20
Starla wished that the earth would open up and swallow her whole. She heard nothing after worthless Deloplane triplets. The accusation stunned her. She had grimaced visibly at the verdict’s unfairness but remained silent, knowing that she lacked the courage to offer any defense. Her own subterfuge on this catastrophic trip had rendered herself and her surviving children defenseless. It was the most humiliation she had ever felt about anything in a lifetime of humiliation.
And yet, Jack’s account of that night’s events was harrowing. He still blamed himself for every mundane decision along the way, turning every misstep into a willful mistake. Each event leading up to Evelyn’s killing was now a cancerous cell, multiplying exponentially in his mind. Starla looked up from her hands into his eyes, tears flowing freely, listening once more and thinking . . . This man is the father of my children.
“I heard men shouting about someone being shot. I ran outside and saw a small crowd gathered around the Escalade. At that point, everything got scrambled, honestly. When I finally made it over to her, she was already gone, bloody . . . unrecognizable. But of all the images from that night, her bloody face is the most clear to me. Everything else was black and white or blurry . . . but her face was in crystal clear HD. Still is. I don’t think I’ll ever completely purge it from my memory. You know that picture of us you saw on the mantle? I can’t look at it anymore without seeing her bloody face.”
Then he lost momentum, and the story lay unfinished like a dish on the table. Starla dabbed at her tears with her napkin. Jack seemed shocked by his own words, astounded that he had shared such painful memories with the woman across from him—a virtual stranger. Her tears are what stopped him. Maybe he had gone too far, crossed some honesty boundary buried deep within the human heart. Perhaps there was a limit to how much internal pain it was safe to share. He suddenly felt ashamed of his candor. Jack reached across the table and grabbed ahold of her hand.
“Carolyn, I’m sorry. I had no right to dump all of my garbage onto you like that. You’ve had your own loss . . . please forgive me.”
The heat from his hand startled her, increasing her discomfort beyond what she thought possible.
* * *
Kevin pulled into the driveway of the freshly painted Dutch colonial house with its curved eaves and shiny black shutters. It was a neighborhood of old, quaint homes with yards full of mature trees and trimmed hedges—not at all like what he had imagined. Visions forged in a vengeful heart seldom are. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, then walked up the sidewalk and rang the doorbell before his courage ran out. The door opened slightly, revealing the face of a young woman.
“ . . . Can I help you?”
“Yes . . . I’m looking for Starla Deloplane. Is she home at the moment?”
“Who’s looking for Starla Deloplane?” asked the timid girl from the crack in the door.
“My name is Kevin . . . wait.” Kevin decided to take a chance. “Are you her daughter? . . . Roberta, is it?”
She smiled. “Roberta? Hell, nobody’s called me that in years. My friends call me Bobbie. What do you want with my mother?”
“I just wanted to ask her a couple questions.”
“Questions? Are you a cop?”
“No, no! Look, I’ve driven a long way today . . . maybe you can help me. Can I come in?”
Bobbie opened the door only slightly and gave him a long look. Then another nervous smile.
“ . . . Sure.”
As she opened the door and Kevin made his way past her, she called out, “Rich! We’ve got company.”
Kevin heard footsteps from down the hallway coming toward the living room where he and Bobbie had sat across from each other on two newly purchased upholstered teak-wood chairs. The room was beautifully and tastefully decorated—another surprise. Then he appeared under the curved archway of the hall . . . Richard Deloplane, identical replica of Evelyn Rigsby’s murderer.
Bobbie attempted introductions. “Rich, this is Kevin . . . I didn’t catch your last name . . . ”
“I’m Kevin Rigsby.”
“This is my brother Richard.”
“I know who he is.”
Richard stepped forward and offered his hand, a congenial smile on his face. “Pleased to meet you.”
Bobbie laughed. “So you seem to know all about us, but we don’t know a thing about you. Should we know you?”
Kevin paused, unsure of himself. Everything about this visit was different than he thought it would be. The house, the neighborhood, these people—who seemed pleasant enough, and, at least on the surface . . . guileless. He chose his words carefully.
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s any reason why you would know who I am, although we are connected in an unfortunate way . . . see, your brother, Robert, murdered my mother last September.”
