Chapter Thirty-Two
With Diana close behind, Jessica trudges through the parking lot and around a cluster of beat-up garbage cans to the rear of the bar.
She selects a plastic crate from a stack along the chain-link fence and drops it next to the back door, where it clatters to the ground.
She sits, stretching her legs out onto the gravel, and lights up a cigarette.
“I gave up drugs and alcohol, but I can’t quit cigarettes. I’ve tried, believe me.”
The air here smells musty and pungent, making Diana gag. Thinking wistfully of their scarred wooden table inside Fiona’s, she grabs a crate and places it next to Jessica, away from the smoke but close enough to hear.
After Jessica takes a long drag and exhales, she addresses Diana. “Why did you want to talk to me?”
“Tom left me a letter to read after his death, and in it, he says he did something criminal, something terrible,” Diana says, impressed with her ability to keep her voice steady. “I think it’s connected to Grace and William’s fire and that you have the details.”
Jessica removes her cigarette from her lips. “So he wrote you a letter.”
Diana straightens, her body in a tight line. “You know about the letter?”
Jessica taps ash onto the ground, barely missing her foot. “Like I said, Tom didn’t really talk about you. There was one time when he said he’d tried to tell you all of this but couldn’t do it. A letter, I said. Write her a letter.”
Since finding that letter, Diana has pictured so many scenarios about her husband’s past; that he had a secret relationship with Jessica, and followed her advice, wasn’t one of them.
This startling truth chisels its way through her protective outer shell, cutting into the soft parts she tries to protect.
She presses her fingernails into her palm to keep from lashing out, and her skin puckers under the pressure, dark-red half-moons arcing along her lifeline.
“When did you tell him this? How often did you see him?”
Jessica glances across the trash cans and back toward the front of the bar, shame coloring her cheeks. “We met up every couple of months. It started when we bumped into each other in the courthouse.”
“You met every couple of months? For thirteen years?” Diana is certain she’s going to vomit.
The heat, the trash smells, the cigarette smoke, Jessica telling her she and Tom were in touch all this time—it’s too much.
To avoid thinking about the bile burning her esophagus, Diana imagines leaving this place.
She sees herself jump up and race to her car, jamming the key in the ignition and driving far away.
She feels the weight of her keys in her hand and the pressure of her foot on the gas pedal.
“I told him to tell you about me,” Jessica says defensively, interrupting Diana’s daydream.
Diana tries a new tactic, putting aside Jessica and Tom’s relationship for the moment. “I saw Grace. She hasn’t been able to move on from William’s death. She can’t get resolution without you, Jessica.”
At Grace’s name, a noise comes out of Jessica that sounds like glass shattering, abrupt and stinging. The sobs that follow are aching and full of hurt.
I’m close, Diana thinks. I’m almost there. She removes tissues from her purse and gently lays the packet onto Jessica’s knee. “Please tell me what you know.”
Several minutes pass before Jessica speaks.
“My parents sent me to my aunt and uncle that summer because they didn’t want me around my younger brothers and sisters.
I was trouble, they said.” Her raspy voice grows brittle.
“I could tell by the way Grace and William talked to me, the questions they asked, that they thought I was trouble, too. They wouldn’t have liked it if Tom and I were involved.
They would have been afraid a relationship with me would mess him up. ”
Jessica scrubs at her eyes, and makeup streaks across her cheeks.
Her cigarette is forgotten, crushed under her shoe.
“So I slept with him. Our first time was in the hayloft in the barn. He kept asking if I was sure. Didn’t I want to wait to go someplace nice?
I didn’t care. I wanted to make a point.
Not to Tom. To my parents, to everyone.”
Jessica grips her knees, knocking Diana’s tissues to the ground.
“It’s the kind of stupid stuff you do when you’re sixteen.
If my parents or Grace and William had known, so what?
I did exactly what they thought I would do: seduce the good boy everybody loved.
A self-fulfilling prophecy, that’s all I was then. Maybe still am.”
She returns to tapping her cigarette pack against her wrist, putting a dull thud behind her words.
“When we were done with our chores, we’d meet up in the hayloft, or Tom would take me for walks in the woods.
We’d lie by the apple trees and talk about where we wanted to travel, what we dreamed about.
No one ever listened to me like he did.”
Diana’s fingers locate her wedding and engagement rings on the chain around her neck, the jewelry warm and reassuring against her damp skin.
Jessica lights another cigarette, the smoke curling in the air. “There was this one day when Tom said he wanted to plan a romantic evening for me because I was special. He said that: I was special.”
Had Tom loved Jessica? Had he hoped for a future with her? There are so many questions to which Diana will never have answers.
“My parents called as I was heading out to meet him. I was still mad they’d sent me to Hamilton, and I’d been avoiding them.
Grace didn’t like that we weren’t getting along and made me get on the phone.
I don’t remember what we talked about, probably nothing important.
The call made me late to meet Tom. I was worried he’d left, but I found him outside the barn, waiting for me.
” Jessica smiles then, a woman remembering a teenage girl’s joy.
“He grabbed me by the hand, and we ran through the apple trees to a pond, in the woods about a mile from the farm.”
The plastic crate presses against Diana’s buttocks and thighs, and a trail of sweat slides between her breasts.
“He’d brought me there before to swim and look at the stars.
He’d have a backpack with beer and a map of the night sky.
