Keep No Secrets (6 page)

"I want the truth."

She rolls away from him onto her back.

She pulls the covers higher, as if protecting herself. Their shoulders are still touching underneath the sheet.

"It depends. Yes, I trust you again. But it's a very fragile trust and I can't promise you that it can withstand anything you might say." She pauses. He knows what she's about to ask. "Have you done something to break that trust?"

"No, I don't think so. But . . ."

The light goes out in the hall, the room grows even darker.

"Don't keep me waiting, Jack. Just spit it out."

Her voice has changed. It's louder, clearer. And stronger. She's braced herself.

Under the covers, he reaches for her hand. She lets him take it.

"Jenny's back."

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WORDS HIT Claire like a sucker-punch. She'd bend over if she weren't already lying down. Fear clutches at her throat, making it impossible to speak. It's worse than the fear she felt four years ago. When he first asked the question, she thought he was about to admit to an attraction to another woman, a
different
woman. Nip it in the bud by telling her.

But now she realizes how ridiculous this was.
Of course
it's Jenny. Who else could it be? Although he's always radiated a boyish innocence that charms women—

all women—without even trying, he's never been a player. It's why she fell for him.

Jenny is the only other woman capable of harnessing his light for herself.

It's almost as if she's stopped breathing.

He can't hear a thing, not a thing.

Suddenly she springs up and sits on the edge of the bed, her lovely, naked back facing him. When he reaches over and touches her lightly, she shudders.

"Claire?"

When she speaks, he hears the tears in her voice. "Listen to me," she says. "I'm not going to ask you questions. I don't want to have to guess at what questions to ask, even, to pry it out of you. I just want you to tell me everything." The statement reminds him of what he said to Jenny in the café in Hannibal.

"Okay," he says quietly. He can do this.

He can tell her everything without fear because he's done nothing. Nothing, at least, that he can't tell her about. He's already convinced himself of that. The one single thing he won't tell her about—

the brief kiss in the tunnel—had nothing to do with him; he's already convinced himself of that, too.

"Last night," he begins, "heading to my car from the law library, I was walking through the underpass, and she was there, waiting for me." It sounds so freaky now that he's said it out loud. It sounds as if she was stalking him. At the time, after the initial shock of seeing her, he didn't find it so odd. It was as if he'd been waiting for that moment for four years.

As if he knew, eventually, it would happen. He simply hadn't known when, or where. But the fact of it, the certainty?

Yeah. He always knew.

"She didn't say anything, not then . . ."

Claire twitches, then fiddles with the covers to disguise it. She doesn't miss a thing. She knows, simply from his words, that he's seen her twice already. Just since last night. "Only that she needed to talk to me. She wouldn't say why." He waits at first, but remembering this isn't a normal back and forth conversation, he goes on.

"She wouldn't tell me anything at first.

Not where she'd been all this time, nothing. She wanted to go somewhere right then, but I said no. I told her I needed to get home." Claire grunts, an editorial. Jack's not sure if it's directed at him or Jenny. "But . . ." He breathes in deep. The next statement will be the hardest for her to hear, even though she's already expecting it. "I told her I'd meet with her today, and I did." Her shoulders fall.

Everything. He needs to tell her every detail. That's what she asked.

"I picked her up this morning from a motel in St. Charles. That's where she's been staying, I guess, I don't know how long, and we drove up to Hannibal. We sat in a café up there and talked."

She lifts hand to her face. She still has her back to him, but he knows what she's doing. She tugs at the sheet, pulling it up.

He reaches over to his nightstand and grabs a tissue, holds it out for her. They were on his side of the bed because he was the last one to have a cold. Claire, it seems, never gets sick. "The mother doesn't have time to be sick," she always says.

She takes the tissue.

He's not sure what to do. He hears the question in her head— "What did you talk about?" —but he's not sure whether to answer, since she hasn't asked it. But she said she wouldn't, didn't she? She said she wouldn't ask any questions. And he
does
trust
her
. Implicitly.

He decides to keep talking until she tells him to stop.

