Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  Why did Jenny have this video? Was she having me followed?

  I watched as I turned into the Matthews’ neighborhood, now seeing all the same in-ground pools and tennis courts from above, as opposed to street level.

  There was no sound. Just the picture. The Range Rover pulled into that parking area across from the Matthews mansion. As soon as I stopped, the drone’s camera zoomed in. The angle was off to the side enough that I could see my own face as I got out of the car.

  I watched myself going around to Parker’s side, feeling a pang as the tiny brown head of my eldest daughter emerged. Then I went around to Cate’s side. Before long, there was Cate’s head, with its mass of curls.

  Soon, I was making that unwieldy walk—with one child on my hip, one at my hand, and a Pack ’n Play on my shoulder—up the path toward the mansion. I rang the doorbell, and then disappeared inside, almost like I had been invited.

  Then the screen went dark.

  There was no footage of my burned-ass retreat, nor of my drive back. Just this one five-minute snippet of my life, with no explanation.

  I was stumped. Utterly. Jenny had put this in her jewelry box, a place I ordinarily never would have waded into. Not her drawer, which I might have gone into while putting away her laundry; not the bathroom, which I shared with her; not under the mattress, where I might have unearthed it while changing the sheets. Her jewelry box.

  So she must have wanted to hide it from me.

  At the same time, she obviously wanted to be able to watch it again sometime, or have it for some future reference. Otherwise she would have just thrown it out.

  Had she hired someone to produce this video for her? Or had someone given it to her? I was pretty sure she hadn’t made it herself. My wife’s talents, while myriad, did not include drone piloting.

  I was baffled. And I wouldn’t have believed it, except the evidence was right in front of my eyes:

  Someone besides Rogers and the Praesidium had been following me.

  CHAPTER 31

  JENNY

  From the moment she arrived at work—more than two hours late, escorted by a pair of armed guards—Jenny was aware that pretty much everyone at Carter, Morgan & Ross was tiptoeing around her.

  They had, of course, heard about the attempt on her life. Some of them had still been in the building when it happened and heard the gunshot. Others had seen the woman with the orange hair lingering near the entrance and were eagerly tossing what details they could into the office rumor mill.

  Jenny had the sense it was probably all anyone was talking about. She didn’t know if it had made her an object of fascination, revulsion, pity—or some combination of all three.

  Whatever it was, she wished it would go away. She had things to accomplish and an all-important 5:00 p.m. executive committee looming.

  Then she checked her voice mail and had one more problem added to the pile. It was Clyde Henderson, Danece’s husband. And he sounded distraught.

  Jenny had two other voice mails as well, but she called Clyde first.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “Mr. Henderson, it’s Jenny Welker from Carter, Morgan, and Ross.”

  Jenny could hear Danece coughing in the background.

  “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Welker, but I didn’t know who else to call. Landlord came by this morning. He’s fixing to evict us. He says we got to get out by the thirtieth or the sheriff is going to throw us out. Don’t know what we’re going to do. I already called the shelter and they can’t take us on account of Danece’s oxygen tank. I talked to one of those extended-stay hotels they got by the highway, but—”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Jenny said. “First of all, have you been served an unlawful detainer notice and given a court date?”

  “An unlawful what?”

  “An unlawful detainer notice. Unless your landlord has filed one, and unless a judge has ruled in your landlord’s favor, the sheriff’s office isn’t going to throw you anywhere. Eviction is a legal process, not a blanket excuse for your landlord to bully you. And shame on this guy for lying to you and making you think you have to go anywhere when he hasn’t even started the proper court proceedings. So the first thing you’re going to do is give me your landlord’s name and number because I’m going to tear the guy a new one.”

  Clyde gave Jenny the man’s information.

  “Good,” Jenny said. “Now, how much do you owe this guy?”

  “It’s more than three thousand dollars.”

  “That’s not a problem. My firm has a fund for clients who are struggling with their bills and whatnot. Basically, it’s an interest-free line of credit, using your future judgment in the CP and L suit as collateral. Once the CP and L money comes in, you pay off the loan. Is that something you might be interested in?”

  “What if we don’t win the lawsuit?”

  “Then the loan is forgiven. You really have nothing to worry about. I’ll arrange for the fund to pay your landlord the back rent you owe. I can send some paperwork next week. In the meantime, all I need is your verbal okay to proceed.”

  “Oh, you got my okay. You got my okay, my thank-you, and my thank-the-lord too.”

  “You and Danece are going to be just fine, Mr. Henderson,” Jenny assured him before she hung up. “The fund is going to take care of you.”

  The fund would do no such thing.

  The fund didn’t actually exist. The loan was really going to come from Jenny.

  But she knew Clyde Henderson would have a much easier time accepting the money if he didn’t know that.

  CHAPTER 32

  NATE

  Feeling like someone else was operating my body, I called the number Rogers had given me.

  I told the woman who answered I wanted Lorton Rogers to contact me and left my number.

  Fifteen minutes later, he showed up on my back porch.

