Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
AUGUST
The light has been slow to come back into my Lennon’s eyes.
I remember the woman from that first night so clearly. The gorgeous creature who giggled and shimmied simply because there was a hot tub, bubbles, and the sudden possibility of freedom. She’d looked at me as though she’d only just discovered she was allowed to want things.
That woman is still in there.
Some days, I catch her.
Other days, Jake’s shadow gets there first.
She has her own version of Dr. Delaney now.
They met twice a week in the beginning, when Lennon could barely sleep without jolting awake convinced someone was standing over her.
Now it’s once a week, every Thursday at ten, though her therapist has made it clear she can call if the nightmares get bad again.
The criminal case has its own schedule. A much slower one.
They’re charging Jake with aggravated assault of a family member with a deadly weapon causing serious bodily injury, a first-degree felony. More damning are the two capital murder charges for the pregnancies he knew about and continued poisoning her through.
There’s documentation that he attended the ultrasound appointments.
Pictures too.
In one, Jake stands behind Lennon with his hand resting possessively over her stomach, smiling into the camera while the grainy image of their child glows on the monitor beside them.
I saw that photograph once.
Once was enough.
Lennon is still bewildered by how he could do something so evil. She keeps looking for an explanation large enough to contain it, as though a crime that monstrous must have been committed for some equally monstrous purpose.
I suspect it was far simpler in Jake’s mind.
He wanted all of Lennon’s attention for himself.
A baby would divide that attention.
There was no demon whispering in his ear. No dark force crawling into his body and taking control of his hands.
Just a man who wanted something and convinced himself he was entitled to remove whatever stood in his way.
I know Lennon isn’t suggesting anything supernatural when she calls what he did evil. She means the ordinary human variety. But as someone who has spent much of his life being accused of having demons inside him, I find the evil in men both far more mundane and much more horrifying.
I’ve witnessed it more than once.
Men convincing themselves that cruelty is discipline and that the terrible thing they’re doing is necessary because the person they’re hurting has left them no other choice.
Those people at the troubled teen camp did it when they marched terrified teenagers through the scorching wilderness for days on end, barely feeding us.
Jake did it while poisoning his wife and unborn children.
He likely told himself he was saving his marriage.
Lennon had been quite far along in her last pregnancy.
Learning the truth has devastated her.
Not merely the truth of what he did, but the truth of her entire existence with him.
Every migraine she dismissed. Every unexplained illness.
Every time he brought her tea and sat beside the bed acting concerned.
She’s had to revisit nine years of memories and ask herself which moments were real and which were performances.
There has been a lot of sobbing.
There has also been healing.
The kittens help.
Mayhem and Goblin enter our lives after another long session with the detectives working the case.
It was a nine-year marriage, and the DA wants a bulletproof timeline of every time Lennon became ill with symptoms of poisoning, especially during her pregnancies, so they can corroborate her recollections with her medical records.
The meetings take place in a conference room at the Hays County Government Center, where the air-conditioning blows too cold and the windows don’t open. The table is always covered in folders, photocopied calendars, hospital records, and photographs Lennon can barely stand to look at.
She sits across from the detective and tries to remember whether a particular migraine began before or after Easter eight years ago.
Whether Jake made dinner the night she collapsed in the bathroom.
Whether the metallic taste in her mouth appeared during the first pregnancy or only the second.
Questions no one should ever have to answer.
She has mostly recovered from the latest poisoning physically, though she still tires more easily than she used to. The sessions exhaust her in a different way.
By the time we leave that afternoon, she moves like someone who has been hollowed out.
The late sun strikes the pale stone of the government building hard enough to make me squint. Heat rises from the car park in shimmering waves, and the inside of my truck is an oven until the air-conditioning finally begins to push out something cooler.
Lennon buckles herself in without a word.
She turns toward the window as I drive away, watching San Marcos pass in a blur of traffic lights and sun-bleached shopfronts. Her fingers remain folded too neatly in her lap.
That’s how I know she’s not all right.
Lennon is not a still person when she’s content. She taps along to music. She points out dogs hanging their heads from car windows. She reaches across the console to touch me for no other reason than that I’m there.
Today, she stares through the glass.
