False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  The fact that Celia Collier’s RV was parked in the driveway hadn’t exactly brought her comfort. The tan and brown monstrosity looked like the meth lab from Breaking Bad. Leigh had casually pried it out of Maddy that Walter’s mother had decided to come visit on a whim, but Celia didn’t do anything on a whim. Leigh knew that she had gotten both doses of the vaccine. She had a sinking feeling Maddy’s grandmother was here to babysit while Walter took a weekend away with Marci.

  “Mom, are you listening?”

  “Of course I am. What did she say next?”

  Despite the strident tone in her daughter’s voice, Leigh felt her blood pressure drop. The faint sound of crickets came through the car windows. The moon was a sliver low in the sky. She let her mind wander back to that first night she had spent with her daughter. Walter had put pillows all around the bed. They had curled their bodies around Maddy like a protective heart, so in love that neither of them could speak. Walter had cried. Leigh had cried. Her list of cat litter and kitten food had turned into diapers and formula and onesies and plans for Walter to immediately accept the job in Atlanta.

  The paperwork that Callie had left in the bottom of the cat carrier had made it impossible for them to stay in Chicago. As with everything else in her sister’s life, Callie had spent more brainpower doing the wrong thing than she would’ve had to expend doing things right.

  Without telling anyone, Callie had moved to Chicago eight months prior to Maddy’s birth. During her pregnancy, she had used Leigh’s name at the women’s health clinic on the South Side. Walter was listed as Maddy’s father on her birth certificate. All of Callie’s prenatal visits and blood pressure checks and her inpatient hospital visits and wellness checks had been covered by the Moms & Babies program of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

  Leigh and Walter had been given two choices: They could move to Atlanta with all of the medical records and pretend that Maddy was their baby, or they could tell the truth and send her sister to prison for Medicaid fraud.

  And that was assuming the investigators would believe the story. There was a chance that the government would’ve accused Walter and Leigh of being in on the scam. Maddy could’ve ended up in foster care, a risk neither one of them was willing to take.

  Please accept the gift of this beautiful girl, Callie had written. I know that no matter what happens, you will both always and forever keep her happy and safe. I only ask that you will call her Maddy. PS: Félicette was the first cat astronaut. You can look it up.

  Once they were safe in Atlanta, once the fear had died down, once they were sure that Callie wouldn’t tear back into their lives and try to take Maddy away, they had tried to introduce her sister to their daughter. Callie had always politely refused. She had never asserted ownership. She had never implied in any way that Leigh was not Maddy’s mother, or that Walter was not her father. The child’s existence had become like everything else in Callie’s life—a distant, vague story that she let herself forget.

  As for Maddy, she knew that Leigh had a sister, and she knew that the sister suffered from the disease of addiction, but they still had not told her the truth. At first, they had waited for the statute of limitations to run out on the fraud, and then Maddy wasn’t old enough to understand, and then she was going through a difficult time at school, and then being a twelve-year-old with parents who were separating was bad enough without having Mom and Dad sit you down to explain that you weren’t really their biological child.

  Unbidden, Leigh found herself recalling Andrew’s words while they stood in his backyard this morning. He had said that Callie loved what Buddy had done to her, that she had moaned his name.

  None of that mattered. Callie might have enjoyed the touching, because touching felt good, but children were incapable of making adult choices. They had no comprehension of romantic love. They lacked the maturity to understand the way their bodies reacted to sexual contact. They were physically and emotionally unprepared for intercourse.

  Leigh had not really understood that at eighteen, but she clearly understood it now as a mother. When Maddy had turned twelve, Leigh had gotten a front-row seat to the magic of a twelve-year-old little girl’s life. She knew how sweet they were, how desperate for attention. She knew you could convince her to do cartwheels with you up and down the driveway. You could watch her break into giddy laughter one moment and burst into inexplicable tears the next. You could tell her that you were the only person she could trust, that no one else would ever love her the way you do, that she was special, that no matter what, she had to keep what was happening a secret because no one else would understand.

  It was no coincidence that Leigh had crashed and burned her marriage when Maddy had turned twelve. Callie had been twelve years old when she had first started babysitting for the Waleskis.

  The understanding of how profoundly vulnerable her sister had been, what Buddy Waleski had stolen from her, was a cancer that had nearly killed Leigh. There had been days when she could barely look at her own daughter without having to run to the bathroom to break down. Leigh had kept herself so tightly wound around Maddy that she had spun out of control with Walter. He had put up with Leigh’s erratic behavior until she had found the one thing that would make him leave. It wasn’t an affair. Leigh had never cheated on him. In many ways, what she had done was far worse. She’d started binge drinking after Maddy had gone to bed. Leigh had thought that she was getting away with it until one morning she had woken up still drunk on the bathroom floor. Walter was sitting on the edge of the tub. He had literally held up his hands in surrender and told her that he was done.

  “What was I going to do?” Maddy asked. “I mean, for reals, Mom. Tell me.”

  Leigh was at a loss, but she had been down this road before. “I think what you did was exactly the right thing, baby. She’ll either come around or she won’t.”