"She said someone's threatening her, that she needed my help."

Claire whips her head around. Her eyes are narrowed. She's so angry that he leans back slightly. He hasn't been slapped, but he might as well have been.

"God!" She's yelling, but it's under the breath so she doesn't wake the boys. Even in her anger, even in her apparent disappointment in him, she thinks of the kids. "Have you learned nothing?"

"Yes," he says quickly. He jumps ahead so she understands he
has
. He really has.

"I didn't agree to help her. I told her I'd think about it." Another grunt. "Claire, I told her that because I wasn't about to do anything without telling you, without talking to you first." She's quiet, so he adds, "That's why I'm telling you all this, don't you understand?"

He rises and slips into the boxers he left on the floor earlier when he undressed. He moves to sit beside her.

Surprisingly, she lets him take her hand.

"Don't you understand?"

She looks him straight in the eye.

"Don't
you
understand? Why didn't you tell her to go to hell the minute she pounced on you?" He finds himself thinking: how interesting, Claire's choice of word, because "pounce" is almost exactly what Jenny did last night. It's the perfect description. "Why didn't you tell her to
go fuck herself
?"

"Because—"

"Don't even answer, Jack! I already know the answer, okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"She's like a drug to you. I know that. I
get
that. I thought you got it, too. I thought you understood that the only way you'd stay clean was to stay away from her."

He looks away, shaking his head.

"You know how I know for sure?" she asks.

He turns to her, waiting for the

indictment.

"Because otherwise, you wouldn't be telling me this now, after you'd already met with her. You could have told me last night, when you got home. But you didn't, because you were afraid then you wouldn't be able to see her again."

She sounds like a lawyer. She hasn't sounded like one in a long, long time. She was a good lawyer. She hated practicing, but she was good. She was smart,
is
smart, and she also has a psychological grasp of people that gave her an edge. But now he feels as if she's badgering the witness. He feels as if he came as close to telling Jenny to go to hell as was possible.

"Look." He doesn't want to argue. He tries to remember the point of all this, of the decision to tell her. He wanted to do the right thing. He didn't want to give her any reason not to trust him. "I
should
have said something last night. I shouldn't have waited until after I met with her today. But you're wrong about her being a . . ." He can't even say the word
drug
.

"It's over."

Claire stares into her lap. All the fight has left her. She wants to believe him.

He drops to one knee in front of her, almost as if he's about to propose again.

"Claire?" She raises her eyes. "I swear to you, it's
over
. It has been for a very long time. I wouldn't be telling you all this if it wasn't."

She nods slowly, and the tears let loose.

He doesn't question if they're crocodile tears, as he did when Jenny cried. He knows they're not.

"Okay, okay," she whispers through quiet sobs. "Okay, Jack."

He takes her in his arms. He holds tight, eyes closed. He questions his judgment. He tries to think of what he might have done differently. What he could have done to prevent her pain.

Because he promised himself he'd never hurt her like this again.

He's angry, but he's not sure why, or at whom. He just feels this boiling anger inside.

Suddenly, he knows. Suddenly it occurs to him: no matter what he did—tell Claire, not tell Claire, help Jenny, not help Jenny—he was fucked.

And Jenny knew it, too.

He holds her late into the night. After a while, she stops crying and simply lies against him in the dark. He thinks she might ask for the rest of the story. He thinks she'll want to know more about why Jenny feels she's being threatened, how she expects him to help. Instead, she clings to him quietly. It's as if they're both wondering what lies ahead.

Finally, she falls asleep, but he doesn't.

He can't.

When he thinks she's sleeping deeply enough, he crawls from the bed, pulls on a T-shirt and heads downstairs for a drink of water. He tells himself this, but he could have cupped his hands and drank from the bathroom faucet. It'll be colder downstairs, so he stops near the landing and pulls a fleece blanket from the linen closet. It's one of Jamie's and is festooned with a repeating Spiderman pattern.

The light under Michael's door is still on.

He knocks gently. Michael mutters,

"Come in."

