A. Yes, because I’m proud of it. The money that these four contestants would’ve earned, the money they would’ve received had Leonard not done what he’d done, it’s going directly to the NAACP.
Q. And why the NAACP, Mr. Forrester?
A. Do I really need to answer that? It’s not obvious? All of this isn’t obvious?
Q. Let’s say it’s not obvious to me. Could you please answer the question?
A. I’m done. Finished.
Q. Mr. Forrester?
A. You’re acting like a fool, questioning my integrity like that. You think because they let someone like you into a fancy law school that you somehow deserve to question me like this? I refuse—
Q. Someone like me, huh?
A. Yes, someone like you.
Q. Mr. Forrester, can you please just answer the question?
A. I’ve got nothing more to say. Really. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You haven’t this whole time.
Q. Interesting. Someone like me doesn’t have a clue. A woman like me doesn’t have a clue, is that what you meant to say?
A. Are we done here?
Q. Oh, Mr. Forrester. We’re a long way from done. A very, very long way from done.
Part IV
2019
Jaidee
I ran.
I ran.
I moved around Victor and Cory, and I ran.
Jaidee is sitting in a restaurant in North Beach in San Francisco, a subdued Italian place on Columbus called Arpeggio. He’s in the United States on business, will be meeting the next day with potential investors on a land deal. He’s become an architect of some renown, though his team here cares nothing about his input: he’s only here as a face, a creator, someone to lend legitimacy to the business ventures of his colleagues; he is, in other words, the talent.
Around him, sips and coughs and clinks and wisping conversation emanate, and above, lulling piano music streams, pacifying and elegant. His waiter, a young white man with a close-cropped red beard, has refilled his water three times, not because he’s particularly good at his job but because the restaurant isn’t that busy, and the young man seems bored, and Jaidee downs each glass in a couple gulps.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some wine while you wait?” the waiter asks, head cocked, concerned.
Jaidee shakes his head.
He wishes he were back at his hotel, sitting in silence, or reading a book, or video-chatting with Kiet. He nearly hadn’t come here, to this meeting, because Kendra Brown and he have never actually spoken face-to-face. At the trial, they hadn’t made eye contact, and as soon as the verdict had been read—guilty, guilty, guilty—Kendra and her family had silently and swiftly exited the building. Jaidee had looked for them outside, but had only found a still parking lot, a bright-blue sky, the thrumming yawn of early-fall cicadas.
“Here’s a wine menu, just in case,” the bored waiter says, setting a leather-bound book on the white tablecloth. Jaidee opens it, sees a bunch of words, closes it again. From a distance, he feels the waiter’s frown. He puts his elbows on the table, closes his eyes.
I ran, he thinks. I moved around Victor and Cory, and I ran.
For the last few days, the Cell Five scene has played out every time he’s closed his eyes: Leonard pressing a knife—a real knife—into Bryan’s throat. Everyone bewildered, whispering. Bryan pleading, crying, sweating, bleeding.
Are you a part of all of it? Victor shouted. Getting us this far and making us lose?
Jaidee shakes his head, beckons the waiter over, opens the wine book, points to a random pinot noir, orders the bottle. The waiter says, “Good choice.”
He closes his eyes again. The scene repeats. Over and over, just like it had for months after the incident, after the trial.
I ran, he thinks. I made a choice. I ran.
The moment before the running, the moment Cory steps in front of Victor, blocks his way, pushes him, and says, What the fuck are you doing?, the moment right after Victor’s shout but before Jaidee’s right foot pushes his left foot forward: that moment is a blank.
Cause and effect, he thinks. Cause. Effect. Victor. Run. Cause. Effect.
He’d told the jury that the cells had gotten to him, that all the crazy, creepy chaos had affected his thinking, his logic: by that time in the game, he’d said, he was so used to running, dodging, racing, that when he saw an opportunity, he took it, more as a reflex than anything.
The cells got to you? the defense attorney asked.
Yes, Jaidee replied. I wasn’t in my right mind.
The wine comes; the waiter presents it, opens it, offers Jaidee a taste. It burns his throat, warms his chest. Jaidee nods. The waiter fills his glass, leaves the bottle, departs. Jaidee checks his phone.
