The Last Breath

by Kimberly Belle

  I crawl across the bed to the window and peer onto the front yard. The protesters are gone, but there, under the streetlight at the very end of the driveway, is Jake’s truck. Empty and dark. I stuff my feet in my fake Ugg boots, wrap the down comforter around my shoulders and sneak into the hallway.

  Even after all these years, creeping down the stairs without waking my sleeping father feels like second nature. Hug the wall at the top. Avoid the squeaky spot halfway down. Take a giant stride over the Persian at the bottom. I glance into the living room, where my father softly snores, and slip out the front door into the night.

  Jake’s face glows under a supermoon and a zillion stars. He looks surprised to see me, but no more surprised than I am at the paintbrush in his hand. He gives me a guilty smile, and then he shrugs.

  I step back and check the house, still shiny and wet where he painted it pale, creamy yellow. The exact shade of the siding. Beneath the gleaming paint, those awful words—Die, Murderer—are now only a vague shadow.

  “How did you know the color?”

  “I stopped by earlier for a chip.” His voice is a wisp of a whisper, but I hear him just fine. He dips his brush in the can by his boot and returns to the siding. “I think it’s going to need a few coats. There’s water if you want it.”

  I shuffle to the edge of the porch by the stairs, pluck a bottle from the paper bag, twist it open. The cold liquid does nothing to wash down the sudden lump. A lump so sweet it hurts, literally aches, in my chest. Not the same ache I have when my father writhes in pain, or when Lexi told me she’d given up on wishing he were innocent. This ache is the good kind. Buoyant, like there’s a secret smile tucked just behind it.

  “They’ll only paint it again tomorrow.” Thank God I’m whispering, because I’m certain my voice would fail me.

  “Then so will I.”

  I slide my back down the railing until I’m sitting, tucking the comforter around my bare legs. “But why? You don’t even know my father.”

  Jake turns and smiles like it’s a silly question. Like I should know the answer. And then he goes back to painting.

  I watch him work for a while in silence, thinking back to the last time someone offered me a gift so beautiful. A gold locket from my father and Ella Mae on my sixteenth birthday. A bouquet of wildflowers, mismatched and wilted but handpicked by my first love. A homemade card from a four-year-old boy I pulled—literally and with my own hands—from the rubble. None of them come even close.

  Jake’s gift sinks into my brain and my heart, imprinting both. It is the single most generous thing anyone has ever given me, and Jake, painting in the dark with no witnesses, gave it to me without even trying.

  The universe works in tricky ways. Maybe Jake is its way of throwing me a bone.

  “Jake?”

  He glances at me over his shoulder, his brush never missing a stroke.

  “If I forget to tell you later, thank you.”

  Jake turns now, brows dipped. “Why would you forget to tell me?”

  “Because once I get you in that truck of yours, I plan to forget all my manners.”

  He nods thoughtfully. “Promise?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, then.” He turns back to the wall, but not before I catch a flash of white teeth. “I better hurry.”

  * * *

  Somehow we make it all the way to the four-way stop before Jake slams his truck into Park, shoves the seat back as far as it will go and pulls me onto him. As far as hottest places to get it on go, Jake’s cab is not the most comfortable, but there’s something about the image of his truck, steamed up and rocking in the middle of a country road, that’s wildly erotic. Jake seems to think so, too, judging by the way he barely pauses to recover before guiding my hips into another steady rhythm, slower this time.

  Afterward, he pushes back my hair, planting a row of kisses along my jawline. “I had a secret fantasy you slept nude, but that little tank top of yours is a damn close second.”

  I glance down at my thin white shirt, now twisted and damp with sweat. “Does that mean you want me to take it off?”

  Jake shakes his head. “I want to take it off. Slowly, and preferably in a place where there’s central heating and a bed.”

  I blow out an exaggerated sigh. “You’ll never be a good country boy if you don’t learn to love your truck more.”

  “I love my truck.” He pulls me to him for another quick kiss. “Especially with you in it.”

