Skewed

by Anne McAneny

I rose from the table, my chair grating against the floor, my height dwarfed by his. He hovered over me as he had my entire existence, an indiscriminate cloud too heavy to move, too porous to touch. I looked down, hoping the moment would evaporate into nonexistence, but I could feel the radiance of his gaze on my face. No wonder he’d been touted as a sure thing. He mesmerized without even trying.

  As I reprimanded myself for having given the elevator nurse such a hard time, I raised my face to—undeniably—my father’s.

  “Hello, Mr. McLemore. I’m Jane Perkins.”

  His smile conveyed the frivolousness of my words. They were practically an insult.

  My hands stayed glued to the small, clear purse I’d brought solely for the purpose of clutching in case he reached out to shake my hand. He didn’t.

  “Janie, what a joy to finally meet you.” He’d changed Jane to Janie as naturally as breathing. So much for my attempt at maturity.

  His voice really was ridiculous. What must it have been like to see him on the campaign trail? Supposedly, he was a rock star, but I’d attributed the trumped-up accounts to the public’s shallowness. Now I understood. I’d met only one other person who held this kind of immediate sway over people—a suspect in an insurance case for which I’d been hired to take pictures—and he’d turned out to be plotting his mother’s murder after hiding three bodies in her basement. Still, I had enough practice in keeping my distance and detaching from situations. In this case, I needed only remind myself that the strong hands clasped together in front of me had pulled the trigger on the gun that cost me a mother.

  We sat down, nothing between us but a shoddy table onto which someone had scratched the words This Sucks with a sharp object. The message’s existence didn’t bode well for the prison’s security screening system, but the sentiment made me feel less alone.

  “I need to talk to you about a photo,” I said, cutting hard to the chase.

  For all the attention he gave my declaration, I might as well have announced he’d be getting an extra pudding with dessert tonight.

  “You look so much like your mother,” he said. His doleful expression coated me, but not in a good way. More like toxic paint. He raised one hand quickly to his mouth, then let it drop again. “It’s extraordinary.”

  “I’ve heard about the resemblance,” I said, “but of course, I never met my mother and only know her through photos, one of which I’d like to show you.”

  That oughta dump a load of antifreeze on his warm, familial bullshit.

  He nodded, closing his eyes to add sincerity to the gesture, but the cluster of freckles on his eyelids pissed me off to no end. Was he whiling away his punitive years in the sun, stretched out on a lounge chair while sipping tea with lemon? Did the guards grant him special privileges? Of course they did. No one looked this good in prison unless the people in charge were complicit in his upkeep.

  “Janie, your attitude is completely understandable.”

  If only I had an engraved plaque to hand him. It would read Understatement of the Century.

  “I wish we’d gotten to know each other all along,” he continued, “although the logistics would have been tough.” He grinned and damn if it didn’t make him more likable. “I know how lucky I am that John has allowed me to be part of his life. I can’t tell you what that’s meant to me.”

  John? Really? Nobody called my brother John. Would he next break out the full Jane Elizabeth Perkins?

  “I’ve never asked the same of you,” he said.

  “You’re not really in a position to ask me for anything, are you, Mr. McLemore?”

  The Mr. McLemore part got to him. It showed in the horizontal creases near his eyes. “I’ve kept a personal vow never to intrude in your life. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to.” His fingers touched each other periodically, as if he wanted to reach out and hold someone’s hand while delivering this tripe.

  There’d be no offer from this side of the table.

  “I’ve followed your schooling and career,” he said, “and John keeps me up to date, but, if I’m honest, the emptiness haunts me. Because you were the girl. I should have been around to protect you.”

  I raised one hell of a dubious brow. With that kind of protection, I’d be better off living under the care of Dizzy the Drug Lord.

  And then he released tears, as if commanding a small cadre of laborers in his amygdala to unleash the waterworks. This guy was unreal. But then, why did I feel myself swallowing back a rush of emotion? Why did I want to reach out and reassure him and catch him up on the entirety of my existence?

  I didn’t do it, of course. An unyielding silence gripped me as I focused on something—anything—less cloying. I noticed the protrusion of his cheekbones and the angle of his nose. He’d be the rare perfect subject for a Rembrandt portrait, where a light source above the head makes the nose’s shadow fall toward the cheek. Not every face could pull it off. It needed a particular bone structure. The effect was a triangle of light below the eye, surrounded by shadow. Some photographers felt it gave the subject a sophistication and gravity. I always felt it suggested a dark intelligence and a calculating precision to every move and emotion.

  While he got himself together, apologizing here and there, I observed how his shoulders slumped forward now, as if every part of him were reaching out, giving its utmost. Those selectively benevolent shoulders had probably worked in his favor when he leaned down to shake a frail constituent’s hand. Maybe an old woman with a cane or a veteran in a wheelchair.

  I saw him once again for who I knew him to be—a heartless, spineless cad who, when push came to shove, couldn’t act out the Superman role he’d been born to play. If there had been a third person in the room that night, Fate’s central casting had put Grady in the right place at the right time to save my mother, but it hadn’t given him the right set of tools.

