Again, Bryce swallowed in a futile attempt to keep the tears from flowing. “Thanks for coming,” he whispered. “I’ve thought about you a million times.”
“I’m sorry, Cale. I should have tried harder to find you when you were a kid. I was told you were placed with a foster family. I guess I wanted to believe you were better off.”
“Maybe I was eventually,” Bryce said. “The school they put me in was a good one.”
Your attorney is convinced of your innocence, and if you want to talk, I'll be happy to listen. If you don’t, that’s all right, too. I just want to be here for you.”
“I spend every waking moment exhuming the past for my lawyer. And you’re right, she believes in my innocence, maybe even more than I do. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to hear about your life.”
Jason refused to talk about his tours in Vietnam, but told Bryce he married Katja while stationed in Germany. They had two children—a daughter, Brianna, and a son they’d named Caleb. For years, they’d moved from one post to another, but once the kids were in high school, Jason retired and opened a small landscape business in Salt Lake. Now, Brianna would graduate from high school next spring and Caleb was a freshman at the Southern Oregon University, right there in Ashland.
“When I left Utah, I didn’t think I’d ever go back,” Jason said. “But as I got older, it pulled me and I wanted to see Wheatley again.”
“Has it changed much?” Bryce asked.
Jason laughed. “Changed? Has it ever. I figured you heard—it’s under a hundred and fifty feet of water now. They dammed up the Provo River, call it the Jordanelle Reservoir.”
“Maybe it’s just as well. It’s not as if we have a lot of happy memories of the place. But…” Bryce shook his head. “I still can’t believe you named your son after me. Does that mean you actually liked your pesky little brother?”
“Yes,” Jason said, swallowing hard and dropping his gaze to his lap. “And I never stopped thinking about you, Cale.” He raised his watery eyes. “I always told people I had a little brother even when I wasn’t sure you were still alive.” Jason fiddled with the button on his shirt pocket, then removed a stack of snapshots of his family. He pressed them, one by one, against the Plexiglas wall.
A little blond girl with sparkling blue eyes stood on tiptoes and smiled up at Bryce from a ballet recital.
Then, slightly older, decked out in a bunny Halloween costume, long, pink ears flopping against her rosy cheeks.
Standing at home plate, a serious, thin-faced boy, maybe seven or eight, in a miniature Dodger’s uniform, a wooden bat slung casually across his thin shoulders. His namesake, Caleb.
A beautiful teenage girl in a prom dress.
A boy who looked to be about sixteen, heavier, with a wide grin and a line of pimples across his forehead.
Picture after picture.
One of a tall, slender woman sitting in front of a Christmas tree, a young boy and girl on the floor next to her, ripping off wrapping paper.
“Is this your wife?”
“No,” Jason said. “It’s Mom with my two kids, quite a few years ago. She looks a lot older now.”
Bryce stared at Jason, but said nothing. He tried, but couldn’t state why the photograph of his mother disturbed him so much. His breathing grew shallow, and he wiped at his eyes. His throat and nose seemed blocked. He’d had panic attacks before and tried to slow down his breathing so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.
After a few seconds, Jason flattened another photograph against the glass—one of the last photos of their father. Dressed in the dusty clothes and helmet he wore into the mines, Isaiah Bryce stood between eighteen-year-old Jason and six-year-old Bryce. One pale arm dangled at his side, the other draped over his elder son’s shoulders.
When the buzzer sounded to signify visiting hours had ended, Bryce was not ready to say goodbye to his brother or to his niece and nephew whose whole lives had spread out on the wall in front of him, like a picture book. A nephew, named for him, right under his nose in Ashland and he didn’t even know it. Perhaps they’d passed each other in the halls of the Modern Languages building where Bryce took a class, or on the tree-lined mall in front of the student union, or seated at a small desk by the windows in the library.
“I’ll be back,” Jason said.
“How long are you staying?”