  “Come on in,” I said, opening the door for him. “Check this out. This was on a thumb drive Jenny had.”

  My laptop was waiting on the kitchen peninsula with the video already queued up. I hit play, then went into the living room to check on the girls, both of whom were showing signs of impending meltdown from having been ignored by Daddy so much.

  I returned to the kitchen as the video finished. Rogers was staring pensively at the screen.

  “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  “Her jewelry box.”

  “Did she say anything about it to you, or—”

  “Why would she say anything about it? She’s clearly trying to hide it from me.”

  “Right, right, of course,” he said, letting out an oversize breath. “Well, that explains that. It’s all coming together. It always does.”

  He had this look of wonderment, joined by a small smile—like a clergyman who had seen miracles before, but still took the time to be moved by them.

  “What’s coming together?”

  “Mr. DeGange’s prediction. It’s making more sense, that’s all.”

  “How so?”

  “We had seen a drone in the sky over your house now and then. We thought maybe it was unrelated. Now I get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “What’s new? I don’t like any of this.”

  “I realize that, but . . . well, I had hoped this wouldn’t come out, to be honest. I wasn’t going to tell you about it because . . . I know you think I don’t care about your feelings and I don’t, in some ways. But I also didn’t want to cause you unnecessary pain, and—”

  “Would you just spit it out?”

  He bowed his head for a moment before bringing it back up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Jenny is cheating on you.”

  I had heard some unbelievable things tumble out of Rogers’ mouth. And not that this was the strangest—not by far—but my first reaction was still doubt.

  “No she’s not,” I said. “When would she even have the time?”

  O
r the energy? Or the desire?

  “I’m sorry. It’s why she’s having you followed. You know how you and the girls sometimes visit her in the office?”

  “Yeah. We call it ‘Your Daughters Show Up at Work Day.’”

  “She was worried about you coming into work unannounced, not finding her there, then asking questions about where she was. Whoever she hired, they were good. We never saw them. But we would see that drone. It went into the air whenever you left the house.”

  Was that true? How had I not noticed?

  Then I thought about the trips I made most of the time—to the grocery store, to the doctor’s office, to Parker’s tumbling class. It was all routine stuff. And I was always wrestling two little girls in and out of the car, worrying about their snacks, their toys.

  I probably wouldn’t have noticed an F-18 following me, much less one little drone.

  “There’s got to be another explanation,” I said. “I just can’t believe she would . . .”

  I couldn’t complete the sentence.

  Rogers pulled out his phone and swiped at it, like it pained him to do even that much. Then he held out the screen for me.

  It was Jenny, dressed as she had been on Tuesday, leaving the headquarters of Carter, Morgan & Ross. She had a leather document case under her arm and was walking with her head down, almost like she was embarrassed by what she was doing and didn’t want to be seen.

  “You’ve been following her?” I asked, as if it wasn’t already obvious.

  “Of course we have. We leave nothing to chance. You must know that by now. We followed her to a hotel called The Commonwealth.”

  He showed me another picture of her walking past a bellman. I knew The Commonwealth. It was just down from the state capitol.

  “Okay, so she walked into a hotel—that doesn’t mean she’s having an . . . an affair.”

  I could barely spit out the words.

  “Well, except this is who walked out twenty-five minutes later,” Rogers said, then held up his phone again, showing me a picture of a man in a suit.

  The gasp got stuck in my throat. He was a big guy, with a chiseled jaw and TV-weatherman hair.

  Greg Grichtmeier. Kara’s husband.

  I felt like I had been stabbed.

  “Your wife walked out about three minutes later,” Rogers said, showing me that picture.

  “But that’s . . . that’s got to be a coincidence. I’m sure he just had a meeting there, or—”

  “It’s not the first time. They’ve been doing this a lot. I could get you other pictures if you like. Here, hang on.”

  He tapped at his phone, then brought it up to his ear.

  “Could you text me some of the other photos of Welker and Grichtmeier at The Commonwealth?” he asked. He listened for the response, then said, “Yeah, that’d be fine. Thank you.”

  Nausea was welling up in me. I seriously thought I was going to vomit. I glanced toward the sink, feeling like I might need to make a dash that way.

  Rogers wasn’t looking at me, and I didn’t blame him. I’m sure it was difficult to watch a man sinking slowly from shame, horror, and disgust.

  His phone pinged. He looked down at it.

  “Yeah, here we go,” he said. “This was the first time. Or at least we think it was.”

  There were two pictures in the same text message. One showed Jenny, with the same document folder, this time with her winter jacket on. The other was Greg, dressed in a different-colored suit. Both photos were shot from the same angle, at the same time of day, showing them walking into The Commonwealth.

  “They’re good,” Rogers said. “You never actually see them together. Usually they spend anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour in there.”

  The phone went off again. Two more photos. Different day. Same hotel.

  Then there was another text. This time it was Jenny from Wednesday, wearing some thin attempt at a disguise. A Richmond Flying Squirrels baseball cap and sunglasses. But it was still very clearly her.

