She spoke softly, almost in a whisper, but he heard it as clearly as if her lips had been an inch from his ear. He stopped, but kept his back to her. He wanted to pull her into an empty room and interrogate her. Who was she? What did she know? Why did she say these things? What did she see in Claire that he couldn't? He heard a toilet flush and knew he had to get out of there.
When he reached the turn in the hallway, he looked back at her one last time. She waved slightly, and he finally felt that if she was right, this impropriety, this blatant flouting of the rules of ethics, was perhaps one of the times when the ends could justify the means. If she was right. He mouthed Thank you and left to endure the crowd as they gathered by the courtroom doors, waiting for the rest of the show.
When he approached the witness box the second time, he was still thinking of the redhead's words outside the bathroom. At first he tried not to look at her, partly for fear of upsetting Judge Lehman but more for fear of losing it all over again. He finally gave in, though. When he was certain that Sanders wasn't looking, and suspected that Judge Lehman wasn't either, he glanced at her and was surprised to find that their brief eye contact comforted him. He searched the back of the courtroom for Claire but didn't see her. When Sanders resumed his questioning, Jack responded quickly. He'd accomplished what he'd set out to do and now he just wanted to get out of there.
When he'd finished answering Sanders' questions—which, to Sanders' dismay, included testimony about Alex touching the wine glasses and most likely being seen by the guy who delivered the Thai food—and the judge had finally excused him, he didn't wait around to hear more. He'd returned to the city only to play his small role in the trial. He hadn't really cared what ultimately happened—it had all seemed so irrelevant. Jenny was gone, Maxine Shepard was gone, and he'd believed his marriage to be irretrievably broken. He had testified merely because they had asked him to.
But the exchange with the redheaded juror changed things. It instilled hope somewhere deep inside him.
His impatience compelled him to hurry down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. He jogged through the downstairs lobby and past security. The guard called to him, a cordial goodbye—some people stuck by you no matter what—but he merely waved as he pushed open the heavy door and stepped into the sunlight.
He was met with an omnipresent odor that hung over the city on certain days—yeast, hops, barley and rye—the sweet smell of brewing beer. He couldn't breathe without inhaling its moist weight. But it was March and the bulbs were in bloom; the yellow daffodils refused to be quieted by the persistent chill in the air. The tulips, though not yet gracing the streets with their brilliant colors, were pushing their green stalks through winter's protective mulch.
He scanned the area in front of the courthouse. He didn't see her, but he knew she was near, that she was waiting for him somewhere. He felt her pull like a magnet, and he was certain now that she felt his, too. It had compelled her to come to the courthouse, to sit through his testimony and find out just how bad it was. Why would she have bothered, if what the redheaded juror had told him wasn't right?
He'd parked in an open lot several blocks from the courthouse. As he walked to his car, he could think of nothing except seeing her, touching her, holding her. He didn't think about whether she'd be amenable to this; he didn't think about what he'd say to make it happen. It just seemed inevitable. His hope had grown to a spiritual certainty, a belief based upon nothing more than faith.
He was still on the sidewalk when he saw her, six rows deep in the middle of the lot, leaning against his car. A fence surrounded the lot and he quickened his pace, all the while keeping his eyes trained on her.
She watched him approach with the same expression she'd worn in the courtroom. He almost expected her to open her arms to him, but when he finally stopped a foot in front of her, she looked down and then to the side to avoid his eyes. He felt an inkling of doubt creeping in, but the pull was still there, leaving him no choice but to rely on its force.
"Claire." He said it not to get her attention or as a prerequisite to any other statement, but simply as an expression of relief that she was finally so close to him again, after so much time.
She looked up at him, and her eyes looked like an ice sculpture that had stood too long in the afternoon sun. So many times over the past year he'd stared into those eyes without really looking.
He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets and pulling them out again. In his haste to leave the courthouse, he'd left his coat in the DA's office. He crossed his arms to ward off the creeping chill, but he knew, and she knew, that he had nothing else to do with his hands anyway. Perhaps winter was not yet over.
He was afraid to ask the one question he needed to ask. Maybe the kind juror had been wrong. Maybe Claire had already discarded what might have been salvageable, tossing it into a heap of what was but is no more.
But if he didn't ask, what then? He'd never know where he stood.
"Why did you come?" His voice was barely more than a whisper.
She didn't say anything, but he thought he heard her swallow. She unzipped her purse and pulled out a manila envelope. The lawyer in him told him exactly what it had to be, and his stomach began to turn, his heart began to claw against the walls of his chest. Tricked. He took a step backward.
"I found these." She held the envelope out to him, but he merely stared at it and then glanced at her. She nodded for him to go ahead and take it, so he did, letting his fingers brush against hers when he reached for it. "Please, open it."
But he didn't want to. He thought that not knowing whether he'd ever be with her again was better than knowing for sure that he wouldn't. He sensed that certainty lay somewhere in the envelope.
"Please, Jack, just open it."
A reluctant gentleness seeped from her voice; she wanted to be angry still but had either grown too weary to maintain it or, he hoped, had exhausted it all in the past few months. He fumbled with the clasp and slowly opened the envelope. His fingers were cold and he had trouble sliding the contents out, but as soon as he saw them he knew what they were.
