Binds that tie, p.22
Binds That Tie, page 22
Chris had asked the question. “Do you still love Jake?”
The question had been met with a silence that swallowed Chris’s heart whole. In so many moments in life, silence answered questions that words could not. Maggie was quiet for so long that Chris thought she’d fallen asleep. Despite needing the answer, he felt his eyelids droop closed.
Her fingertips had found his in the dark. She pulled his hand to the gentle dip between her breasts, and her heart thumped twice under his thumb. “No.”
They had both pretended it wasn’t a lie.
Chris saw the lie with the clarity of hindsight, as large and looming as the proverbial elephant. It had always been like that, though. Chris could only think clearly in Maggie’s absence. He was logical; he could assess situations, even his marriage. But when they were together, she seemed to fill the room, suffocating him and demanding his attention, an unrelenting force.
Chris recognized the absurdity of that. Maggie had spent her entire life ducking the spotlight, kowtowing to a demanding older sister. On the surface, she commanded no more attention than a common housecat.
And the really messed-up part was he longed for her. He felt like the biggest chump. He pulled out that goddamn letter every goddamn day, as if he was some lovesick kid. How could he want someone and be so pissed at her at the same time? Pathetic.
The one time he’d jerked off in prison, quick and surreptitious under the scratchy green blanket—into a white government-issued sweat sock as if he was fourteen again—he was thinking of Maggie. Which was weird because his mental Rolodex at home—usually in the morning shower—consisted of women on television or movies, or the Starbucks barista who gave him free coffee with a smile, or sometimes even a girlfriend from freshman year who used to suck on ice then do a thing with her tongue. But that time, he’d imagined Maggie when she straddled him only a month ago, her skin reflecting the bluish moonlight. Her one hand cupped her breast, the other tangled in her hair, and her eyes were half open and her lips parted.
The problem was, having been away for almost two weeks, the drug of Maggie’s presence was seeping from his system. In its place was the hard, black-and-white truth Chris could no longer avoid. The pressure Chris always felt when they were together, the soft cluck in her voice, the somewhat imagined rise and fall of her chest whenever he answered a question just not quite right—it was all a by-product of her quiet disappointment that he wasn’t someone else.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maggie
Maggie had been avoiding Jake. She muffled her retching into a trash can if he was downstairs, or she took her time in the shower until she heard him puff with frustration and stomp down to the first-floor bathroom. After a few days, it occurred to Maggie that Jake was also avoiding her. Sleep evaded her, and she stared at the ceiling at night, imagining she could hear Jake’s soft snoring.
Pregnant! The whole thing was ridiculous. All she’d wanted for years was a baby. She used to cry at work after a “first doctor’s visit” with the infants. She’d take their temperatures and examine their pink, scrunched baby feet, their toes like raisins. The parents would leave, crowing about their perfect baby, and Maggie would lock herself in the ladies’ room, lifting her legs up onto the toilet seat to avoid detection. And now she was growing more pregnant each day, but her life was suspended while the rest of the world spun around her. She had a million questions: When should she tell Chris? Jake? What would they do? How would it work? What if Chris lost the hearing? Would he let her come forward? Would he ever answer her letter?
To make matters worse, she was consumed with thoughts of Jake. Blame it on hormones or call it escapism, but it was driving Maggie crazy. Jake, Jake, Jake. As if she didn’t have better things to worry about. She was overly aware of when he was in the house and when he wasn’t. She woke up every single time he went to the bathroom at night, and long after he’d climbed back into bed, she’d stare at the ceiling and feel his hands on her hips, her thighs, skimming the mound of flesh between her legs. God, a person could lose her mind that way.
The night after Tiny’s cross-examination, when Jake had looked as if he’d been punched in the gut, when Miranda had moved out and Maggie couldn’t decide whether she wanted to comfort him or slap him, she heard him pacing in the living room. She crept from her bed and paused in the hallway, cocking her head toward the sound of low talking. She inched down the stairs, the second step from the bottom groaning even though it never had before. She stood on the hall side of the doorway, cloaked in darkness, with a hand clamped over her mouth.
Jake, mumbling and broken, cried into his phone. “Please come home. I’ll be back soon. This is all going to shit, and I don’t know if I’ll keep the case. I’m too close to it. I can’t live without you. Please?”
When she allowed herself a peek around the corner, she saw him, or rather the outline of him, in the moonlit living room. He sat on the floor, his elbows on his knees, holding his head. She listened to his voice crack for an hour.
“I’m sorry. I’ll do better, I’ll be better.” Near the end of the conversation, his tone lifted. “I love you, too.”
She crept back up the steps and sat on the cold floor outside her bedroom door. Reality hit her hard and fast. Jake had two options: his estranged wife who wanted nothing to do with him, or Maggie, warm and real and, as far as he was concerned, willing. He still chose Miranda. Despite the pregnancy, Maggie felt rejected.
Maggie waited, with her back pressed against her oak-paneled bedroom door, for Jake to return to his bedroom. She had a fleeting fantasy of holding Jake while he cried on the floor, telling Maggie he loved only her. Women need to be needed. Charlene’s voice popped in her head. The stairs creaked, and she stiffened.