Richard made his way quickly over to his sister’s side of the room, placed his hand on her shoulder, and let out a long sigh.
“Shit, man. We’re very sorry for your loss . . . but we don’t want any trouble from you.”
“No, no . . . There’s no trouble. It’s just been a hard thing to recover from for me and my family . . . I’m sure it’s been tough on you guys as well.”
“Yes. It has.” Richard’s voice was more firm now, less submissive.
“The thing that’s been the hardest for me is how meaningless it all was . . . one minute she was happy and going about her life, a minute later she’s gone, and for what reason? After all this time, it dawned on me that I don’t know a thing about your brother except what I read in the paper. I guess I was hoping that maybe if I talked with your mother, she could provide some insight into what was going on with him at the time of the murder, that perhaps there was some context that could serve as something approximating a . . . reason, an answer—even an imperfect one—to the question . . . why?”
Bobbie looked across the room at Kevin with what felt like genuine compassion.
“Mr. Rigsby, our mother isn’t home now, but I can answer your question. He was our brother, after all, so if anyone should know the answer, it would be us. The truth is, there is no answer to the question of why. Robert was a lost soul. All of his life he was messed up, troubled, confused . . . long before he got started with the drugs, which only made it worse. To Robert, everything in the world was a conspiracy, usually against him. He never met a conspiracy theory that he didn’t believe—hook, line and sinker. Even made up a few of his own. Mom had him in several different rehab centers, tried three different shrinks, and nothing ever worked. He was just a tormented person. Toward the end, he even turned on us, especially Mom. Accused her of trying to kill him once. Even blew up at her one night, claiming that our dad wasn’t our real dad. She actually kicked him out several weeks before it happened. He had gone off the deep end, started making threats. So . . . even though it was horrible to hear the news of what happened, nobody in this house was surprised. It’s been hardest on Mom. She blames herself for not telling the sheriff’s office how crazy he’d become. For weeks after, she just laid around the house in a daze, hardly saying a word for days at a time. Then all of a sudden, she seemed to snap out of it and became her old self for a while. Went on this crazy spending spree. Bought all this new furniture for the house and all. But a couple weeks ago, she got quiet again. The next thing we knew, she’d packed a couple bags and gone, without so much as a word of explanation. I called her on her cell a dozen times before she finally answered. Said she was away getting her mind right and would be back before long, though she wouldn’t tell me where she was. She forgot that right after she lost Robert, she made us put that FindMe app on our cell phones. She was worried that somebody might try to kill us or something. She’s somewhere called Camden, Maine of all places. As far as I know, we don’t know a single soul in Maine—never been there. Neither has Mom. Anyway . . . so I’m sorry you came all this way, and I’m also sorry that I couldn’t help you with your question. I guess some things just can’t be explained. Sometimes, there’s no rational reason behind irrational shit that happens. Richard and I are sincerely sorry for your loss. From everything we read, she seemed like a wonderful woman . . . ”
Kevin stood up slowly, “ . . . Yes. She was quite wonderful. Thanks for your time. I’ll let myself out.”
Kevin walked into the darkness toward his car, stunned by the possibilities. He drove into the town of Madison Heights to the room he had reserved at the Hampton Inn, traversed the brightly lit parking lot in silence, slipped his key into the keypad of room 216, and collapsed onto the bed with only one thought pulsing in his brain . . . Was Starla Deloplane the new woman in his dad’s life?
* * *
Starla looked up at Jack, trying to navigate the impossibly violent currents all around her. How had she managed to get to this place, this restaurant, sitting across from this man? She was overwhelmed by the possibility that there was no way out, that this time her horrible choices had backed her into a corner. If she told the truth, she’d be left with nothing in the world to hold onto. When had the truth ever been her friend? In the grand sweep of her crazy life, what had transparency ever done for her? But now, listening to Jack’s story, hearing her innocent children denigrated by his ignorance, noticing the contempt in his eyes as he described her spawn . . . a fire had ignited in her that was rapidly consuming her self-regard. She was close to not caring what he thought of her, and the further she felt herself moving in that direction, the closer she came to blurting it all out. She suddenly withdrew her hand from his.