"Where did you get these?" he asked. He didn't look up from the top photo—a picture of the ice-encased rose bushes, the ones she'd planted the spring before. He hadn't thought of those bushes or of the photos he'd taken since the day of the ice storm. He realized now that he'd forgotten to have them developed for her birthday. The bushes, he remembered, had survived.
"The film was still in your camera when I dug it out for Christmas." She shrugged. "So I developed it." As if it was something she'd always done: develop photographs that he'd taken.
He tried to imagine the scene as he wished it might have occurred. Claire alone in the house one day near Christmas, missing him but not wanting to. Coming across his camera while looking for her digital one. Holding it, feeling the weight of it in her hands, the silence of the large house surrounding her and making his absence more palpable. Deciding to develop the film on the off chance there might be pictures of him—pictures she'd never seen before that might provide some clues to what had happened to him, to them.
He wanted to set the photos on the car and step closer to her. He needed to know if she'd even let him do that. Instead, he continued to stare at the tiny, tender buds that had somehow managed to bloom vibrant pink by August.
"There's more," she said, motioning tentatively with her hand for him to look at the others. He shuffled through the photos of the bushes, of the trees, of fallen debris on the ground, and, of course, the ones of Jamie. When he came to the first picture of Jamie he closed his eyes. It was too hard. It reminded him too much of his shame, of his ache to see his kids, and of his fear that he'd allowed himself to become a stranger to them.
But he forced himself to look at the rest because he sensed that she wanted him to. He knew he'd come to the photo she wanted him to see when she looked away.
It was a picture of himself. The picture Jam
ie had taken, so close and so vivid. It had a grainy texture, though it was hard to tell if this was a result of the mist or of the lack of distance between photographer and subject. He had a wide, easy smile on his face. He remembered that he'd been laughing at Jamie when the picture was taken. His eyes had been laughing, too, he noticed now. They were clear and bright and betrayed no evidence of the emotional seesaw he'd been riding in the weeks leading up to that day, and for many months thereafter. His happiness during the hour spent in the yard with Jamie had been fragile but pure.
"I'm so confused," Claire said suddenly, a gush of silent tears following her words. Her pain ripped through him and he finally did by instinct what he'd been yearning to do since first approaching her. He reached for her and slowly pulled her close. She didn't resist.
"Why did you come?" he asked again.
She backed away as if she'd just heard the question for the first time. She began to speak in one uninhibited rush.
"All this time, I've wanted to ask you why. I wanted to scream it at you. I wanted answers from you. I wanted to force you to give me answers, even though I knew there were none. But I told myself that it was the one question I'd never let myself ask, because I knew—no matter what you said—it would never satisfy me, never justify what you'd done."
"Claire, I—"
"Be quiet." It was an order. "You asked me a question. Let me answer it." She retrieved a tissue from her purse before continuing. "I knew I could never understand, so why bother asking? Plus, I knew you'd lie. I knew you'd try to sugarcoat it for me. But then . . . Mark told me you'd finally come back to town to testify.
"I realized your testimony would be the only opportunity I would have to hear the truth, because I knew you, of all people, wouldn't be able to lie on that stand." She waved one hand in the direction of the courthouse, as if the witness stand was another object worthy of her contempt. She did not at that moment admire his loyalty to the law; perhaps she never had.
She paused, but his shame only intensified in the silence because he knew she was right. He had been more truthful on the stand than he would have been with her, and he was beginning to understand how she could hate him for that.
"That picture of you? It haunts me. I look at it, and as much as I don't want to, I still have feelings for the man in the picture. And I don't know what to do about those feelings. I don't even know what the feelings are. Are they love? Or just love's remnants? And what am I supposed to do with them?"
He knew these questions were rhetorical. Besides, anything he might say, no matter how he tried to say it, would be exposed for what it really was—the attempt of a desperate man willing to say anything to get his wife back.
"You know, certain things used to be so black and white for me. There were good guys, and there were bad guys. Men who cheated on their wives were bad guys. Pigs. No questions asked, no excuses. A woman who stayed with a pig deserved whatever shit he kicked in her face. But now, I don't know." She carefully wiped her eyes with the tissue. "I don't know what to think, what to do. Everything I knew to be true, well, it isn't. I feel like someone's played a cruel joke on me.
"And the worst part of all is that I wonder whether the man in the picture is the same man standing in front of me right now. And do I even want him to be?"
"He's not," Jack whispered. "He's not the same."
The next thing she did was so unexpected that he thought he would lose any composure he'd been able to maintain up to that point. She placed her palm on his cheek. "I think I just might believe you."
He grasped her wrist so that she wouldn't take her hand away.
"Tell me what you want, Claire. Tell me what to do."
"I don't know. I don't know what either of us should do." She looked him in the eyes. "I just don't know if I can handle the constant reminders that would be inevitable. I don't know if I'm a big enough person to get past it. Even now, I know you're mourning her, as if she died. Maybe for you she did. But how am I supposed to deal with that? I guess I can't deny you your feelings for her, but I can't bear watching it, either."
