“Except her hair was black.”
“Because she went to the beauty parlor.” Sam ran her hand through her hair. Her fingertips tripped over the furrow where the bullet had gone in. She said, “There was a Latin American study conducted by the University College of London that isolated the gene that causes gray hair. IRF4.”
“Fascinating,” Charlie said. Her arms were crossed. Should they hug? Should they shake hands? Should they stand here staring at one another until Sam’s leg fell out from under her?
Sam asked, “What happened to your face?”
“What indeed?”
Sam waited for Charlie to acknowledge the bruises around her eyes, the nasty bump in her nose, but as usual, her sister did not seem inclined to explain herself.
“Sam?” Ben broke the awkward moment. He threw his arms around Sam, his hands firm on her back in a way that no one had held her since Anton had died.
She felt tears in her eyes. She saw Charlie watching and looked away.
“Rusty’s condition is stable,” Charlie said. “He’s been in and out of it all morning, but they think he’ll wake up soon.”
Ben kept his hand at Sam’s back. He told her, “You look exactly the same.”
“Thank you,” Sam mumbled, self-conscious.
“The sheriff’s supposed to come by,” Charlie said. “Keith Coin. You remember that dipshit?”
Sam did.
“They made some bullshit statement about using all their resources to find whoever stabbed Rusty, but don’t hold your breath.” She kept her arms tightly crossed over her chest. Same prickly, cocksure Charlie. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of his deputies.”
“He’s representing this girl,” Sam said. “The school shooter.”
“Kelly Wilson,” Charlie said. “I’ll spare you the long, tedious story.”
Sam wondered at her choice of adjectives. Two people had been shot dead. Rusty had been stabbed. There did not seem to be an aspect to the story that was either too long or in any way tedious, but Sam reminded herself that she was not here to find out details.
She was here because of the email.
Sam asked Ben, “Could you give us a moment?”
“Of course.” Ben’s hand lingered at her back, and she realized that the gesture was because of her handicap, not out of a particular affection.
Sam stiffened. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“I know.” Ben rubbed her back. “I’ve gotta go to work. I’m around if you need me.”
Charlie reached for his hand, but Ben had already turned to leave.
The automatic doors swung closed behind him. Sam watched his easy, loping gait through the windows. She waited for him to turn the corner. She hooked the cane on her arm. She motioned for Charlie to continue up the hallway to a row of plastic chairs.
Charlie went first, her feet pushing off from the floor with her usual physical confidence. Sam’s stride was more tenuous. Without the cane, she felt as if she was walking the slanted floor of a fun house. Still, she made it to the chair. She put her hand flat to the seat and eased herself down.
She said, “What Rusty this cause.”
Sam’s eyes closed as the jumbled words reached her ears.
She said, “I mean—”
“They think it’s because he’s representing Kelly Wilson,” Charlie said. “Someone in town isn’t happy about it. We can rule out Judith Heller. She was here all night. She married Mr. Pinkman twenty-five years ago. Weird, right?”
Sam only trusted herself to nod.
“So, that leaves the Alexander family.” Charlie quietly tapped her foot on the floor. Sam had forgotten that her sister could be as fidgety as Rusty. “There’s no relation to Peter. You remember Peter from high school, right?”
Sam nodded again, trying not to chastise Charlie for falling back into her old habit of ending every sentence with the word “right,” as if she wanted to eradicate the linguistic burden of Sam having to provide anything other than a nod or shake of the head.
Charlie said, “Peter moved to Atlanta, but he was hit by a car a few years ago. I read it on somebody’s Facebook page. Sad, right?”
Sam nodded a third time, feeling an unexpected pang of loss at the news.
Charlie said, “There’s another case Daddy was working on. I’m not sure who it involves, but he’s been late more than usual. Lenore won’t tell me. He annoys the shit out of her as much as anybody, but she keeps his secrets.”
Sam’s eyebrows went up.