  “How . . . how long has this been going on?” I asked, after he had shown me the third set of pictures.

  “Two months.”

  Another stab. This time with an ice pick.

  We hadn’t had sex in two months. That was also when her hours at “work” had begun to noticeably pick up.

  I had written it all off. The lack of sex and the longer hours were because she had this demanding case on top of all her other work.

  Really, was it all because she had been having nooners with goddamn Greg Grichtmeier?

  I buried my face in my hands.

  Jenny? My Jenny? For the entire time we had been together, our faithfulness to each other had been a given, an immutable part of our equation. All the other variables had changed—what words we used to define our relationship (dating, engaged, married), where we lived, how many people were in our family—except for that one. Jenny and I were monogamous. Period. I couldn’t believe she would even think about cheating.

  But I had obviously been a fool to believe that. And I would only compound my foolishness if I ignored the evidence in front of me.

  Shouldn’t I have known? Didn’t all relationships turn toxic eventually? I’d learned that from watching my mother. How many times had the latest Mr. Onions or Mr. Belly cheated on her?

  Any notion that Jenny wasn’t like that had just been wishful thinking. The only difference was that it had taken her longer to get there.

  Without wanting to, I thought about Jenny and Greg together, in that hotel: about her giving her body to another man; about that bond I cherished being so freely shared with another; about the duplicity, the betrayal.

  And I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

  I walked over to the sink, turned on the tap, and puked.

  Then I hurled again.

  Rogers walked up behind me and put a hand on my back. I brushed it away.

  “Just give me a second,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  It took longer than a second.

  I kept taking in large mouthfuls of water and swishing it around, trying to rinse away the acid. But it was still burning my throat, coating my teeth.

  At one point, Parker wandered into the kitchen. She must have heard the strange noises.

  Her little eyes went wide as she took in the sight of her indomitable daddy leaning on the sink, defeated, tears leaking down the side of his face. I didn’t want to know what her three-year-old brain made of it.

  “Daddy’s tummy is just upset,” I said. “It’s okay. My friend here is going to help me feel better.”

  She glanced suspiciously at Rogers. “Okay, Daddy.”

  “Go look after Cate-Cate. Maybe play peekaboo with her.”

  Again: “Okay, Daddy.”

  She practically ran out of the room. I grabbed a kitchen towel and mopped my sloppy face, embarrassed she had seen me like that.

  I had myriad memories of my own mother in similar poses. She would then descend into these long blue periods during which there would be no joy (or cooking or cleaning) in the household. Until she recovered—usually because she had met the next Mr. Whatever—it would be all I could do to get her to order me takeout from the pizzeria on the corner. By the time I was ten or so, I learned to make the call myself.

  One thing I had already resolved: I was not going to let my children suffer the same way. As far as they would be concerned, nothing had happened.

  Daddy was fine.

  Even if Daddy was actually furious. I could feel the rage bouncing around inside of me, making me want to tear my own face off—and someone else’s too. I swear, if Greg Grichtmeier had walked into the kitchen, I would have punched that perfect jaw of his.

  And as for Jenny . . .

  I spit into the sink, trying to get more of the rancid taste out of my mouth. I could already imagine confronting her. Would she deny it? Or try to explain herself? Or say it was my fault in some way, that Greg was giving
her something—emotionally or physically—that I hadn’t?

  Would she beg for my forgiveness? Or—and this seemed more like Jenny—would she simply hold up her chin with that stainless steel confidence of hers and essentially tell me to deal with it? As I thought about the possibilities, my fury only grew.

  I looked up and saw Rogers studying me.

  “Is this why I end up killing her?” I asked grimly.

  “I don’t know if anything is ever that simple. I think it’s probably the totality of the situation, knowing you ultimately didn’t have any other choice. Though I couldn’t say for sure. Not even Mr. DeGange could say. He only knows the what, not the why.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” I said. “I mean, I’m . . . livid. Beyond livid. But even as angry as I am right now, I’m not sure I could . . . you know.”

  “In some ways, it’s not really your decision,” he said.

  “Because there’s no free will. Because next Tuesday has already happened.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, I still don’t know if I buy that.”

  “I thought you were finally convinced about Mr. DeGange’s gift.”

  “Sure, it’s just”—I released a large sigh—“I don’t know. Even now, talking about future me, it feels like I’m talking about someone else.”

  “That’s because you are talking about someone else,” Rogers said, with surprising passion. “The things that will happen to you, even if you’re actually the passive receiver of them, they don’t feel like they’re inevitable. Your brain is trained to believe it has free will, and therefore the events of your life impact you as if you chose them. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “It’s not all bad, by the way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to describe, even though I’ve seen it dozens of times. You’re about to have a series of life-shaping experiences that you’ll always remember and refer back to. It’s a powerful thing, going through the trial, becoming part of the Praesidium. As I told you, Mr. DeGange discourages religious language, but it really is like an awakening. Or call it a personal transformation. But, yes, you’ll be a different person by the time it’s all over.”