Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 36

Cotton picking began this morning. Not the full harvest, but scattered bands of men and machines controlled by farmers who got fed up with staring at stunted cotton that would grow no more before the drought finally broke and soaking rain flooded the scorched fields and a money-eating rot set in. Men who felt like fools for gambling against God by putting out growth regulators at the wrong times and who finally just said fuck it and called their hands and fired up the four-row pickers to try to salvage what they could.

From my front porch I watch gunmetal clouds gathering over my neighbors’ fields. They hover with mocking heaviness, unmoved by wind or by the drone of the mechanical pickers. Drewe left early this morning for her clinic in Yazoo City. I’ve passed most of the day walking from room to room, avoiding my office. No one has called, few cars have passed on the road, and despite the slow dusty progress of the pickers, the whole world seems to be waiting.

The ring of my office phone is almost a welcome sound. I trot through the front door and veer left, expecting Daniel Baxter’s voice from the machine, or Miles’s, but I hear neither. It’s Drewe, and she sounds shaken.

“I’m here!” I say, picking up.

“Harper, I need you to drive to Jackson right now.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid Erin might hurt herself.”

“ What? She threatened to kill herself?”

“No, she told me everything was fine.”

“Then what-?”

“Everything is not fine. We know that. But she told me she’d found a way to solve all her problems. She said it might be painful for everyone for a while, but in the end it would be for the best.”

I feel like my body temperature is plummeting.

“I want you to go right now.”

“Wouldn’t she rather see you?” I ask.

“She doesn’t want me there. I’d go anyway, but I’ve got a difficult delivery on my hands. It could be a while.”

“Drewe, I’m the last person Erin wants butting into her problems. She doesn’t even like me.”

“Harper, please. Erin respects you more than any man she knows.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Then why did she tell me that? Now get your butt over to Jackson and talk her out of doing anything stupid. Get her out of there if you have to.”

“And take her where?”

“Bring her to our house. Do whatever you have to do.”

“And if she won’t come?”

“Figure something out. Please get going.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Call me if it gets crazy, and I’ll find someone to handle this delivery.”

If it gets crazy? I set down the phone and glance around the office for my keys. This situation is long past crazy, and I have a feeling it’s going to get worse.

Erin and Patrick live in the Belhaven district of Jackson. Most people at their income level long ago moved out to the enclaves of Ridgeland and Madison, but Patrick took advantage of white flight to trade up to palatial quarters for a bourgeois price. I managed to make the whole hour-and-twenty-minute drive from Rain without thinking. I popped in Joni Mitchell’s Hejira and turned it up to the pain threshold, following Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass as it wound through the spaces between Larry Carlton’s guitar and the soaring vocal. But now I’m here.

The front door of the house has one of those burled finishes you’d expect to find at a Victorian men’s club. I hammer the big brass knocker and wait, listening to the blows reverberate over the slate and hardwood floors inside. At least a minute passes before I hear heels clacking. There’s a rustle at the curtained windows to one side of the door, then stillness again.

I try the handle, then push open the door.

Erin stands just inside, looking at me with preternatural calm. Her facial bruises are yellow at the edges, setting them off from the tanned skin that might otherwise have masked the damage. The orbit of her left eye is a continuous contusion, like an indigo map of an island. Flecks of blood dot the corner of the eye itself. A closed fist delivered that blow.

She’s wearing a linen sundress, the color of lilac. It lies as smoothly against her upper body as a silk camisole, billows slightly at her waist. Another bruise marks her left breast where it disappears into the dress. Her hair is tied up, with a dark spray falling around the back of her neck. She wears no shoes, earrings, or wristwatch. No wedding ring.

“Come in,” she says, turning away and walking through the entrance hall. “We’re in the TV room.”

“Is Patrick here?”

The back of her head turns once from side to side.

As she moves deeper into the house, I fear that Drewe may be right about the danger here. The air conditioner is not running, which on this day is evidence enough of mental instability. Ahead of me, Erin walks with the grace she always possessed, yet her fluidity seems oddly exaggerated. The dimness and heat increase with each step I take. I have a disturbing vision of myself following an Egyptian girl into a tomb.

What do I sense here?