“I know, right? How has she worked with him this long without killing him?” She gave a sudden laugh. “In case you’re wondering, she was at home when Daddy was stabbed.”
“Where?” Sam asked. She meant where was home for Lenore, but Charlie took the question differently.
“Mr. Thomas, the guy who lives down the street, found him at the end of the driveway. There wasn’t a lot of visible blood except for a cut on his leg and some on his shirt. He bled mostly inside his abdomen. I guess that’s how it is with those types of wounds.” She pointed to her own belly. “Here, here and here. Like they shiv you in prison—pop-pop-pop—which is why I think it might be related to this other case. Daddy has a way of pissing off convicts.”
“No shit,” Sam said, a crude but accurate consilience.
“Maybe you can get some information out of her?” Charlie stood up as the doors opened. She had obviously seen Lenore through the windows.
Sam saw her, too. She felt her mouth gape open.
“Samantha,” Lenore said, her husky voice as familiar from Sam’s childhood as the ringing of the kitchen phone announcing that Rusty would be late. “I’m sure your father will appreciate your being here. Was the flight okay?”
Sam was again reduced to nodding, this time by shock.
Lenore said, “I’m assuming you two are talking as if nothing ever happened and everything is fine?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll go check on your father.”
She squeezed Charlie’s shoulder before continuing up the hall. Sam watched Lenore tuck a dark blue clutch under her arm as she approached the nurses’ station. She was wearing navy heels and a short matching skirt that hit too far above her knee.
Charlie said, “You didn’t know, did you?”
“That she was—” Sam struggled for the correct words. “That—I mean, that she was—”
Charlie had her hand over her mouth. She shook with laughter.
“This isn’t funny,” Sam said.
Trapped air sputtered around Charlie’s hand.
“Stop it. You’re being disrespectful.”
“Only to you,” Charlie said.
“I can’t believe—” Sam couldn’t finish the thought.
“You were always too smart to know how stupid you are.” Charlie could not stop smiling. “You really never put it together that Lenore’s transgender?”
Sam returned to shaking her head. Her life in Pikeville had been sheltered, but Lenore’s gender identity seemed self-evident. How had Sam missed that Lenore had been born a man? The woman was at least six-three. Her voice was deeper than Rusty’s.
“Leonard,” Charlie said. “He was Dad’s best friend in college.”
“Gamma hated her.” Sam turned to Charlie, alarmed by a thought. “Was Mom transphobic?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so. She dated Lenny first. They almost got married. I think she was mad about the …” Charlie’s voice trailed off, because the blanks were easy to fill in. She said, “Gamma found out that Lenore was wearing some of her clothes. She wouldn’t say which, but you know the first thing that came to mind when she told me was that it was her underwear. Lenore told me, I mean. Gamma never talked about it with me. You really didn’t figure it out?”
Again, Sam could only shake her head. “I thought that Gamma thought they were having an affair.”
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Charlie said. “Rusty, I mean. I wouldn’t wish—”
“Girls??
?? Lenore’s heels clicked against the tiles as she walked back toward them. “He’s lucid, at least for Rusty. They say only two visitors at a time.”
Charlie stood up quickly. She offered her arm to Sam.
Sam leaned heavily on her cane and pushed herself up. She was not going to let these people treat her like an invalid. “When will we be able to speak with his doctors?”
“They make their rounds in another hour,” Lenore said. “Do you remember Melissa LaMarche from Mr. Pendleton’s class?”
“Yes,” Sam said, though she didn’t know why Lenore remembered the names of one of Sam’s friends and a teacher from high school.
“She’s Dr. LaMarche now. She operated on Rusty last night.”
Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Father.
She had not attached that word to Rusty in years.
“You go first,” Charlie told Lenore. Her eagerness to see Rusty had visibly dissipated. She stopped in front of a row of large windows. “Sam and I will go in after.”
Lenore left them in silence.
