The Truth Hurts

Julia came running, but not out of any concern for my plight. “Hush, Marie! You’ll wake the dead! What will the neighbors think! What have you done this time? How did you ever get up there?” If clichés came in streams, my Aunt Julia would be Niagara Falls.

  Nate trailed behind her, avoiding my eyes.

  Seems he’d gone running in to get her, but got distracted by lunch. Or at least he claimed he ran to get her; even at the time, I suspected he panicked and ran away. He didn’t take any of the blame for it, either, just stood there silently while she berated me.

  Julia got me down by wrapping her strong arms around my legs and pulling. I cried like a banshee at the vicious scraping I was getting on the tree bark.

  Nate did nothing to help her, said nothing to help me.

  But I didn’t rat on him. I didn’t say, “It was his idea, too! He pushed me up there and left me!” I let him get away with all of it, because I knew the worst that I would get was the scolding, but that she’d whip him if he got in trouble. They had odd ways of showing their love, my aunt and uncle. “We’re only doing this because we love you,” they’d tell Nathan as they applied the belt, the hand, the back of the metal spatula to bare skin, and they meant it, too. In their home, it was a much better fate to be neglected. That’s why I always let him get away with it, with everything. I loved him, I felt horribly sorry for him, he was my little brother who needed my protection. And he loved me, too, or at least, most of the time he did. Even as a little girl I understood there were times when he could only love himself—although I couldn’t have phrased it like that—and so I let him do it.

  “You understand?” he asks me now, looking for my usual sympathy.

  I can only nod, with narrowed eyes and clenched jaw. Oh, yeah, I understand all too well. Spoiled brat! And I helped make you this way, not that I’m going to take the blame for your childhood, or for mine, either.

  “I can get myself to the airport,” he tells us magnanimously.

  “That’s good,” is my hurt, childish retort, “because neither of us will take you.”

  “Oh, come on, Marie, don’t be like that.”

  But it’s thirty-five years too late for me not to “be like that.” I stand up from my half-eaten breakfast and throw down my napkin like a petulant toddler. It’s all I can do to stick out my lower lip and accuse him, “You always leave me hanging! You forget about me, you don’t help me, you don’t love me!”

  Maybe I’ll go eat worms after all.

  When my cousin/brother drives away from the inn almost an hour later, we haven’t made up. At all. Haven’t spoken. Haven’t crossed paths in the same room. Have carefully avoided each other’s “space.” He, getting into his own rental car, moves like he can’t wait to get out of here, doesn’t even look back to see if I’m coming to say good-bye. And I, hiding in the shade of a pin oak tree at the side of the inn, miserably watch him leave. Who is this cousin I thought I knew? Ah, but that’s just the problem. He is exactly the cousin I know so well. The better question might be, Who is this incredibly childish version of the me that I thought I knew so well?

  Maybe it’s being here, in Sebastion. It got to both of us.

  We’re reverting, Nathan and I, to the ages of about three and six. If we keep going backward, by tomorrow I’ll be dead. Oops. Not a good line of thought, all things considered.

  As I turn to go back inside, I think of the lyric from the old rock and roll song, I’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing I ever do.

  I can only hope it isn’t.

  Not that Nathan would care!

  Once he’s gone, I walk slowly back up to the suite. I’m already feeling horribly guilty about letting him go without a forgiving hug. These aren’t the times when you want to let somebody you love get away from you without making amends first, if there ever was such a time. But I feel so betrayed! Trust is a big, big thing with me. I guess when you’ve grown up thinking your own parents dumped you, trust does tend to become a bit of an issue, as they say in the psychotherapy trade. It appears that martyrdom may be a bit of an issue, too, judging from my turned-down mouth and my slumping shoulders. But jeeze, I’ve always been there for my cousin when he needed me; it floors me that he wouldn’t stay for any other better reason than that I wanted him to, I needed him to. I was so glad to see him. I would have stayed for him. I would have done anything for him.