  “Mr. McLemore, as I—”

  “Please, call me Grady. That’s what your brother calls me.”

  “We’re twins, not robots.”

  Another crack in his handsome armor, evident in the tightness of his lips. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

  “Someone mailed me pictures of the crime scene. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “Your mother’s crime scene?”

  “Of course my mother’s crime scene. The one you staged for all of us.” Despite evidence to the contrary in my possession, I still needed to say it. Thirty years of coarse, DNA-entangled hatred didn’t just evaporate overnight. I reached into my bag and slapped the photos in front of him like an accusation.

  He gazed at them and I’d never seen anything like it. No shock, no horror, no regret. An actual smile crossed his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said upon realizing his expression. “It’s just that”—and here came the tears again—“I haven’t seen a picture of your mother in so long. I’m sure when you look at it, you see—”

  “A recurring nightmare? The brutal shortening of a vibrant life—and almost two more?”

  Grady reached across the table to touch me, only to be throat-cleared into submission by the guard, not to mention the abrupt removal of my hand. He retracted the offer smoothly, as if it had never been made. “I see the woman I loved, the woman who was going to give me the life I dreamed of but didn’t think possible, considering . . .”

  “Considering what?”

  His sigh came out with more timbre than most people’s voices. If he vocalized a glitch at the end of it, I might lose my shit. He didn’t.

  “Considering the life of a politician,” he said, “a public figure. I didn’t think I’d have a normal shot at it. Assumed everything would be manipulated for maximum advantage.”

  “Why?”

  Grady chuckled. “You never met my mom. No first comes love, then comes marriage. It was first comes achievement, then comes status, and
finally, power. Only heard the word love when I brought a girl home for Easter one year. Don’t go falling in love with that opportunist, Grady; she is not daughter-in-law material.”

  I suppressed all thoughts of Grady’s cold-hearted mom possibly being my grandmother.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” he continued, “but there are lots of politicians out there with fixed marriages to cover for their true preferences—or arrangements where trusts are traded for social status. But with Bridget, I had it all. I didn’t need anything from her except to be with her. I could give her everything, and I loved doing it.” He let out a short exhalation through his nose. “I sound like a dime-store romance novel, but she made my life whole. We were in love.”

  Hell, I wouldn’t pay a nickel for that schlock. “What must your mother have thought?” I said. “Or were you planning to deliver the knocked-up waitress to her like a dish of cold revenge?”

  “We’d stopped speaking by that point, although Bridget had planned to remedy that.”

  Hadn’t known my mom was the let’s-all-get-along type, but given her own experience, she probably couldn’t fathom a cold relationship between parent and child.

  “This is eye-opening and all, Mr. McLemore, but I didn’t come here to climb the old family tree. I need to know one thing: Who took this photo? Because these smudges down here are supposedly you.”

  He squinted and zeroed in on the base of the photo.

  “Even through your crocodile tears, you must be able to see that this was taken before my grandfather traipsed over your collapsed body to save my mother.”

  The words were meant to sting and they did. His brows formed a V. “Forgive me, I . . . I . . .”

  “Yes, shocking. I understand. But I’d like to get your answers quickly, before you can shellac them with lies. It’s been so long. Why not come clean?”

  He took a long moment to gaze at the photo, his eyes slowly widening as they showed a combination of surprise and disbelief. “Janie, if your assessment of these photos is correct, then they’re proof of the third person. Whoever injected me.”

  “Then who the hell was that? Someone you hired?”

  His expression dimmed. “You know as well as I do. The Haiku Killer. To this day I have no idea who he was.”

  “A lot of people—twelve in particular—think the Haiku Killer’s only role in this case was as an excuse.”

  Grady shook his head, but his face showed patience. “My old handler, Sam Kowalczyk, looked into it for years. He investigated dozens of people, but no one panned out. He looked into local folks, guys passing through town, customers at Field Diner, people who resented me, supporters, ex-cons, even people who might have known about your mother and me.”

  The last one caught me off guard. “Who else knew?”

  “Sam knew, of course, and it’s possible a few hotel employees put two and two together.” He gazed upward for a moment, thinking. “There was one other man your mom was worried about, but Sam couldn’t come up with anything concrete on him.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I can’t remember his name. A neighbor of hers. I’ll get the name from Sam.”

  “Did Sam share his findings with the police?”

  “Never came up with anything solid enough. Besides, case was closed. They had their man. Me.”

  I leaned back, listening to the grinding gears in my head as I shifted from hating this guy to viewing him as a potential resource. But the clutch stuck and I couldn’t get there yet.

  “What did my mom say to you that night that made you rush to her house?”

  “It’s in the police files. Haven’t you read them?”

  I shook my head. “Until now, I assumed they were filled with fabrications.”

  A glimmer of hope flickered in Grady’s eyes, turning them a sparkling russet. Come on, did he really think a couple blurry photos extrapolated by an eccentric in a log cabin would exonerate him? Then again, what the hell was I doing here if they hadn’t?