Michael is in front of his computer, but nothing's on the screen except the Chuck Norris desktop. Jack knows he minimized whatever was up there upon hearing the knock.

"You still awake?" Stupid question.

"Yeah." With a snap of his head, Michael flips his hair out of his eyes. Jack stopped trying to get him to cut it about the same time he lost his son's respect.

Even after what happened on Saturday night, he doesn't think he's earned it back yet; he wonders if he ever will.

Michael notices Jamie's blanket in Jack's arms. "What are you doing up?"

Jack glances down at the blanket as if he's forgotten it. "Oh, couldn't sleep and didn't want to wake Mom." Michael stares, waiting for more. He has doubted everything his father says since the day he learned the truth. Jack nods at the computer. "What's up with you?"

In the same way Jack reacted to

Michael noticing the blanket, Michael acts as if he forget the computer in front of him. "Just IMing some friends. I'm getting ready to go to bed."

Jack wishes he looked at the alarm clock, because he has no idea how late it is.

"How is Celeste? Was everything okay when she got home?"

Michael stills. Then, "Uh, yeah, I guess."

"Good." Jack sighs. "Okay, then. See you at breakfast?" Sometimes Michael meets friends for coffee before school.

Jack finds it odd that teenagers drink so much coffee nowadays, but as Michael proved on Saturday night, there are worse things they could be drinking.

"Yeah, sure." His leg is shaking now; he's ready to have Jack gone. Someone, Celeste perhaps, waits patiently at the other end of cyberspace for him to return.

After awkward "good nights" Jack softly closes the door.

He tosses the blanket onto the couch on his way to the kitchen, still clinging to the fiction that he came down for a drink.

Claire waits until Jack leaves the room and then opens her eyes. She hears him talking to Michael. She thinks about what he told her. She thinks about what it means that Jenny has returned.

When she first learned Jenny had run, she was surprised, but relieved. At the time, she hoped it would douse the fire Jenny stoked in him.

And it did. For once, she saw Jack starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, Jenny was guilty of Maxine Shepard's murder. Claire saw it in his face during Alex's trial. Even as he confessed to the world he'd spent the night with a woman who wasn't his wife, causing him to become that woman's alibi, he also admitted under oath that he'd slept for a good part of that night and really couldn't be sure she'd been with him the whole time. He wouldn't have ever admitted his growing doubts to anyone—after all, Claire knows his testimony was intended to prove Jenny's innocence (not, as he'd convinced himself, to prove Alex's guilt)

—but she could tell. Claire always found his effort a bit ironic, because it was so contrary to what he usually did in court.

Innocent until proven guilty
, not vice versa.

A few months after the trial, after Alex had been sent to death row to wait for his attorneys to make their appeals, she silently watched Jack's nagging suspicion grow to a reluctant acceptance once he discovered the contents of the case file from Jenny's family's murder. Only then was it discovered that Maxine had been her father's mistress. At the time, some speculated that the mob had ordered a hit on Harold Dodson for his failure to pay his debts—debts he'd allegedly incurred to support that mistress. If Jenny had blamed Maxine for the murders of her parents and sister when she was a child, murders that occurred before her very eyes, then it didn't stretch the imagination to believe she would later murder that same woman in retaliation.

Even after discovering the information about Maxine, Jack posed the issue as

"maybe Alex isn't guilty" as opposed to

"maybe Jenny is," but Claire knew. He choked up when he told Claire what he'd learned. He hadn't wanted to tell her, he said, because it might be "pouring salt into your wounds." But he also didn't want her to find out through the press.

He'd tried to keep his promises by telling her, just as he was trying to do tonight.

But still she remembers thinking, "Are you upset about what you're doing to me, or for what you think you've done to Alex?" even though she knew it was both.

And neither.

Because she knew, above all, he was upset over what he'd finally accepted about Jenny.

Now, Claire imagines him downstairs in the dark, his dormant desire for Jenny to be innocent given new life. In one stroke, Jenny has managed to re-ignite a fire that Claire thought had been extinguished.