  Except let him go ? Except let him grow up, Marie ?

  “Oh, shut up,” I tell my Inner Therapist.

  Immediately upon opening the suite door, the first thing I see is Steve Orbach standing by the bay window, and the next thing I see is a wallet lying on the floor at the edge of the bed facing me. I walk over, pick it up, and hold it up so he can see.

  “Yours?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh, that idiot!” I exclaim, suddenly furious all over again. “Nate must have taken his wallet out for some reason while he was packing, and he probably set it down on the bed and it fell off and . . . I can’t believe he did this. . . . Oh, never mind, yes I can. This is so like him. This is just like him!” Steve is looking at me, expressionless. God only knows what he thinks of the sibling tantrums he’s witnessed today. “Steve, he can’t get on the plane without his driver’s license. We’re going to have to run up to the airport and get this to him.”

  I get the impression that my bodyguard was standing beside the window watching over me as I stood hiding under the tree. Now he asks, “Has he got a cell phone with him?”

  “If he does, I don’t know the number.”

  “Then let him find out the hard way.”

  “He really wants to go home.”

  Steve shrugs heartlessly, as I should probably do, too.

  “A little inconvenience won’t kill him,” he says, no doubt accurately.

  “I know, but—”

  I just can’t do it, not when it comes to Nathan, not even now.

  But when I walk over to the dresser to grab my purse where I left it earlier, Steve says, “You stay here. I’ll go.”

  “I was thinking we’d both go.”

  “No. I’ll drive faster without you.”

  “You’re leaving me, too?” I hear the whining, self-pitying note in my voice, and then I feel my face flush. This is embarrassing. I’ve got to get myself together here. Surely I can survive for a couple of hours without him or Nate, not that Nathan would have been much protection anyway. “Okay,” I say, forcing a calmer tone. But then I spoil it by adding a postscript that makes me sound like Dr. Aileen Rasmussen stating the obvious. “Don’t get a speeding ticket.”

  He smiles slightly and I get the feeling that he’s just barely keeping himself from saying, Yes, Mother. What he says, instead, is, “I’m not planning to. I’m also not going to leave you alone.”

  “What do you mean? You can’t be in two places at once.”

  “No, but this might be a good time for you to talk to the cops.”

  “About what? Last night, they decided—”

  “Yeah, they decided, but that doesn’t mean you have to do what they think, does it?”

  “I guess not, but—” Suddenly, I collapse onto the side of the bed. “My God, Steve, I’ve got to snap out of this. Do you know what’s happening to me? I’m turning into a kid, I’m acting as if all the adults know best and I have to do what they say. But I don’t, do I? You’re right. I need to start making some independent decisions here.”

  “What if you showed the cops that story about your parents and let them tell you what they think of it?”

  I think that over, finally saying, “I don’t know about that, but there are plenty of other things I could ask them, instead, if I decide not to do that. And maybe I can hang around the police station until you get back.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” He steps toward me a couple of paces. “Ms. Lightfoot, no disrespect to your cousin, but he’s so full of shit it’s a wonder his eyes aren’t brown. He shouldn’t have left like that. I
promise you that I won’t take any chances with you.”

  It’s good to hear him say that. An automatic defense of Nathan rises to my lips, but for once I bite it back.

  In no time at all, Steve takes off with the wallet and the Lexus, after dropping me off at the edge of downtown Sebastion.

  30

  Marie

  Even though Sebastion’s fortunes and population have dramatically eroded in the past few decades, it’s still the county seat, and home to the county sheriff’s office, instead of a police station. There’s not much to the headquarters, I discover, just a plain, square, cement block building with a handful of jails and open office space. When I walk in, there’s a uniformed officer doubling as receptionist/secretary, and the deputy sheriff’s on the premises, but apart from two sheriff’s cars parked in a lot to the east, that’s about it for law enforcement in Sebastion today.

  When I see that the “receptionist” is a white man and the deputy is a black woman, I find myself awed at how much the world can change when it has a chance to. I’m in the heart of Alabama, for God’s sake, and I’m just about to take my case to a black female cop.