” Jessica doesn’t say the pond was where they met to have sex, but the way she pauses when she speaks, as if she’s editing herself, makes Diana believe they had.
“We’d sit by the water and drink while he pointed out constellations I’d never heard of before.
He’d tell me about the stories behind each one.
The princesses and heroes and the gods who turned them into stars. ”
Diana sees Jessica and Tom lose track of time out there in the woods, the cool water lapping against their bodies.
When they climb out of the watering hole, their feet squish in the swampy grass along the edge, and heat swirls over their skin.
With their hair dripping wet down their backs, Tom kisses Jessica, an ardent embrace that engulfs Diana with envy.
“I loved that spot,” Jessica continues. “I hated the pond, though. There were these plants that grew at the bottom and snagged your legs as you swam. I didn’t tell Tom they bothered me; I wanted him to like me, so I always followed him in.
I’d stay at the surface and float along until he was ready to get out. ”
“What does this have to do with the fire?” Diana is hesitant to interrupt this memory, but she’s concerned Jessica is drifting into sentimentality.
“Like I said, Grace and William didn’t know we were dating. Sneaking around made our relationship more exciting for Tom, I think. That’s why he waited for me in the barn while I was on the phone with my parents instead of knocking on the door.
“All these years, I’ve thought about the ways Tom and I could have prevented what happened.
” Jessica ticks the options off on her fingers one by one.
“If I’d never gone to Hamilton that summer.
If Tom hadn’t worked for Grace and William.
If we hadn’t slept together. If we hadn’t kept our relationship a secret.
If we’d done something different that night, like go to the movies or visit his cousin at the diner.
We had so many opportunities to make different choices. ”
A list comes to Diana: How Could I Have Prevented Being Here Right Now?
I couldn’t have, she thinks. Maybe that’s one of the saddest truths of all this: Tom didn’t understand I loved him too much to let his secret go without answers.
Jessica holds her cigarette between her lips as she digs into her pockets. She produces a worn elastic hair tie and piles her curls into a tight bun. She instantly ages, giving the impression of being closer to the end of her story than to the beginning.
“We’d smoked in the barn before. It drove William crazy, but we knew how to safely put out the cigarette and stick the butt in the back pocket of our jeans so there wouldn’t be any evidence.
That night, though, Tom wasn’t as cautious as he should have been.
” She jumps up to kick stones against the trash cans and pace across the small space.
“Tom’s cigarette started the fire. He didn’t mean for it to happen, but it made him responsible.
Me too. I was the one who first smoked in the barn and got him to do it.
That’s what he couldn’t tell you. That people died because of him. Because of us.”
I owe it to you to tell you the kind of man I really was, Tom wrote.
Diana fights the instinct to collapse. Her body is heavy, and she struggles from the burden of staying upright, her head dipping down, and her shoulders curving inward. When she found Tom’s letter, she described it as a storm, splintering her into pieces. How right she’d been in that description.
Jessica stops in front of Diana, her hands out, her cigarette dangling between her fingers. “So, Tom’s wife, is this what you wanted?”
“I wanted the truth,” Diana says softly. “Is this it?”
“Yes, it’s the truth,” Jessica sneers, her bloodshot eyes narrowing. “You don’t believe me? You know, I didn’t have to come here and talk to you.”
Jessica wants Diana to attack, to distract her from the pain she’s carried all these years. To do that, though, will only make Jessica walk away, and Diana isn’t done asking questions.
“You’re right.” Diana keeps her voice calm and forces herself to sit up. “You could have ignored me, though I would have kept looking for you.”
“I heard those voicemails you left my parents. It sounded like you wouldn’t give up. That’s one reason why I’m here.”
“What’s the other reason? Or reasons? There must be more, or else why were you following me around?”
“I wasn’t following you around.”
Diana can’t help it, but she rolls her eyes. “Coming to my son’s basketball game and driving by my house in the middle of the night? Breaking into my house? What else would you call it? Maybe ‘stalking’ is a better word?”
“I just . . . I just wanted to understand his life. If I saw where he lived and heard his voice, maybe he wasn’t really gone.”
“His voice?” Diana inhales sharply. “Oh my God, I am so stupid not to put all of this together. You’re the one who’s been calling my house. Those hang-ups are you.”
“It was the only way I could hear him,” Jessica says, her voice cracking.
“It started when I was in rehab, after Tom died. I’d gotten rid of my phone so I wouldn’t be tempted to call any of my old friends.
There was a pay phone for patients to use, and I’d call your answering machine to hear him say hello.
It felt like he was talking to me. When I got back home, I kept calling.
” Jessica looks down at her feet, averting her eyes from Diana. “I loved him, too.”
Diana bites her lip so she won’t react to Jessica’s declaration of love for her husband.
She focuses instead on sorting through everything Jessica has told her so far.
It’s terrible, enough to fuel years of anguish, yet the story, she intuits, is incomplete.
The rest is hiding along the edge of Jessica’s words, shadowed and disguised.
“That’s why you took the photo. Not because my children were in it, but because he was.”
Jessica nods.
“But you’re holding something back, aren’t you?” Diana says, at first speaking hesitantly, and then with more confidence. Her question is directed to Jessica, but really, it’s for Tom, wherever he is. “I need you to tell me all of it. Go all the way, Jessica. No more hiding.”