Karin Slaughter - Fallen

Zeke cleared his throat. She thought that the hostilities had passed, but his posture indicated otherwise. If there was one constant in her life, it was Zeke’s enduring sense of moral superiority.

She tried to get it over with. “What?”

“That Victor guy seemed surprised to hear about Emma. Wanted to know how old she was, when she was born.”

She choked, trying to swallow. “Victor was here? In the house?”

“You weren’t around, Faith. Someone had to stay with your son until I got here.”

The string of curses that came to Faith’s mind was probably worse than anything Zeke had heard while stitching up soldiers in Ramstein.

He said, “Jeremy showed him her picture.”

Faith tried to swallow again. She felt like rusty nails were catching in her throat.

“Emma’s got his coloring.”

“Jeremy’s?”

“This some kind of pattern with you? You like being an unwed mother?”

“Hey, didn’t they tell you when you got back that Ronald Reagan isn’t president anymore?”

“Jesus, Faith. Be serious for once. The guy has a right to know he’s a father.”

“Trust me, Victor’s not interested in being a father.” The man couldn’t even pick up his dirty socks off the floor or remember to leave the toilet seat down. God only knew what he’d forget with a baby.

Zeke repeated, “He has a right to know.”

“So, now he knows.”

“Whatever, Faith. As long as you’re happy.”

Any normal human being would’ve trounced off after dropping that bon mot, but Zeke Mitchell never walked away from a fight. He just sat there, staring at her, willing her to crank it back up. Faith reverted to old ways. If he was going to act like he was ten, then so was she. She ignored his presence, flipping through the Lands’ End catalogue, ripping out the page that showed the underwear Jeremy liked so she could order it for him later.

She flipped to the thermal shirts, and Zeke tilted back in his chair, staring out the window.

This tension was nothing new between the two of them. Faith’s selfishness was Zeke’s favorite one-note song. As usual, she accepted his disapproval as part of her penance. He had good reason to hate her. There was no moving past an eighteen-year-old boy finding out his fourteen-year-old sister was pregnant. Especially when Jeremy got older and Faith saw what it was like for teenage boys—not the walk in the park it had seemed when she was a teenage girl—Faith had felt guilty for what she’d done to her brother.

As hard as it was for her father, who was asked not to attend his men’s Bible study, and her mother, who was ostracized by most every woman in the neighborhood, Zeke had endured a special hell because of Faith’s unexpected pregnancy. He’d come home from school at least once a week with a bloody nose or black eye. When they asked him about it, he refused to talk. He sneered at Faith over the dinner table. He shot her looks of disgust if she walked by his room. He hated her for what she’d done to the family, but he would rain down hell on anyone who said a word against her.

Not that she could remember much from that time. Even now, it was one long, miserable blur of slobbering self-pity. It was hard to believe that so much had changed in twenty years, but Atlanta, or at least Faith’s part of it, had been more like a small town back then. People were still riding high on the Reagan/Bush wave of conservative values. Faith was a spoiled, selfish teenager when it happened. All she could focus on was how miserable her own life was. Her pregnancy had been a result of her first—and, at the time, she vowed last—sexual encounter. The father’s parents had immediately moved him out of state. There was no birthday party when she turned fifteen. Her friends abandoned her. Jeremy’s father never wrote or called. She had to go to doctors who probed and prodded her. She was tired all the time, and cranky, and she had hemorrhoids and back pain and everything ached every time she moved.

Faith’s father was away a lot, suddenly required to take business trips that had never before been part of his job description. The church had been the center of his life, but that center was abruptly ripped away when he was informed by the pastor that he no longer had the moral authority to be a deacon. Her mother had taken off work to be with her—whether forced or voluntary, Evelyn still would not say.

What Faith did remember was that she and her mother were both trapped at home every day, eating junk food that made them fat and watching soap operas that made them cry. For her part, Evelyn bore Faith’s shame like a hermit. She wouldn’t leave the house unless she had to. She woke every Monday morning at the crack of dawn to go to the grocery store across town so that she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. She refused to sit in the backyard with Faith even when the air conditioning broke and the living room turned into a kiln. The only exercise she took was a walk around the neighborhood, but that only happened late at night or early morning before the sun came up.

Mrs. Levy from next door left them cookies on the doorstep, but she never came in. Occasionally, someone would leave religious tracts in the mailbox that Evelyn burned in the fireplace. Their only visitor the entire time was Amanda, who didn’t have the option of dropping off her de facto sister-in-law’s social calendar. She would sit in the kitchen with Evelyn and talk in a low voice that Faith couldn’t hear. After Amanda left, Evelyn would go into the bathroom and cry.

It was no wonder that one day Zeke came home from school not with a busted lip but with a copy of his enlistment papers. He had five more months to go until graduation. His ROTC service and SAT scores had already lined up a full ride to Rutgers. But he took his GED and entered the pre-med program almost a full year ahead of schedule.

Jeremy was eight years old the first time he met his uncle Zeke. They had circled each other like cats until a game of basketball had smoothed things over. Still, Faith knew her son and she recognized his reticence toward a man he felt wasn’t treating his mother right. Unfortunately, he’d had a lot of opportunity over the years to hone this particular emotion.

Zeke dropped his chair back onto the floor, but still did not look at her.

Faith chewed the nutrition bar slowly, forcing herself to eat despite the nausea that gripped her stomach. She looked out the sliding door and saw the kitchen table, Zeke’s posture, straight as a board, reflected back. There was a glow of red beyond the glass. One of the detectives was smoking.

The phone rang, and they both jumped. Faith scrambled to answer the cordless just as the detectives came in from the backyard.

“No news,” Will told her. “I was just checking in.”

Faith waved away the cops. She took the phone with her into the living room, asking Will, “Where are you?”

“I just got home. There was a jackknifed trailer on 675. It took three hours to clear.”

“Why were you down there?”

“The D&C.”

Faith felt her stomach lurch.

Will didn’t bother with small talk. He told her about his prison visit, Boyd Spivey’s murder. Faith put her hand to her chest. When she was younger, Boyd had been a frequent guest at family dinners and backyard barbecues. He’d taught Jeremy how to ride a bike. And then he’d flirted so openly with Faith that Bill Mitchell suggested the man find an alternative way to spend his weekends. “Do they know who did it?”

“The security camera happened to be out in that one section. They’ve got the place in lockdown. All the cells are being tossed. The warden’s not hopeful they’ll find much of anything.”

“There was outside help.” A guard must have been bribed. No inmate would have the time it took to disable a camera mounted inside a prison corridor.