Maybe she’s not coming, he thinks, noting that it’s now twenty minutes past the time they’d agreed on. Maybe she backed out.
He checks his messages. Two from Kiet. The first wishes him good luck in the meeting tomorrow. The second says, I love you.
He takes a sip of wine and thinks about his boyfriend’s face—his chubby cheeks, his thin goatee, his quick, generous smile. After the trial, Jaidee hadn’t wanted to stay another minute in Nebraska, so he’d bought a ticket, flown home, and enrolled in Chulalongkorn’s architecture program. While there, he’d met his future boyfriend, a physical-therapy student named Kiet, and the first time they’d slept together, anxiety, dread, fear, apprehension, and all of the inadequacies he’d felt since adolescence slid smoothly off him: he slipped out of an old, dusty skin and tumbled into Kiet a new person, one who no longer felt unwanted, one who understood that while power determined the world, the world did not dictate his own personal power.
During a series of dinners, he’d told Kiet about Victor, about Lincoln, about Bryan, about the Quigley House, and Kiet listened sympathetically, sometimes nodding, sometimes shaking his head. Kiet couldn’t believe that such a place as the Quigley House existed, let alone that his boyfriend had gone through it, and in the dark trenches of night, when Jaidee shivered and shook, shouting to an apparition in the dark, Kiet held Jaidee tight, cursing America for producing something that had caused his love so much trauma.
You’re always safe here, Kiet told him one night, his right arm firmly grasping Jaidee’s left pectoral. Remember, always.
Jaidee smiles at Kiet’s text, sends back five heart emojis, puts his phone back in his pocket. He pours himself another glass of wine.
Cause and effect, he thinks. Victor, love. Run, Bryan: death. Cause. Effect.
But no. What had Malee said all those years back? What had she wrongly thought must come before an effect?
A command.
Yes, a command. Not love. Command. Meaning: Victor, command. Run, Bryan: death.
He shakes his head, sips his wine. Ten minutes pass. Jaidee considers getting the check, heading back to his hotel. It’d be morning in Bangkok. He could video-chat with Kiet before Kiet starts his shift at the hospital. Jaidee flags the waiter, and right as he does, she appears, scanning the room thoughtfully. He hasn’t seen her in over twenty years, but she looks the same—the spray of freckles across her cheeks, the kind but suspicious brown eyes, the short, meaty legs. She crosses her arms, heaves a long sigh, tucks her hair behind her ears. He lifts his hand in a half wave. Her face lights. She smiles. Then, as if realizing the inappropriateness of her smile, she looks away, tightens her lips.
“Yes?” the waiter says.
Jaidee has forgotten that he’d signaled him over. He shakes his head, says, “No, we’ll be a bit.”
“Another glass?” the waiter says.
“Yes, please,” Jaidee says.
Kendra takes the seat opposite him, rests her hands on the table. They sit for a while in silence, looking at each other. Close up, Jaidee sees that she has indeed aged: two curved lines fall from the corners of her lips and purple crescents ring the bottoms of her eyes. She wears a red floral-print dress that puffs at her forearm
s and, on her face, a pair of smart round glasses, brown and yellow and unfailingly hip.
“It’s good to see you,” Jaidee says.
Kendra’s face bunches up, and for a moment Jaidee fears she’ll cry. Instead, however, she says, “I’m sorry I’m late. I’m such a cliché. CPT and all.”
“CPT?” Jaidee says.
She shakes her head. “Truth be known, I nearly didn’t come.”
“I wondered if you might not,” he says.
“But here I am,” she says. “And here we are.”
“Yeah,” Jaidee says, feeling an ache in his chest. “Here we are.”
He’d found her online—it hadn’t been hard. She was a senior financial analyst at Maddox Bank, and her promotions had been very public, very celebrated. She wasn’t on social media, but her husband was, and he was an avid poster, sharing album after album of them in various tropical locations—Cabo, Jamaica, Tahiti, Hawaii. In all the pictures, she looked cautiously happy, her smile tentative, her eyes skirting, and if Jaidee hadn’t known better, he’d have thought that she harbored misgivings about her spouse, a tall, muscular Black man who’d founded a music school for underprivileged youth. In no pictures did they define the visual caricature of happy coupledom: mainly, she looked away, smiling that sensible smile while he angled the camera above, trying to get a decent shot.
