“A gun?” Sam asked. Had he been shot, too?
“A pistol,” Rusty confirmed. “One of those foreign models.”
“For fucksakes, Dad,” Charlie muttered. “Then did you drop a shipping container on his head?”
“Well—”
“That’s how Lethal Weapon 2 ends. You told me you watched it the other night.”
“Did I?” Rusty seemed blameless, which meant there was much to blame.
And that Sam was an idiot.
“You asshole.” Charlie stuck her hand on her hip. “What really happened?”
Sam felt her mouth start to move, but she could not speak.
Rusty said, “I was stabbed. It was dark. I didn’t see him.” He shrugged. “Forgive a man for trying to exploit the meager attentions of his two demanding daughters.”
“That was all a lie?” Sam seized her purse between her hands. “All of it, pulled from a stupid movie?” Before she knew what she was doing, Sam swung the bag at her father’s head. “You asshole,” she hissed, echoing Charlie’s words. “Why would you do that?”
Rusty laughed even as he held up his hands to block the blow.
“Asshole,” she repeated, hitting him again.
Rusty flinched. His hand went to his stomach. “Don’t make sense: you raise your arms and your belly hurts.”
Sam said, “They cut through your abdominal muscles, you lying imbecile. It’s called your core because it is the central, innermost foundation of your body’s musculature.”
“My God,” he said. “It’s like hearing Gamma.”
Sam dropped her purse onto the floor before she hit him again. Her hands were shaking. She felt besieged by acrimony and acerbity and indignation and all of the other tumultuous feelings that had kept her away from her family for so long. “Good Christ in heaven,” she practically screamed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Rusty listed on his fingers, “I was stabbed several times. I have a heart condition. I have a filthy mouth that I apparently passed onto my daughters. I guess the smoking and the drinking are two separate things, but—”
“Shut up,” Charlie interrupted, her anger seemingly reignited by Sam’s outburst. “Do you realize the kind of night we’ve all had? I slept in a God damn chair. Lenore was about ready to pull out her hair. Ben is—well, Ben will tell you he’s fine, but he’s not, Dad. He was really upset, and he had to tell me that you were hurt, and you know how shitty that was, and then he had to email Sam, and sure as fuck Sam doesn’t want to be here ever, as in never.” She finally stopped for breath. Tears filled her eyes. “We thought that you were going to die, you selfish old shit.”
Rusty remained unmoved. “Death snickers at us all, my dear. The eternal footman will not hold my coat forever.”
“Don’t fucking Prufrock me.” Charlie wiped her eyes with her fingers. She turned to Sam. “I can probably go online and try to change your flight to an earlier one.” She told Rusty, “You’re going to be in the hospital for at least another week. I’ll have Lenore notify your clients. I can get continuances on—”
“No.” Rusty sat up, his humor quickly retreating. “I need you to handle Kelly Wilson’s arraignment tomorrow.”
“What the—” Charlie threw her hands into the air, clearly exasperated. “Rusty, we’ve been over this. I can’t be—”
“He means me,” Sam said, because Rusty had not stopped looking at her since he had made the request. “He wants me to handle the arraignment.”
A flash of jealousy lit up Charlie’s eyes, though she had refused the task.
Rusty shrugged at Sam. “Tomorrow at nine. Easy peasy. In and out, maybe ten minutes.”
“She’s not licensed with the state bar,” Charlie pointed out. “She can’t—”
“She’s licensed.” Rusty winked at Sam. “Tell her I’m right.”
Sam didn’t ask her father how he knew she had passed the Georgia bar exam. Instead, she looked at her watch. “My flight is already booked for later today.”
“Plans can be altered.”
“Delta will charge a change fee and—”
“I can float you a loan to cover it.”
Sam brushed some imaginary lint off the sleeve of her six-hundred-dollar blouse.
They all knew this wasn’t about the money.