Resolve. Some decision has been taken. A choice has been made in cold deliberation, and the weight of it is tangible. As Erin steps out of the dark hallway and into a blue glow, fear suffuses me. Not for myself, but for what I might find at the end of this brief journey. Where is Holly? screams my brain. I quicken my steps, hurrying after Erin, hoping to prevent any madness that might remain unconsummated.

Then I see Holly. She’s propped on thick pillows in front of Patrick’s treasured fifty-two-inch television. Her back is to me, and she doesn’t seem to be moving. I don’t see Erin at first; then my eyes pick her out of the shadows, seated in a cushioned chair against the wall to my left, her long bare legs stretched across an ottoman. I move quickly to Holly and lean over her. Her eyes are barely open. I stare with frantic intensity at the little belly beneath the “Precious Cargo” T-shirt, watching for the rise and fall of respiration.

She is breathing. With relief cascading through me, I swoop her up from the floor as though she were weightless.

“You’re going to wake her up,” Erin says.

I lay Holly’s head on my left shoulder and begin rocking her gently as I walk around the room.

“Put her down,” Erin insists. “It’s nap time. She’ll be comatose by the time Ursula the Sea Witch shows up.”

I turn toward the TV and see the comforting yellow splash that is Flounder, then the orange hair of Ariel, the Little Mermaid. “What’s going on, Erin?”

“What do you mean?”

“Turn on the lights.”

“They’ll wake up Holly.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’re not her mother.”

“I-”

“You’re not that either,” she snaps. “Except in the genetic sense. You’re the sperm donor. What are you doing here anyway?”

“Drewe called me. She’s worried about you.”

Erin gets to her feet and moves toward me. “Give her to me. She’s already asleep.”

“First tell me nothing crazy is going on here. That Holly’s okay.”

“What?” Her voice drops to a threatening whisper. “ You-give-me-my-child.This instant!”

Reluctantly, I release the little body that is flesh of my flesh yet resides under another man’s roof, under another man’s protection. Erin leaves the room with her.

When she returns, she is alone. She clicks on the overhead light, stretches out on the chair and ottoman, and studies me as if I am some nonhuman creature of trifling interest.

“Now,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

I grope for words that will not sound pompous, but find none. Talk about a fool’s errand. Content to let me suffer in silence, Erin says nothing. Who are we? I wonder. Two people who three years ago thrashed around a bed in Chicago for three days and somehow produced the beautiful child who now stands unknowing in the eye of a gathering emotional hurricane?

One thing is certain: whatever we shared is finally gone. A few nights ago, when Erin sat down on my bed and began crying, I felt a response, a pulling toward her. Even through her despair, I sensed desire, a possibility of consummation, however mad it would have been. But today there is nothing. If a landscape of her emotions could somehow be superimposed upon this room, we would be sitting in a blasted gray ruin, devoid of vegetation and fast running out of water.

“It’s probably good that you’re here,” she says finally. “It’ll make things simpler.”

“How?”

“Patrick and I have been having some discussions.”

“Violent ones.”

“That’s completely irrelevant and all my fault.”

“I doubt that.”

“Don’t.”

“Has my name come up during these… discussions?”

A faint smile touches her lips. “God, you’re so predictable. All you’re worried about is yourself. Or maybe Drewe’s precious illusions being shattered. Right? That’s all anybody ever worries about.”

“I’m worried about you too. And Holly.”

“Spare me, okay? You’re here because Drewe told you to come, and you couldn’t get out of it without telling her the truth about us. Right?”

She doesn’t wait for verification. “Let me put your mind at rest. Your worst fear is right on target. The problems between Patrick and me are about Holly’s father, nothing else.”

I’m not sure what is happening to my face, but it must be funny in an awful sort of way, because Erin is laughing at me. “You’d better sit down,” she advises.

I back gingerly to a sofa and drop onto it.

“It’s all going to come out,” she says in a matter-of-fact voice.

I peer across the shadowed room at her face, a study in self-possession. “Why is that?”

“Because it has to. We were stupid to ever think it wouldn’t.” She makes a steeple of her long fingers and studies me over it. “You’re terrified that Drewe can’t take the truth, aren’t you?”

“You think she can?”

