Stand Your Ground: A Novel (23 page)

“To his mother and father, it probably feels that way.”

“And speaking of his father . . . his father and his uncle always have something to say. They’re out there every day with those black champions.”

“Black champions?” I frowned; I paused. “You mean the Brown Guardians?”

My mother waved her hand. “Whatever. It’s all of them, all the
time. The only thing they haven’t done is drag his mother to the stage.”

That made me stop altogether. I hadn’t seen any of the recent news stories, but every day I thought about Marquis’s mother and I wondered why she hadn’t spoken.

Although if anyone had taken Billy away from me, especially with the way Marquis had died, I wouldn’t ever get out of bed. So she was way ahead of anything that I would’ve been able to do.

My mother didn’t give me much time to stay in my thoughts. She said, “So far, the news coverage has been all about them. I think it’s time for this to be about us.”

“We’re riding it out, okay?”

“As long as there will be no charges and this whole thing is dropped, I’ll be fine,” she said as if this were in any way about her.

“We’re not sure what the police will do,” I said. “I don’t know how they can just ignore what happened.”

“They already know what happened.” As if she were telling me something for the first time, she added, “It was self-defense. Wyatt was protecting himself, you, and Billy. That’s what he told us and that’s what they said on Fox.” She kept on because, of course, now she was an expert.

“When it’s self-defense, you can stand your ground. You don’t have to retreat.” A pause and then with a wave of her hand, she finished with, “Anyway, this will all be over soon because there’s a witness.”

My eyes stretched wide as I slowly walked around the bed to the side where my mother sat. I said nothing at first because it was hard to speak when my heart was blasting its way through my chest.

There was a witness? Someone who knew what I knew?

I sat down, then forced myself to speak before my heart attack claimed my life. “Who . . . who is the witness?”

She looked at me as if I’d just asked the dumbest question. “Wyatt! He was there.”

I pressed my hand against my chest, trying to push my heart back inside, and with my other hand, I wanted to shake my mother for scaring me like that. “Really, Mom? Really?” I jumped up. “Wyatt cannot be his own witness.”

“Well, he’s the only one who was there.”

“He’s the only one who was there who is still alive. The other witness is dead.”

My mother put her head down, then flicked her fingers against the robe as if she were removing lint. “Well, that boy shouldn’t have been in the streets acting like that. Threatening people. I bet this is not the first time he did something like this. Wait until they pull up his police record. I bet you he has one ten pages long. He just came upon the wrong man this time.”

“How can you talk like this when a boy is dead? You sound like it’s no big deal.”

“Because it’s not a big deal to me if the choice was either that boy or your husband. I, for one, am glad with the way it turned out.”

For a second I closed my eyes. May 12. That image.

She said, “I just wish there
had
been another witness besides Wyatt, because maybe then, all of this foolishness would have already stopped.”

Again I sat down on the bed. I waited a moment before I said, “I’m not sure that there aren’t any other witnesses.”

Her eyes grew wide and round. “What do you mean?”

In the moments that passed, I thought about my secret. It felt
like it was getting bigger by the day, a burden that had grown into a boulder and was becoming too heavy to carry.

Maybe I could tell my mother.

“Meredith, what are you talking about? What witness?”

Could I, should I tell her? I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure where my mother’s loyalty lay. She loved me, but she really loved Wyatt. Because like he promised, he’d made my mother’s one-bedroom Section 8 apartment part of her history. She was no longer a woman on welfare, no longer on food stamps.

I’d married up; she’d come up. Gloria Harris was a “kept mother-in-law” with a condo, a car, and a credit card.

“Meredith? Did someone come to you and tell you something?”

“No.” I shook my head. “No one else.” I paused. “But I . . . I may have seen something.”

The way my mother’s eyes moved, I could tell she was searching my face, studying me to determine what I was trying to say.

Then her tanned face drained of all its color, turning her skin porcelain as her eyes widened with all kinds of understanding.