“I’m flying back home tomorrow afternoon, but there’s something I need to tell you, something I would like you to know. But we can’t talk about it here, like this. Is there somewhere we can go?”
“How about I walk you back to your hotel?”
“Yes. That would be nice.”
21
It was a delightfully mild night as the two of them walked the side streets down toward the harbor. The closer they got, the more briny the air smelled.
Jack absently asked, “When does your flight leave tomorrow?”
“4:30, I think.”
“Out of Portland?”
“Yes.”
The conversation seemed silly and contrived, nothing more than an attempt to fill the air with words. There was more than the smell of the ancient sea in the atmosphere. There was a growing feeling of dread rising in them both. Jack felt the weight of the unknown. He had overcome, or at least thought he’d overcome, grave misgivings about Carolyn, but now he wondered what secrets she held in reserve. Starla knew full well the magnitude of her secret and the power it had to not only destroy the fragile flower of her self-respect but to further damage Jack—maybe beyond remedy. What could she possibly hope to gain by telling him the whole truth? Every calculation available to her told her to just let it go, kiss the man on the cheek, and walk out of his life for good. But there was a part of her heart which didn’t honor calculation, a part that longed to, for once in her life, tell the truth, become an honest partner, transform from a manipulative, self-interested striver to a transparent human being capable of love and kindness. Why shouldn’t Jack know the truth? What was so fragile about his state of mind that forbade him from knowing that two grown adults walk the earth with his blood in their veins? What about her fragile state? Hadn’t she lost a son to the ravages of mental illness, then listened to Jack denigrate not only her children but herself? Didn’t he deserve to know the only lasting result of their one night together?
She told herself that she didn’t want a dime of his money. But what did she want? It became clear to her as they reached the boardwalk at the edge of the water, turned left, and walked down towards the harbor master’s hut. She wanted Jack Rigsby to know that she wasn’t a horrible person, that she was trying to struggle down her life’s path, battling to overcome the hand she’d been dealt at birth, trying to do good and be good just as hard as he was. And despite what he might think, she was, in fact, a good woman.
When they reached an empty bench, she whispered, “It’s really nice out. Can we sit here for a minute?”
Jack looked behind him, saw the steep, sweeping hill that ran away from the water up to the library. He remembered looking down from its window and seeing her sitting on this very bench.
He heard her voice begin. “Jack, the night we met all those years ago, I remember telling you that for that night, that one night, I would be anyone you wanted me to be. Do you remember that?”
Jack’s face relaxed, a soft hint of a smile growing as he gazed across the water at a majestic three-masted schooner rocking in the calm water.
“ . . . Yes, I remember that very well.”
“Well, starting tonight, I can’t do that anymore.”
* * *
Despite his exhaustion from the eight-hour drive and the tumultuous events of the past couple hours, Kevin couldn’t sleep. He looked at his cell. It was only 10:00. His mind tried to sort through his competing, swirling thoughts. The Quik Stop parking lot had felt like a tomb. The Deloplanes seemed totally believable, even sympathetic. They were equally wounded by the tragedy of September—not the culpable creatures of his imagination. But their mother had wound up in the same mid-coast Maine town as his dad, and his own father had just told him about meeting a business associate from twenty-five years ago. Was it even possible that they knew each other years ago? The mother of his wife’s murderer? It was too much to absorb in one day. Sleep was a pipe dream. On an impulse, he searched through his contacts until he found the number. Mitchell Blaire . . .
“Kevin? Hey, buddy! What a surprise, hearing from you!”
Mitchell was a night owl, always had been. Kevin knew he would be up and willing to talk for hours if he got him started. Kevin and Mitchell had always gotten along well. Kevin liked him. He was fun.
“I know it’s kinda late, Mitchell . . . but have you got a minute to talk?”
“Absolutely, Kev. What’s up?”
“I guess you know that dad is up at the lake. Well, I talked with him a day or so ago and found that he had run into an old friend of his . . . a woman friend.”
Mitchell’s voice had a goofy quality to it whenever the subject of women came up . . . any kind of women, really. Now he sounded positively giddy.
“ . . . Wait, WHAT? Your dad is seeing someone? Hell’s bells, man, that’s great news! No offense to your sainted mother, Kev, but Jack needs to snap out of this deep funk he’s been in, and maybe someone new will be a first step. Don’t ya think?”