Erin suddenly begins speaking in Drewe’s voice, quoting lines I’m sure Drewe has never spoken. “ ‘Erin screwed every good-looking guy in school, but dear sweet Harper was above it.’ That’s what she thinks, isn’t it?”

“She knows I’m not above that.”

“Oh, you diddled some cheerleaders. But that’s not the same, is it? After all, Princess Drewe wasn’t putting out, was she? But to come to me, that’s another thing.”

“I didn’t come to you, Erin. You came to me. And it was ten years after high school.”

“In her eyes that’s worse, stupid. You weren’t a horny little seventeen-year-old then. You were supposed to be committed to her. You were supposed to have judgment.”

“I think Drewe may know us better than we think. I doubt the attraction between us was as secret as we always thought. I think maybe she’s knows we’re not above it, but she hopes we wouldn’t do it.”

“But we did, didn’t we?”

I say nothing.

She shakes her head. “You still think about it, don’t you?”

“What? Chicago?”

“I know you, Harper. You tell yourself you’d sell your soul never to have done it. You lie awake at night, sweating, promising the dark that if only something would make it all unhappen, you’d never do anything like that again. And five minutes after that you’re standing in the bathroom making yourself come, thinking about how it felt to be inside me. How it felt to have supermodel Erin sucking your precious weenie.”

“Erin-”

I gape as she hikes the lilac sundress up to her hips with a fierce flourish. “Well? There it is. That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it?”

She is wearing sky-blue panties, but they are sheer, and the black tangle beneath them is obvious. In spite of everything, my eyes lock there with three million years of evolutionary focus. Then the lilac veil falls and she is up on her feet with her hands in the air.

“That’s all men ever think about with me!” she cries, turning away in anger. “Because I’m not the girl you marry, am I? My past is just too much. Except for someone like Patrick. Sweet, hardworking, rich, impotent Patrick.”

My mouth falls open again.

“Oh, we’re way past spats in the kitchen,” she says, turning back. “When his obsession hit critical mass, Patrick’s plumbing stopped functioning. In the last two months we’ve made love twice. If you could call it that. Both times he came home drunk at midnight, climbed on top of me, and started flailing away before I could even wake up. If I hadn’t known what was making him crazy, I would have hit him in the head with the telephone. But you know what I did? I told him I loved him and begged for more. And as soon as I did that, it was over. He couldn’t finish. He doesn’t have meanness like that in him.” She leans back and touches her bruised eye, and I realize she is on the verge of tears. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“He deserves better than me.”

“That’s not true, Erin.”

“Better than what I’ve been giving him, then. I was a fool to make him promise never to ask who the father was.” She laughs. “I actually thought he was Dr. Pretorius.”

She’s lost me. “Who’s that? Somebody from New York?”

“No, stupid. Dr. Pretorius was Cary Grant.”

“What?”

“It’s a movie. I thought you knew every movie ever made. Cary Grant plays this wonderful doctor who marries a woman who’s pregnant by another man. And it all works out.”

“Oh.”

“I was actually dumb enough to think a Cary Grant movie could come true. But men aren’t wired that way. They can’t handle something like that, and I should have known it. God knows I know everything else about them.”

“Erin-”

“Oh, don’t stop me now. Maybe I did know that about men. But I made Patrick promise not to ask anyway. You know why? To protect Drewe. I didn’t want Drewe’s illusions shattered any more than you did. And I knew if Patrick found out about you and me-about Holly-Drewe would eventually find out everything. In the heat of some family argument, it would explode.”

“That’s where we are anyway, isn’t it?” I point out. “Except you’re the one who’s about to explode.”

She shakes her head slowly, and I sense sadness flowing into the place where her anger had seethed. In a voice stripped of all hostility she says, “Do you believe in sin, Harper?”

At last I understand her strange intensity. She has finally flipped out. She is born again, saved, or whatever they call the manic grasping at straws that occurs when people who’ve damaged their lives beyond all repair hurl themselves into lunacy in the quest for one more chance, for that mythical clean slate.

“I know you’re not religious,” she says calmly. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a sin against yourself. Against people you love. People who trust you. Do you understand what I mean?”

I don’t know what to say. When Erin speaks again, her voice is so soft I hear it as a shout.

“What do you believe in, Harper?”