  My parents would be so pleased, and I’m so pleased to be able to think that of them.

  It’s at that moment that the underlying message of last night’s party really hits me for the first time, and the impact is so strong that I nearly turn around and go back outside to find a bench to sit down on. My parents were not killed by the KKK. My parents were not traitors to their Hostel friends. They were, themselves, betrayed. They were what I longed for them to be and never believed could come true—decent people doing the right thing for the right reasons.

  I’m tired and hungover and stressed-out.

  It’s all I can do not to burst into grateful tears right there in the lobby.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  Self-control is a wonderful thing sometimes. “Yes, sir.” I smile, trying to draw forth my southern heritage. “I’d like to see the sheriff, if I may.”

  “He’s not here. Deputy do?”

  “Deputy’ll do,” I say.

  She’s angry before I open my mouth.

  “If you’re here to accuse Hubert and Rachel Templeton of having anything to do with the disappearance of your parents almost forty years ago, you’d better have some damned good evidence before you go slandering those good people’s names to me.”

  For a moment, I’m so startled, I can’t think.

  “Clayton Fisher was here?” I thought he wasn’t going to come in to report this until at least after the meeting at the inn tonight. Why did he do this prematurely? I’m caught off balance here, unsure what to say or where to head with this. “You know who I am?”

  “Yes, he was, and yes, I know.” She nods, a quick, furious jerk of her head up and down. I needn’t worry about where this is going; it looks as if she’s going to take charge of that, and most vehemently. “You listen to me. I don’t care who the hell these white people think they used to be in this town.” She leans toward me, shaking a finger at me. “That doesn’t give them a right to go accusing Mr. Hubert and Miss Rachel of any thing, much less anything like you’re talking about—”

  “I’m not—”

  “Well, somebody is. And what I hear is that you gave them some information made them jump to this ignorant conclusion. You ever met Mr. Hubert and Miss Rachel?”

  “Yes.”

  “They strike you like people could ever do such a thing?”

  I shake my head and tell the truth. “No.”

  “Me, neither. And I’ve known them all my life. You got some proof you didn’t make this whole story up?”

  “No, but I didn’t make it up.”

  “Who you get it from then?”

  That’s the part, the whole truth, that I didn’t tell the couples at the party last night. I just told them I received it anonymously. But now I tell this resentful cop the rest of it. “I’ve been receiving threatening E-mails. That information was included in one of them.”

  “Who’s threatening you?” She looks highly skeptical.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the threat?”

  “To kill me, to hurt my friends if I don’t do what he tells me.”

  “What’s he say you have to do.”

  “Write a book about my own murder.”

  She blinks. “I thought I’d heard everything.”

  “Me, too,” I confess. “Listen, can we just talk? Without accusing anybody of anything? Can we just talk?”

  After staring at me while I hold her gaze, she finally, with every show of reluctance, says, “I guess.”

  “Just because they didn’t get arrested that night,” she says, after she has heard it all, “that don’t mean nothin’.”

  Her name, I have finally found out, is Florence Sachem, but that’s all the personal information she gives out, except for the earlier comment, when she said she’s known the Templetons all her life. From that, I take it she’s a local girl, and she knows these locals—at least the black ones—well, or thinks she does. She and I are not any better friends at the end of my recital than we were at the start of it, but at least she’s listening and thinking about what she’s hearing from me.

  “But why wouldn’t they?” I ask her. “All the other—”

  “Yeah. Every damn one of the other black members of Hostel paid dear for it, and they even threw in a few nonmembers just because they could. But I’ll tell you why Hubert and Rachel probably didn’t, and maybe you’d have to be more southern than you are to understand this. Even then, they were well respected around here. Hell, between them, they worked for practically every big white family in town, Hubert doing errands and yards, Rachel working in their houses, taking care of their children.”

