No Defense (34 page)

I couldn’t stop myself I slapped him across
his cheek as hard as I could.

The packed courtroom fell silent. Everyone
stared at me as I strode out of the courtroom.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Imagine a sixteenth-century navigator on a
great ship plying the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a
cloudless night, weeks after leaving Spain, and he glances up to
take solace from the familiar Pole Star, the brightest star in the
Northern Hemisphere, the star on which he and all navigators rely
in charting their routes, the star around which the rest of the
night sky is arranged and which puts everything into perspective.
On that night he looks to its expected location and, not finding
it, begins to search the sky ever more desperately. Finally he
shakes his head as if to shake loose something lodged there and
looks again. The Pole Star is gone. Breathing deeply, he moans and
then sobs in utter despair. He is lost, hopelessly lost, and
nothing will ever be the same again.

I knew that nothing would ever be the same
in my life after that trial. My father had been the one constant in
my universe, and had he died I would not have felt any more adrift
than I did when the charges against him were dismissed. I would
have grieved, longer and perhaps more deeply than most, but I would
have survived and gone on about my life without this feeling of
absolute disillusionment compounded by a pervasive sense of my own
culpability.

At the moment I slapped him and walked out
of the courtroom, I would almost have preferred my father’s death
to what he’d revealed about himself by heartlessly covering up his
fifteen-year-old love affair.

I spent the first nights and days after the
trial in hiding, refusing all phone calls and visits. Jolene
covered for me, as always. She even slept at our house--worried, I
suppose, about whether I was competent to care for the children
should a middle-of-the-night emergency arise. Estelle and Roland
ran the Steak House. When I wasn’t asleep (my preferred state), I
played with Jessie and the twins. My favorite make-believe game
with Jessie was one I invented. Four of her Barbie dolls lived on
the planet Zygor in a distant galaxy. The dolls were all alone,
just the four of them; they took care of each other, and they knew
and needed no one.

I realized during my second day at home that
the answer was simple. We would move, far away from Tallagumsa,
leaving behind the entire experience and, most important, my
father. Outside the state, I would never have to meet the eyes of
all the people who knew our tawdry secrets. With that decision as a
talisman against what I knew everyone must be saying and thinking,
I emerged from my house on Thursday afternoon, three days after the
trial ended.

The minute I stepped outside I sensed a
change in the weather, a sharpening in the air that signaled a
change of seasons. A breeze carrying the first gentle touches of
fall rustled the still-green leaves.

I drove first to Jane and Buck’s, anxious to
assure myself about the welfare of Jane and the baby. Jolene had
informed me during my three days in hiding that Jane was out of
danger, but I couldn’t be sure that Jolene wasn’t shading the truth
to protect my vulnerable psyche.

Jane and Buck’s house was in a new
subdivision of Tallagumsa called Overlook, a neighborhood of
lonely-looking brick mini-mansions, complete with columns, pools,
and foyers as big as my house, built in the middle of two and a
half acres of barren land. Hundreds of acres of magnificent trees
had been bulldozed to build the subdivision. In their place, the
developer had planted small, pitiful-looking saplings along the
sidewalks and every few hundred feet in the yards.

Buck’s silver Cadillac was in the driveway.
I pressed the doorbell. Chimes reminiscent of church bells rang for
at least a minute before Buck opened the door.

He was surprised and not particularly happy
to see me. “I wanted to see how Jane was doing, if there’s anything
I could do,” I said.

“She’s better,” he said quietly, blocking
the doorway.

Buck seemed a shrunken version of himself.
He looked pale and exhausted. All his bluster and hot air were
gone. To my surprise, I missed them. I wanted him to call me by
some movie star’s name, or pat me on the back, a little too hard,
or criticize my jeans and T-shirt.

“Can I see her?” I asked him.

When he didn’t answer, I took his hand and
begged, “Please, Buck?”

“Okay. You can come in for a quick visit,
but only if you promise not to upset her. That means don’t talk
about what all’s happened,” he said sternly. “I know you want to,
but don’t. She’s under doctor’s orders to stay in bed and remain
calm.”

There went my plans to bare my soul and beg
for Jane’s forgiveness. I understood that I could never have
stopped Daddy from letting Chip tear Jane apart on the stand, even
if I’d known the truth about Jane’s past. But I had taken my
father’s side, again and again, and attacked Jane for her refusal
to do the same, and for that I owed her an apology.

Buck followed me into their bedroom and
hovered about like a mother hen, obviously distrustful of my
intentions.

When I saw Jane’s turtlelike shape lying in
the canopied bed I’d always thought more suitable for a junior-high
girl, I fought back tears, determined for once to rise above my own
self-indulgent sorrow and put her best interests ahead of my
needs.

“Hey, Sis,” I said, reverting to my
childhood name for her. I leaned down to kiss her cheek. Her face
was not as puffy as it had been the last time I saw her. She looked
relaxed, the strain of the trial replaced, I hoped, by optimism
about her future as a mother. Without the usual layer of hair
spray, her hair had a soft, girlish look.

“When did they let you come home from the
hospital?” I asked.

“Two days ago, when my blood pressure
finally came down and the fluid drained out of my face and hands.
They were so swollen,” she said. “I looked like a balloon, but I
feel much better now.”