Out of the mouth of a distraught woman comes the question I have tried to answer since I started thinking for myself. A question Brahma asked me only yesterday. And I am no closer to an answer now than I was when I was thirteen years old.

“I guess I believe in… honor. Keeping faith. Trying to do the right thing. And consequences if you don’t.”

“If you believe in that, you believe in sin.”

“Erin….”

“And that we have an obligation to try to make things right. Don’t you?”

“Not the way you’re talking about. You’re talking about more pain.” Too anxious to sit any longer, I get to my feet and shake the tingles out of my arms and legs. “You know what I really believe in? Goddamn it, it’s only now that I see it. I believe in Drewe. In her optimism, her trust. Her faith in happy endings, that happiness is even possible. I know there’s nothing out there but an abyss, but she doesn’t. Or she’s convinced herself she doesn’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter. My point is that if happiness is possible, it’s going to be made by people like her. People with the strength to hold on to their illusions in the face of all evidence to the contrary. In the face of nothing.”

Erin watches me in silence for a long time. “I understand what you’re saying. Some illusions are necessary. But the reality sleeping on the Piglet blanket back in my bedroom can’t be ignored or suppressed or anything else. Holly may be a symbol of weakness, something we’d like to shield Drewe from, but she is also real. And to have a life, the life she deserves, she needs both her parents. And I don’t mean you. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Not want. I’m going to tell Patrick the truth about how Holly was conceived. Tonight.”

Jesus God.

“And you’re going to tell Drewe.”

I am numb. I try to tell myself this is not happening, but the fact that my brain is trying to shut down my peripheral nervous system confirms that it is. Blood is rushing from my extremities to my core organs as surely if I were being chased by a man with a machete.

“Harper?”

As I stare at Erin’s bruised angelic face-her eyes burning with misplaced conviction-several thoughts crystallize at the speed of light. She means what she says about telling Patrick. She means to make me confess to Drewe. Words will not stop her.

But one thing could.

She is speaking again, but I hear only the blood in my ears. A roaring blast like a divine voice: She’s the one who put you in this situation … who showed up on your doorstep and stepped naked into your shower. She could have told you she was pregnant before you married Drewe. She could have prevented ALL of this. I feel sweat in my palms, an electrical tensing in the muscles of my arms. Forced to choose which woman is more important to me, I have chosen. With dreamlike slowness I take two steps toward Erin, then another. Her eyes widen in puzzlement as she speaks. I outweigh her by close to a hundred pounds-

“-but Holly would never be the same, would she?”

I feel as though someone just slapped me.

“Are you listening to me, Harper?”

I nod dully, look down at my closed fists. It was Holly’s name that broke my trance. Not the fact that Drewe knows I am here, or that I would almost certainly be caught if I hurt Erin. Holly’s name. There are not two women in this insane emotional equation, but three.

“I’m listening,” I murmur, dimly aware that I’ve dodged some point of no return.

“Did you take something today?” Erin asks, staring suspiciously at my eyes. “Are you wired or what?”

I laugh hollowly. “Hell no. You’re the drug addict.”

“I resent that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you going to tell her or not?”

“Erin-”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll have to.”

“I’ll tell her, goddamn it!”

She is no more shocked by my shout than a ghetto kid by gunshots. In a taut voice I add, “I just hope you realize what could happen because of all this.”

She laughs softly and turns away. “I know better than anyone. I think about it day and night. You and I could lose everything we love. But don’t you see, Harper? It’s also the only way we can truly have the things we love.”

“They’re not things, Erin. They’re people.”

She says nothing.

“Nothing’s going to change your mind?”

She shakes her head and turns back to me, her eyes wide and earnest. “This is the right thing, Harper.”

I give her a brief hiss of scorn.

“Do you remember Chicago?” she asks.

“According to you, I do.”

Two spots of color touch her cheeks. “I remember. Do you remember the strange thing that happened? What you did for me that no one ever had?”

She steps to within two feet of me and rests a sun-browned hand on her flat abdomen. I swallow and clear my throat. “You mean the passing out?”

She nods. “You remember we talked about it? How it was like a little death? A momentary union with whatever is beyond life?”

“Yes.”

