Cam's face lowered toward hers. "We're going to ruin the waffles," she murmured, and then she buried her fingers in his hair and pulled him close.
He was amazed anew at the image of her body. Her skin seemed to glow. His hand spanned the distance from her breasts to her hips. He told her he loved her, and it was not a confession, but a prayer.
Mia was on top of him, her head thrown back and her unruly hair making spiral shadows on his chest, when the back door that led directly into the kitchen opened. She had heard it somewhere in the back of her mind, along with Kafka's paws padding along on the carpet upstairs and the temperature rising a degree outside. But, as with these other things, when Cam was filling the rest of her senses she was not inclined to pay attention.
Ellen MacDonald stood three feet away, a spare key in one hand and a plate in the other. Her cheeks were as pale as the angel food cake she had brought for Cam. A treat, because Allie was not there.
"Something's burning," Ellen said, and then she threw the cake down on the counter and left without another word.
Because he didn't want anyone around who was liable to eaves drop, Graham asked Jamie to meet him at the foot of the pass in the Berkshires that made Wheelock so picture-perfect. There was a path there that eventually fed into the Mohawk Trail, but for a good ten miles before that it was just a dirt road used by ambitious teenagers on neon-painted mountain bikes. With the few inches of snow that had fallen over the past week, Graham knew he'd be assured of privacy, and it was finally time for his client to tell him the truth.
Jamie knew why he was there; knew he was going to have to talk about it with Graham sooner or later and in much more detail than he'd gone into for his voluntary confession. The two men walked in silence for half a mile, their heads bent against the wind, their hands buried deep in their parkas. "When did she ask you?" Graham said.
"First? In January. We were in Quebec. It was after the chemotherapy, but before the radiation treatments for the eye. I sort of laughed it off."
"And then?"
Jamie bent down to pick a twig out of the snow. He traced the footprint of a rabbit, white on white. "After her doctor's appointment that week in September. She went on a Friday--she always scheduled the last appointment of the day, because she wanted to put in a full day of work before hearing bad news. So she usually got home about six.
"She didn't get home until after nine o'clock at night." Jamie smiled faintly, caught in a memory. "Of course by then I'd called every local hospital and police station looking for car accidents and hit-and-runs. She was carrying a box--a big one, I think it was a Stolichnaya box she must have gotten from the liquor store. She didn't say anything to me. She walked upstairs and started putting all her clothes inside it."
What are you doing?" he asked. "What did the doctor say?"
But Maggie continued to fold her clothes. She put the shorts in
first, and he thought maybe she was going through her drawers and sorting them for the winter. But when she packed her underwear away, and the nightgown she had worn the evening before, he knelt down beside her and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.
"Jamie," she said, "I'm not going to do this anymore."
Do what? His mind grasped at straws. Fold clothes? Talk to him? He pulled at her hands until she came to sit beside him on the bed. "I don't so much mind the dying," she said. "It's not knowing what's coming next that's killing me."
She asked him, flat out, to take her life. He told her he absolutely wouldn't do it. She said he was being selfish. He said she was being selfish too. She told him she had every right to be.
She wanted him to do it then; he wanted to have one more weekend with her. She wanted to get everything in order so that he would not be cleaning up after she was gone; he forced her to put her clothes back in the drawer, saying a shadow and a memory of her were better than nothing at all. He told her he would pick the place, since he could not continue to live in Cummington if he always remembered it as the town where he had suffocated Maggie.
On Saturday they slept late so that Jamie could wake up with Maggie's hair twined over his hands and his face. They had a picnic on the roof of their house, from which they could see nearly twenty miles. They went to a movie they did not watch and kissed and stroked each other in the silence of the very last row.
On Saturday night they went to the very expensive restaurant where eleven years before, Jamie had asked her to marry him. They ordered the priciest entrees on the menu and they ate with their hands, holding ripped pieces of tenderloin and lobster to each other's mouths. They crashed a wedding party at the Red Lion Inn in Lenox and danced until the swing band went off to bed.