“You look wonderful,” I said.

“You want to sit down?” she asked, turning
her hand in the direction of a wingback chair covered in the same
lavender-flowered material as the bed canopy.

I glanced at Buck. He frowned; clearly he
did not want me to get too comfortable. “No, thanks,” I said. “I
just stopped by for a minute.”

“Did you know I probably have to stay in bed
the whole rest of the pregnancy?” Jane asked.

“You are a braver woman than I,” I said.

“It won’t be that bad,” she said cheerfully.
“I have my knitting and my magazines and those romance books you
hate, and Buck can do a lot of the legwork for me.” She smiled at
her husband. “It’s worth it.”

“Where’s Mother?” I asked.

“She’s not staying here anymore. She’s
home,” Jane said.

“Home?” I said, surprised. I’d assumed that
once she got as far as Jane and Buck’s, she’d never go back to
Daddy and the lake house she’d never wanted in the first place.

“Yeah. She went home when I got back from
the hospital,” Jane said.

After several uncomfortable silences,
punctuated only by small talk about my children and the weather, I
said good-bye. At least Jane and Buck had let me in the house. It
was a beginning. I would miss them when I moved.

My next stop was my parents’. Mercifully,
only Mother’s beige Buick sedan was parked next to the house. I
walked along the wooden walkway to the back of the house, which
faced the lake. Two squirrels ran across my path, scared off by my
footsteps. Bright sunlight fought its way through the thick, leafy
overhang, forming shifting spots of light.

Through the wall of glass, I could see
Mother sitting on the living-room floor, pulling clothes out of
boxes. She folded the clothes and placed them in three separate
piles. Wearing old baggy brown slacks and a pink pin-striped shirt
of Daddy’s, she hadn’t dressed with her usual impeccable care. Her
hair hadn’t been brushed either. Was she leaving Daddy? What all
had happened while I was holed up at home?

“Where are you going, Mother?” I asked,
opening the back screen door.

She looked up at me, and a smile lit her
face. “Nowhere. I’m sorting through these old clothes for the
church collection. I got a call in the middle of the night that
Frank, our church janitor, lost his home in a fire. Everything’s
gone. Bad wiring caused the fire. That’s why I look like this,” she
said, referring to her unkempt hair and clothes. Her voice was
hoarse.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, but ten people who lived in a
two-bedroom house are homeless and without food and clothing. I’m
in charge of the relief effort for our church. You want to help me
sort through these? I’m washing the dirty ones and sewing the ones
that need it.”

“Are you sick?”

“My voice, you mean? No, I’ve just been
talking too much, organizing the relief effort and not getting much
sleep for the last week.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“At his office.”

“He’s working already?”

“He never stopped.”

“I guess I’m not surprised. Nothing fazes
him, does it?”

“You can come all the way in, LuAnn,” she
said. “I won’t bite.”

I realized then that I had been standing
half in, half out of the doorway, with my hand on the door handle.
I came inside and closed the door behind me. The country-music
station on her radio was playing “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies
Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

“I’ve tried to reach you every day this
week,” Mother said. “I’ve been worried about you. Are you all
right?”

“Jolene told me you called. Thanks for
worrying about me at all after the way I’ve acted. I’m physically
okay but mentally kind of a wreck. I just couldn’t face anyone for
a few days, and I’m still not really ready, but Jessie was starting
to look at me funny-you know, very concerned-so I got up and
left.”

“I’m glad you ventured out, but I must say,
you don’t look well.” Mother stood up and set the clothes in her
lap on a chair. “Come on in the kitchen and I’ll get you some tea.
Have you eaten?”

“I don’t think I can eat. Every day when I
wake up it feels like somebody has grabbed my stomach and squeezed
it into a little ball, then kicked it a few times for good
measure.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll make you something light.
Maybe that’ll put some color in those cheeks.” She walked over to
me and touched my cheek lightly. “You really do look too thin.”

I shrugged and followed her into the
kitchen. I doubted I could eat, but it was easier to follow her
than to argue.

She prepared the hot tea, handed it to me
along with a plastic bear full of honey and started to prepare
scrambled eggs and toast. As she worked she hummed something I
couldn’t identify.

I cupped the tea with my palms, enjoying the
cup’s warmth on my hands.

When my parents moved out to the lake, my
frugal mother had insisted on bringing all the antique furniture
from the old house, even though it seemed incongruous in this
modern glass-and-wood setting.

The kitchen table where I now sat was the
one I’d grown up with, a round oak table with an ornately carved
base and two leaves. On the edge across from me was the bum mark
I’d made one night smoking when I was a teenager. A high-school
junior home alone and experimenting with smoking, I’d left a lit
cigarette resting on the table while I put a stack of records on
the turntable. I was horrified to find that the cigarette had
burned all the way down to the filter, right through the wood
grain, leaving an ugly, indented black mark. I never admitted that
I was the person responsible for that damage either, but I guess
Mother and Daddy must have known all along.

The smell of the butter, eggs, and toast in
the air reminded me of even earlier times. “I feel like a little
kid who’s home from school, being taken care of by her mother,” I
said. “But-” I stopped abruptly.