She pulled her hand away and stood up straighter. "Here they come."
"Who?" He turned around. Streams of men and women were heading to the parking lot. The trial must have recessed for the day. Jack saw Jim Wolfe in the middle of the bunch and it was clear that he'd seen them, too.
He grabbed Claire's hand and pulled her to the other side of his car. "Get in," he said, opening the passenger door for her. But as soon as he'd spoken the words, they brought it back. Just like that, it was April and he was back in the parking garage, trying to coax a drunken Jenny to get into her car.
Claire noticed. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said, shaking his head, shaking off the memory.
He glanced at Wolfe, who was approaching quickly, and then at Claire, sitting in the front seat. He realized that she'd gotten in the car willingly. Wolfe was breathing down their necks, but Jack knew she was strong enough to stay and handle the reporter if she really didn't want to go with him. Despite her pain and confusion, despite everything she'd said, she'd gotten into the car. And that one action told Jack everything he needed to know.
EPILOGUE
Late Spring
JACK SAT SIDEWAYS on the top step of the deck, his back against a post-rail, and gazed into the backyard where Jamie played in the water. The community pool wouldn't open for another week, but the heat of summer had arrived early, so Jack had bought a wading pool to tide him over to Memorial Day.
The file lay next to him on the deck. He fiddled with the elastic string but didn't open it. He'd had the file in his possession for several weeks now. He'd forgotten that he'd asked for it, until Rose called him one afternoon and apologized profusely for it taking so long to arrive from storage. She didn't know if he still wanted to see it, she'd said, but she promised to hold it until he let her know. It took him about a week to decide to pick it up from the file room; two weeks later and he still hadn't opened it. Until the day before it had sat on the corner of his desk, blending in with the other files, but always within his line of sight.
He wanted to read it at home, away from the office, but he also wanted to read it when he was alone, or rather, when Claire wasn't home. He knew he'd have the opportunity soon enough. Since moving back, the routines he'd been used to had changed. Claire spent more time away from the house now, sometimes leaving Jack to take care of the kids or sometimes taking them with her. If she took the kids, it was usually to spend an afternoon or evening at her parents' house. When she went out alone, he didn't always know where she went. Sometimes she would mention that she was going out with one of her girlfriends, but at other times she didn't say, and he didn't ask.
He hoped they would eventually reach a point when they could talk about everything again, when they could do so matter-of-factly, without reopening their wounds. But for now the topic was untouchable, though ever-present. It was the elephant in the room. Sometimes at night, lying in the same bed but miles apart, he'd wake to hear her crying softly. He wondered if maybe he'd been talking in his sleep, saying things he shouldn't say. He'd reach for her, and sometimes she'd let him and sometimes she wouldn't, and he had no choice but to accept her decision.
He still thought of Jenny daily, wondered where she was, and he knew that Claire must know this. For a time he resisted the thoughts, but once he learned to accept the intrusions they became easier to bear. What surprised him most was the sheer number of reminders that popped up when he least expected them. Accidentally hitting her office number on his speed dial at work; the sight of her homeless friend camped out under the walkway to the stadium; even the brochure for that summer's Bench & Bar conference, with a full-color picture of the lake on the cover. The obvious reminders he could prepare himself for; it was the ones that sneaked up on him that threatened his ability to cope.
Jamie's giggles and shrieks coming from the yard reassured him that life was as close to normal as it could be. In moments of
tenderness with Claire, which, as time passed, became less bitter and more sweet, she told him that although Michael still held a grudge, the kids were behaving better since he'd returned. He worried that this was the only reason she'd allowed him back, but, as with his recurring thoughts of Jenny, he accepted those doubts as something he'd have to deal with until they went away. He stared at the file and debated whether to risk the possibility of stalling their fragile progress.
Most of the time he believed that he knew everything there was to know. The jury had convicted Alex of Maxine Shepard's murder and sentenced him to death. Based on reports both from Jeff and from the news, Jack knew that the verdict had been decided, in part, on the strength of his testimony. And though Alex's appeals could take years, that knowledge didn't even begin to alleviate Jack's guilt over the sentence.
He'd even learned that the alibi "leak" hadn't been a leak after all. It had merely been a hunch by Jim Wolfe, who'd tested his theory by suggesting it to the interested parties and then watching to see how they reacted.
But then there were the times when he'd sit up in bed in the middle of the night, seeing again the fingerprints on Jenny's back, trying to remember if he'd gripped her hard enough to cause them. He'd think about the story she told of her family's murder, and it bothered him that she'd left out more details than she'd put in. He'd tell himself it didn't matter; the rest of the details were irrelevant. Whatever had happened over a quarter of a century ago was just history.
But then Rose called, telling him she had the file.
He glanced at Jamie, who had left the pool and was chasing a butterfly near the edge of the woods. It was Saturday, and Claire wouldn't be home for a while; she'd taken Michael shopping for the supplies he needed for camp that summer. Jack picked up the file and held it in his lap for a long time before finally slipping off the string.
His hands trembled as he opened it. He leafed through some of the pleadings, but a few yellowed newspaper articles fell out and he grabbed them before they blew away.
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