“Maggie? What are you doing?” His voice was low even though they were the only two in the house. He knelt in front of her. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head, hot tears dammed in place by the bags under her eyes. I’m pregnant. She couldn’t say that to Jake, or maybe she couldn’t say it at all. She knew the confession would bring his final rejection. It would be the final ker-thunk of a deadbolt, locking Jake and Maggie in the past. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted the warm, tangy telltale iron.
“Mags, seriously, what’s wrong?” He placed a large hand on her knee, his eyebrows knitted. “You’re scaring me.”
“Jake, who do you love? Do you even know?” The question popped out. She kept her knees pulled to her chin and watched his face.
He sat back, positioning his long legs on either side of hers. “Truthfully, no.”
His candidness surprised her. Maggie nodded and reached out, needing to touch him. He grasped her wrist, a quick defensive move, and held it in an almost parental gesture of admonishment. Her face flushed.
“How is Miranda?” The question sounded snotty, which was an accident. She’d been trying for casual.
He tilted his head, twisting his mouth. “She’s at your parents’. Can you imagine? With the kids?”
“Phillip is probably miserable. So much echo in those marble halls…”
Jake snorted. “It’s for show. I think. I’m pretty sure Miranda doesn’t actually want to leave me.” He ran a hand through his hair.
Who did he love? She wasn’t going to let him wriggle out of answering. Jake had spent most of his life dodging hard questions. Everybody’s buddy, Jake. The hard conversations made that a tough reputation to keep. When one drew lines in the sand, people tended to get pissed. Jake avoided pissing people off like a cockroach avoids light.
“What do you want, Jake? If you could have anything, what would you pick?” Who would you pick? Maggie avoided the real question, which was a Jake move. Perhaps they weren’t all that different.
“Ah, Maggie. It won’t change anything. We’re both stuck in the lives we’re in, right?”
“Jake, that’s the thing. We don’t have to be.”
“Yeah, we have to be.” He chucked her under the chin. “Doesn’t mean you’re not the love of my life.”
Maggie knew Jake was simply making his life as painless as possible, buffing the rough corners of his relationships down to a soft, easy curve. She resented his spinelessness, hated his weakness. She touched her chin with her thumb. Too late, too late, too late. In so many words, she had her answer. Who did he love? He loved Miranda. It was really that simple. She stood and the blood rushed to her head. She left him sitting on the floor in the hallway, and she let the bedroom door shut behind her with a hushed click.
Maggie gave up on sleep long after she heard Jake retreat to his room. The digital clock on her nightstand read 3:10 when she crept downstairs. The déjà vu of standing in her living room, her head cloudy from lack of sleep, in the middle of the night was overpowering. She stared at the mantel and envisioned Logan’s bulky frame crumpled on the floor. She scooted to the kitchen, retrieved a glass of water from the tap, and drank it down in one gulp. The dining room was black. From the kitchen, the doorway loomed, dark and alluring. The pull of all those manila folders, all those notes was strong. How much did Jake know about her? About them? Likely, everything.
Maggie flipped the switch on the dining room wall and squinted in the bright light. The table was covered in papers, most contained within creamy yellow files. The pile seemed to have grown tenfold since she’d been in there four days earlier. She shuffled through the mess until she found Christopher Stevens. She took her time reading each document, each note. She painstakingly decoded Jake’s shorthand, his doctor-like scrawl, until she knew everything Jake knew.
She realized two things: Jake didn’t know about Tracy, and he didn’t know about the vase. Chris had probably never told Jake about Tracy out of pride. The affair wasn’t germane to the hearing, and it suited Maggie just fine to not air that particular dirty laundry in court. But the lack of references to the vase in Jake’s notes meant that even if Chris had spoken to Jake about being a “witness” instead of a suspect, he hadn’t done it with any level of detail. Yet. But it was coming.
Culpability was a funny thing. Although in most situations, the finger pointing went both ways, the truth was generally some variation of it’s complicated. Maggie thought about Chris rolling up that fat, foul tarp, digging a hole in the dark, wiping sweat from his brow, heaving the gravel back on top, smoothing out Logan’s very existence. Had he doubted himself? Impossible to tell.
She knew, deep down, had they called the police—had Chris listened to her instead of blindly forging his path, expecting her to trail behind him like the dutiful wife—their entire nightmare would be over. Maggie would be making pepper steak out of Gale’s cookbook, and Chris would be banging through the front door, his work boots caking mud all over the house. She might have killed Logan out of fear and desperation, but when it came down to it, who was more culpable?
Maggie’s fingers trembled as she shoved paperwork back into folders, trying to reorder her mess. She thought of the baby. If it lived—and she barely allowed herself to think about the possibility of it living—would one of its parents be in prison? Would she take an infant to that dank, clammy visitors’ room? She tried to envision herself with a wailing baby boy, a pacifier dangling from his onesie and a trail of white spit-up on his chin. Would she bounce him on one knee while she made small talk with Chris, dressed neck to ankles in an orange jumpsuit? He can wave now, show Daddy how you wave! They’d leave after an hour and stop at McDonald’s on the way home so she could breastfeed him in a stall in the bathroom.