Kevin tried to hide his disappointment in Mitchell’s breezy dismissal of his mother. It was information he needed, not an argument.
“Well, maybe so, I guess. But I’m curious about this woman. Liz actually flew up and stayed a few days with him. She met this woman briefly. Dad says that she was a business associate of his from twenty-five, thirty years ago when you and him were starting the business. I was just wondering if you had any idea who she might be?”
Mitchell fell silent—a strange turn of events in any conversation which he was a party to. Finally, “Wow, Kev, twenty-five years was a long time ago.” Another oddly long pause. “ . . . a business associate, he said?”
Kevin began to feel strange about Mitchell’s sudden reticence. This unsettling night was getting weirder by the minute.
“I can’t remember the exact phrase he used . . . either business associate or someone he had met through business, something like that.”
“What are you concerned about, Kevin? You worried that your dad was fooling around on Evelyn? Because I am here to tell you that your father wasn’t that kind of man.”
“No, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, I was just wondering if you knew of anyone he was friends with through the business back then. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Good.” Mitchell seemed suddenly annoyed with the conversation, nervous and apprehensive. “Here’s the thing about your dad, Kevin. The reason we always work so well together is because we are opposites. We complement each other’s skill sets. I love that man like a brother, and like a brother, I’ve always tried to outdo him. We’ve always competed over everything—you know how we are, right? But, see . . . in one way, he was always better than me. I couldn’t touch him . . . with women.”
Kevin swallowed hard, uncomfortable with the new territory opening between them. For the first time, Kevin noticed a bit of a slur . . . was Mitchell drunk?
“See, your dad was squeaky clean when it came to women. Me, on the other hand, well . . . like I said, we are opposites, your dad and I. He confronted me a couple times over the years about my behavior. He wasn’t a big fan of adultery, thought it reflected poorly on my character, and, by extension, the character of the business. We agreed to disagree, but I toned it down for his benefit.”
Kevin could hardly believe what he was hearing. He had never thought of Mitchell as a philanderer . . . hadn’t thought of him as anything other than a cool uncle. Now, here Mitchell was acting like he was in a confessional.
“What about Tricia?” The question flew out of his mouth fully formed before he had a second to reconsider.
“Tricia? Oh, she knew. She’s always known. We work things out, the two of us. Every marriage can’t be like Jack and Evelyn’s, son.”
Then Mitchell went quiet again, sinking down into a familiar place of resentment. Everything he’d said about Jack was true. He did love him. He did admire him. But for twenty-five years, Mitchell Blaire had alone seen the chink in the great man’s armor. He had never used it to his advantage, even resisting the dozen or so chances he’d had with Evelyn over the years to tip the scales in his favor. He had bitten his tongue out of loyalty. They were like brothers, after all.
But now Evelyn was gone, snuffed out of all their lives, and Jack hadn’t contributed more than a month’s worth of work to the business since September, wallowing about in his grief as if nothing else mattered. And now, his boy Kevin was trying to put two-and-two together. The fact was that Mitchell only knew one woman Jack had ever met through business in 30 years, and that was his cute little waitress at The Hedges. Maybe the moral scales needed a little balancing. Mitchell took a deep draw of his Maker’s Mark.
* * *
It was the occasion of Jack and Evelyn’s tenth wedding anniversary that dominated the first scene of his fevered dream. Mitchell and Tricia had volunteered to keep the kids for the long weekend while the two of them escaped everything for three days and nights at the beach. Jack had found a very cozy bungalow nestled in a sparsely inhabited section of Pawley’s Island featuring all the amenities and a semi-private beach. They were in desperate need of a break. The business was off the ground now and starting to produce some serious money, but Jack felt the pressure of it all to a degree that made him question if it was worth it. Sixty and seventy-hour weeks will do that to a person. Jack had pondered the question more than once . . . What good is making all this money if I haven’t got time to spend it?
This trip had actually been Evelyn’s idea—something out of character for her, since she had always deferred to Jack when it came to vacation planning. But she had sensed his growing unhappiness with their lives. She couldn’t help noticing the worry lines that had appeared at the corners of his eyes. She noticed his loss of appetite for food, spontaneity, and . . . her. On this trip, she would attempt to bring him back to life.