Rusty said, “I just need a few days to get back on my feet, then I can jump into the case. It’s a deep dive, my girl. There’s a lot going on there. What say you help your old daddy make sure the big wheels keep on turnin’?”
Sam shook her head, though she knew that Rusty was probably Kelly Wilson’s only chance at a zealous defense. Even if the standard was lowered to an obligatory defense, it would likely be impossible to find someone to take the job on short notice, especially given that her current lawyer had been stabbed.
Still, that was a Rusty problem.
Sam said, “I have work to do back in New York. I’ve got my own cases. Very important cases. We’ll be at trial within the next three weeks.”
Neither of them spoke. They both stared at her.
“What?”
Charlie said, quietly, “Sam, sit down.”
“I don’t need to sit down.”
“You’re slurring your words.”
Sam knew that she was right. She also knew that she would be damned if she sat down over a simple case of exhaustion-induced dysarthria.
She just needed a moment.
She took off her glasses. She pulled a tissue from the box by Rusty’s bed. She cleaned the lenses, as if the problem was a spot that could be easily wiped away.
Rusty said, “Baby, why don’t you go downstairs with your sister, let her get some food in you, then we can talk about it when you feel better.”
Sam shook her head. “I’m—”
“Nuh-uh,” Charlie interrupted. “Not my job, mister. You tell her about your unicorn.”
“Come on,” he tutted. “She doesn’t need to know that part right now.”
“She’s not an idiot, Rusty. She’s going to ask eventually, and I’m not going to be the one to tell her.”
“I’m right here.” Sam put on her glasses. “Could you both stop talking as if I’m in another room?”
Charlie slumped against the wall. Her arms were crossed again. “If you do the arraignment, you’re going to have to enter a plea of not guilty.”
“And?” Sam asked. Seldom was a plea of guilty entered at an arraignment.
“I don’t mean pro forma. Dad really thinks Kelly Wilson is not guilty.”
“Not guilty?” Now Sam’s auditory processing was shot. They had finally managed to short-circuit the last meaningful parts of her brain. “Of course she’s guilty.”
Charlie said, “Tell that to Foghorn Leghorn, JD, over there. He thinks Kelly is innocent.”
“But—”
Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “Preacher/choir.”
Sam turned to Rusty. If she was unable to ask the obvious question, it wasn’t because of her injury. Her father had finally lost his mind.
He said, “Talk to Kelly Wilson yourself. Go to the police station after you eat. Tell them you’re my co-counsel. Get Kelly alone in a room and talk with her. Five minutes, tops. You’ll see what I mean.”
“See what?” Charlie asked. “She murdered a grown man and a little girl in cold blood. You want to talk about seeing? I was there less than a minute after it happened. I saw Kelly literally—literally—holding the smoking gun. I watched that little girl die. But Ironside over here thinks that she’s innocent.”
Sam had to take a moment to let the shock of Charlie’s involvement sink in before she could ask her sister, “What were you doing there? At the shooting? How did you—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Charlie kept her focus on Rusty. “Think about what you’re asking, Dad. What it means for her to get involved in this. You want Sam to get attacked by some revenge-driven maniac, too?” She snorted a derisive laugh. “Again?”
Rusty was immun
e to low blows. “Sammy-Sam, lookit, just talk to the girl. It’d help me to get a second opinion anyway. Even the great man you see before you is not infallible. I’d value your input as a colleague.”
His flattery only annoyed her. “Do mass shootings fall under the purview of intellectual property?” she asked. “Or have you forgotten the kind of law that I practice?”
Rusty winked at her. “The Portland district attorney’s office was a hotbed of patent infringement, was it?”
“Portland was a long time ago.”
“And now you’re too busy helping Bullshit, Incorporated, sue Bullshit, Limited, over some bullshit?”
“Everyone is entitled to their own bullshit.” Sam did not let him move her off the point. “I’m not the sort of lawyer Kelly Wilson needs. Not anymore. Actually, not ever. I could be of more service to the prosecution, because that’s the side on which I have always stood.”