Come on, babe, Jaidee imagined him saying. Just look at the camera. Just this once.
But she never did, and Jaidee, after a while, concluded that this had nothing to do with her husband. Jaidee himself had experienced the lingering effects of trauma: it’d become nearly impossible to confidently look anyone directly in the eye for more than a second, and it made sense that Kendra might share this condition.
Jaidee emailed. Kendra didn’t respond. Jaidee emailed again. Kendra still didn’t respond. Jaidee emailed a total of twenty-three times before receiving a curt, three-word response: Leave me alone. Jaidee felt encouraged by the message: it meant that she hadn’t filtered him out, nor had she blocked him. He continued emailing. Finally, he told her that he had a business trip coming up in San Francisco, and knowing that she lived there with her husband, asked if she’d be willing to meet, just for a single dinner, nothing more than that—perhaps at a place called Arpeggio in North Beach? Say, 7:15 p.m. on the fifth? He’d make the reservations.
She replied: Fine. Okay.
“It’s way too easy to find people nowadays,” Kendra says, pouring herself a glass of wine. “Even if you don’t put anything out there, other people do it for you. It’s almost impossible to be left alone.”
“Yeah,” Jaidee says, taking the jab.
“I tell my husband this all the time, to stop being so online, but he won’t listen, says it opens up a broader community that he needs.” She shrugs, sips. “Whatever.”
They sit for a while. The waiter returns, takes their order. They both get the special: ravioli. Jaidee orders another bottle of wine, thinks about his meeting the next day. It’ll be good to be hungover, useless. Nobody will care. In fact, they’ll like seeing him sitting there, quiet and demure. He takes a long gulp of wine, feels his face flush.
“So, what is this?” Kendra says, resting her hands in her lap. “What is this reunion about?”
“I don’t know,” Jaidee says. “I just thought, we were in the same city, so—”
“No,” Kendra says. “Don’t minimize it. Don’t do that. You dredged up a bunch of shit, so don’t make it seem like a pleasant and friendly hello.”
“Dredged up?” he says. “Did it ever go away for you?”
She blinks, bites her lip. “That’s a dumb question,” she says. “You know that.”
The waiter returns, shows them the bottle, gives them a taste. He pours. They drink. A handsome white couple is shown to a table a few feet away from them. Enjoy your meals, the host says.
“I suppose you’ve heard about Leonard Grandton’s release,” Kendra says.
“Yes,” Jaidee says.
“I’ll be honest,” she says. “When I heard, I was okay with it. I hate him, I’ll always hate him, but I also feel a little sorry for him. For someone to be so easily used . . .”
“Yeah,” Jaidee says. “I know.”
They fall silent. A few tables away, a phone rings. Jaidee looks over, sees a pudgy man in a dark suit gritting his teeth. Are you gonna get that? he says to his table mate, a young brown-haired woman in a dark-green dress. Don’t be bitchy, Dad, the woman says, digging through her purse.
“I suppose you’ve also heard of John’s death,” Kendra says, filling her glass, sipping.
“Yes, that too,” Jaidee says.
“Fitting, huh?” she says. “Stories like that really make me think there’s some cosmic meaning to all this shit.”
Jaidee nods. Apparently, John hadn’t ever been able to recoup his losses from his haunt and had wound up working as a prep cook at a strip club in Reno. One day, as luck would have it, he’d slipped in the dry storage room, hitting his head on the moving steel cart, and toppled over a five-gallon tub of ketchup. The tub hurtled directly onto his upturned face, snapping his neck, and he’d died, the article put it, surrounded by synthetic red paste, as appropriate a death as anyone could’ve expected for a man like him.
“I laughed when I found out,” Kendra says. “I’ve never laughed at anyone’s misfortune in my life, but I laughed for days about that one. I mean, the guy got off, right? Nobody even investigated him. So him dying like that? Yeah. I laughed.”