  “But she was so young—”

  Florence gives me a disgusted look. “Think. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and suppose in my mind that you know a little black history. Black girls went to work in people’s homes when they were practically babies. Seven, eight years old, they could sweep a broom. Rachel, she must have been no more than twenty when this all happened, but that would have meant she’d been working for twelve, fifteen years already. She came from a good family, everybody knew that. Hubert, he didn’t, but he had a way about him—you’ve met him, you know this—that people liked, no matter what their color was. I think the truth is, not even the crackers had the stomach for putting Hubert and Rachel in prison. I mean, hell, their wives would of give them hell for doin’ that. It would have meant losing the best yard boy”—she says it with a bitter twist to her mouth—“in town, and the best lady’s maid, too. You see what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Just like you don’t prove anything,” she snaps right back at me.

  There’s a crackle of static from their police radio behind us, and she holds up a hand to listen. All I hear is a jumble of numbers. As long as I’ve been hanging around cops, I never have memorized their codes, so I don’t know what this message says that makes her suddenly stand up and look dismissively at me.

  “Accident out on 65 south.”

  “Highway 65, to Birmingham?”

  “Yeah, I gotta go, but you listen up. I am not, repeat not, goin’ to tolerate this kind of slander on the names of those fine people, so you can just forget—”

  A sense of foreboding makes me interrupt her.

  “Do you know what kind of vehicles were involved?”

  “Didn’t you hear it?” She’s disdainful of me as she adjusts the gun belt at her hips and grabs a notebook off her desk. “One car wreck. Nice new Lexus. Totaled. Driver thrown from the car, got a life flight called from Birmingham.”

  I stand up, feeling my face drain of blood.

  “Where will they take him?”

  “Him?” She stops for an instant, looks at me curiously. “You think you know these people?”

  “It’s just one
person. The driver. A friend who came down with me.”

  She frowns and almost looks sympathetic. “I’m sorry to hear it.” And then she relents. “You can come with me, if you want to.”

  With my heart in my throat, making speech impossible, I can’t even thank her for that small favor.

  I ride with the deputy, forty-five miles south of town. This is a beautiful stretch of road. Ahead of us, an overpass connects the hills. Thick forest lines the road on either side. Trees arch overhead and thick bushes fill the spaces in between. From both directions, the highway curves toward the overpass, which is situated right where you might not be able to see it until you were directly on it. Driving here, we passed two signs warning of this curve, this danger. But if you were coming too fast, if you were reaching down for a dropped cigarette, if you had only turned your head to tell the kids in the backseat to settle down, you might miss the warnings, speed into the curve, and trying to correct too late, skid off into the cement pilings.

  Even from here, I can see the wreck is a terrible one.

  There are brake marks—thick black slashes—but they’re not long ones.

  Judging from those, he didn’t have much time to react. And the truth is, he hadn’t been driving all that long, certainly not compared to other men his age. When they were getting their first driver’s licenses and their first cars, when they were surviving the usual fender benders that some teenage boys collect like other kids collect stamps, Steve was in prison. In the space between one prison sentence and the next, he did learn to drive. But then it was years later—and not very long ago—that he actually got to do it like a normal citizen. Maybe he knew how to come out of a skid, and maybe he didn’t. Or maybe there wasn’t time, even if he had known.

  He drove the Lexus into the concrete post supporting the underpass.

  It must have happened fast; it looks as if it did.

  If anything saved him—and I don’t know for sure yet that it did—it will be that he went in crooked, grazing the cement with only the passenger side of the vehicle. That entire side of the car is caved in, very nearly sliced off. The driver’s side is as intact as if it had just come off the showroom floor, although the driver’s side door is wide open, as if it’s waiting for somebody to step in to give it a test drive. Even though that side doesn’t have a scratch, the impact must still have thrown the driver about like a rag doll, even if he was wearing a seat belt. I’ve been in a car a few times with Steve by now and I don’t remember that he ever belted himself in. If he was thrown out of the Lexus, as Florence told me he was, it’s hard to imagine how he even survived.