William Lashner - Fatal Flaw

It was shortly thereafter that the file came.

AT THEstart of the Gonzalez case I had made all the routine inquiries and received the routine answers. Gonzalez had lived for a time in Denver, so I contacted his old employer for his insurance records and used those to track down possible hospitals where he might have been treated. From those hospitals I requested any medical records they might have had on the man. I had sent out my requests, backed by threat of subpoena, before the thing with Hailey turned into what it became. And then, after everything had changed, out of the blue a package came from Denver. I closed the door and, with shaking hands, I opened it. It was Juan Gonzalez’s medical file with a copy of my request inside. He’d had pains in his head, there was a scan taken, they had found an aneurysm, ready to burst at any moment. There was nothing to be done, no operation that was not too risky. The advice was to leave it alone and pray, and that is what he had done.

Juan Gonzalez had a preexisting medical condition that he had not disclosed to his doctor and that had caused his grievous injury. Bad things happen, and some bad things that happen are nobody’s fault, and this time I could prove it.

Before I showed the file to anyone else, I took it to Hailey. She didn’t seem terribly surprised. She took off her glasses, read it through, shrugged her shoulders, smiled sadly. “I suppose Costa Rica will have to wait,” she said.

To her credit, she didn’t push. She didn’t even so much as suggest. She could have, and I would have gone along. Pushing me would have been as easy as pushing aside a curtain, I could feel the weakness in myself, but she didn’t push. That would have changed everything, and she knew enough not to change anything. So it was my idea to tell no one, to bury the file, to continue moving the case toward settlement. My idea, my choice. And it wasn’t even that hard a choice.

In my mind I was already free of my family, my career. I had broken every rule for the love I felt for Hailey, why should one more transgression make any difference? Leaving my wife, my children, that would be hard. But in my mind I had already fled my career, ditched the law, to which I discovered I was constitutionally ill suited. To ditch my fiduciary responsibilities and work it so that Red Book Insurance compensated the Gonzaleses for the bad result visited upon their patriarch, and to finance my freedom in the process, seemed nothing in comparison to what I had already decided to abandon.

I handed her the file.

She said she would destroy it, and then she kissed me, she kissed me, and whatever feeling of dread I felt washed out of me with that kiss, along with something else.

What would I call it? Innocence? No, not innocence, something else. Hope maybe. I had held the hope, foolish certainly, but still the hope that everything would work out perfectly, that my wife would serenely accept my defection and move on with her life, my children would adjust without any damage, that Hailey and I would sail off into the pure waters of unadulterated happiness. Can there be unadulterated happiness in adultery? Yes, there can. I felt it in those moments when, naked, we pressed against each other, when I hugged her so tight it hurt, because I wanted us to be as close as two could possibly be. I felt it then, and I held true every hour to the fantasy that such would comprise our future. I suppose my final hope had been that Hailey would tell me to not to hide the file, to give it to the insurance company, to start our lives clean. Maybe that was the most foolish hope of all.

When she said not a word as I handed it to her and then gave me her kiss, the hope bled out of me, all my hope, and I saw with utter clarity what lay ahead: disillusion, bitterness, separation, devastation. I saw it so clearly, and yet there was nothing I could do to stop it. Because I loved her, Victor, and I had no option but her. I was ready to lose everything for a hope I now knew was false. I now knew it was false, impossible, ruined already by my own hand, and still I had no choice.

What does a degenerate gambler do when the luck dies and he loses everything, when he knows the tide has turned and he has no chance at all? He doubles the wager and bets his life.

IT WASnever the same after that. Never.

I convinced Red Book to settle, and once the papers were signed and the check cleared, I went about the grim task of extricating myself from my grim legal life. Leila took it badly, melodramatically, played it out in a series of ugly scenes; the children took it better than I expected, which was somehow even worse. My father-in-law went stone cold with rage. He knew enough to suspect something about the Gonzalez case but did nothing, except send Skink after me looking for any files I might still have. The one he wanted, though, I had already given to Hailey. To Hailey. And I decided, as a cover for the money we had stolen, to stay in the law, at least for a time. I started my own practice, forged anew my old chains. I figured I would find my great transformation not in a new profession but solely in Hailey.

But even before I moved in, she had changed, grown mysterious. I still loved her so much it ached, but she had changed. I tried to step out a bit, start a new life with her. I introduced her to you even before the move and to some other of my former friends after, but something was wrong. We stopped making love, she came up with excuses every night. She would take pills to go to sleep and drift off into something closer to a coma than a doze. It drove me crazy, her denying me and slipping away from me like that, and strangely it made me want her even more. As she lay drugged beside me, I fantasized about her and grew painfully overheated. I forced her once, and she was too drowsy to stop me, telling me in that drugged girlish voice to be quiet, be quiet, they might hear. I hated myself after that and didn’t again, ever, but that didn’t stop the wanting.

She started coming home late, coming home half drunk, as I had come home half drunk when I started seeing her. I sensed she was becoming involved with someone else. Feeling desperate, I acted desperately. It had always been my plan to wed after the divorce, and so I set the scene with a hundred candles surrounding the tub. I filled the Jacuzzi and tossed rose petals onto the surface of the water and I waited. She looked at the scene strangely when she came home, as if disgusted at the overt romantic display. I told her milady’s bath was waiting. She sneered at the corniness of the line and then undressed as if facing an execution. She immersed herself so deeply I was afraid she would drown. When she came up for air, I fell to my knee and asked, and she said yes, a sad, stone-faced yes.

But nothing changed. We still made no love, she still took her pills to get to sleep, I still lay beside her, my mind a riot. She was distant, distracted. There would be days when she disappeared entirely without explanation. I grew certain that she was seeing someone else. I snooped through her drawers, her effects, I found baggage receipts for the airport in Vegas. I imagined she had gone there with her new lover and it drove me crazy. Our relationship had turned into a nightmare even before I discovered that most of the money was gone.

I won’t go blow-by-blow with you, how I found out, how I confronted her, how she reacted, and how I reacted back. There were arguments, bitter fights, threats, tears, more fighting. It wasn’t the money I was upset about, it was her. I was losing her. We fought about the money because it was easier than fighting about what was really happening. If I confronted her about her lover or Vegas, I feared it would be over, I feared she would throw me out, and so I kept it to the money only. But she never told me what she had done with it, what she had spent it on, and my shouts only strengthened her resolve to stay silent.