On Sunday, they watched the sun creep over the Berkshires like an unfolding fan. They spent the day looking for the richest colors--the blues of a brilliant sky, the yellowest dandelion, the reddest fire engine--so that Maggie would be able to take them with her. They held each other on a black night when the moon was too embarrassed to appear, and gave names to the children they'd never had.
On Monday morning they drove to Wheelock and checked into the Inn. Jamie bought a bottle of champagne from the bartender downstairs and they drank this and ate pizza and discussed how it would be done.
They made love Monday night, passed out in exhaustion, and woke up still joined together.
On Tuesday morning, Maggie kissed him goodbye.
It took less than five minutes," Jamie said, shuffling his boots in the snow. "I used a pillow. She scratched at me in the middle of it, but this was something we'd talked about, and I wasn't supposed to stop. So I just leaned closer and whispered to her--you know, things I knew she would want to be thinking, and then she stopped moving completely."
Without a word, Graham started back down the incline to the foot of the hills. He looked behind him when they reached the main roads of Wheelock Center. Jamie's face was red and chapped, his nose was running. Graham imagined he looked the same. It was another reason Graham had chosen this place for their interview. In December, coming back from the pass, you would never be able to tell if a man's face was raw with the cold, or if he had been crying.
"Jamie," Graham said, turning to face his client. "I know you would do it over again. But would you do anything differently?"
He watched Jamie's face fold in upon itself as he struggled with control. "I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself, too," Jamie answered quietly, "but I've never had that kind of courage."
FOURTEEN
When her son Cameron was sixteen, Ellen MacDonald had walked in on him with a girl. She had knocked on his bedroom door, like she always did, but it was a quick one-two, and then open. And on the bed, kneeling before each other, were Cam and a girl she had never seen.
Cam's shirt was off, bur then again so was the girl's. His hands were fastened on the girl's breasts, and for a moment, that claimed all of Ellen's attention--with a middle-aged jealousy, she focused on those high, round globes that looked a way hers never would again. She must have made a noise, because the girl looked up and squeaked. Cam whirled to face his mother, his lips soundlessly moving over syllables he couldn't utter.
For a long time after that, Ellen could not look Cam in the eye. It was not his shame, or her embarrassment, that strained their relationship. It was what she never would have believed secondhand; what, after all these years, still stood out in her mind like a red flag: that in a matter of seconds, she had watched her child turn into a man.
Ellen had not stayed at Cam's house after finding him with Mia. She didn't trust herself. When this happened before, she had consigned the episode to a teenager's raging glands. This time was entirely different. And where she had once been silent, she now felt as if she was volcanic, ready to explode in her indignation.
If she had known where Allie was, she would have called her. Instead, Ellen spent two whole hours trying to restore herself to a state of peace. Then, giving in to her anger, she took out her dowsing rods. She held them a
t hip level, comfortably setting her wrists so that they acted as shock absorbers. With the dog following her, Ellen walked from room to room--starting in her bedroom, where Cam had been conceived, moving to the room that had been the nursery before it became Ian's office, then down the hall to the room that would always be Cam's.
She stood in its center, her rods quivering. She glanced from the wallpaper--big clipper ships with unlikely, topheavy masts--to the narrow bed, which Cam's feet had hung off of from eighth grade on. Glancing down at her rods, she cursed. They were shaking a bit, but they weren't crossing. In fact, she could not be sure that the shivers which ran down the sleek copper weren't coming from her own internal imbalance.
But she would be damned if she'd stop trying. She walked back to her bedroom and retraced her path to the nursery and then Cam's room. Ellen sniffed at the air, catching only a trace of Lemon Pledge when there should have been something rank and strong; surely something that had festered for so long would be dark and deep and malodorous. She crawled on her knees to look beneath the radiator; she checked the spot beside the fireplace where there had once been dry rot. She would not give up, she told herself, until she found the puddle of immorality which must have seeped into her own child's soul.