“Prosecution, defense—what matters is understanding the beats of a courtroom, and you’ve got that in your blood.” Rusty pushed himself up again. He coughed into his hand. “Honey, I know you came all the way down here expecting to find me on my deathbed, and I promise you, on my life, that it’ll get to that point eventually, but for now, I’m gonna say something to you that I have never said to you in your forty-four beautiful years on this earth: I need you to do this for me.”
Sam shook her head, more out of frustration than disagreement. She did not want to be here. Her brain was exhausted. She could hear the sibilant slithering out of her mouth like a snake.
She said, “I’m going to leave.”
“Sure, but tomorrow,” Rusty said. “Baby, no one else is going to take care of Kelly Wilson. She’s alone in the world. Her parents don’t have the capacity to understand the trouble that she’s in. She cannot help herself. She cannot aid in her own defense, and no one cares. Not the police. Not the investigators. Not Ken Coin.” Rusty reached out to Sam. His nicotine-stained fingertips brushed the sleeve of her blouse. “They’re going to kill her. They are going to jam a needle in her arm, and they are going to end that eighteen-year-old girl’s life.”
Sam said, “Her life was over the minute she decided to take a loaded gun to school and murder two people.”
“Samantha, I do not disagree with you,” Rusty said. “But, please, will you just listen to the girl? Give her a chance to be heard. Be her voice. With me laid up like this, you’re the only person on earth I trust to serve as her counsel.”
Sam closed her eyes. Her head was throbbing. The sound of machines grated. The lights overhead were too intense.
“Talk to her,” Rusty begged. “I mean it when I say that I trust you to be her counsel. If you don’t agree with the not-guilty plea, then go into the arraignment and throw down a flag for diminished capacity. That, at least, we can all agree on.”
Charlie said, “That’s a false choice, Sam. Either way, he gets you in court.”
“Yes, Charlie, I am familiar with rhetological fallacies.” Sam’s stomach churned. She had not eaten in fifteen hours. She had not slept for longer than that. She was slurring her words—that is, when she could speak in complete sentences. She could not move without her cane. She felt angry, really angry, like she had not felt in years. And she was listening to Rusty as if he was her father rather than a man who would do anything, sacrifice anyone, for a client.
Even his family.
She picked up her purse from the floor.
Charlie asked, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” Sam said. “I need this shit like I need another hole in my head.”
Rusty’s bark of laughter followed her out the door.
9
Sam sat on a wooden bench in a large garden behind the hospital building. She took off her glasses. She closed her eyes. She tilted her face toward the sun. She breathed in the fresh air. The bench was in a walled-off area, a water fountain trickling by the gated entrance, a sign reading SERENITY GARDEN – ALL WELCOME mounted directly above another sign showing a cell phone with a red line through it.
Apparently, the second sign was enough to keep the garden empty. Sam alone sat in serenity. Or at least in an attempt to regain her serenity.
A mere thirty-six minutes had passed between Stanislav abandoning her at the front doors and Sam abandoning Rusty in his room. Another thirty minutes had passed since she had found the Serenity Garden. Sam had no qualms about interrupting her driver’s lunch, but she needed time to compose herself. Her hands would not stop shaking. She did not trust herself to speak. Her head ached in a way that it had not in years.
She had left her migraine medication at home.
Home.
She thought of Fosco stretching his back into a reversed C as he lolled on the floor. The sun streaming through the windows. The warmth of the swimming pool. The comfort of her bed.
And Anton.
She allowed herself a moment to think about her husband. His big, strong hands. His laughter. His delight in new foods, new experiences, new cultures.
She could not let him go.
Not when it mattered. Not when he had asked her, pleaded with her, begged her to help him end the misery of his existence.
Initially, the fight was one that they had taken on together. They had traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, back to Sloan Kettering in New York. Each specialist, each world-renowned expert, had given Anton anywhere from a seventeen to twenty percent chance of survival.
Sam was determined he would best those percentages.