Now she was the one to jump off the bed and she glared down at me. “Were you out there with him?”

“No,” I said, though she already knew that.

“You were in the house when this happened?”

“Yes.” She knew this part, too. She knew it all, except . . .

“Then you didn’t see anything,” my mother stated as if it were a fact.

“But I did. I saw—”

She held up her hand, stopping me. “You saw nothing. And even if you did, a wife can never testify against her husband.”

That surprised me, a little. I guess my mother’s study of the law,
which came from watching
Law & Order
, was paying off. “But,” I began, determined to now tell her.

My mother spoke over me. “You are not going to say anything to anyone. You’re not going to tell me; in fact, you’re not going to think about it anymore; you’re not even going to dream about it.”

“But suppose I know something that’s really important?”

“Didn’t I just tell you what you know?” She spoke to me as if I were nine years old. “You know nothing.” But then she sat down on the bed and didn’t say anything for a long time; she just held my hands. But after a while she said what I’d been thinking.

“What do you think will happen to you, to Billy, if Wyatt goes to prison?”

“I’m his wife,” I said, as if that were the answer to every question that would come if I told what I knew.

“His wife who would be responsible for him getting convicted of murder!”

I was surprised that my mother assumed that what I’d seen could do that.

She continued, “If Wyatt goes to prison because of you, he will make sure that you have nothing.”

I shook my head. “The courts will make him pay . . . something. He has a son.”

“He’ll make sure that his family gets custody of Billy.”

“They won’t take him away from me,” I said, with a surety I didn’t feel. I was shocked that my mother would think that, yet I knew what she said was true and I was horrified.

It was just Wyatt, Wally, and their eighty-three-year-old mother, who lived in Vancouver with her eighty-eight-year-old sister. I’d only seen Wyatt’s mother once, when she made the cross-continent trip
to attend our wedding. She’d never met Billy, not wanting to return to the States too much after her husband’s tragic death from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Not to mention the twenty-four-hundred-mile trip was too much for her elderly bones, no matter how she traveled.

And Wally . . . even Wyatt said that his brother was a waste of skin. He was in his fifties, yet he’d never held a job outside of the positions that Wyatt gave him, and he couldn’t even hold on to any of those.

Would a judge allow Wyatt’s brother or Wyatt’s mother to raise Billy? And would Wyatt even want that for his son, no matter what I did?

Shaking my head, I said, “No, Wyatt wouldn’t do that.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Then I know your husband better than you do.”

“I’ll fight him in court.”

“With what money, Meredith? You don’t have anything without Wyatt.”

And there it was.

The truth.

She looked around my massive bedroom and I knew what she was thinking. This space where I only slept and bathed and dressed could hold the entire apartment where I’d grown up. “Do you see where you live? Have you checked out the credit cards in your purse? What about the clothes in your closet?”

She was asking all the questions aloud that I’d already asked myself. “So I’m just supposed to live with what I know?”

“Yes,” my mother said, like she had no doubt. “There’s nothing you can do to bring that boy back.”

I took a breath, and was reminded that Marquis would never take a breath again.

For good measure, my mother added, “I’m telling you, that boy did something that made Wyatt do what he had to do.”

My stomach rumbled.

“Promise me that you’ll do what I said.”

I didn’t move.

“Promise me!” my mother demanded.

“Promise you what?”

Wyatt’s voice made both of us jump, and for a second, there was silence as my husband studied me and my mother.

My mother crossed her legs and gave her son-in-law a seductive grin. “I was telling my daughter to promise me that she was taking good care of her husband.”

“Oh, really now?” Wyatt said as his lips spread, showing how much my mother’s words pleased him.

My mother nodded.

And I sat there with a rumbling, tumbling stomach. I sat there until I couldn’t sit there anymore. I rushed past Wyatt and into the master bathroom, past the double sinks, past the Jacuzzi tub, past the steam shower.

I made it to the commode in time to close the door behind me. And then it was seat up, head down.

