Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  * * *

  After Alison arrived back home from church, we had time for only a quick check-in about Sam—what he had eaten, what we had done together, whether he seemed to be okay—before I had to get ready for the fund-raiser.

  Sunday with the Senator: An Intimate Afternoon with Blake Franklin was being held at a yacht club in Newport News. Blake might have now been a Democrat, but he still raised money like a Republican.

  When I arrived, I was given a name tag that read JUDGE SAMPSON. I knew his staff was just being respectful. But if I had some Wite-Out I would have used it. I didn’t mind being “Judge” in the courthouse. Elsewhere, I preferred to be Scott.

  The crowd was more intimate than I thought the “intimate afternoon” would be, which told me it was also more expensive than I realized. A thousand bucks a ticket? Five? I probably didn’t want to know. As the policy wonk on his staff, I had always isolated myself from the grubbier details of campaign finance.

  As I walked into the country club’s ballroom, I spied the senator locked in an earnest conversation with a pair of would-be donors. Blake was barrel-chested and just over six feet. He had fantastic hair, still thick and wavy even though it was now fully gray. It sat atop the kind of big head and strong features that gave him a larger-than-life aura and looked great on television.

  Blake had relentless energy, and it had pushed him a long way in this world. He had been a blue-collar kid, the son of a Newport News shipyard worker and a homemaker. He put himself through college, then, with seed money he cajoled out of a few rich friends he had cultivated, started his own real estate development company. He made a small fortune during the 1980s buildup, when Hampton Roads was booming with military spending, then sold out before the cold war ended and the bubble burst.

  He entered politics because he wanted to make sure his kind of up-by-the-bootstraps personal narrative stayed possible for the next generation. It was a line that appealed to Republicans and Democrats alike.

  I watched as Blake moved on to delighting a small group of older folks who sort of reminded me of china: fragile and expensive. Over the years I worked for him, I started off thinking his seemingly effortless schmoozing had to be fake, or at least affected. I assumed it was something he did out of necessity, because he understood politics, like so much of life, was about relationships. And that therefore it made sense to invest in them.

  It turned out he was far less calculating about it. He simply enjoyed the pressing of flesh, the telling of stories, the connecting and reconnecting with friends new and old. His enthusiasm was genuine.

  Perhaps a minute after walking in, I was approached by a waiter carrying flutes of champagne on a tray. He looked at me expectantly, like I should have been happy to see him. And that was when I realized I had made a huge mistake in coming here. Champagne? How the hell could anyone be drinking champagne when Emma was in danger? When Alison might have been scheming behind my back? When all I really wanted to do was crawl in a hole and die?

  The mere thought of it was revolting. It made me feel like smashing the whole tray on the floor.

  The waiter smiled at me. I knew I was supposed to be doing the same. Everyone around me was. I just couldn’t.

  I had to get out. Immediately.

  “No, thanks,” I said, and turned to leave.

  Which was when Blake surprised me from the other direction. He swiped a champagne flute from the tray and simultaneously put his arm around me while sticking the glass in my hand.

  “Great to see you, great to see you,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  From somewhere nearby, I heard a camera clicking.

  “My goddaughter behaving herself?”

  He removed his arm. With the photographer still lurking, I felt compelled to force a smile. “As much as she ever does,” I said.

  The camera clicked a few more times. Blake ignored it. I found it unnerving.

  “Good, good,” he said, then pulled me close again. “I’ve got to do my thing here, but stick around so we can catch up later, okay? We can grab dinner or something.”

  Then he was off. I studied the champagne, now in my hand. Moved by an impulse I can’t explain, I drank it in one gulp, feeling it burn my esophagus. I didn’t even like champagne. I signaled the waiter for another.

  Maybe Alison was right. Maybe I should try to take my mind off things, take a break from the stress. I was putting on a show all week at the courthouse. I could continue the act around Blake.

  I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone, but I downed the second glass, then a third. By the time it was announced the senator would be making some remarks, I was flush-faced. I wobbled to a seat just in time for Blake to give a short version of his “Bullish on America” speech, which I had heard many times before, even if the details always changed slightly. It was a talk that played well with this crowd: It stood to reason that if they could drop a few thou on an afternoon at a country club, they were pretty bullish too.

  He then spoke about the election at hand, about the importance of scrapping for every vote. Virginia had leaned Democratic in its last several statewide elections, but only by the narrowest of margins. Polls now had Blake trailing, not that he mentioned that part.

  Toward the end, he got around to recognizing his hosts and some of the other local folks who had helped put the event together. I wasn’t paying particular attention until suddenly I heard my name.

  “. . . who was a member of my staff for many years and was nothing short of the best policy guy in Washington. I can’t tell you the number of times he made me look smarter than I really am,” Blake said, getting a polite chuckle. “He now serves his country on the federal bench here in the Eastern District of Virginia. Some of you may have seen his name in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times this week about this big ApotheGen case, so now he’s a celebrity. Judge Sampson, can you wave to everyone?”