Photodynamic therapy. Chemotherapy. Radiation therapy. Endoscopy with dilation. Endoscopy with stent placement. Electrocoagulation. Anti-angiogenesis therapy. They removed his esophagus, raising his stomach and attaching it to the top of his throat. They removed lymph nodes. They performed more reconstructive surgery. A feeding tube was placed. A colostomy bag. Clinical trials. Experimental treatments. Nutritional support. Palliative surgery. More experimental treatments.
At what point had Anton given up?
When he had lost his voice, his actual ability to speak? When his mobility was so reduced that he lacked the strength to shift his frail legs in the hospital bed? Sam could not recall the occasion of his surrender, did not take notice of the change. He had told her once that he had fallen in love with her because she was a fighter, but in the end, her inability to quit had prolonged his suffering.
Sam opened her eyes. She put on her glasses. A wave of blue and white hovered just beyond the reaches of her narrowed right peripheral.
She told Charlie, “Stop doing that.”
Charlie came into her line of sight. Her arms were crossed again. “Why are you out here?”
“Why would I be in there?”
“Good question.” Charlie sat on the bench opposite her. She looked up into the trees as a light wind rustled the leaves.
Sam had always known she had inherited Gamma’s striking features, that obtuse coldness that chilled so many people. Charlie’s affable countenance stood in direct opposition to their mother’s line. Her face, even with the bruises, was clearly still beautiful. She had always been so clever in the way that made people laugh rather than recoil. Relentlessly happy, Gamma had said. The kind of person people just like.
Not today, though. There was something different about Charlie, an almost palpable melancholy that seemed to have nothing to do with Rusty’s condition.
Why did she really ask Ben to email Sam?
Charlie leaned back on the bench. “You’re staring at me.”
“Do you remember when Mama brought you here? You broke your arm trying to save that cat.”
“It wasn’t a cat,” Charlie said. “I was trying to get my BB gun off the roof.”
“Gamma threw it up there so you couldn’t play with it anymore.”
“Exactly.” Charlie rolled her eyes as she slumped down onto the bench. She was forty-one years old, but she might as well have been thirteen again. “Don’t let him talk you into
staying.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.” Sam looked for her cup. She had purchased some hot water at the cafeteria along with a sandwich she’d been unable to finish. She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside.
Charlie said, “We have tea here.”
“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water. She had a quiet moment of panic when she saw her bare ring finger. Then she remembered that she had left her wedding ring at home.
Charlie did not miss much. “What is it?”
Sam shook her head. “Do you have children?”
“No.” Charlie did not return the question. “I didn’t bring you here to kill Rusty. He’s going to do that to himself eventually. His heart isn’t good. The cardiologist basically said he’s one strained bowel movement away from death. But he won’t stop smoking. He won’t cut back on the drinking. You know what a stubborn jackass he is. He won’t listen to anybody.”
“I can’t believe he hasn’t done you the courtesy of drawing up a will.”
“Are you happy?”
Sam found the question both odd and abrupt. “Some days are better than others.”
Charlie tapped her foot lightly against the ground. “Sometimes, I think about you all alone in that shitty, cramped apartment, and I just get sad.”
Sam didn’t tell her that the shitty apartment had sold for $3.2 million. Instead, she quoted, “‘Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy.’”
“Flannery O’Connor.” Charlie had always been good with quotes. “Gamma was reading The Habit of Being, wasn’t she? I had forgotten all about it.”
Sam had not. She could still recall her surprise when her mother had checked out the collection of essays from the library. Gamma had openly disdained religious symbolism, which ruled out most of the English canon.
“Dad says she was trying to be happy before she died,” Charlie said. “Maybe because she knew she was sick.”
Sam looked down at her tea. During Gamma’s autopsy, the medical examiner had discovered that her lungs were riddled with cancer. Had she not been murdered, she likely would have been dead within the year.
Zachariah Culpepper had used this as part of his defense, as if a few more precious months with Gamma would have meant nothing.