Faultlines

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  I thought I told you to keep your doors locked.

  7

  Rather than three dimensions—past, present, and future—time could more accurately and simply be described as having two: before and after. There was the sweet ordinariness of life before the crash, and there was the nightmare that began after. And in the course of that nightmare’s unfolding, there was the routine pause for breath before Jenna announced that Emmett wasn’t Jordy’s father, and there was the horrible, ringing shock of after.

  Sandy would never forget it. Those moments when time slipped past in a vacuum without thought or movement. When even breath and heartbeats were suspended. When the very earth paused on its axis.

  The silence lacked air; it lacked even a glimmer of comprehension. Everyone stared. Sandy’s stare felt stupid on her face. Looking at Emmett, she found him looking at her, bewilderment lancing his eyes, a half smile wavering on his mouth.

  Jenna’s making a joke? he seemed to be asking her. Here? Now? In these circumstances?

  “Jenna!” Sandy found her voice, and Jenna’s name shot from her mouth, a warning, a protest, a plea. “What are you doing?” she asked. Begged, actually, although, honestly, in some part of her brain, she knew it was too late. She thought of that old adage about closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

  “Sandy?”

  She looked up when Emmett prompted her, meeting his gaze and holding it even though it was hard. “Jordy is yours in every meaningful way a son can belong to his father.”

  She said what she had believed nearly from the moment Emmett came back to her from Berkeley at the start of her senior year at the U of H, when he’d said leaving her had been the worst mistake of his life and begged her forgiveness. Her joy and relief were overwhelming. She might have fallen right there in the doorway of their apartment, if Emmett hadn’t caught her. If he hadn’t held on to her.

  When they’d made love that day, he had adored her with his mouth, worshipped her with his hands; he had entered her as if she were a priceless treasure. And she had returned his reverence, running her palms along the familiar and sorely missed planes of his shoulders. She had numbered the bones connecting his spine, outlined the smooth, muscled contours of his buttocks. He was her home and she was his.

  And it would have been perfect, except she was pregnant, the result of a recent and unfortunate handful of encounters, exactly three, with a man who had mentored her over the summer. Who had been gentle and kind, and suffering from his own grief. And although the affair was over by mutual consent, she knew she had to tell Emmett about it. But every time she tried, panic closed her throat. On the day she finally managed to say it, to say, “I’m pregnant,” Emmett misunderstood.

  It was seven days after his return—ten days since she’d repeated the test three times that confirmed her nagging dread—and they were walking in Hermann Park. It was late in the afternoon. The light had gone silver, and an unseasonably chilly breeze skittered fallen leaves across their path. There was an urgency in the air; Sandy felt it pressing in on her. Soon it would be Christmas. They would be going home for the holidays. She would be showing by then. She had to tell. Had to. And so she did.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, and the words came out blunt and hard, as hard as the knowing of their power to destroy her in Emmett’s eyes.

  She wasn’t prepared when he wheeled, his face alight, when he practically shouted, “We’re having a baby?” Without waiting for her answer, for the truth, he lifted her, spinning her around until they were dizzy.

  His elation had been palpable, as agonizing to her as it was joyful to him. Her mind went blank. She couldn’t say what should have been said: The baby isn’t yours. She had only just gotten him back. She couldn’t risk losing him again. And when the very next day she came home from morning classes to find a giant stuffed Tigger sitting on their sofa, with a copy of the Pooh stories and a set of Winnie-the-Pooh baby dishes carefully balanced in Tigger’s stuffed lap, her heart stumbled. She thought the dishes were hers, from her childhood, until she read his note, saying he had found them at Macy’s.

  I remember how much you loved Pooh and Tigger when we were kids. And you will never know how much I love you. After that she thought telling him the truth would be cruel; it would be the same as ripping out his heart. That’s when she’d gone to see Jenna, because she had to tell someone.