  I giggle and roll off, reaching for the comforter and my panties, both in a heap on the cab floor. Jake fastens his jeans and cranks the engine, and the vents spew frigid air at my head. I bounce around for a bit, shrieking for him to turn it off. He drapes the comforter over both of us instead, pulling me tight up against him, and guns the gas until the heater kicks into gear. A few minutes more, and the cab is warm and the windows clear.

  “So now what?” I ask. I’m so not ready to go back to the house.

  Jake reaches around my shoulder for the gear shift, works it down a few notches. “Now we go for a ride.”

  I check the clock on the dash. “But it’s after three in the morning.”

  “So?” He flicks on the radio, pulls into the intersection, swings his truck away from town. “You have anywhere else you need to be?”

  “No.” I don’t even have anywhere else I want to be.

  “Good. ’Cause it seems like a nice night for a drive.”

  I slip my hand across his waist, snuggle against his shoulder. “I take it all back, Jake. You are an excellent country boy.”

  For the next few hours, we drive aimlessly over dark streets, winding up hillsides and coasting down into valleys, over train tracks and potholes and dirt roads. We talk about everything and nothing, about weather and food and our childhoods. Jake tells me, in between a story about his first real girlfriend and a new supplier of venison he found in one of the Carolinas, about some of the places he’s lived, and I intersperse my anecdotes about Bo and Lexi with how I lost my mother and found another in Ella Mae. Jake points out the house he’s thinking of buying, a fixer-upper by the river, and I show him where I crashed my first car, Ella Mae’s hand-me-down Chevy Citation, into a tree. Neither of us seems in a hurry to get anywhere special, and neither of us seems to mind the occasional silences.

  At sometime around seven, when the first of the morning pink slashes the sky, Jake steers the truck into a fast food drive-through. If the attendant finds anything unusual about the half-dressed girl wrapped in a comforter attached to his hip, she doesn’t show it. She simply smiles, hands us our coffee and a ridiculous amount of food in exchange for just under twelve dollars, and wishes us a nice day.

  “Seriously?” I peer into the giant bag on my lap, stuffed full with paper-wrapped sandwiches and breakfast platters stuffed into cardboard containers. “Twelve dollars for all this? This can’t all be food.”

  “Sure it is.” Jake pulls into a parking spot at the far end of the lot and digs a sausage biscuit out of the bag. “Genuine processed animal parts mixed with artificial fillers and genetically manipulated corn sugars. Try it. It’s the food equivalent of crack cocaine, so good.”

  I open one of the larger containers and gape at the steaming mound—pancakes buried under scrambled eggs, sausage patties and hash browns. Enough to feed a dozen kids for an entire day in Africa.

  I poke the eggs with a plastic fork, a familiar frustration flaming in my belly.

  “I know these fast food chains do good work with their charities and all, but with their buying power they should really be tackling world hunger. I bet if they pooled together, they could feed the entire third world for half of what it costs us to feed Dadaab alone.”

  Jake swallows, wipes his mouth with the back of a hand. “I think they’re too busy exploiting those third world countries
to care about their starving population.”

  “Exploiting how?”

  “Cutting down their forests, using their land to grow grain for cattle, depressing their wages for cheap labor.” Jake swipes a hash brown from my container. “Those charities are only a distraction tactic.”

  My stomach turns, and I flip the lid on the container and lower it, uneaten, back into the bag.

  Jake notices, and he looks down at his half-eaten sandwich. “Oh, Jesus. I’m one of those clueless Americans who’s part of the problem instead of the solution, aren’t I?”

  “It’s not your fault. I’ve just seen too much, watched too many people die of starvation.” I sigh, try to shake it off. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to preach. It’s sometimes hard for me to balance the poverty of that world with the wasted wealth in this one.”

  “No, no. I’m a dick, and you’re totally right.” He rewraps what’s left of his sandwich, crumples it into a ball and drops it back into the bag, and then he swings the truck out of the lot and into early morning traffic.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  When he whizzes past my neighborhood a few minutes later I’m a little surprised, even more so when he pulls onto a dirt road almost completely overgrown with brush.