  I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to be the dog or the pony in this show, but I waved, feeling embarrassed.

  “Thank you. And now that y’all know who he is, those of you who lost a bundle on ApotheGen stock this week know who to lobby so you can make your money back.”

  There was a big grin on his face when he delivered the line, and the room, as if following audience cue cards, erupted in laughter. Outwardly, I laughed with them, trying to appear to be a good sport. Inwardly, I seethed.

  He had no right to call attention to me like that. And to even suggest I was somehow susceptible to lobbying or could have my opinion influenced by a conversation at a cocktail party? It was a huge insult to my integrity.

  And, yeah, sure, maybe some of my reaction was because I knew just how thoroughly my integrity had already been compromised, but I left as soon as I could find a way to make an unobtrusive exit.

  He could find someone else to have dinner with.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The older brother held a piece of paper in his hand as he twisted the handle of the door of the little girl’s room.

  The lock sprang open, making a pinging sound, and he walked in. He didn’t immediately see her, not until her head popped up from the other side of the bed.

  “What are you doing over there?” he asked.

  The little girl stood up.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly.

  He walked over to where she was standing and looked down at her. Children were terrible liars. She was up to something. He just couldn’t tell what.

  “Show me your hands,” he said.

  She held out her palms so he could see they were empty. The older brother narrowed his eyes. He still didn’t believe her.

  He wished, again, that they could keep her chained to the bed or restrained in some meaningful way. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about what she was or wasn’t doing.

  But there was the matter of the woman, whoever she was, and her
orders.

  No matter. He had a task he needed to accomplish. Grabbing the little girl’s arm, he led her into the bathroom, where she squinted in the light. He handed her the piece of paper.

  “Hold this,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just hold it.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Stop asking questions.”

  The older brother took his phone out of his pocket and jabbed at it a few times until he got the camera app going. Then he looked up at her.

  “No, not like that,” he said, repositioning the paper so the words on it were facing him. “Like this.”

  The little girl did as she was told. But now she was studying the sign.

  “No, no. Don’t look at the sign. Look at me.”

  The little girl ignored him.

  “Don’t make me spank you. I’ll spank you if you don’t look at me.”

  Their employer said not to hit the children. The woman had apparently been quite insistent on that point.

  But she wasn’t around. The older brother would do what he needed to do.

  “Now,” he barked.

  Finally, the little girl turned toward him.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Now look at the camera.”

  As soon as he was sure he was capturing the lost look on her face, he started snapping pictures.

  THIRTY

  I was still simmering at Franklin when I returned to the house, and I was set to spend the evening ignoring Alison—or at least avoiding meaningful contact—until, as I brushed past her in the foyer, I smelled something.

  Cigarette smoke.

  There was just a hint of it. But there was no question in my mind, or in my nose, about what it was.

  “Hey,” I said to Alison, who was already on her way back to the kitchen, where she had some pasta boiling for Sam and chicken in the oven for us.

  “Yeah?” she said, turning back toward me but staying in place.

  I walked up to her until I was basically on top of her, trying to suck as much air in through my nostrils as I could.

  “What?” she said, taking two steps back.

  “Have you been smoking?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. Though not convincingly.

  “Then why did I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke as I passed you?”

  She smelled her clothing, one shoulder, then the other.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sam and I were at the grocery store before. I walked past a smoker on my way out. Maybe it . . .”

  I crowded her again. We were in the kitchen now, where the cooking aromas masked whatever it was I had been able to detect in the foyer.

  “Let me smell your hand,” I said. Alison was a right-handed smoker. Always had been.

  “What?”

  “Hold out your hand. I want to smell it.”

  “No,” she said, protecting the hand with her other arm.

  “If you haven’t been smoking, there should be nothing for me to smell.”

  “Scott, this is ridiculous.”

  “So you deny it. You deny that you’ve been smoking.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Because you quit before you got pregnant with the twins, is that right?”

  “Stop it,” she said. “You’re being weird. Why are we even talking about this?”

  “Because I know what I smelled.”

  “What are you, the high school principal?”

  “Just tell me you smoked a cigarette. You’re a grown-up. You’re allowed to smoke if you want to. Why are you trying to hide it?”

  “I’m not . . . This is stupid,” she said, then pointedly turned away from me and returned to her cooking.

  “I know what I smelled,” I said, one last time.

  She ignored me. And I let her. There was no point in continuing with this charade. Her reaction was telling enough. The denial. The deflection.

  I knew it shouldn’t have mattered much. If, during this horrible chapter of our life, my wife wanted to continue with a relatively harmless cigarette-a-day habit—to relieve stress, to find a few seconds of escape—she was certainly entitled to.

  But why did she have to lie about it?

  It was just one more thing making my head spin as I went to bed that night. I had turned in early, in the hope of getting a good night’s sleep so I could be well rested for the Rule 16B Conference that was scheduled for the next morning.

