Tell No Lies (40 page)

Trembling with relief, he drove out of the circle and onto another street that came within several hundred feet of the side of their house. From there, it was merely a matter of cutting through a few yards and some woods to approach the house from the back. He killed the engine, stepped out of the car, and quietly closed the door. The cold air hit his sweat-drenched body; he shivered and pulled his coat tighter.
 

He saw her as soon as he reached the deck. She stood inside the house, just on the other side of the sliding door, and stared at him. Faint red blotches marked her face, and the swollen rims of her bloodshot eyes were angry with tears. Strands of hair on each side of her face stuck to her wet cheeks. Her ethereal innocence, her invisible light that had served as both his beacon and his compass, had vanished. She was not the same woman he'd kissed that morning before he'd left for work. She was the most beautiful and tainted thing he'd ever seen.

He tried to pull the door open but found it locked. His eyes began to well up, and when she saw this, she banged repeatedly on the glass with her fists.

"Don't you dare! Don't you dare cry. You have no right to cry!" Her screams seeped through the glass, slightly muffled but clearly audible.

He pulled on the door with one hand and struggled to wipe his eyes with the other.

"Let me in, Claire. You can hit me, but just let me in." He feared she would break the glass, and then they'd have an emergency room visit on top of everything else.

She unlocked the door and pulled it open. He started to approach her but she was on him in an instant, hitting his chest and pushing him backward, farther out into the middle of the deck. Not one long push but a series of pushes that were really open-palmed strikes.

"I hate you! I hate you!" she said with each contact. Tears flooded her cheeks. "I hate you!" she repeated over and over, and he began to wonder if she really was speaking or if it was merely the echo of her voice playing in his head. "Don't you cry! You have no right to cry!" He tried to hold back his tears because he wanted to do whatever she wanted him to do.
 

He grasped her wrists and held her arms in midair. "Stop it."

She twisted to free her arms but succeeded only with the right one. She promptly began hitting him again with it. "Let me go! Don't touch me!" Her voice and her energy began to wane. He now had a firm grip on her left arm. "You . . . have . . . no . . . right . . . to . . . touch . . . me!" She said it slowly, methodically, and with each word she punched him, but the punches were less forceful, as if she was finally surrendering to the reality of his treason.

"What have you done?" she sobbed, and he guided her unaware back into the house. She jerked her left arm and he let it go. She backed herself to the kitchen table and collapsed on a chair.

"I've done something terrible, but it's not what you're thinking," he said. He stayed by the door. "It wasn't an ongoing thing."

She covered her ears. "No, no, I don't want to hear this. Don't you dare try to minimize what you did, what you've done to us." She inhaled, the short, quick breaths of one who's been crying hard. "You've destroyed us."

The last words hit him hard. "I'm not trying to minimize it. I just thought you should know. It was just one time."

She must have refueled because she came at him again. In one quick motion she was on her feet in front of him, pushing, striking at him with her open hands. She pressed him against the slider and he had nowhere to go.

"Tell me, Jack! Why should I know that? Huh? Tell me why! What's the difference?" She tried to catch her breath. "You're a fucking cliché, you know that? What are you going to say next? It didn't mean anything? Well, fuck you! It meant everything." He tried to block the punches—she'd progressed once more to fists—but his heart wasn't in it because he knew that she was entitled to every one of them and more. "One time, huh? Too bad for you, Jack. You've should've fucked her brains out a million times to make it really worth it. Because you've destroyed us. I hope your one time was worth that."
 

He closed his eyes and just let her do it—let her hit and punch and flail at him until she'd drained her reserves again. When she finished, he listened to her cross the room and climb the stairs, and then he slid his back down the glass and sat with his head between his knees for a long time. He'd never known such pain.

Later, he heard her footsteps and looked up to see her coming down the stairs with a small satchel in her hand. He panicked. Somehow, the thought that she might be the one to leave hadn't occurred to him.