  “Hold on,” he says, and it’s a good thing I do. The cab plunges into darkness, then hurtles and jostles us around like a county fair ride. I cover my ears at the piercing squeals of branches and sticks tearing down the sides of his truck bed. Moments later we emerge, in a clearing just big enough for the double-wide parked in its middle.

  Jake winks at me, reaches for the bag of food. “Be right back.”

  I watch him jog to the door and dig under a cinder block for the key, which he uses to slip inside. The cab feels cold and empty without him, and I pull the comforter higher over my chest. Less than a minute later, he slides back into the cab and hurls the truck into Reverse, tossing me another wink.

  “When old Otis wakes up, he won’t let that food go to waste. He’s skinnier than a telephone pole, but the man can eat.”

  I look over at Jake, and something squeezes, warm and tight, in the pit of my stomach. Painting my house, bringing old Otis and who knows who else food. This man is a blue-ribbon prize, and I feel like I’m the winner.

  We’re barely at the edge of the clearing when I wrap a leg over his lap and climb on. Jake hits the brakes, skates his hands from the wheel to my waist.

  “I like you, Jake Foster. I like you a lot.”

  Maybe even more than a lot.

  “You’re likely to have me starve to death, Gia Andrews, but the feeling is mutual.”

  I lean forward, touch the side of his neck with my tongue and whisper, “Do you think old Otis is awake yet?”

  Jake’s fingers tighten around my middle. “If he is, he’ll be more interested in the food.”

  “Okay, but this might take a while.” I nibble on his earlobe, slip my fingers under the hem of his T-shirt. “And I’ll probably be loud.”

  I feel his grin against my shoulder and his right thigh shift underneath me, and the truck eases ten feet forward, until it’s completely swallowed up in the brush.

  * * *

  It’s close to eight by the time Fannie pulls up alongside Jake’s truck in the Sulpher Springs Primitive Baptist Church parking lot, grinning like she’s the one who just got serviced.

  “Well good mornin’, sunshines,” Fannie says through her open window. “I would ask how y’all are doing, but judging by the looks of Gia’s hair I think I already know.”

  “Your hair is hot,” Jake whispers from the side of his mouth.

  Fannie lifts her hand for a high five from Jake, who flashes me an amused-apology smile before he taps her palm with his.

  I slump against the seat, a hot blush blooming up my chest. Asking Fannie to meet us here this morning ranks right up there with requesting a transfer to war-ravaged Somalia. But when Jake and I pulled onto my street a half hour ago, the protesters and press were already stationed at the end of the driveway. The image of me and my bed head, hopping in my blanket and skivvies out of his truck, was something neither of us wanted to see flashing across the 65-inch plasma above Roadkill’s bar.

  Jake leans an arm out the open window like it’s mid-June, and not February and freezing outside. “How are you, Fannie? Haven’t seen you in Roadkill for a while.”

  “On account of I’ve been working like a dog, trying to recoup what that rat bastard Lester stole from me. But I tell you what. I’d quit tomorrow for some more of that wild boar ravioli.”

  Jake smacks a palm on the outside of the driver’s door. “I’ll talk to the chef, see what I can do.”

  “You do that, sugar. Now if you two lovebirds don’t mind, I’d like to get down to business. There’s a sweet old man waiting on me back at the house.”

  Fannie hands him my jeans and coat, and he passes her the comforter. The instant frigid air hits bare skin, I snatch my jeans from Jake’s lap and pull them on at the speed of sound.

  “Th-th-anks.”

  “No problem,” Fannie says. Her car inches forward, then stops. “Oh, and, Gia?”

  I grit my teeth into a smile, peek at her from around Jake’s shoulder.

  “Your tank top’s on backward.”

  Dammit. My arms fly to my chest, covering myself.

  And then she guns the gas, and not even her tires peeling off the pavement can drown out the sound of her cackles.