  “I guess.” Maddy sounded unconvinced, but she pivoted. “Did you talk to Dad about the party this weekend?”

  Leigh had taken the coward’s way out and texted Walter. “You can’t sleep over, and you have to promise everyone will keep their masks on.”

  “I promise,” Maddy said, but, short of peering through the basement windows, there was no way of knowing. “Keely said she finally called.”

  Leigh’s daughter was the Where’s Waldo of proper nouns, but she usually planted enough clues. “Ms. Heyer?”

  “Yeah, she said something about how one day Keely would understand but she met somebody and she still loves her dad because he would always be her dad but she had to move on.”

  Leigh shook her head, trying to extricate the meaning. “Ms. Heyer is seeing someone? She’s cheating on Mr. Heyer?”

  “Yeah, Mom, that’s what I said.” Maddy fell back into her comfort zone, irritation. “And she keeps texting, like, hearts and shit and I mean, why won’t she call again to talk about what’s going to happen next and how this is gonna work out instead of texting?”

  For Maddy’s sake, Leigh said, “Sometimes, texting is easier, you know?”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ve gotta go. Love you.”

  Maddy abruptly ended the call. Leigh assumed someone more interesting had made themselves available. Still, she stared at her phone until the screen went black. Part of Leigh wanted to jump into whatever mom text chain was going around about Ruby Heyer getting her groove back, but that was not why Leigh had driven out to the suburbs at eight in the evening. She had come here to find Walter and blow up her entire life.

  Andrew clearly considered Tammy Karlsen nothing more than collateral damage in his war of mutually assured destruction. What he really wanted was for Leigh to live in fear. For her to know that at any moment, her perfect mommy life with its PTA meetings and school plays and her stupid husband could disappear the same way that Andrew’s life had disappeared when she had murdered his father.

  The only way to take away Andrew’s power was to take away his control.

  Before Leigh could
lose her nerve, she texted Walter—are you busy?

  He wrote back immediately—Love Machine.

  Leigh looked up at Celia’s RV. They had started calling it the Love Machine after Walter had accidentally walked in on his mother and the man who ran the Hilton Head RV park.

  The front door to Walter’s house opened. He waved to Leigh as he walked toward the Love Machine. She glanced around the cul-de-sac. She should not have been surprised that one of the neighbors had ratted her out. Six firemen fanned out around Walter’s house. He had gone to bat for each of them on several occasions, negotiating pension settlements, medical bills and, in one case, sending one to rehab rather than jail. They all treated Walter like he was a brother.

  Leigh left her phone on the seat as she got out of the car. Walter was folding up the table when she stepped inside the Love Machine. Celia hadn’t spent much money on decorating, but everything was neat and functional. A long banquette served as a couch between two partitions. The galley kitchen ran along the back with a closet and bathroom making a small hallway to the bedroom at the rear. Walter had turned on the running lights along the strip of carpeted floor. The soft glow brought out the sharp angle of his jawline. She could see the shadow of a beard growing. He had started shaving every other day since the pandemic. Leigh hadn’t realized how much she liked it until those brief months during the first lockdown when she had found herself back in his bed.

  “Shit.” She put her hand to her bare face. “I forgot my mask.”

  “It’s all right.” Walter took a step back, leaving some distance between them. “Callie made an appearance at Maddy’s soccer practice today.”

  Leigh felt the usual mix of emotions—guilt that she still had not called to check on her sister since last night and hope that finally Callie had shown some interest in being part of her family.

  “She looks okay.” He leaned against the partition. “I mean, she’s way too skinny, but she was smiling and joking around. Same old Callie. I swear to God, she looked like she had a tan.”

  “Did she …”

  “No, I offered, but she didn’t want to meet Maddy. And yes, she was high, but not falling down or making a scene.”

  Leigh nodded, because that wasn’t the worst news. “How’s Marci?”

  “Getting married,” Walter said. “She’s back with her old boyfriend.”

  For the first time in days, Leigh felt the anvil lift a tiny bit of its weight off of her chest. “I thought when I saw the RV—”

  “I’m gonna quarantine out here for ten days. I asked Mom to drive up so she can keep an eye on Maddy.”

  Leigh felt the weight come back. “Were you exposed?”

  “No, I was going to call you tomorrow, but then you showed up here and—” He shook his head, like the details didn’t matter. “I wanted to be able to do this.”

  Without warning, he closed the gap between them and pulled Leigh into his arms.

  She put up no resistance. She let her body melt into his. A sob came from her mouth. She wanted so desperately to stay with him, to pretend like everything was okay, but there was nothing she could do but try to memorize this moment so that she could think about it for the rest of her life. Why did she always cling to the bad things and let the good things slip away?

  “Sweetheart.” Walter tilted up her face so that she would look at him. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Leigh touched her fingers to his mouth. She felt in her soul that she was on the precipice of doing lasting harm to what was left of their marriage. She could have sex with him. She could fall asleep in his arms. But then tomorrow or the next day she would still have to tell him the truth, and the betrayal would cut that much deeper.