Damn his mother. Cam followed Mia around the house as she dumped the burned waffles into the sink and picked her socks up from the crevices in the couch and collected her toothbrush from the bathroom. He had a hard-on like he couldn't believe because of what they hadn't been able to finish, and he wanted to speak to her, but all he could think of to say was that they still had twenty-one hours left. "Where are you going?" he asked.
Mia tossed Kafka into her knapsack. "Where do you think?"
Cam rubbed a rough spot on the hardwood floor with his bare toe. "I'll come by later, then. After I strangle my mother."
"Don't." Mia slipped the knapsack over her shoulder. The vinyl made a faint zipping noise against her down jacket that sounded terribly final to Cam. "I have things to do."
"You were going to do them with me," he said. "You planned to spend the whole day here."
"That was before," Mia said. She brushed her hair back from her eyes, and her cuff fell over her hand, obscuring it like a small child's.
He took the knapsack off her shoulder and slid the sleeve of the coat up her arm so that her fingers peeked out again. He curled his hand over hers and kissed her knuckles. "She won't say anything," he promised.
"It doesn't matter if she does or if she doesn't. She knows."
Cam knew he couldn't stop her, so he followed her down the stairs. At the door, when she would have walked out without saying goodbye, he put a hand on her shoulder and spun her around. "Do you know what it's like," she said, "to know that the only way you can be happy is if you make everyone else's life miserable?"
Cam watched his hand cup Mia's cheek. When he drew it away, his palm was crossed with fine wet lines. He thought of his mother's pinched face, and then he thought of Allie. "I have a fairly good idea," he said.
In her hurry, Mia had left half her clothes behind. A bracelet, which Cam pocketed, a clean pair of underwear that had tumbled out of her knapsack during her hasty packing, and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt marked with a day-camp-style label that said Mia Townsend. These things Cam stuffed into a drawer with his boxers and socks. Then he dressed in a St. Andrew's sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and drove to his mother's.
The front door was open; his mother was nowhere in sight. Her dowsing rods were lying on the kitchen table, crossed, which was a better sign to Cam of her emotional distress than any amount of yelling could have been. You never crossed dowsing rods; how many times had she told him that? Carefully, he picked up the copper sticks, surprised at the hum that rang through his forearms, and set the rods into their protective wooden box.
He glanced up to find his mother standing three feet in front of him. "Damn," he said, trying to smile. "You're good at sneaking up on a person."
Ellen folded her arms across her chest.
"Are you going to tell Allie?" Cam asked.
She looked directly into his eyes. "That's your punishment," she
laid.
He could hear the house settling around them, creaks and groans that had once made Cam run from his room in the middle of the night to sleep in the solid protection of his mother's embrace. "Are we going to talk about it?" Cam said quietly.
Ellen shook her head. "I don't know you. I didn't raise you to do this."
Implicit in her statement were the words Neither did your father. How many times had he heard the lecture? MacDonalds don't cheat and they don't steal. They honor their word. And they never, ever break a vow that has been sealed.
If you were a MacDonald and you made a promise, you took it to the grave.
An image of Jamie flashed across Cam's mind. What had he sworn to his wife?
For that matter, what had Cam sworn to his own?
He thought of Allie and visibly became smaller, his shoulders rounding and his head ducking down with the weight of his im-petuousness. Then he remembered that this had nothing to do with her. Falling for Mia had not been something born out of spite for his wife, or out of dissatisfaction in his solid, stable marriage. It was a selfish act. And it was probably the only thing Cam had done in his life strictly because he had wanted to.
He had wanted to wear cutoff jeans and faded khaki Tshirts and to be a travel writer; instead he was a uniformed police chief. He had wanted to skim the surface of the world, touching down like a dragonfly where he chose to; instead he was bound and tied to Wheelock. He had wanted to become a faceless individual in the crowds that thronged the Riviera and the running of the bulls; instead he was the titular head of a clan and completely unmistakable to its members.