  By then Jenna was married to John, and they were living in San Antonio. John was on the police force there. Sandy had been in fear of how Jenna might react. She was morally conservative, and she could be judgmental, but upon Sandy’s arrival, she found that Jenna was bursting with the same news. She was pregnant, too, and in her ebullience—she and John had been trying for almost four years—it was almost as if she didn’t register Sandy’s troubled confession. They had hugged and laughed and cried, celebrating the prospect of raising their children together, and somehow Sandy’s lie became the truth, the way lies do when they’re repeated, and what everyone wants to hear anyway.

  Once. She had spoken of her brief affair with Jordy’s birth father only once, and only to Jenna. Sandy had put it out of her mind after that, deliberately and consistently, and Jenna’s reminder now felt foreign, as if it bore no connection to her or her history. It had never crossed Sandy’s mind that Jenna would betray her.

  “Who is Jordy’s dad?” Emmett’s voice was hard, inflected with disbelief and offense. How could she? it seemed to ask. How dare she?

  “You left me.” Sandy’s need to defend herself overwhelmed her. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  “It’s a guy she worked with,” Jenna said.

  “Does he know about Jordy?” Emmett asked.

  “Yup.” Jenna sounded exultant, as if she were pleased with herself.

  That tone—Sandy couldn’t stand it. She jumped up, flinging her arms. “Jenna! For God’s sake, shut up. What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this?”

  Jenna went on as if she were oblivious, disconnected from the fallout her bombshell had created. “Would you rather Emmett got the news from the nurse who took his blood?” she asked. “You know they’d tell him, right?”

  Sandy had no idea what was right. She appealed to Emmett. “He—Jordy’s birth father—I never saw him again after you came back. He understood that he was never to contact me, that he wasn’t responsible for the baby.”

  Emmett looked on the verge of speaking, but Sandy would never know what he intended to say, because right then Dr. Showalter appeared, looking grim.

  “Mrs. Simmons?”

  Jenna stood. Very slowly, they all did.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said, and in response to his apology, Sandy, her mom and dad, Emmett, and Troy as a group pressed close to Jenna as if they might shield her. A moment came then, one that in Sandy’s mind she could never characterize as before or after. It was an instant out of time, shot with love and the grief her family bore for the loss of one of their own: Travis, who had scarcely begun his life, a bird barely fledged, and now he was gone.

  Later on that Saturday afternoon, a matter of hours after Travis slipped away, Sandy was parked alone on the shoulder of CR 440 at the spot where Jordy’s Range Rover had left the road. She hadn’t intended to come here. Home, where she’d been going, was in the opposite direction. She desperately wanted a hot shower, a change of clothes, a break from the hospital. It seemed somehow horrible of her to want any of these things when Jenna was at home now, so stunned at the loss of her son she couldn’t even cry, according to their dad.

  Because of what had happened here, in this place. What it had taken from her.

  Sandy stared out at the twisted barbed wire, shattered fence posts, the churned and broken ground. The funeral display of condolences was windblown now, like so much trash along the highway’s brush-choked verge. She had always hated the custom, marking an accident scene with gloomy memorabilia that after a matter of days resembled the aftermath of an ill-conceived and ghoulish revel
ry.

  The sound of an approaching car brought her gaze around. She recognized the car, that it was a Lexus, but not the woman driving it. They were two strangers, and yet their gazes caught, and something universal passed between them, like commiseration, or perhaps it was pity, or Sandy’s imagination. Who knew? But Sandy envied the woman, whoever she was, driving away. She could be congratulating herself that it wasn’t her that was involved in this nightmare. No one had dropped a bomb on her family. But it was unkind, Sandy thought. She didn’t even know the woman.

  Travis was buried the following Tuesday, the same day Jordy was arrested.

  Sandy was at the hospital, alone in Jordy’s room—the other bed had remained unoccupied—waiting for him to be discharged when Huck and the other patrol sergeant, the one she’d met while Jordy was undergoing surgery, appeared.

  Jordy was in the bathroom, changing into the suit she’d brought him to wear to the funeral, and she was standing at the window, looking out, when she heard them at the door.

