in his eyes, which were large and brown. Also, Kevin was tall for eleven, which I suspected had come more from Jet than from Paul.
Jet herself amazed me. Buck’s description of her as an Arabic Emmylou Harris had proved prescient; she’d aged every bit as gracefully as the singer. She was forty-five then, but except for a few tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, slightly wider hips, and a heavier bosom, she could have been the girl I spent the summer riding bikes with in 1986. We traded small talk while we checked out, but then she told Kevin to go look for some new tennis shoes. As soon as the boy vanished, her mask slipped. She asked about my father again, and I gave her a more honest assessment. Then I asked how she was really doing.
“It’s hard,” she said softly, averting her eyes. “Paul’s been unhappy for a long time.”
“Unhappy with what? Life? You? What?”
“All the above.” Then she looked back at me. “How are you really doing? I wrote you a long letter after . . . you know. But I didn’t mail it. It was too personal.”
She meant my son’s death, I supposed. I waved my hand to move the conversation along.
“So you’re divorced,” she said.
“Mm-hm.”
“And very popular, I’m sure. Are you seeing anyone?”
I shrugged. “There’s somebody.”
She forced a smile then. “Serious?”
The silence that followed this question was one of the most pregnant moments of my life. “Define serious.”
She held up her left hand and tapped her wedding ring with her painted thumbnail.
“No,” I said. “Not soon, anyway. Your son looks really great, by the way,” I told her, trying to change the subject. “He looks like you.”
“Oh, he’s something. Paul and Max already have him playing every sport ever invented. They send him off to special camps, and he’s on a traveling baseball team. I think he’s too young for all that.”
“He is a Matheson,” I pointed out.
She let out a long sigh. “About three-quarters Matheson, I’d say. I may have a quarter of him. That’s what keeps me sane.”
In that moment I saw the deep pain working inside her. “Do you have a friend?” I asked. “A good one?”
She gave me a wistful smile. “Not really. Not a close one. You know me. Too private.”
“Does Paul realize how unhappy you are?”
“If so, he doesn’t do anything to help. I think he knows he can’t. Not where it counts. His mother’s been kind to me. Sally. She has some sense of the position I’m in. Being Max’s wife all these years had to be tough. She’s empathetic. But the rest of them, Max and their redneck cousins from Jackson—”
“I remember the cousins,” I said, thinking of the night we climbed the electrical tower.
“They were there when Adam drowned, weren’t they?” she asked. “In the river?”
I nodded, forcing my mind away from Dooley and Trey Matheson.
“So will you be coming down more often? To help take care of your dad?”
“I think so. More to help with the paper, really. It’s been going down fast.”
“I’m sorry. It has gotten a little . . . rickety. But I’m not sorry to hear I might see more of you.”
And there it was.
After that day, I knew that if I came back to Bienville, Jet would come to me. Even if I didn’t ask her to. Even if we resisted consummation, fate would unfold in that direction. And from that moment, this knowledge began to work on me. I felt like Jay Gatsby staring at the stupid green light across the bay. The truth I had denied for decades finally rose to the surface and would not be denied any longer.
I had wanted her for so long. Even during the first year of my marriage, when my new wife filled most of my conscious mind, a faintly glowing anima remained in the dark chamber where Jordan Elat Talal had resided since I was fourteen years old. The farthest I ever got from Jet was probably the two years that my son was alive. Baby Adam soothed the unquiet ghosts of my youth, stilled the restless desire that no other woman but Jet had quenched.
But after he died, my world emptied out, as though all life had been poured from it. I became a ghost myself, moving noiselessly through my days, hardly noticed, noticing nothing. To my surprise, as I retreated inward, I discovered that the inmost chamber of my mind still had its tenant. Even more surprising, that chamber