"I've packed a change of clothes for the kids." Her voice was flat. "I want you to meet Michael at the bus stop; don't let him come to the house. Then pick up Jamie at Christopher's; he's supposed to play there after school. The directions are in the side pocket of the bag. Where you go with them after that is up to you. Just don't come back here tonight. You can drop them off tomorrow." She set the bag on the table and turned to go back up the stairs.

"Claire, you can't barricade yourself in here."

"Once the story breaks, he'll leave." She spoke with her back to him. "Anyway, they already got my 'no comment' at the university. It's you he's waiting for." Her voice, though steeped in sarcasm, wavered, and he thought she was about to cry again.

"What do you want me to tell them?"

She turned. Her usually bright eyes were darker than he'd ever seen them. They both knew he was talking about the kids, not the reporters.

"I think I'll leave that up to you. How 'bout that, Jack?"

When he finally went upstairs to rinse his face and pack a change of clothes for himself, he found her sprawled face down across the bed. He stood in the doorway of the bathroom, trying to send her a telepathic message to turn her head, to look at him just once. Except for the sporadic rise of her back when she sniffled, she lay motionless. He knew she was awake.

He went into the bathroom to compose himself. After splashing his face and drying it, he looked in the mirror and was frightened by what he saw. His eyes were bloodshot, and his fair skin lacked even a hint of color. But it was more than physical. He'd lost something inside.

With his toothbrush in hand, he crossed the room to his closet and grabbed a pair of jeans, a shirt, socks and underwear. He shoved it all into a small overnight bag that he found on the floor behind yesterday's dirty laundry. He looked at her again. He had to say something.

"Claire?"

She didn't respond, didn't even flinch at the sound of his voice.

"Claire? Can we talk?"

Her silence scared him more than her outbursts downstairs. He sat down on an old wicker chair. The room was quiet enough for him to hear the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hall downstairs.

When she finally spoke, her voice dripped sarcasm and was raspy from prolonged crying. "Yeah, sure, what do you want to talk about? How was the weather when you drove home?"

"Claire—"

"I have just one question for you." She sat up and faced him. Seeing the hollowness in her eyes again filled him with an insatiable longing for her, a longing to hold her until she had no choice but to forgive him. "I want to know how it happened. I mean, did you plan it? Or, you know, did circumstances throw you together, and then you simply couldn't resist? How did it happen?"

It was as if she'd asked so that she could weigh the evidence to determine whether he should be charged with manslaughter or murder. Were his actions heat-of-the-moment, or premeditated? Jack understood that her ability to forgive him was perhaps dependent on the answer.

"I didn't plan it, not like you're thinking, but . . . it wasn't an accident, either."

She turned to the window with a grunt. "What's that supposed to mean?"

What
did
it mean? He hadn't planned it, at least he didn't believe he had. He thought back to what Jenny had said about everything being so calculated. He'd never felt that way and still didn't. He'd thought about it a lot, that was true, but until that moment in the garage, when words he hadn't planned to speak fell from his mouth, it had never been anything but fantasy. It was as if he'd snapped, as if he'd temporarily lost the use of his brain and his common sense had taken a leave of absence. In Jenny's presence he'd lost all ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior.
 

That was it. It was like temporary insanity. That wonderful defense he'd always scoffed at.

"I don't know," he said finally. There was no way now to explain his thoughts.

After another two chimes on the clock, she said, "I want you to leave."

His heart beat furiously. He'd expected more questions, a real discussion of what he'd done, but now he realized that he'd messed up again by not giving her a satisfactory answer to what she claimed was her only question. "Don't you want to—"

"I mean leave. Not just leave right now. But leave. I can't share the same space with you." The sharpness in her voice had dulled. Now she just sounded weary.

"Claire, come on, don't do that. We need to talk." She'd never even asked him why. He wanted the chance to try to explain himself.

"I can't have you here. It hurts too much."

"But the kids will—"

"You can come over when you want to see the kids. I won't keep you from them."