  But that wasn’t happening. I was thinking back to that pack of cigarettes in her drawer at work; to the sight of her hanging out by the side of her workplace, smoke pouring out of her mouth.

  There’s a famous theory in policing known as broken windows. It’s the notion that if the police ignore petty crimes—like vandals who break windows—it will lead to a sense of lawlessness that allows bigger crimes to occur.

  If I had confronted her about her cigarettes way back then, would Paul Dresser be happening now?

  Or was Paul Dresser an unstoppable force the moment he chose to step back into her life? Had I always been some kind of consolation prize? I was now playing back all the times through the years she had referenced him. Even if she was being facetious, it now seemed obvious to me he had been on her mind an awful lot for a guy she hadn’t been with since high school.

  After an hour or two of thrashing around in bed with these kinds of thoughts playing in my head, the incessant anguish of it all got to be too much. I went into the bathroom, where I found the sleeping pills that had been prescribed to me after The Incident. Back then, one pill usually helped me when the pain in my chest and armpit was making it difficult to drift off. They were, of course, long since expired.

  I didn’t care. I took three of them.

  So I wasn’t really aware of it when I finally slipped into a slumber. Nor did I realize that Alison had joined me sometime later.

  I just know what woke me up:

  The unmistakable thunderclap of a gunshot.

  * * *

  The sound waves were still echoing off the trees as I leapt out of bed.

  “What was that?” Alison asked, sitting upright.

  I was already striding toward the door of our bedroom, groggy as hell but determined.

  “Don’t you dare go outside,” Alison brayed. “For the love of—”

  “Just go be with Sam. He’s probably scared.”

  I didn’t wait around for her response. I barreled down the stairs, flipped on the outside lights, and, with nothing more than pajama bottoms and a T-shirt to protect me, threw open the front door. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the shooter before he fled.

  Instead, the shooter was stalking around from the edge of the porch. I froze. I had been at the wrong end of a gun once in my life. That was more than enough.

  The gunman wasn’t looking at me, though. His rifle was pointed toward something in the front yard. His finger was still on the trigger. He had what looked like night-vision goggles strapped to his head, with the lenses flipped up. He was covered from head to toe in jungle camouflage and what I could see of his face was obscured by black paint.

  Then, despite the paint and goggles, I recognized it was Jason, my brother-in-law. Karen’s night watchman had been doing his duty.

  “Jason, what the—”

  Then I heard a moan, coming from just beyond the steps. I walked to the edge of the porch. On a thin patch of grass and pine straw, perhaps eighty feet from the house, was a man. He was young. And scrawny. He was clutching his leg and unleashing every curse word he knew.

  “The assailant may still be armed,” Jason said in my direction. “Just stay there until I determine the threat level.”

  Looking at this kid as he writhed on the ground, banging it occasionally with his palm, I felt a twinge in my armpit. I would remember forever how it fel
t in those first moments after that bullet struck me. The pain was indescribable.

  And incapacitating. Forget what you’ve seen in action movies, where the gun-blasted hero bravely fights on. When you’ve been shot in real life, all you can do or think about is the searing hotness of ripped flesh, how you would give anything to make it stop, and how you’re quite sure anything that hurts that bad must be fatal. Striking back doesn’t enter your thinking.

  “I’ll put one in his head if I have to,” Jason announced loudly.

  Between bursts of profanity, the kid said, “Come on, man. I swear, I ain’t armed or nothing, I swear.”

  He was sucking air in and out with ferocity. Jason reached him and, with the barrel of the gun pointed at the young man’s head, ordered, “Let’s see those hands, punk. Hands. Now.”

  The kid lifted his hands away from his wound. He held them up in the air. His arms shook.

  “Higher,” Jason said, then strode up to him and gave his now-exposed midsection a savage kick with a boot that was heavy, black, and probably steel-toed.

  The kid squealed and curled his body, bringing his good leg up for protection. The lame one was still straight. He was whimpering: “Please, oh please, oh sweet Jesus, please, it hurts so bad.”

  Jason had finally stopped pointing the gun at his target but was now raising its stock chest high, like he was going to bludgeon the kid. Maybe in the leg. Maybe in the head.

  “Jason, stop, now,” I said. “He’s had enough.”

  I ran toward them, yelping as my bare foot struck a pinecone. I slowed only when Jason brought the gun back down. He reached into his vest—was it actually body armor?—and I thought maybe he was going to pull out a handgun to finish the kid off. Instead, he extracted a flashlight, which he turned on and shined down on his prey.

  The boy was in his early twenties. If that. He had a scruff of hair on his chin. He was wearing a tank top that exposed several tattoos, including a large one that looked like the Little Mermaid, albeit without her shells. His skin was pimply and sallow. My courtroom had seen its share of crystal meth addicts. This kid reminded me of several of them. He certainly didn’t look like any kind of criminal mastermind capable of kidnapping my children.