indignation, conviction, contempt. Yet I still hear the tiniest thread of hope.

“Shut up!” Bo shrieks, surprising us with both his volume and his vehemence. “I want to hear it from Gia.”

“I’m so sorry, BoBo.” My voice drops to a whisper. “But it’s true.”

He makes a choking sound and buries his face in his hands.

I turn to Lexi, my voice hardening to match her tone. “Don’t even think about leaving.”

My sister shakes her perfect ponytail, shifts her designer bag onto a shoulder and stomps across the Rooms To Go carpet.

But I’m faster. I sprint around her, spread my arms wide, press my back against the door. A human wall between Lexi and outside.

Lexi dips her head, says from between clenched teeth, “Move.”

I don’t. “Listen to me first. I know—”

She hitches a thumb to the left. “Move, dammit.” This time she loads her words with a silent
or else.

I plant my feet firmer into the floor. “I let you ditch me once. I’m not going to let you do it again. We have about a million things to do, even more decisions to make.”

“Decisions? What kind of decisions?”

“Well, for one, we promised Dad a memorial.”

“A memorial.” She grunts. “Lemme give you a little tip for future reference. When your father makes a deathbed confession that he really is guilty of the murder he claimed for sixteen years not to have committed, his last wishes can go to hell right along with him.”

“But what about his remains?”

“Put ’em in a garbage bag and drop ’em in the Holston River for all I care. I will certainly not be touching them.” She glares over her shoulder at Cal. “And if you put his ashes anywhere even two hundred miles upwind of Ella Mae’s park, you can go to hell, too.”

Cal pushes to a stand, looking every bit his sixty-three years. “I’ll take care of his ashes, and don’t worry. They won’t be anywhere near here.”

Lexi turns back to me. “Now that that’s settled...” She raises an expectant brow.

When I don’t move, she pushes me aside, yanks open the door without another word and marches across the porch toward the stairs. I follow her to the edge of the porch.

“Lexi, wait!”

She doesn’t slow.

By the mailbox, a cluster of five or six gray-haired women look up from their candles with shocked expressions. Their presence here strikes me as downright absurd, considering Lexi’s desertion and Dad’s confession, and I am about to give a bitter laugh when suddenly, the weight of the situation hits me like an anvil to the temple. They don’t know. Folks in Rogersville still think Dad is innocent. I had been so concerned with telling my siblings and Jake, I hadn’t thought about the rest of the town.

My sister clearly hasn’t given them a second thought, either, because she tears up the walkway to her car, not slowing, not looking back. A shot of fresh red-hot rage scorches a path up my spine.

“You selfish bitch!”

Lexi looks over her shoulder just long enough to roll her cornflower eyes. “You’re gonna have to try a little harder than that, girlfriend. I’ve been called much worse.”

Silly me. Lexi is right, she has been called a lot worse, and mostly by me. I ramp up my insult to a slight Lexi will comprehend.

“Selfish, ass-ugly, thunder-thighed, bad-root-jobbed bitch. And your jeans are too tight!”

“Uh-oh,” Bo mutters from somewhere behind me.

A quick burst of snickers erupts from the spectators up by the mailbox, a group whose members seem to have multiplied. At least three new cars have tripled our audience.

But none of them could ever accuse me of not knowing my sister. She skids to a stop and wheels around, her expression so deathly calm that if I weren’t so furious, I would find it hilarious. Or it would scare me shitless, either one.

“Did you just call me fat?”

Of course that’s the one she picked up on. My gaze flits to the crowd up at the street. Their candles hang by their sides, their mouths half open in unabashed curiosity. Vigil-holders turned rubberneckers.

“Can we please discuss this inside?”

She takes three threatening steps back up the walkway. “I said, did you just call me
fat?
” Her last word echoes throughout the valley.

I come down the porch stairs, moving closer and dropping my voice so that hopefully, not all of Rogersville will hear what I say next. “The insult I was going for was selfish. Have you taken even one second to think about anyone other than yourself? Use that pretty little brain of yours to think about what Dad’s confession might’ve meant for the rest of us. What it might have meant for me.”

Understanding blooms across her brow. “You told Jake?”

I nod.

“And?”

Tears spring to my eyes, answer enough for Lexi. She drops her bag on the grass and closes the distance between us, pulling me into a hug.

“Aw, baby. I’m so sorry.”

If nothing else, at least this past month has given me back my sister. I clutch her closer, inhale her sugar-sweet scent. No matter what happens next, I will not allow us to lose touch again.