But even when I was empty, I stayed on my knees. I was in the right position to do what I didn’t do often—I needed to have a conversation with God. About my secret, though now I suspected that I held more than one.

I
stood on the balcony off of the master suite and looked down onto the pool.

Billy’s giggles rose as he and Wyatt splashed my mother while she lounged in her usual chair wearing a Stars and Stripes bikini, her tribute to this day.

“Hey,” she squealed, sending her grandson into another fit of laughter.

This was our Memorial Day celebration, though I seemed to be the only one in our family who realized there wasn’t anything to celebrate, though there was much to remember.

Today was Monday. Two weeks after May 12. I wondered what kind of Memorial Day Janice Johnson was having.

Turning away, I stepped inside and took in the display that I had sprawled across our bed: my platinum Visas, my gold MasterCards, and my black American Express.

“Have you checked out the credit cards in your purse? You don’t have anything without Wyatt.”

Sitting on my bed, I picked up the cards and counted them: four platinums, four golds, one black. Nine. And these didn’t include the accounts that I had at Gucci and Chanel.

With a sigh that came from deep within me, I gathered the cards and returned each to its designated slot inside my lambskin wallet.

I sank onto the duvet and leaned back, resting on the pillows. I’d gotten so used to living here that I no longer noticed all the symbols of wealth. But the signs of our affluence were everywhere—I was sitting on a duvet that cost over five thousand dollars, leaning on mulberry silk pillows, holding a wallet that would have paid my rent for a year when I was growing up—everywhere I turned, I had the best of everything. The way I’d lived these last years overrode every past hardship. How could I go back to that?

Years of living this life with Wyatt had made it ordinary to me. But this was so far away from ordinary and I needed to remember that. I needed to go back to being grateful the way I was the first time I’d come into this house.

On May 12.

But it was a different May 12 from the one that I remembered now. The May 12 of two weeks ago was about death. The other May 12 was about life, a new life.

May 12, 2007 . . .

“Where are we going?” I asked, peeping through the tinted limousine window.

Wyatt didn’t answer. Instead, he tossed a couple of hundred-dollar bills into the driver’s hand. “We’ll see you in the morning,” Wyatt told him. “We have to be at the airport three hours early for the international flight.”

I was still sitting inside the car when I asked, “Are we staying here?” Wyatt hadn’t told me anything about our wedding night or even about our honeymoon. I imagined that we’d stay in the Ritz-Carlton, or maybe the Rittenhouse Hotel before we took a flight tomorrow to places
unknown, at least unknown to me. All I knew about our destination was that I needed my first passport.

But this wasn’t a hotel; it looked more like a house. It wasn’t Wyatt’s home, though. I tried to get a better glimpse, but it was difficult to see in the darkness of midnight.

Wyatt took my hand and helped me to maneuver out of the limo through what felt like miles and miles of the sequined organza of my Vera Wang gown.

As he led me up the walkway, I asked again, “Where are we?”

Wyatt’s response: he swept me up and into his arms, then carried me over the threshold into even more darkness.

But then there was light when he said, “Welcome home, sweetheart,” and the circular-shaped space became illuminated.

I slipped from his arms, but all I did was stand there, mouth open, eyes wider. The marble floors, the circular staircase, the chandelier that hung as high as the sun.

Questions swirled through my mind, but I was too stunned to focus on a single one.

So Wyatt answered what I couldn’t ask. “I bought this house just for you.”

“A house?”

“For you.”

It was hard to wrap my mind around anything this wonderful. Even as Wyatt took me on a tour of the already furnished, six-bedroom home that felt more like a country club than a residence, I knew this couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be for me.

With my dress hiked up as high as I could handle, I ran from room to room, marveling at the ceilings that reached to the heavens, the French doors throughout, and marble and crystal everywhere.

“
All for you, sweetheart.”

In the twenty-six years that I’d been on earth, I’d never been inside a house like this, let alone imagined that there would ever be a day when I called a place like this home.