  His expression mellowed then, as if enough years had passed that he could now look back on the dreaded night with a degree of peace. “Bridget called shortly after I left the diner. Sam had dropped me back at the office and I was polishing a speech. She sounded panicked, very unlike her, and she said she had a haiku, a real one. I asked why she thought it was real, but she was too flustered to answer. She was worried the guy would double back and kill her. She said she had to get out of there. I told her to stay put, that I’d be right over, but she was breathing fast and all she said was, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and then the connection went dead.”

  “What happened?”

  He stared not at me, but through me. “I don’t know. That’s when I panicked. I didn’t like that diner manager and for all I knew, he was somehow involved. I should have called the police but I was only a few minutes away, so I raced over. Darkest night I’d ever seen—no moon—and no one else on the road. I got there within five minutes, but she was nowhere to be found.”

  He paused, breathing hard, his body recalling the adrenaline rush.

  “When I couldn’t get inside the diner, I snapped. I was about to smash the window with a bench when I finally noticed her car wasn’t there. I jumped back in my car and raced to her house. Must’ve been going ninety on those curvy roads.” He stopped suddenly and looked at me with concern. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  Not at all. “Yes, go ahead.”

  “Crazy ideas flew through my head. By the time I got there, I was ready to take down the first person I saw. I grabbed my gun—I always kept one in the car—and I swear, even from outside the house, even though I’d never been there, I knew something was wrong. I walked into the living room and Bridget was . . . She was just standing there. In the middle of the room. It was . . . eerie. Like she was frozen, but in a dream. She had this bewildered look in her eyes and I realized the guy was already there. She had to be incredibly scared for you and John.”

  “Did she say anything? Nod to you or something?”

  “There wasn’t time. It was pitch black behind me and I don’t know if he had a gun aimed at her head or what, but before either of us could say anything, I felt a sting in my neck and my knees hit the floor.”

  Grady leaned forward, his hands on those same knees, his face splotchy. So much for the peaceful recollection. “I never heard him, never got a good look at him. It was so unlike me. I used to be a hunter, for God’s sake.” He jerked his head up. “Have you ever had a panic attack?”

  “No.”

  “Even before he injected me, weird things were happening to my body. I couldn’t breathe right, I had tunnel vision, my heart was racing. It was bizarre. My whole life, I’d never flinched or backed down. First shot at a buck, I was fifteen, didn’t hesitate. But this time it was Bridget in the crosshairs and I lost it. I was down before I could even tape up my gloves for the fight.”

  “But you didn’t bring gloves, Grady. You brought a gun. Do you take any responsibility for walking into a volatile situation with a loaded gun?”

  “Of course! Why do you think I’m here? I never denied what I did, but I sure as hell disagreed with the how and why that the prosecution claimed.” His voice held remarkably little anger for an innocent man, but after thirty years, even a boiling cauldron of anger could run dry—or at least satisfy itself with a steady simmer.

  His words came out all crumbly. “I thought I could save her—and I was a damn good shot.”

  “Apparently.”

  He took his medicine.

  “If I had it to do over again—”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. You don’t get to give that speech. Not to me.”

  He cast his eyes down and in that single gesture, I sensed thousands of lonely nights spent reliving the nightmare of the shooting. Suddenly I was whirling in a riptide, getting pulled into a vortex where Grady c
ontrolled the outcomes. I needed to remain neutral, to swim parallel to the shore, the way Grandpa Barton had taught me. He’d made me fight vicious undertows at the beach to be sure I wouldn’t get sucked into a questionable situation—one with no answer but death.

  I swam parallel now. “Assuming the mysterious third party is still alive, why did he mail this photo now, after all this time?”

  Grady’s stunning eyes opened wider and I could see him as a younger man, before the lids had grown heavy and the skin had succumbed to age, albeit gently in his case. The appearance rattled me as a resemblance to Jack flashed across his face.

  “As I’m sure you know,” he said, “I’m getting out next week. Despite your moving letters.”

  I dropped eye contact, but refused to apologize. Was I supposed to feel guilty that every few years, I’d crafted a stirring missive to remind the parole board that the man before them was a heartless killer, not some handsome charmer? I’d laid it on thick, reminding them of the sad life of half a twinset who’d become less of herself each year for lack of a mother and father—thanks to the selfish actions of a wheeler-dealer who took advantage of a young woman and then discarded her like a torn campaign poster.

  Now, with these damn pictures, I had to question whether I’d kept an innocent man in jail. “I didn’t put you in here,” I said. “I wasn’t even born.”

  Grady gazed at me until I lifted my eyes to his. I lost myself in them—a cold heart warmed by a crackling fire.

  “Janie, I wasn’t implying that you did. I can’t imagine how difficult this all is for you.”

  What was I supposed to do with a free, possibly innocent Grady McLemore? He’d never been anything but a pixelated planet in my universe, one that included my 3-D, full-color mother as the sun. Grady had been the dark to her light, the bottomless evil to her infinite love. In my mind, the two of them only existed when I wanted them to, when I needed someone to adore or despise. The energy I could muster from either emotion was often the only thing that kept me going.

  “If the Haiku Killer mailed this because you’re getting out,” I said, “then he’s been following your life all this time.”