  She turned, and in the moment she registered the men in uniforms, she knew why they’d come, and her heart slammed into the wall of her chest. “No.” Her protest came unbidden.

  “Jordy here?” Huck asked.

  She shook her head. “You can’t do this now. Travis’s funeral is today in Wyatt. We have just enough time to get there.”

  “I’m sorry, but as I told you on Sunday, I don’t have a choice. I’ve given you a couple of days. That’s all I can do.”

  “Trav was like Jordy’s brother. They were brothers. You know that. You can’t do this to him, take away his chance to pay his last respects to his brother.”

  “I understand—”

  “I know you do, Huck. John was like your brother, wasn’t he? And when he was shot and killed, you were there. You felt the same as Jordy does, that it was your fault John was dead, right? Could anything, anyone—should anyone have tried keeping you from paying your last respects? It’s all Jordy has now, all he can do.” Sandy’s voice broke, and she took a moment, fighting for composure, steeling herself. “He blames himself, too, you know. He wishes he had been the one driving.”

  “He was, Sandy.”

  “My son isn’t a liar, and he says he wasn’t.” Sandy fought her doubt.

  “The evidence says otherwise, as I’ve already explained.”

  “No. You have it in for Jordy. You’ve got something against him. What is it? Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Is that what he’s saying? How he wants to play it? That Madrone County law enforcement is out to get him? Because that’s not how we operate, I can tell you.”

  “Jordy doesn’t want to play it any way,” she said. “Can we talk about how many times he’s been stopped and ticketed for practically nothing? Something is going on between you two. There has got to be a reason why he’s being targeted.”

  Huck kept her gaze and his silence.

  “C’mon.” Sandy almost stamped her foot, her frustration was that intense. “We’ve known each other for how long? You’ve sat at my table, Huck; you’ve spent time with Jordy. He looks up to you. He and Trav always did.”

  The other cop shifted his weight, and she shot him a glance. Ken Carter. His name surfaced in her mind. He looked so uncomfortable. Too bad, she thought. You don’t know the meaning of uncomfortable, she thought.

  “You break the law, there are consequences. He’s a hard case, Sandy. He won’t learn.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Why are you saying that? If that’s what you think of him, why haven’t I ever heard you say it before?”

  “He drinks. You know that, right? That maybe he’s got a problem, and it’s not getting better?”

  “But you’ve never ticketed him for that, have you? Minor in possession, isn’t that what it’s called? You’ve never called me, or Emmett, to say you thought Jordy was in trouble that way. Why is that, Huck?” She waited. “I thought we were friends.”

  Nothing. His stare, patient, long-suffering. Obdurate.

  She wasn’t getting anywhere, and she took a moment, and then very softly, she said, “Can’t you please give him a few more hours? Let him attend Travis’s funeral, then I’ll drive him to the jail myself. This afternoon. We’ll go through this ridiculous charade—” She broke off. Would she really drive Jordy there? She thought of the research she’d done.

  On Sunday evening, after Huck’s interrogation of Jordy, after Huck had agreed to wait until Jordy was discharged to arrest him, out of deference, he said, to Jenna and the other members of Sandy’s family—not that she or Jordy were part of it anymore—Sandy had gone home and looked up countries that had no extradition agreement with the United States. It had turned out that Russia was the most likely place they could go and have a chance of surviving.

  There were other countries—Somalia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Syria—a handful of third-world countries, but even the thought of trying to go to any one of those mired her in fear. Overseas travel of any sort, though, would necessitate passports, immunizations, all kinds of arrangements . . . the idea was overwhelming, and it would all have to be done in secret, alone, without any assistance from anyone.

  But giving her son up to the Texas criminal-justice system if—when—he was innocent was just as incomprehensible.

  “You should know, if you don’t already—” Huck paused.

  Sandy looked at him.

  “Folks around town aren’t going to welcome Jordy at the church or the cemetery, if I was to let him go there. Even Jenna’s not too keen on seeing him, or you, right now. I’m sorry to have to say it, but it’s true.”