Jaidee nods again. He hadn’t laughed, per se, but he’d felt, upon hearing the news, a sort of feathery levity. Though he’d only ever seen John from afar in the courtroom, he’d known that the man was, in some large way, the source of his constant, wretched heartache, and he couldn’t have wished a more ridiculous death on anyone.
“So whatever happened to everyone else?” Kendra says. “Jane? Victor? You contact them too?”
Jaidee shakes his head. “I haven’t spoken to them since the trial. I have no idea.”
She fidgets with her purse, checks her phone, looks up. “Talking about this again, after all this time,” she says. “My god.” She pauses, looks around the room. “I’ll say this: For the last two decades, I’ve blamed everyone. I’ve blamed you. I’ve blamed Victor. I’ve definitely blamed Leonard and John. I even blamed my aunt and mother. Can you believe that? They didn’t even know I worked there, but still, I blamed my mom for dragging me out to Nebraska and Rae, well, I blamed her for just being Rae.” She chuckles. “You know neither of them would talk to me for, like, six months afterward? Even now, twenty years later, there’s this hesitation around me. Neither of them has been out here to visit. They barely call. They’re old and all, but still.” She sighs. “Anyway, I guess I blamed all of them, but the person I blamed most was myself.”
“Yourself?” Jaidee says. “Why would you blame yourself?”
“I asked Bryan to go,” she says, her lips broadening to a sad smile. “I begged him to go. I used my dead father to make him more likely to go. Isn’t that terrible?”
“But that doesn’t make any of it your fault,” Jaidee says.
“I wanted him to win the money. I was interested in flying some stupid boy to Nebraska. It was all so silly.”
“But again, that doesn’t make it your fault.”
“I know,” she says. “I know that now. I know that it’s nobody’s fault but John and Leonard’s. I just have these thoughts, you know?” She pauses, runs her finger along the edge of her wineglass. “I think about what I’ve learned through all of this, Jaidee, through these years of piecing things together,” she says. “I think of myself back then and cringe. All that horror nonsense that I loved. Thinking that those stories meant something, tested the limits of love. It’s ridiculous that I thought that way. Love isn’t meant to be wrung through all that treachery. It’s not supposed to be as hard as we make it.”
“Yes,” Jaidee says, thinking of Kiet.
�
�I hate it now,” she says. “Halloween makes me sick. Every year, I get a bellyache in October. It lasts all the way until Thanksgiving.”
“I understand,” Jaidee says.
She sighs. “I mean, life is the real horror, isn’t it? A president who looks at guys like John and Leonard and says, ‘Good guys, both of them.’ Half the country defending him, and other people, well-meaning people, so shocked and horrified, thinking this is new, like this hasn’t always been the reality for Black people in this country. This is the true nightmare.” She looks toward the window. It’s drizzling; raindrops zigzag purposefully down the glass. “You know, I went back.” she says. “After I graduated high school, I went to UNL for college. It’s like I’d decided I couldn’t avoid the tragedy in my head, so why not get physically closer to it? Anyway. When I was in college, I took long study breaks, went to Holmes Lake and biked around alone. Bryan used to take me there, and it felt good, to be reminded of him. But it also felt awful. Because every time I went, I kept wondering what he would’ve become, you know? Every time I went, I thought, Where would you be, right now, if that hadn’t happened? And it’s the worst thing to think that. Really, it is.”
Jaidee fidgets. He’d thought, at first, that he’d wanted to see her to reiterate his innocence, to confirm for her, in person, that he hadn’t known that it was real, that he’d rushed Leonard because he’d firmly believed he was still in the game. The clock had been running. Leonard’s acting had been terrible. Nobody could blame him, right? That’s what everyone had thought, anyway. But over the last few years, as the scene played and replayed in his mind, he’d begun questioning what he’d known, how he’d felt, what his role had really been. Cory had blocked Victor, and Victor had said—no, had commanded Jaidee to run. And Jaidee had made a choice. It hadn’t all been adrenaline. It hadn’t all been reflex.
“You know,” he says, “Bryan’s friends once threatened to beat me up. Eli and Terrence? You know them? They took me outside, gave me a sermon. They said that we should be brothers, we should be on the same team, me and them.”
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