On this night, they had ended up on a blanket near the dunes watching the stars come out, listening to the waves break on the shore. Jack had been quiet, pensive. He heard Evelyn’s voice.
“I’m getting worried about you, Jack,” she’d sighed dreamily. “I’m worried about your memory.”
“What’s wrong with my memory?”
“Lot’s of things.” Suddenly she was sitting up, hugging her knees tightly to her hibiscus-flowered sundress.
“You’ve forgotten a lot about yourself. You’ve forgotten what kind of man you really are, Jack.” She turned her face away from the horizon and toward her husband. “You somehow have convinced yourself that you are a powerful man, a man of great consequence. That business of yours, your employees, all that money has changed how you think of yourself.”
Then she rose to her feet and turned to face him. “Jack Rigsby, you spend so much time being a big-shot businessman, and you take so much pride in being a father, deacon at the church, leader in the community, that you’ve forgotten one thing. See, although all those things are quite admirable, and things that make me proud, you’ve forgotten a pivotal part of what makes Jack Rigsby . . . Jack Rigsby.” The silk coral sundress floated to the sand at her feet. “What you’ve forgotten is that underneath all of that other stuff beats the heart of a man who more than anything else . . . just wants to fuck his hot wife.”
Jack’s dream faded into darkness, leaving nothing but the soft, lapping waves in the distance. The gently flowing timelessness of dreams next dropped him in the corner of his kitchen, observing his younger self embrawled in an angry fight. He saw the veins of his neck and forehead surging with venom. He watched Evelyn, noticed her arms folded across her heaving chest, walled off, closed to him and his words. Her face flushed red as she dished out her own accusations, equally angry, equally venomous. Off in the distance, standing unnoticed in the dining room, was little Kevin in footie pajamas—three, maybe four years old—his hands held tight over his ears, streams of tears rolling off his bright red cheeks. The pain of the scene tore a gaping wound in Jack’s heart, compelling him to cover his own ears.
In a cloudy minute, in a state neither solid nor vaporous, neither real or imagined, Jack once again heard the surf in the distance, then found himself naked, sweating, and entangled with Evelyn under a canopy of stars. Evelyn kissed him slowly, then rested her head on his chest.
“See, Jack . . . there’s a part of you that’s different from the man everyone else sees. It’s the part that belongs to me. Never forget about him again. I want that man. That’s the man I dream about at night.”
The sun peaking through his bedroom window from the back of the house woke him from his restless dreams. He lay still in the growing light, his thoughts not yet caught up with his consciousness. He remembered the dreams in delightful and terrifying detail. He could smell Evelyn’s hair, her subtle perfume. He could hear her screams from the kitchen and the cries of his son. What did it all mean? Anything? What are we to make of dreams anyway? For all anyone knows, they could be faulty neurons firing off in the brain, stirring up the blood, leading to great misunderstanding. Or they could be messages communicated to sleeping men who fail to listen once awake. Perhaps Evelyn was trying to relay a message . . . You were a magnificent lover . . . your carefully groomed image was not the real you . . . you were a phony . . . Although we were great together, we were also capable of cruelty and pettiness. We enjoyed transcendent joy and endured our share of darkness . . . so don’t preserve my memory under glass like some expensive, fragile thing. I was tougher than that, and so are you . . .
When Jack’s mind finally engaged with the reality of a new day, he thought first of the woman who lay sleeping in the guest house up the hill, behind the cabin . . . Starla Deloplane.
22
Starla had expected a restless night. Here she was, alone in Jack Rigsby’s guest house after a night of truth-telling, she hadn’t laid her head on the pillow until after midnight. She’d thought she would toss and turn, replaying the night over and over in her head, dissecting every word. Instead, she instantly fell into an impenetrable sleep, her body and mind limp and empty.
Now, the sun filtering through the tall pines had awakened her. It had taken a second to recognize where she was, her accommodations a vast improvement over the Tidal Beach Inn. She then remembered Jack’s insistence: Well, you just can’t leave tomorrow, not after all this. I need some time to process. In the morning, I’ll have questions. You just can’t leave . . . and I can’t let you stay in this dump. I’ll take you back to the cabin. You can stay in the guest house out back . . .