  “Jenna told you to do this, didn’t she? She wanted Jordy arrested today to keep him from coming to Trav’s funeral.”

  Huck didn’t answer.

  It was Ken Carter who spoke. “Your son committed a crime, Mrs. Cline. There’s evidence to support the fact. We’re here to arrest him because that’s the law, not because anyone told us to.”

  “Ha.” Sandy turned her back to the lawmen. “We’re getting a lawyer—”

  “Mom?” Jordy appeared in the open bathroom doorway, wearing the sweats and T-shirt she’d brought him, not the suit. That was folded over his arm. “I’ll go with them,” he said.

  “But Travis’s funeral—you have the right to say good-bye. You didn’t do anything.” Sandy was begging. Begging Jordy, of all people, when even he knew it was futile. He’d consigned himself to the outcome.

  Sandy glanced at Huck, and the look of pitying commiseration he gave her was almost more than she could bear. He stepped over to Jordy. “Son,” he began, “you have the right to remain silent . . . ”

  They were taking Jordy to the jail in Greeley, the Madrone County seat, twenty-five miles west of Wyatt. Visiting hours were posted online at the Madrone County website. Huck gave Sandy that information as he escorted her son out of the hospital’s front entry doors and into the backseat of his waiting squad car. Jordy bent his face, his pale and exhausted face, to the window and mouthed something.

  “What?” Sandy took a step toward him.

  But now the car left the curb, and within moments it was out of sight.

  She was still holding Jordy’s hospital-discharge papers, the ones Showalter had signed, that in effect had released Jordy into police custody.

  Showalter hadn’t had the nerve, or the courtesy, or whatever it would have taken, to appear in Jordy’s room himself. He’d sent a nurse, and when Sandy had asked her about Jordy’s aftercare, she’d said doctor’s orders included no driving for two weeks and no strenuous activity for six. Jordy, who had been handcuffed and Mirandized by then, had snorted so hard he’d almost choked. “Since the state took my license, driving’s not an issue,” he’d said. “Don’t think strenuous activity is, either. Can’t get too worked up in a jail cell, right, Sergeant Huckabee?”

  Sergeant Huckabee, Jordy had called him. Not Huck or Len. Sandy didn’t think she’d ever heard any member of her family call the man by hi
s professional title. She had shot Huck a look and said to Jordy that he wouldn’t be in a cell long enough to find out how arduous it might be, although she had no idea.

  But the whole situation was impossible. She couldn’t fathom how her life—her family’s lives—had spiraled so far out of control.

  Emmett had left her—again—on Saturday, as soon as he knew Jordy was out of danger. His aunt Leila had called him to say his mother had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, suffering from chest pain, and she’d been admitted for observation. Something was going on with her heart again; they weren’t certain what. Emmett felt he had no choice. The sisters were old; they had no one but him. Even Sandy’s father had encouraged him to go.

  “Irene isn’t strong,” her dad had said. “You can’t expect Emmett to tell her over the phone that Travis has died and Jordy might well be charged with manslaughter. Who knows what more damage that might cause to her heart.”

  “Why tell her at all?” Sandy had asked. “Why worry her?”

  “You want me to pretend everything is fine?” Emmett had given her a disbelieving stare. Am I starring in an episode of Twilight Zone here? He’d asked that of Sandy, derision heavy in his voice.

  Did he think it wasn’t the same for her—hearing Jenna blurt out the secret she’d been entrusted to keep? Sandy thought she would never grasp the enormity of that betrayal any more than Emmett seemed able to grasp her betrayal of him.

  How could you lie to me? He had repeated the question, for possibly the tenth time, moments before climbing into his truck to leave her.

  “I didn’t lie,” Sandy said. “I just didn’t tell you.”

  “You’re splitting hairs,” he said.

  She guessed she was. At least in his mind, there wasn’t a difference between a sin of omission versus one of commission. The result was the same.