She pushed herself off the bed and trudged to the bathroom. Her face revealed no emotion; he preferred the anger. At least then he knew he still provoked feeling in her. His greatest fear was that she would stop feeling anything for him.

"I don't want to just 'see' my kids. I want to live with them."

She grabbed the molding on the doorway, and for a moment he thought she was going to faint right there. "I guess you should have thought about that before you decided to screw her, huh, Jack?" She spoke with her back to him. "See, I've always believed building a life with your wife and kids to be mutually exclusive from screwing another woman. The two just don't mix. I always thought you believed that, too. Silly me."

She closed the bathroom door. Within a few minutes he heard the shower running. He walked to the door and let his weight fall against it. It was as close as he could get to her. He listened as she slid the shower door open and then closed. He tried the doorknob, but she had locked it. He took a few steps to her side of the bed and picked up her pillow. He buried his face in it. The scents were subtle, mixed, but there. The clean smell of her skin after bathing, the faintly citrus fragrance of her cologne, the balmy scent of her sweat after they made love.

He heard her crying. Her sobs were contained at first, but he could detect them nevertheless over the pattering of the shower. He lowered the pillow as the muscles in his chest tightened and he imagined that having a heart attack must feel like this. When her cries metamorphosed from uncontrollable sobs into intentional wails, as if she was trying by sheer will to force the pain from her body, he went back to the door and placed his palm on it. He tried to absorb it all—all of the hurt that poured from her body with each exhalation. He could never tell her so, but he felt it, too: the grip on the lungs that made it hard to breathe, the excruciating hole in the heart where the blood and emotion tried to escape. Except he knew that her pain seared from anger, while his burned from shame. And that made all the difference in the world.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

HE DID EXACTLY as she had instructed. He parked his car near the bus stop, but out of sight of the reporter, and waited for Michael to get off the bus. He told him only that a reporter had staked out their house because of developments in Jenny's case and that he'd explain more later, but he already felt an unspoken accusation in Michael's stare. Michael was old enough to perceive when Jack and Claire were fighting, and Jack knew that his son was also old enough to figure out, by the looks on their faces alone, who was probably to blame. Right now, Michael blamed Jack.

He left Michael in the car when he picked up Jamie. Jack held on to Jamie tightly while the mother of his playmate made small talk in her foyer. He tried, unsuccessfully, to read her face for clues of having heard the latest news.

Back on the road, he racked his brain, trying to figure out where to take the kids for the night. The thought of a hotel room was just too depressing. He drove in no particular direction, with no particular destination.

"What are you doing, Dad?" Michael asked. The disgust in his voice was palpable.

"I'm trying to decide where we're going for the night." Jack kept his eyes on the road.

"Where's Mom? Why isn't she coming, too?"

"She wanted to stay home. The reporter wants to talk to me. I'll explain later, Michael."

"I want to go to Uncle Mark's."

Jack finally looked over at Michael, who was sulking against the passenger door. Strands of his sandy-colored hair fell across his forehead—he was in desperate need of a haircut—but Jack could see the resentment in his eyes. He knew from hours spent on the job with therapists that Michael was at a very impressionable age. The odds were now greatly increased that he would follow in Jack's footsteps as an adult. He would hate what his father had done, but ironically, he'd be doomed to repeat it.

Go to Mark's. It was a pretty good idea. Why hadn't he thought of it? Mark was going to find out everything anyway, and Jack doubted that reporters would come looking for him there.

"Okay, we'll go to Mark's."

But Michael didn't even acknowledge him.

Jack drove to his brother's house without bothering to call first. Mark worked from home, so he decided to take his chances. If Mark wasn't there, well, he'd worry about it then.

When Mark opened the door, he looked from Jack down to the kids and then back. Jack suspected, from the look on Mark's face and the fact that he didn't automatically step back to let them in, that he had a visitor.

"Can we come in?" Jack asked, walking in without waiting for an answer.