It had felt like an order—a command from a superior officer. Refusal was not an option. She had agreed with great hesitation, yet an inability and unwillingness to say no.
She rolled over and looked through the window she hadn’t noticed last night. The cabin was fifty yards down a sloping hill, framed beyond by the glassy, still water of the lake. She saw his silhouette pass by the kitchen window. She drew in a deep breath and wondered what this day would bring. In the bathroom, she looked at her reflection in the mirror with a surprising detachment, no longer concerned with every imperfection. She jostled her new shorter hair, shaking out the bed head, then taking another look. She noticed the hint of a smile in the corners of her mouth and heard herself say, “At this point, it is what it is, girl.” She dressed, slipped on a bathrobe to protect her from the chilly morning air, walked down the hill on the slab-and-pebble walkway to the cabin, paused, took another deep breath, then gently rapped on the door.
“Come on in . . . it’s unlocked.”
Starla opened the screen door and then pushed the heavy door open. “Hello,” she offered timidly.
A few more steps into the small entryway revealed Jack in blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, the word Maine emblazoned across the chest. He was standing at the stove of the small kitchen, tending to a frying pan filled with eggs.
“I figured you’d be up soon, so I took the liberty of making some eggs and bacon. I mean, you have to eat, right? Hungry?”
Starla hadn’t expected friendliness and hospitality. She didn’t know what to expect, but this wasn’t it.
“Not really, no.”
“Well, you should eat some anyway. You sleep okay?”
Starla noticed the kitchen table in the windowed corner with the spectacular view of the lake. He’d set two placemats with napkins and silverware and a couple of juice glasses.
“Actually, under the circumstances, I slept like a baby. I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.”
“Lucky. Not me, I tossed and turned all night. One weird dream after another.”
“I suppose that’s my fault.”
“Yeah, probably is.” Jack was spooning the scrambled eggs onto a serving plate along with eight strips of bacon. “There’s coffee on the counter if you want any.”
“Thanks, that would be nice.”
Jack handed her a clean mug and sat down at the table. Starla poured the coffee and sat down across from him. They looked at each other, full on, for the first time.
Jack spoke first. “Some night, huh?”
Starla was startled by his demeanor. Almost playful, as if they had spent two hours having a mild disagreement about politics.
Jack cut off any discussion. “Let’s eat.”
When the time finally came for Starla to tell him the truth, she had spoken from her heart, without calculation or script. She thought she might break it to him in stages, but worried that she might lose her nerve and leave something out. So she had picked out a small boat at the end of the shortest pier as her focal point, giving her eyes something to concentrate on as she blurted out the truth in one rambling sentence.
“Yes, I am the woman who slept with you at The Hedges, but that’s the only truth about me that you know . . . what you don’t know is my real name . . . I’m Starla Deloplane, which up until last September would have meant nothing at all to you, but now I imagine would make you want to kill me . . . but even that isn’t the whole story. You see, when my Robert killed your Evelyn, I noticed a picture of you and her in the newspaper, and I put it all together. It occurred to me that there might actually be a chance that my three children belonged to you and not my husband. I gathered a DNA sample from Dee Ray while he was back for the funeral. Two weeks ago, my lawyer confirmed that Dee Ray wasn’t their father. Since there had never been anyone else but you . . . I figured it out . . . ”
Jack made loud denials, shouted obscenities, and demanded proof, which Starla handed him in the form of DNA results extracted from his fork at the Café—results which had arrived via FedEx a mere four hours before dinner had started. Jack was outraged at her duplicity. You stole my fork? Then his facial expression had darkened into a menacing glare.
“You came all the way up here to try to extort money from me? You actually think I would give you one goddamn dime of my money? What? You think I prize my reputation so much that I would be willing to pay whatever it takes to keep this quiet? That’s not gonna happen. You would actually be doing me a favor, destroying my pristine reputation for me—something I’ve never had the balls to do myself . . . ”
Starla took a sip of coffee, then a bite of the eggs, waiting for his next explosion. Instead, Jack ate his breakfast with enthusiasm and attempted small talk.