So I drive a few miles up the road before turning off again.
She looks over when I slow.
“Do we need gas?” Her voice is hoarse from hours of talking. “Why are we stopping?”
“You’ll see.”
It’s all I say, following the directions I entered into the navigation before we left home.
She studies me, suspicious but too tired to interrogate me properly.
Then the sign comes into view.
SAN MARCOS REGIONAL ANIMAL SHELTER.
Everything about her changes.
Her back straightens. Her mouth parts. Even the color seems to return to her face.
“August,” she breathes.
Her hand whips across the console and closes around my forearm.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“But what if Jake gets out of jail?” The brightness falters almost immediately, because even joy has to pass through the fear he left behind. “I’m only in the house temporarily. If we have to move back into the RV, there won’t be enough space for a kitty.”
“He’s never getting out of jail.”
I say it with more confidence than any man can honestly possess about the future.
Still, I believe it.
The judge set bond at two million dollars after hearing how strong the evidence was and how much danger Jake posed to Lennon. In spite of Kathy’s humiliating fundraising campaign, they came nowhere close to collecting enough to get him released.
Turns out even the most loyal family friends and church ladies have their limits.
A wife-and-fetus poisoner apparently exceeds them.
Jake will rot in county jail until trial. Afterward, God willing, he’ll spend the rest of his life behind another set of bars.
Lennon’s hand slides down my arm and into mine.
It still takes my breath away that her first instinct is to reach for me.
When she wakes from a nightmare, she reaches for me.
When grief takes her by surprise in the cereal aisle because she sees a mother holding a newborn, she reaches for me.
When she remembers something new about Jake and needs to say it aloud before it eats a hole through her, she finds my hand.
She allows me the privilege of holding her when she cries.
She trusts me to be there when she opens her eyes again.
I know hatred isn’t Christian. But I hate my motherfucking brother.
He’s fortunate he’s behind bars.
Frankly, so am I.
Because if I had the chance again, I’m not certain I could stop myself from killing him with my bare hands.
I squeeze Lennon’s fingers.
“Let’s go meet the newest member of the family, shall we?”
She looks up at me.
For the first time in weeks, her smile takes over her whole face. It’s the smile from the hot tub, the one that made me want her before I knew anything about her except that she was beautiful and sad and trying very hard not to be either.
She nods hard enough to make her hair bounce.
Then she practically launches herself out of the truck.
The moment we step inside, we’re met by barking from somewhere behind a closed door. The reception area smells faintly of disinfectant and dog biscuits, with an underlying animal warmth no amount of cleaning could completely erase.
A volunteer in a blue shirt greets us from behind the counter.
“We’re only looking,” Lennon announces.
I glance at her.
The volunteer glances at me.
Neither of us insults her by pretending to believe it.
We sign in, and a few minutes later we’re led through another door into the cat area. The noise from the dogs becomes muffled, replaced by smaller sounds: the scrape of litter, the occasional plaintive meow, a bell jingling as one kitten attacks a hanging toy.
Lennon slows as we pass the enclosures.
There are cats sleeping in hammocks, cats pressed against the glass, and cats pretending not to care that we exist, as cats do.
Naturally, she falls in love with all of them.
“That one has one eye,” she whispers.
“He appears to be managing.”
“Oh, look at the little black one. August, he has a bow tie.”
“It’s a patch of white fur.”
“It’s a bow tie.”
We reach the get-to-know-you room, where a volunteer lets several kittens out to play.
Lennon plops herself onto the floor before the woman has even finished explaining the rules.
Within seconds, she’s swamped.
The kittens can tell she has good creature energy.
I knew it too, the first time I caught a glimpse of her.
One climbs onto her thigh. Another attacks the drawstring on her blouse. A tiny tabby wedges itself between her hip and the wall, then immediately begins to purr as if Lennon is the one who has been selected for adoption.
Her grin stretches from ear to ear while little bodies tumble over her.
One kitten plants both paws against her stomach and kneads enthusiastically.
“He’s making biscuits,” Lennon says, delighted.
“I believe he’s destroying your shirt.”
“He’s helping.”
Another kitten climbs her shoulder and becomes briefly tangled in her hair.
She doesn’t care.