The alternative seemed so clear to Maggie. One of them was going to pay—they’d committed a crime and someone had to be held responsible. She tried to picture herself dressed in a women’s correctional sea-green maternity shirt, her prenatal care reduced to a worn-down, burned-out doctor at the prison infirmary. Would anyone care if her baby lived or died? Not likely.
What you need, Maggie Bell, is a plan. She heard Phillip’s voice, as clear as if he were standing in the room next to her.
When Maggie was sixteen, Phillip had taught her to drive. She gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles literally turned white. Later when she let it go, her hands had cramped and her palms were red and itchy. She sat in the driver’s seat, panicked as she let her foot slowly off the brake and felt the car move underneath her. She slammed her foot on the brake so hard they both lurched forward, Phillip bracing himself with a slap against the glove box. She didn’t know what was more nerve wracking: the lesson itself or the fact that Phillip was perched in the passenger seat, his back rigid as he barked instructions. More gas, less gas, brake. Don’t forget your signal.
When the session was over, Phillip had held out his hands for the keys. As she placed the key ring in his palm, his fingers curled around her wrist. “In driving and in life, always have a plan.”
She’d nodded, trying to form her face into something that would look impressed at his wisdom, but as usual, she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Always think about what you would do if the oncoming car crossed the yellow line,” he’d said. “Don’t get complacent.”
She could barely hear him over the thumping of her heart.
He’d pulled on her hand, drawing her closer. “In crises, people survive on a plan alone.” He dropped her wrist as if it had scalded him and opened the car door.
The memory ambushed her. She’d thought of his advice many times in her life, and if she’d been asked, she would have said she was a person who generally liked to have a purpose. But she hadn’t thought about that afternoon in a long time. She had stood in that misty parking lot, the fog settling low and heavy as the sun dipped below the horizon, until Phillip rapped on the passenger-side window and motioned for her to just get in the goddamn car.
Don’t be complacent. She’d been drifting. They both had. With the baby—the baby—she had purpose. She flipped back through Jake’s notes, fanning the pages like a deck of playing cards. She had no real idea what she was looking for. Somewhere in the first few pages, a name jumped out at her, the shadowy figure of a man who could be her salvation. People survive on a plan alone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chris
“I’m sorry, I still don’t understand. Why can’t I testify?” Chris folded his arms and leaned on the long table in the courthouse conference room.
Jake was studying his legal pad, and Chris wanted to pound his fist on the table. Jake had asked for the early-morning meeting. He expected the prosecution to rest, and then, he’d explained, he would call his one and only defense witness: Leon Whittaker. Through Leon, he could tell the full story of Logan, his life, and his presumed death—one that had nothing to do with Chris or Maggie. It was, after all, a hell of a story.
Jake set down his pen and met Chris’s eyes, drumming his fingertips on the tabletop. “Oh, you can. Never assume I said you can’t. That would get me disbarred. You are absolutely free to testify on your own behalf—the Constitution says so. But you should know that if you testify, we’ll lose.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re lying.” Jake was matter-of-fact. He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head.
Chris stood, his vision clouding with white starbursts. “I didn’t kill him!”
“No, but you know who did.”
“What?”
“You know who killed him. And so do I,” Jake said. “If you take the stand, do you think they’re going to stop at ‘Did you kill Logan May?’ No. Janice will find what is currently a nick, a tiny paper cut: the fact that you know who killed him. We’re ninety-percent winning. But if you took the stand, she’d stick her finger in that paper cut and work it open to a full-on wound. We’d bleed to death. Got it?”
Chris grimaced. “That is a disgusting analogy.”
“Like you’re afraid of blood.”
Chris snorted but said nothing.
Jake stood and motioned for him to follow. “It’s show time.”
Judge Puckett filed in. Everyone stood then sat again. Chris had grown weary of the playact. The tradition and ceremony had long since lost its luster. The judge banged his gavel to indicate court was in session, and Chris counted to three in his head.
On cue, the squeal of feedback filled the room as Judge Puckett adjusted his microphone. “Yesterday, we heard from the last of the prosecution witnesses. We assume that at this point, the State rests?”
Janice approached the bench and handed a piece of paper to the bailiff. On her way back to the prosecution table, she dropped off what Chris assumed to be a copy. “Actually, Your Honor, a new witness has come forward. With the court’s permission, we’d like to obtain their testimony.”
“Objection, Your Honor. We weren’t informed of this witness, and we’ve had no chance to investigate them or substantiate their claims.” Jake rose, his voice booming.
Chris cringed, and he stole a look at Maggie. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes darted between Chris and the judge. She mouthed something Chris couldn’t make out, and he shrugged, shaking his head. She let her head fall back.
“He came to us this morning, Your Honor,” Janice said. “We’d like to at least hear him out—we’re taking a chance, too. We haven’t even gotten to interview him.”