He had wanted Mia so strongly it shook the faith of his convictions; and in a moment he could not have stopped even if he'd wanted to, he had grabbed hold before the opportunity passed him by.
Ellen took a step closer. Cam was reminded of how, seconds before the sting of her hand flashed across his bottom when he was a child, she had always seemed to grow in size. It had taken him years to figure out that this was simply a matter of perspective as he cowered beneath her fury.
He forced himself to stand tall, towering over his mother. She looked up at him, and for a moment he didn't have the courage to meet her eye. However, when he finally glanced down, she was not glaring at him at all. Her eyes were soft and sloe, the color of the belly of the sea. I married her because of her eyes, Ian MacDonald had liked to say. I fell the whole damn way into them, and I couldn't find my way out.
"I don't understand you," she said quietly, and she walked out of the room, leaving between them the faint and glowing image of Cam's father, the memory of his parents kissing behind a half-closed pantry door, and the looming question of why something that felt so incredibly right could be undeniably wrong.
In his left hand, Graham held the magazine article that had led him way the hell to Boston to visit Dr. Harrison Harding, psychiatrist. In his right hand was the report of the State psychologist's findings from his aborted interview with Jamie: Mr. MacDonald presented no clinical evidence during his examination to indicate any psychopathology. He does not exhibit signs of psychosis, neurosis, or aberrations in personality. His affect was appropriate and his answers were lucid and reasonable. From a legal aspect, it is clear that he knew the nature and quality of his acts.
Jamie was sitting next to Graham, his feet nervously tapping on the floor. He had agreed, out of desperation, to take a battery of tests: Rorschach, IQ, WAIS, Graphic Projectives. But he spent the three-hour car ride telling Graham that since he wasn't crazy, a psychiatrist wasn't going to say that he was. It was his opinion that Dr. Harding would be no different than the asshole the State had sent him to.
Graham had other ideas. "If Harding doesn't think you were disturbed enough to affect your judgment," he said, "we'll find someone else who does."
But he didn't thin
k he was going to have to look much farther than this finely fashioned, austere office. According to the Time article he clutched like a lifeline, Dr. Harrison Harding ardently supported euthanasia. Not that he'd acted on his impulses; he was just a sort of well-mannered, gray-templed spokesman for assisted suicide. He had been interviewed in conjunction with a feature story on Kevorkian, some reporter's way of showing that more than one educated man of science believed in mercy killing.
Harding himself came to the outer office. "Mr. MacPhee," he said, extending a hand. He raked Jamie with his gaze. "Mr. MacDonald."
Graham turned to Jamie. "Stay here," he said, feeling like a mother. "I want to talk to him alone for a minute."
Jamie grunted, but he sat down and opened an Omni magazine. Graham followed the psychiatrist into his inner sanctum. Unlike the neat waiting room, this chamber was warm and full of sunlight. Bowls of Chex Mix sat on small Formica cubes that served as coffee tables, refreshments for an upcoming session. Dr. Harding sat down on a plump couch and gestured to a matching one across from him. "Quite a case you've got."
Graham had spoken to him when he called to make the appointment, so they had hashed through all of the particulars. Now, briefly, he told Dr. Harding about Jamie's view of events leading up to Maggie's death, about his own impressions of Jamie. "Sometimes you look at him and you think, How the hell could he do something like that? And sometimes you look at him and he just breaks your heart." Graham finished speaking, took a deep breath, and glanced at the psychiatrist, trying to read his face for a clue as to how his words had been received.
Psychiatrists must learn during med school not to give anything away. Harding rested his head on his folded hands and nodded shortly. "You've entered an insanity plea," he said conversationally. "Why not euthanasia?"
Graham didn't bat an eye. "Because America isn't ready for that yet, especially not in the Berkshires, where half our jury will be farmers with eighth-grade educations and machine workers who think in terms of what circle gets welded to what square."