“I leave tomorrow. But I’m coming back for the trial and will stay until it’s over. I’m gonna stop by my son’s dorm on my way back to the hotel.” Jason stood, the phone receiver still pressed against his ear. “He doesn’t know I’m here. Won’t he be surprised to see his old man? Hope I don’t catch him with his pants down.” He grinned, dropped the phone back into its cradle, and hustled from the room behind the other visitors.
* * *
Within an hour of returning to his cell, Bryce lay on his bunk, wondering if he imagined or dreamed his brother’s visit. They grew up in the same family, the same town. And, though he didn’t know it until recently, when he was taken away, he carried enormous hunks of Wheatley, Utah, Isaiah, Rachael, and Jason Bryce with him.
Jason had been the only person in his early childhood that Bryce could consistently depend upon. But as the years passed, all tangible traces of that family had disappeared except for the vivid memories Skyler’s death and Bryce’s incarceration had ironically released.
For days and nights on end, Bryce recalled things in the obsessive detail of someone who was finally disentangling himself from the past. And he came to the late conclusion that the details of his childhood, in some harrowing and illogical way, still mattered.
Nearly overwhelmed by it all, Bryce closed his eyes, and, without any desire to go, drifted into that place between sleep and waking where memory lived. Once there, outside of real time, the invisible clock in his body ran backwards once more, toward the early childhood he spent with Jason.
He began to think memory was a reward we received for each day’s death. It was the place we went to revise and reshape our lives. A way of giving ourselves another chance. And today, in the Jackson County Jail, of all places, Bryce got one with his brother.
* * *
The creak of the cell door opened Bryce’s eyes to the present as Kendra slipped inside. His attorney stood beside the bunk. One hand held her briefcase, the other rested on her hip. “It’s awful early to hit the sack, Bryce. Are you sick or something?”
“I’m recovering from a shock.” Bryce sat. “But then I guess you know my older brother was here today. I haven’t seen him for almost thirty years. I guess you know that, too.”
“Yes, to both guesses.” Kendra dropped her briefcase on the table. “He wanted me to give you these.” She handed Bryce the stack of photographs Jason had pressed against the visiting room glass.
Bryce stacked them on the shelf above his bed, wiped his eyes with his fists, then stood and stretched. “Did you and Radhauser hire someone to find him?”
“We did,” she said.
“Your budget allows for private investigators? No wonder us poor taxpayers are pissed off.” Bryce suspected Kendra paid the PI out of her own pocket, but didn’t want to risk another scene over money.
She smiled, opened her briefcase and laid out the evening’s work.
“I’ve had nothing to do but think since I was put in here,” he said. “And sometimes I think about you and the way you were brought up. Affluent, with highly educated parents. I’m assuming you must have had everything you needed or wanted. So, what makes a rich person like you happy?”
Kendra rubbed her jaw, and thought before answering. “First of all, I didn’t have a mother. She died when I was seven. And you’ll probably think this is strange, or worse yet, corny, but people like your neighbor, Tilly, make me happy. She hasn’t got an extra dime, a pot to piss in as you’d say, but that woman would gather soda cans and take in laundry to feed your cat and keep you from losing your house. You may not believe it, but to me that’s real wealth, Bryce,
the kind that makes people happy. My father, with all his millions, doesn’t have a single friend like her.”
“That reminds me. Tilly gave me a photo of a reporter entering my house. I suspect that’s how they got the poem I wrote about my daughter. I think the reporter’s name is Wally Hartmueller. He’s at that tabloid called The Talent Tattler.”
“I’ll ask Radhauser to investigate,” she said. “If nothing else, we can scare the crap out of him with an arrest warrant.”
“Good,” Bryce said. “I’m sick to death of people walking all over me.”
Kendra smiled. “That’s what I want to hear. The guard told me Poncho is in solitary for a month. Hopefully he’ll learn how to keep his fists to himself.”
Tilly was right, Bryce thought, as they settled into the night’s work. No matter what Kendra’s real motivation for helping him, or what the future held, he’d lucked out when the state of Oregon assigned Kendra to his case.