At first, Charlie let the silence linger. She walked to the windows. She looked down at the parking lot. “Now’s your chance.”
To leave, she meant. Before Rusty had seen her. Before Sam got sucked back into this world again.
Sam asked, “Did you really need me here? Or was that Ben?”
“It was me, and Ben was nice enough to reach out because I couldn’t, or couldn’t bring myself to, but I thought that Dad was going to die.” She leaned her forehead against the glass. “He had a heart attack two years ago. The one before that was mild, but this last one, he needed bypass surgery, and there were complications.”
Sam said nothing. She had been left in the dark about Rusty’s apparent heart condition. He had never missed a phone call. For all Sam knew, he had remained healthy all these years.
“I had to make a decision,” Charlie said. “At one point, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and I had to make the decision whether or not to put him on life support.”
“He doesn’t have a DNR?” Sam asked. The Do Not Resuscitate form, which specified whether or not a person wanted a natural death or CPR and cardiac support, was commonly drawn up alongside a will.
Sam saw the problem before Charlie could answer. “Rusty doesn’t have a will.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Charlie turned around, her back against the window. “I made the right choice, obviously. I mean, it’s obvious now, because he lived and he was fine, but this time, when Melissa came out during surgery and said that they were having trouble getting the bleeding under control, and that his heartbeat was erratic, and that I might have to make the decision whether or not to take life-saving—”
“You wanted me here to kill him.”
Charlie looked alarmed, but not because of Sam’s bluntness. It was her tone, the hint of anger bubbling up around the words. She told Sam, “If you’re going to get mad about this, we should go outside.”
“So the reporters can hear?”
“Sam.” Charlie looked anxious, as if she was watching the clock on a nuclear warhead start to tick down. “Let’s go outside.”
Sam squeezed her hands into fists. She could feel the longforgotten darkness stirring inside of her. She took a deep breath, then another, then another until it folded itself back into a tight ball inside her chest.
She told her sister, “You have no idea, Charlotte, how wrong you are about my willingness or capacity to end someone’s life.”
Sam tilted against her cane as she walked toward the nurses’ station. She glanced at the whiteboard behind the empty desk and located Rusty’s room. She raised her hand to knock on the door, but Lenore opened it before her knuckles touched wood.
Lenore said, “I told him you were here. Wouldn’t want him to have a heart attack.”
“You mean another one,” Sam said. She did not give Lenore time to respond.
Instead, she walked into her father’s hospital room.
The air seemed too thin.
The lights were too bright.
She blinked against the headache that chewed at the back of her eyes.
Rusty’s room in the ICU was a familiar, if more economized version of the private hospital suite in which Anton had died. There was no wood paneling or deep couch or flat-screen television or private desk where Sam could work, but the machines were all the same: the beeping heart monitor, the hissing oxygen supply, the grinding sound that the blood pressure cuff made as it inflated around Rusty’s arm.
He looked much like his photograph, absent any color in his face. The camera had never been able to capture the devil’s glint in his eyes, the dimples in his rubbery cheeks.
“Sammy-Sam!” he bellowed, hacking out a cough at the end. “Come here, gal. Lemme see you up close.”
Sam did not move closer. She felt her nose wrinkle. He reeked of cigarette smoke and Old Spice, two scents that had remained blissfully absent in her everyday life.
“Damn if you don’t look like your mama.” He gave a delighted laugh. “To what does your old pappy owe this pleasure?”
Charlie suddenly appeared on Sam’s right. She knew this was Sam’s blind side. There was no telling how long she had been there. She said, “Dad, we thought that you were going to die.”
“I remain a constant disappointment to the women in my life.” Rusty scratched his chin. Under the covers, his foot tapped out a silent beat. “I am happy to see that no fresh slings and arrows have been exchanged.”
“Not so you can see.” Charlie walked around to the other side of the bed. Her arms were crossed. She did not take his hand. “Are you okay?”
