Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

“Speaking for me,” Adam assured her, “I think you’re pretty okay now.”

He expected that this compliment would please her. Instead, she answered seriously, “You’re the okay one, Adam. There’s something real at your core that no one will ever take from you.”

He caught something wistful in her tone, a kind of guileless envy. Then she asked, “So why do you want to spend your life defending criminals?”

Adam watched an osprey fly low across the water. “Who says they’re all criminals?” he parried. “Some might actually be innocent. Others may need someone to explain them. There are reasons why we become the way we are, which often aren’t apparent on the surface of our lives.” He paused, then added gently, “You’ve told me that your father drank too much, and that your mother worked too hard to be around. But I don’t know how that affected you, and it matters quite a lot to me. Because you matter to me.”

Jenny’s expression turned opaque. “It’s all I know. So I don’t think about it much.”

“Your father vanished, Jenny. Wasn’t that important to you?”

“No,” she answered coolly. “It’s only important that he’s gone.”

This was so unlike her that, too late, Adam sensed the wall between them. “My modest point,” he temporized, “is that most people have hidden stories. A defense lawyer has to tell them in a sympathetic way.”

“Even if they’re murderers or rapists?”

“Even then.”

Jenny fell quiet, deep within herself. They paddled in silence until they reached the shore.

They beached the kayak, and Adam led her through the trees into a grassy clearing dappled with sunlight. Spreading a blanket, he laid out the picnic he had prepared. “How did you find this place?” she asked.

“Teddy and I found it together. When we wanted to get away, we’d paddle over here with food or books to read. Sometimes we’d camp out for the night, looking up at the night sky, listening to the wind stir the leaves and branches.”

“It sounds peaceful.”

Especially for Teddy, Adam thought. For his brother, this glade was more than a refuge from Benjamin Blaine. Adam still remembered the day Teddy had discovered it. One of the joys of painting, his brother had enthused, is that you can be out in the world and suddenly find yourself looking at something, the image you might create growing in your mind’s eye-at those moments life becomes art, and nothing is wasted. Listening, Adam saw the world as Teddy did. When Teddy painted the glade, he gave the painting to Adam.

“It was,” he told Jenny. “We both loved it here.”

Jenny smiled. “So do I.”

At the bottom of the cooler was a bottle of chardonnay. “A little wine?” he asked.

“Just mineral water, thanks.” She hesitated, then gave him a tentative look. “I’ve started taking meds that wouldn’t mix too well with wine. A good thing, probably. Alcohol hits me too fast, and I like it too much.”

She was on antidepressants, he guessed, though perhaps her fear of alcohol came from her father. “Then I won’t drink either,” he told her.

They shared the picnic in companionable silence, Adam letting Jenny’s thoughts drift where they would. After a while she took his hand, her fingers interlaced with his. “You’re the only person who ever lets me do this.”

“What, exactly?”

She looked into his eyes. “Sometimes I need to be alone. You let me be alone with you.”

For Adam, there was a world of meaning concealed in those few words. Smiling a little, he said, “I just like being with you. Even when you’re alone.”

A new and palpable affection surfaced in her eyes. She leaned over to kiss him, her mouth soft and warm, then leaned her forehead against his. Quietly, she asked, “Would you like to make love with me?”

Taken by surprise, Adam felt a tightness in his throat. “Yes.”

Wordless, she stood in front of him, eyes locking his. She took off her sweater, then her bra, the nipples rising on her small, perfect breasts. Transfixed, Adam watched her step out of her jeans, then lower her panties, exposing the light brown tuft between her slender legs. Then she turned around to show him everything before facing him again.

“Do you like me, Adam?”

He could not seem to move. “Even more than I imagined.”

“Then why are you still dressed?”

He stood, peeling off his clothes, his desire for her written on every fiber of his body. She kissed him deeply, then knelt to take him into her mouth. “Not that,” he murmured. “It’s you I want.”

“Then lie down,” she said in a husky voice.

He lay on his back. With silent urgency, Jenny mounted him, eyes closing as she took him inside her body. As she began to move with him, her face went rigid, almost blank. Their rhythm quickened, drawing soft cries from inside her. When she cried out more fiercely, her body shuddering, Adam saw tears at the corners of her eyes. Then, all at once, he was beyond wondering why.

When they were spent, Jenny searched his face again, as though rediscovering its features. “Just hold me,” she whispered.

Filled with tenderness and questions, Adam did that.

Breaking off this memory, Adam knocked on the door of the guesthouse. “Come on in,” a mordant voice said. “Whoever you are, you can’t be my father.”

Adam stepped inside. Though his brother sat in front of a canvas, for a moment Adam saw neither Teddy nor his surroundings. “What’s wrong, bro?” Teddy asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

At once, Adam shook off the illusion of having stepped into the past. “It’s just that I haven’t been here for so long. The last time I saw this room it wasn’t an artist’s studio.”

That much was true. When Teddy, like Jack, had returned to the island, Clarice had pled with Ben to make the guesthouse Teddy’s home. The front room had become his place of work, with painting supplies, an easel, and several half-finished canvases awaiting the artist’s touch. Teddy had turned from the easel, his normally grave features displaying the engaging smile he reserved for those he cared for. Sitting on the sofa, Adam said simply, “I’m sorry about all this.”

Teddy gave him a look that mingled affection and directness. “Not your fault. I know you always felt like it was, somehow. But the only one to blame is him.”

Adam felt himself relax. Within their family, he realized, his relationship with Teddy was a respite, unalloyed by his own complex feelings for his mother and his loathing for the father he too closely resembled. “Did you have any idea he’d do this, Ted?”

Teddy’s face hardened. “Why would I? He’d written me off when he was still alive. He just decided to save the coup de grace for after he was gone.”

“That could have been years from now,” Adam objected. “Dad was the last man who could imagine his own death. Why change his will so soon?”

In the light from above, focused on Teddy’s easel, Adam saw a grim smile play on his brother’s lips. “Don’t ask me to explain the workings of his mind. Whatever they were, he timed his departure quite badly. I’m destitute.”

“Literally?”

Teddy considered him, his left elbow propped on his knee, his face resting in his palm. “Why do you think I came back? Nostalgia? Once I got lymphoma, I hit the financial wall-I was too sick to work, my old paintings stopped selling, and I was all but uninsured. Then Brian died. In a few months, my life had become the train wreck Dad had always predicted. Mom wheedled the money from him for my treatment, then this ‘safe haven’ in which to recuperate-”

“But you’re all right now, true?”