  “I need to—” Leigh’s voice caught. She took a deep breath. She led Walter to the banquette and sat down beside him. “I have to tell you something.”

  “This sounds serious,” he said, not sounding serious at all. “What is it?”

  She looked down at their intertwined fingers. Their wedding rings were both scratched, but neither of them had ever taken them off.

  Leigh couldn’t keep dragging this out. She made herself pull away. “I need to tell you something out of the confines of our marriage.”

  He laughed. “Okay.”

  “I mean, it’s not part of our marital privilege. This is just you and me talking.”

  He finally picked up on her tone. “What’s wrong?”

  Leigh couldn’t be this close to him anymore. She slid across the seat until her back was against the partition. She thought about all those times she’d reached her foot across the couch cushion because she couldn’t stand not somehow being connected to him. What she was about to say could sever that tie irrevocably.

  There was no more putting it off. She started at the beginning. “Do you remember I told you I started babysitting kids in the neighborhood when I was eleven?”

  Walter shook his head, not because he didn’t remember, but because he thought it was crazy that anyone had believed it was a good idea for an eleven-year-old child to be left in charge of other children.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  Leigh struggled against her tears. If she broke down now, she would never survive telling him everything. She took a deep breath before continuing.

  “When I was thirteen, I got a permanent babysitting gig for a five-year-old boy whose mom was in nursing school, so I was at their house every weekday after school until midnight.”

  Leigh was talking too fast, her words threatening to trip over each other. She made herself slow down.

  “The woman’s name was Linda Waleski. She had a husband. His name was—well, I honestly don’t know his real name. Everyone called him Buddy.”

  Walter rested his arm along the back of the banquette. He was giving her his full attention.

  “The first night, Buddy drove me home and—” Leigh stopped again. She had never said this part to herself, let alone aloud. “He pulled the car over to the side of the road, and he pushed my legs apart, and he shoved his finger inside of me.”

  She watched Walter’s anger compete with his grief.

  “He masturbated himself. And then he drove me home. And he gave me all this money.”

  Leigh felt heat rush to her face. The money made it worse, like payment for a service. She looked over Walter’s shoulder. Her eyes blurred the twinkling lights along the neighbor’s driveway.

  “I told Phil that all he did was rest his hand on my knee. I didn’t tell her about the rest of it. That when I went to the bathroom, there was blood. That for days, every time I peed it stung where his fingernail cut me.”

  The memories brought back the burning sensation between her legs. She had to stop again to swallow.

  “Phil just laughed it off. She told me to slap away his hand the next time he tried it. So that’s what I did. I slapped his hand and he never tried anything else.”

  Walter’s breathing was slow and steady but, out of the corner of her eye, Leigh watched his fist clench.

  “I forgot about it.” She shook her head, because she knew why she had forgotten about it, but she couldn’t think of how to explain the reason to Walter. “I—I forgot about it, because I needed the job, and I knew if I made trouble, if I said anything, then no one would hire me again. Or I would get blamed for doing something wrong, or—I don’t know. I just knew that I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. That no one would believe me. Or that they would believe me, but it wouldn’t matter.”

  She looked at her husband. He had let her talk uninterrupted this entire time. He was trying so desperately hard to understand.

  “I know that sounds crazy, to forget something like that. But when you’re a girl, especially if you start to develop early, and you get breasts and hips, and you have all these hormones that you don’t know what to do about, grown men will say inappropriate things to you all the time, Walter. All the time.”

  He nodded, but his fist was still clenched.

 
; “They wolf-whistle or they touch your breasts or they brush their cocks against your back and then pretend it’s an accident. Or they talk about how sexy you are. Or they say that you’re mature for your age. And it’s gross because they’re so old. And it makes you feel disgusting. And if you call them on it, they laugh or they say you’re uptight or you’re a bitch or you can’t take a joke.” Leigh had to make herself slow down again. “The only way you can get through it, the only way you can breathe, is that you just put it somewhere else so that it doesn’t matter.”

  “But it matters.” Walter’s voice was hoarse with sorrow. He was thinking of their beautiful girl. “Of course it matters.”

  Leigh watched tears roll down his face, knowing that what she said next would turn him completely against her. “When I was sixteen, I saved enough money to buy a car. I quit babysitting. And I passed the job at the Waleskis’ along to Callie.”

  Walter had no time to hide his shock.

  “Buddy raped her for two and a half years. And he hid cameras around the house to film himself doing it. He showed the movies to his friends. They had these weekend parties. They drank beer and they watched Buddy rape my sister.” Leigh stared down at her hands. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “I didn’t know at the time that it was happening, but then one night Callie called me from the Waleskis’ house. She told me that she had gotten into a fight with Buddy. She had found one of his cameras. He was worried that she would tell Linda and he would get arrested. So he attacked her. He beat her. He nearly choked the life out of her. But somehow, she managed to grab a kitchen knife to defend herself. She told me that she had killed him.”

  Walter said nothing, but Leigh couldn’t hide from him any longer. She looked him directly in the eye.