“Evelyn and I added that guest house several years ago once the kids became adults. They wanted some privacy. The bedroom upstairs in the loft is open to the living room, so it offers none. We’ve had lots of friends come up for a week or so and stay back there, which is nice . . . ”
“Yes. It’s quite lovely,” answered Starla, completely mystified at his tone.
On the boardwalk, after an hours-long confrontation in which Jack had done most of the talking and threatening, Starla’s last words were her only defense.
“No, Jack. I don’t want your money. I don’t need your money. Besides, there could never be enough to repair our lives anyway. What I want is . . . peace. I want to feel calm in my heart for the first time in my life. The only way I’m ever going to do that is to confess everything—to come clean and just tell the truth. I’m so very, very tired and exhausted from carrying around all this weight, all this guilt. If it means I have to sit here and listen to you tell me what a horrible human being I am, then that’s what I have to be willing to hear. But what I’m not going to do is allow you to tell me that my children are trash. You don’t know them; you don’t know the first thing about them; you have no idea what the two of them have been through. They don’t deserve your hatred, and not just because they’re yours, but because they’re mine . . . ”
Now it was Starla’s turn to attempt small-talk. “This might be the most beautiful breakfast view I’ve ever seen.”
Jack pointed at the round table on the deck’s edge outside. “In the summer, we take our meals out there. This table becomes a place to pile up junk.”
Jack pointed across the lake to the double A-frame white house, just now getting splashed by the sunlight clearing the treetops behind them.
“Every morning, whenever we see that house get lit up, we know it’s time to put the kayaks in the water. What do you say? Want to come out with me?”
Starla leaned forward on her elbows. “Jack . . . what are you doing? What’s this all about? Why am I here?”
Jack interrupted her. “Look, Starla . . . you laid some heavy shit on me last night. I reacted poorly, said hurtful, angry things that were unfair to you . . . and your kids. I suppose this is my awkward attempt to make it up to you. There will be time for talking and my questions later. Right now, I just want a little peace . . . just like you. I understand more than you might think how rough it is to live with lies and deceit. So listen, let’s just go out and enjoy the lake for a couple of hours.”
Starla finally stopped clenching her fists under the table and grinding her teeth, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Well, I’ve never been on a kayak.”
“Wait, are you kidding me? Never?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t worry, it’s a piece of cake.”
“I can’t swim either.”
“Well, then you better be careful.”
* * *
Liz tossed her cell phone on the coffee table, then sprawled out on the sofa, numb and speechless. She had listened to Kevin’s story at first with incredulous objections, but as he went on, filling in each increasingly believable detail, she had shut up and listened, each new twist in the tale driving her deeper into despair.
“I know that most of this is conjecture,” Kevin had offered. “At this point, it’s just circumstantial . . . but Mitchell’s story adds up from a timeline standpoint, at least.”
“Kevin! Our father cheated on Mom . . . and there’s a better-than-even chance that the woman he cheated with is Starla Fucking Deloplane!”
Kevin had offered no reply. He just let Liz pour out all the same emotions that he’d desperately tried to reign in as he drove through the night toward Angela and yet another confession. Liz spewed it all out, her indignation mixed with betrayal. After fifteen minutes or so, she was spent and fell silent. Kevin filled the void.
“So, I’m heading back home. I need to apologize to Angela for lying to her about my trip, and then I’ll tell her the news . . . ”
“Kevin, you’re the worst liar in the world . . . Angela already knows what you’ve been up to. We talked about it the day you left. She’s smarter than the both of us put together.”
“Great. So, are you going to tell David? I mean, what in the hell are we supposed to do with this?”
“I’m too disgusted with Dad right now for a confrontation . . . and yes, I’ll tell David when he gets home from work. I don’t know, Kevin. Do we call him? Warn him about who she is? Maybe he’s already figured it out.”
“I’ve thought about little else for the past four hours. A phone call isn’t going to do it. I have no idea . . . but the only thing that gives me any satisfaction is the idea of a confrontation—a physical, face-to-face confrontation—maybe all four of us arriving at Loon Magic for one of those intervention things you see on television. We could barge into the place and say something like, “Well, well . . . if it isn’t the mother of our mother’s killer? What are the odds?”
Liz made no response, rendered mute by the surreal ditch into which their lives had fallen.