It was after ten when she left.
Alone in his cell again, Bryce stretched out on the bunk. About a week ago, he had discovered pencil drawings and words written on the cinder block walls, hidden by the mattress. He lifted the thin foam, stared at the scribblings and sensed the spirits of nameless prisoners in this cell before him. Men who had lives, as aching and real to them as Bryce’s was now.
Today is Abby’s third birthday. She won’t remember me.
My father died yesterday, August second, 1997.
My wife got married to my brother. I hate them both.
Bryce felt the other men close by, thinking their thoughts, fearing their fates, and jotting private messages into circles with scalloped mythical wings surrounding them.
A moment later, Bryce stood, rummaged through the cardboard box of tablets and pencils for the tape Kendra had used to piece back together one of the lists he tore in half.
When he found it, he stuck Jason’s photographs on the wall and laid down again, staring up at his family until sleep finally pulled him away.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Each morning, Radhauser helped Gracie change her bandages and empty the drain tube above the place where her right breast had once been. Darker skin, slightly crinkled like parchment, spread across her thin chest like a flower. Its petals blossomed over the area where her nipple had once been. But the stitches had dissolved and the skin begun to smooth over her wounds, making them easier to look at now. He reached for the gauze wrap.
“Don’t look at me,” Gracie said, taking the roll of gauze away from him and struggling with her left hand to wrap herself.
“Please let me help you,” he replied.
She threw the gauze on the bed and some of it came unrolled.
Radhauser rerolled the gauze and gently wrapped it around her chest, careful not to disturb the tube under her right armpit.
She kept her gaze on her lap.
Outside the window, an autumn rain fell, cold and heavy, the kind that sunk into your bones and made them feel weighted and soggy. The only time Gracie seemed happy now was when Lizzie was lying on the bed beside her, pretending to read her mother a story. The doctor said it would take time. That what for many women started out as shame and repulsion turned into a kind of survivor pride.
Still, he was puzzled by her demand not to look at her. They’d been together for nearly a decade. He held her head when she puked, and cleaned the bathroom floor when she was too sick to make it to the toilet. They’d shared so many intimacies. He watched their daughter emerge from her body. How many times had they made love, he wondered? A thousand? Fifteen hundred? And yet sometimes, like now, she felt unknowable to him. He understood she might be ashamed or embarrassed by her wound. But what he didn’t understand was why she was so self-conscious around him.
A blur of red leaves swept back and forth across the panes as the wind picked up, tossing a Japanese maple branch against the window.
Stepping back over to her bedside table, he picked up the small measuring cup of fluid they’d drained, then pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I love you,” he said softly. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world to me.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She leaned into him, keeping her head down to pretend she wasn’t crying. And he pretended he didn’t know she was. “It wasn’t bad news, Gracie. It was inconclusive. So, we have to wait a little longer. Your nodes are going to be clean. And once the baby is born and you complete your radiation and chemo, we’ll find a good plastic surgeon and start reconstruction.”
“It feels like such a long way off. She glanced down at the flat side of her chest. “Such a long time to look like this. And what if the nodes are positive? I won’t abort our baby. I don’t care what anyone says.”
“As soon as you heal, we’ll get you a prosthesis.”
It was hard to watch someone he loved close the door of every optimistic solution he offered. He stepped into the bathroom and recorded the quantity of fluid.
When he returned to the bedroom, she cocked her head slightly, her gaze holding steady with his own. “I’m not a very good patient, am I?”
“I’ll say it again. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world to me.”
When she smiled, he wanted to tell her that nothing was ever as bad as it seemed. But then he thought about Skyler Sterling’s death and the fact that an innocent man was about to go on trial for murder. Some things were every bit as bad as they seemed. And some were even worse. To make things more difficult, the media were crawling up their butts like cheap underwear.