“We had it backwards, Harper. That wasn’t death at all. That was life. The purest distillation of it, the love we felt for each other. I know what the little death is now. It’s the way we’ve been living. Hiding our secret, pretending things are fine, every day having to pile one more lie on top of all the others to keep the house of cards from falling on top of us. That’s death. Dying a little each day. Don’t you feel that?”

I cannot quite grasp the fact that this is Erin speaking. There is absolute certainty in her voice, her eyes, in the set of her perfect mouth and the angle of her chin.

“I guess there’s nothing else to say,” I sigh with resignation.

She steps back and smooths her sundress. “Yes, there is. One thing. As insane as it is, I’m glad you’re Holly’s father. You’re a good man, Harper. But Patrick is too, and he’s my husband. He’s Holly’s father now. And he’s losing his mind. I have a duty to do right by him.”

“By forcing me to destroy my wife?”

“Drewe is stronger than you think. She’s stronger than any of us.”

“I hope you’re right.”

With proprietary boldness Erin crosses the space between us and raises a hand to my left cheek. Her fingers linger there a moment, cool and dry in the heat of the house. They transmit the sensuality she has always embodied, and something more.

“We probably won’t see each other for a long time,” she says, her eyes wide and unblinking.

“Erin-”

She rises on tiptoe and silences me with a soft kiss on the lips, then turns and walks from the room. My face burns from her touch. As I make my way out of the house, it hits me with humbling sadness that this grown-up girl, once known merely for having the Best-looking Ass in the State of Mississippi, has much more than that. She is a woman now, and she has more courage than I.

The ride back to Rain takes half again as long as the ride to Jackson did. I play no music; I don’t even run the air conditioner. I just drive with the windows down and let the hot wind tear through my hair like the fingers of a grave robber.

I never actually thought it would come to this. Incredible as it seems, I somehow convinced myself that the Fates had been on vacation during the nights I rolled around that bed with Erin, or at least that they’d been watching someone else. Perhaps my vanity convinced me that the good things I’d done in my life had somehow built up a credit account from which karmic bills could be subtracted without my making any out-of-pocket payments. But I was wrong. The due date has arrived, and the bank doesn’t want an installment, but the balance paid in full.

For a moment I wonder if Miles is still free and safe, but I don’t spend more than a few seconds on him. The events of the last few days now seem remote, like some tragic newscast watched years ago. A thousand thoughts spin through my brain, and each has but one object: Drewe. Will she be home when I get there? No. I’ll have at least an hour to prepare, maybe longer if the delivery is a really bad one. But what’s the point of preparation? If she were there when I got home, I could blurt out the truth in the first thirty seconds, before doubt and fear turned me into a gutless jellyfish.

Swinging around the final turn toward our house, I see no surveillance cars. I guess Baxter isn’t as concerned with me as he used to be. But as I slow for the driveway, I spy a boxy Ford parked under the shade of our weeping willow. Baby-shit brown with a tall antenna. For an instant I think FBI. Then I see the Mississippi tag. I reach down and touch the butt of my.38 where it protrudes from under the seat. For all I know, Brahma could be sitting in that car.

I turn slowly into the drive, coast forward, and stop practically grille to grille with the Ford. There are two men inside. As I stare, its front doors open and both men get out. The driver is a big red-faced man in his late thirties, stuffed like a sausage into his polyester suit. The other man is older and darker. Something about him seems familiar. Then he smiles crookedly at me, and I recognize Detective Michael Mayeux of the New Orleans police.

“Harper Cole?” says the red-faced stranger, moving toward me with alarming speed.

“Yes?”

“I’m Detective Jim Overstreet of the Jackson Police Department. You’re under arrest for obstruction of justice and harboring a federal fugitive.”

While I stare at Mayeux in shock, Overstreet cuffs my hands in front of me and pulls me to the side of the brown car.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you….”

Mayeux refuses to look at me as he climbs back into the passenger seat. One of Overstreet’s big hands cups the crown of my head and pushes me down into the back.

“… Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”

“Wait a minute! What the hell’s going on here?”

Overstreet leans down so that his sunburned face fills the window. “Do you understand the rights I just read you, ass hole?”

Looking to Mayeux for help, all I see is the darkly freckled back of his neck through scarred wire mesh.

“I understand.”

Overstreet slams the door.