  Less than ten minutes later, Jake kills the engine on the street behind mine, a mere fifty-yard trek through the trees to my backyard. Even though the protesters and reporters will almost certainly see me coming up the back hill, at least this way I’ll be decent, and they’ll never know about Jake.

  I turn on the seat to face him. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “I realize you weren’t here when Ella Mae was killed, but you have a bar. You hear things, right?”

  He nods. “Mostly gossip and conjecture, but sure. I hear twenty versions of everything.”

  “Did you ever hear anything about an affair?”

  He nods again.

  “Did you ever hear a name?”

  Something shutters on his face, like he heard one but doesn’t want to say.

  “Just tell me. Please.”

  “I heard a couple names, but they’re all along the lines of old Otis back there. But from everything I know about Ella Mae, she was good-looking and charming and irresistible, right?”

  I nod.

  “Any way she could have had a fetish for a guy like Otis, a two-toothed old man with more earwax than sense?”

  I giggle. “Not that I know of.”

  “Then I wouldn’t worry too much about the crazy names I’ve heard. Instead, think about the men in town who were just as good-looking and charming and irresistible as Ella Mae.”

  Without thinking, without stopping to ask myself why, my gaze travels toward Dean Sullivan’s property, to his house half-hidden behind the trees. I’ll never forget the first time he walked down the halls of Cherokee High, how the entire female population—and even a few of the males—swooned. How all anybody in town could talk about was Dean’s movie-star looks, Dean’s northern accent, Dean’s stylish city ways. Dean was good-looking and charming and irresistible. He was all of those things, and he lived right next door.

  And then I remember something else. Something that shoots a shiver up my spine and slams my heart to a standstill.

  I remember looking out my bedroom window one weekend afternoon, watching Dean Sullivan scurry across the lawn from our house to his, tucking in his shirt. I remember Ella Mae’s frantic fluster at finding me ten seconds later in the upstairs hallway, when she’d thought I was at
the movies, not napping in my room. I remember her furtive, almost feverish looks that night at supper, searching me for knowledge I didn’t know I had.

  I was too young and naive and self-absorbed then to see the signs.

  But now. Now I see them. Now I understand.

  Jake says something, jiggles my arm. “Did you hear me?”

  I shake my head. I didn’t hear anything.

  “I need to tell you something. I wasn’t completely honest with you before, when I told you how I ended up here in Rogersville.” He scrubs a hand over his cheek, hauls a breath deep enough to reach his toes, blows it all out. “Jeez, this is so much harder than I thought. Okay, so the thing is...I didn’t come here by accident. I came because...well, what I haven’t told you is that I was—”

  “Jake, I want to hear this, I really do.” I’m already scooting to the passenger door, yanking on the handle. “But I gotta go.”

  And then I’m off, tearing out of his cab and through the trees and up the hill, bursting through the front door and past Dad and a grinning Fannie, flying over the fake Persian and up the stairs to the scrap of paper I know is tucked in the inside pocket of my suitcase.

  The one with Jeffrey Levine’s number.

  I don’t need a professor of law to tell me what my memory could mean for Dad’s case. That if it’s true, if Dean was having an affair with Ella Mae, that gives him motive. Motive to lie on the stand. Motive to point the finger at my father.

  Maybe even motive for murder.

  19

  Ella Mae Andrews, December 1993

  THE MORNING AFTER Ella Mae’s birthday night on the town, she stared out the kitchen window at Dean’s dark house while she waited for the coffee to brew. The sky was barely pink with the new day and the rest of her family was still tucked in their beds upstairs, but Ella Mae couldn’t sleep. Hadn’t slept at all last night.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Dean.

  Ella Mae hadn’t been particularly surprised at seeing him at the Main Street Grille—the bigger surprise would’ve been not running into him in a town as small as Rogersville—nor at her body’s reaction to him. They’d been sleeping together for over two months now, and she’d almost gotten used to the way heat shot through her veins whenever he was near. Last night was only the first time her body had been quicker than her eyes.