Greg Iles - Blood Memory

In some people, the pain of living minute to minute simply grows so acute that they can finally stand to look into the face of death without blinking-even look at death as a friend-and cross that river Dr. Malik talked about without a backward glance. For me, even though I’ve crawled right up to the black rim of suicide, pain has always been preferable to the void.

Until now…

There’s a light on in Michael’s house. That alone draws me past the pool and up to the French doors at the back of the house. Suddenly I’m banging on the glass, banging hard, and the pain shooting up to my elbow doesn’t stop me, but only reminds me that I’m alive. I see movement inside, and then Michael is hurrying to the door, his face all concern. Before he can speak, I throw my arms around his neck, stand on tiptoe, and hug him as tightly as I can.

“Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” he asks. “What happened? Did you and your mother have an argument?”

I want to answer, but my chest is heaving against him in great racking sobs that make my whole body shudder. I killed my father! I scream, but nothing comes from my throat.

“Calm down,” Michael says, stroking my hair. “Whatever it is, we can deal with it.”

I shake my head violently, staring at him through a screen of tears.

“You’ve got to tell me what happened, Cat.”

This time my mouth forms the words, but again no sound emerges. Then, like a distraught child, I manage to stammer out the truth. Michael’s eyes go wide for an instant, but then he pulls me tight against him. “Your grandfather told you that?”

I nod into his chest.

“Did he give you any proof?”

I shake my head. “But I feel it…the minute he said it, I felt I’d finally heard the truth. Only…”

“What?” asks Michael.

“I was eight years old. Could I really have shot my father?”

Michael sighs with deep sadness. “When I moved back to Natchez, it was autumn. And one of the first things that struck me was all the pictures in the newspaper of seven- and eight-year-olds who’d shot their first deer.”

I close my eyes in desolation.

“I thought about the possibility yesterday,” he says. “I told you that if it was your father who had molested you, it could have been Pearlie or your mother who shot him. But, yes…it could have been you. Patricide is certainly the most convincing scenario for your retreat into silence.”

What am I doing here? I wonder. Standing in the house of a man I barely know, shaking like an epileptic?

“If that is what happened,” Michael says, “if you did shoot your father, it was a clear act of self-preservation. If an eight-year-old girl was driven to the point where she had to shoot her father, no one in the world would question the rightness of her actions.”

I hear Michael’s words but they have no effect. Words cannot penetrate the wounded region of my soul. He seems to sense this. Keeping one arm tight around me, he leads me to the master bedroom, pulls back the covers, and sits me on the edge of the bed. He kneels and removes my shoes, then stretches me out on the bed and pulls the covers up to my neck.

“Don’t move from this spot. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He vanishes, leaving me in the cool, dry darkness of his airconditioned bedroom. I feel strangely at home here. Mr. and Mrs. Hemmeter slept in this room for more than thirty years. They loved me like a daughter, and something of their spirits must remain.

Michael reappears beside the bed, a glass of water in his hand.

“This is a Lorcet Plus. It’ll take the edge off.”

I take the white pill from his hand and pop it into my mouth, but as the glass touches my lips, I realize I’m making a terrible mistake. I spit out the pill and put it on the bedside table.

“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.

“I can’t take this.”

“Are you allergic to hydrocodone?”

I look up into his concerned eyes, wishing I didn’t have to tell him the truth. Why has he done all this for me? He’s disrupted his entire life to help me. There’s got to be a reason for that. But I can’t lie to him anymore. Not even by omission.

“I’m pregnant,” I tell him, my eyes never leaving his.

He doesn’t flinch the way my mother did when I mentioned my father’s mistress, but something changes behind his eyes. The warmth slowly dissipates into a cool and wary look.

“Who’s the father? The married detective?”

“Yes.”

He stares silently at me for a few moments. “I’ll make you some tea instead,” he says awkwardly. “Decaf.” He turns and walks quickly to the door.

“Michael, wait!”

He turns and looks back, his face pale, his eyes confused.

“I didn’t want this,” I tell him. “It wasn’t planned or anything. But I’m not going to terminate it. I should have told you before now, I guess, but I was so embarrassed. I didn’t want you to think badly of me. But now…with everything else you know, it’s absurd to hold anything back.” My next words take more courage than swimming into the middle of the Mississippi River. “If you want me to go, I’ll understand.”

He only stares at me, his eyes unreadable.

“I’ll get the tea,” he says finally.

I never got the tea. I never took the Lorcet either, but exhaustion gave me that most precious of gifts-dreamless sleep. When Michael woke me a few minutes ago, the clock beside the bed read 11:30 P.M. I felt neither rested nor tired.

I felt numb.

The room is all shadows now, cast by the spill from the bathroom light. Michael has pulled a chair up beside the bed. He’s watching me as he might a patient in the ICU. At least he hasn’t asked me how I feel.

“What do you want to do?” he says.

“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”

“Go back to sleep. See how you feel in the morning. I’ll stay in one of the guest rooms upstairs. If you need me, you can call my cell phone.”

“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even blink.

“I’m not trying to make a pass or anything,” I tell him. “I just don’t think I should be by myself right now. You know?”

He cocks one eyebrow at me. “That’s the first time a woman ever threatened to kill herself if I didn’t sleep with her.”

I’d like to laugh, but I can’t. There’s nothing left in me. I slide across the bed and pull back the comforter. Michael stares at the blank space in the bed, then gets up and walks into his closet. When he returns, he’s wearing a pair of blue gym shorts and an Emory University T-shirt. He sits on the edge of the bed and sets the alarm clock, then slides under the covers and pulls them up to his chest.

It seems a weird parody of married life, both of us lying on our backs, staring at the ceiling as though we’ve been together twenty years and said all there was to say long ago. I expect him to talk, to probe me with questions. But he doesn’t. What does he think of me? Does he regret the moment that he walked into his backyard and picked up the net to rescue me from the bottom of his swimming pool?

Tentatively, I slide my hand over the cool sheet and take his hand in mine. There’s nothing sexual in the touch. I’m holding his hand the way I must have held my father’s long ago-before he twisted our relationship into a perverted shadow of parental love. It takes a while, but Michael squeezes my hand in return. I may be mistaken, but it feels as though he’s shaking. I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to notice, so I say nothing.

After a time, another realization hits me. Michael is hard. I know this without feeling his erection against me. It’s something about the way he’s lying, a tension in his body. This knowledge does something to me. It always has. I feel not only desire, but a sense of compulsion, even obligation. In the same way a match exists to be struck or a loaded gun to be fired, the erect penis is a potential waiting to be released. I’ve seen a loaded rifle instantly transform a roomful of men from ennui to alertness. The moment a bullet enters the chamber, the inanimate weapon takes on an almost living presence, dangerous and impossible to ignore. For me, in this moment, Michael’s penis is the same.