“Well.” Rusty seemed to think about it. “I was stabbed. Or, in the vernacular of the streets, cut.”
“The unkindest kind.”
“Thrice in the belly, once in the leg.”
“You don’t say.”
Sam tuned out their banter. She had always been a reluctant spectator of the Rusty and Charlie show. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to eat it up. He clearly still delighted in Charlie, a literal twinkle flashing in his eye when she engaged him.
Sam looked at her watch. She could not believe only sixteen minutes had passed since she had gotten out of the car. She raised her voice over the din, asking, “Rusty, what happened?”
“What do you mean what—” He looked at his stomach. Surgical drains hung from either side of his torso. He looked back at Sam, feigning shock. “‘Oh, I am slain!’”
For once, Charlie didn’t egg him on. “Daddy, Sam has a flight back this afternoon.”
Sam was startled by the reminder. Somehow, she had momentarily let herself forget that she could leave.
Charlie said, “Come on, Dad. Tell us what happened.”
“All right, all right.” Rusty let out a low groan as he tried to sit up in bed. Sam realized that this was the first sign her father had given that he had been wounded.
“Well—” He coughed, a wet rattle shaking inside his chest. He winced from the exertion, then coughed again, then winced again, then waited to make sure it had passed.
When he was finally able, he directed his words toward Charlie, his most receptive audience. “After you dropped me at ye olde homestead, I had a bite to eat, maybe a little to drink, and then I realized that I hadn’t checked the mail.”
Sam could not think of the last time she had received mail at her home. It seemed like a ritual from another century.
Rusty continued, “I put on my walkin’ shoes and headed out. Beautiful night, last night. Partly cloudy, chance of rain this morning. Oh—” he seemed to remember that morning had passed. “Did it rain?”
“Yes.” Charlie made a rolling motion with her hand, indicating he should speed up the story. “Did you see who did it?”
Rusty coughed again. “That is a complicated questi
on with an equally complicated answer.”
Charlie waited. They both waited.
Rusty said, “All right, so, I walked to the mailbox to check my mail. Beautiful night. Moon high up in the sky. The driveway was giving off warmth saved up from the sun. Paints a picture, don’t it?”
Sam felt herself nodding along with Charlie, as if thirty years had not passed and they were both little girls listening to one of their father’s stories.
He seemed to relish the attention. Some color came back into his cheeks. “I came around the bend, and I heard something up above me, so I was looking up for that bird. Remember I told you about the hawk, Charlotte?”
Charlie nodded.
“Thought the old fella got himself a chipmunk again, but then—Shazam!” He clapped together his hands. “I feel this hot pain in my leg.”
Sam felt her cheeks redden. Like Charlie, she had jumped at the clap.
Rusty said, “I look down, and I have to twist around to see what’s wrong, and that’s when I spot it. There’s a big ol’ hunting knife sticking out of the back of my thigh.”
Sam put her hand to her mouth.
Rusty said, “So there’s me hitting the ground like a rock dropping into the water, because it hurts to have a knife stuck in the back of your thigh. And then I see this fella comes up, and he starts kicking me. Just kicking me and kicking me—in the arm, the ribs, the head. And mail is everywhere, but the point is, I’m trying to stand up, and I still got this knife in the back of my thigh. So the fella, he makes this one last kick at my head and I grab onto his leg with both arms and punch him in the hokey-pokey.”
Sam felt her heart pounding in her throat. She knew what it was like to fight for your life.
“Then we struggle a little bit more, him hopping around ’cause I’ve got his leg, me trying to stay upright, and the fella seems to remember that knife’s in my leg. So he grabs it, just yanks it out, and starts stabbing me in my belly.” Rusty made a stabbing, twisting motion with his hand. “We’re both tired out after this. Plumb tuckered. I’m limping away from him, holding in my own guts. He’s standing there. I’m wondering can I make it back to the house, call the police, and then I see him pull out a gun.”