Murphy ran a tight ship and he made it clear to all of them that the person they worked for was not him or the people of Ashland. They worked for the victim, and had to become the voice of the voiceless—the righter of wrongs for those who couldn’t right them. But the way Radhauser saw it, Bryce was just as much a victim as Skyler Sterling. And he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t find a way to right that wrong.
The phone rang.
Gracie’s mom answered in the kitchen. A moment later, she carried the phone into the bedroom and held it out to him. “It’s for you. An attorney named Kendra Palmer.”
“Tell her to hold on a second.”
He tucked the tube back into place under Gracie’s arm, kissed her on the forehead, then took the phone. “Kendra?”
“I need a favor,” Kendra said. “I’m up to my eyebrows in depositions and I need you to make an airport run.”
“Sure. I can do that. Who am I picking up?”
“Bryce’s mother. I want you to take her directly to the jail, stay with her throughout her visit, then drop her off at her motel in Medford.”
He hated visiting anyone in prison. It was crazy and made no sense, but whenever he did, he felt like he was being punished for some unknown deed. Steel doors slammed behind him. And there was a locker-room smell, male sweat and fear, that seemed to swallow him. Even as a detective, he was searched, counted, required to sign in, and record his visit on an official roster. Every time he entered the county jail, he had a terrible feeling that he wouldn’t be allowed out. Maybe everyone should have the experience, he thought. A specific kind of education. A realization that it was a privilege to be able to exit the steel doors and enter the world again.
“Come on,” Kendra said. “You told me you’d help. This is what I need from you.”
For a moment, a silence fell over him. Disgust began its slow crawl up his spine as he imagined Bryce’s mother—the alcoholic who’d abandoned her six-year-old son. Without warning, his thoughts jumped to Flannigan, the man in jail for killing his first wife and son. “I’m not the best person to do that,” he said. “I have a thing about drunks. I practically break out in hives whenever I’m around one.”
“She’s been clean and sober for more than a decade. I think it might help Bryce to have her and his brother here for the trial.”
Outside the bedroom window, rain fell in gray veils across the gravel drive and pastures and dripped from the monkey bars on Lizzie’s jun
gle gym. It clattered against the rooftop and boiled and snapped in the dark pools that had gathered beneath the swings.
A few minutes before Kendra’s call, Radhauser had the thought he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t do something to help Bryce. Maybe Kendra was right. Maybe having some family support would make him fight harder for himself. “Okay,” he said. “What time does her flight get in?”
* * *
Bryce studied the Thanksgiving decorations provided by a local third grade class that graced the visiting area of the Jackson County Jail. Linked circles of autumn-colored construction paper and glittery glue-streaked margarine lids with photos of turkeys on them dangled on pipe cleaners from the popcorn strings.
He smiled, thinking about the small hands, their sticky fingers gripping dull scissors, intent on cutting out their turkeys. The guard led him to one of the larger booths—with a visitor bench that could seat three. Had Jason changed his mind, stayed longer and returned with his son?
Radhauser led an older woman into the booth and waited until she was seated before sitting beside her. He picked up the receiver.
Bryce grabbed his own and turned on the amplifier.
“There’s someone here who’s anxious to see you.” Radhauser handed a second receiver to the woman.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to set eyes on me again.”
And then Bryce knew. It was his mother.
She lowered her gaze as if embarrassed to look at him. Tendrils of gray hair had loosened from their pins and were suspended in front of her ears. Her face, though lined, was still thin, with prominent cheekbones and beautiful blue eyes framed by thick, black lashes. For a woman of sixty-five, she was hauntingly beautiful.
Unable to respond to his mother’s words, Bryce stared at her wrinkled hand as it clutched the phone receiver. Her veins rose in pale blue cords beneath her translucent skin and that obvious evidence of aging caught him off guard, although Jason had warned him. The last time Bryce saw her, she was young.
The image of his mother and the man he now understood was his birth father rose. Though he had no desire to go back to that night of joy and horror, before he could stop it, the memory rushed by him.
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