On the eighth night, at about nine o’clock, after Theo had gone up, Jonah came into the kitchen carrying a black box.
THE BOX.
It was a flat black steel lockbox, about the size of a hatbox. I recognized it. It had been among the things in the plastic bag. He set it on the kitchen table, between the sugar bowl and a pile of my brother’s homework, and sat down opposite me.
“What is that?”
“Now it’s my turn to be honest.”
I tried to smile.
“Jonah, don’t scare me.”
His expression changed, and my skin went cold.
It was not that it hardened. It was that it opened. All the careful gentleness went out of his face at once, like a man laying down a very heavy thing, and what was underneath it was frightened.
“Before you jump to any conclusions,” he said, “I need you to open it.”
I reached for the lid. My fingers were not steady. I thought of a hundred things. I thought money. I thought a gun. I thought a ring, a letter, an apology, an annulment. I thought that I would be able to bear any of them if I could only keep my face still.
I lifted the lid.
THE CONTENTS.
It was a plastic bracelet.
A white, thin, curved hospital wristband, the kind that snaps shut, lying on a bed of folded gray cloth, with a line of small black type printed along it. I picked it up. I turned it to the lamp.
***LARKIN, CLAIRE M. DOB 04/11. HARTWELL CANCER INSTITUTE. ALLERGY: PENICILLIN.***
I knew the name. It had been in the indictment, on a list of persons interviewed, with the word declined beside it. Claire Larkin. Dane Larkin’s wife.
I did not understand.
Beneath the bracelet there was a bundle of papers held with a rubber band. I took it out and pulled the band off and began to read. Invoices. Statements. Page after page of them, on the letterhead of a hospital in another state. Patient: Claire M. Larkin. Experimental protocol, immunotherapy, AML relapse. Cycle one. Cycle two. At the bottom of the last page, in bold, a figure.
***TOTAL TO DATE: $310,418.22.***
I sat there with it in my hands.
“I don’t—” My voice sounded far away. “Jonah. What is this?”
“It’s what the money was for,” said Jonah.
I looked up.
“It wasn’t Dane’s,” he said. “I mean, it was. He took it. He forged my name; I never signed a thing. But he wasn’t buying a boat, or a house, or a woman in Miami. The rest went on hotels near the clinic, flights, a mortgage on a house nobody could work to pay. His wife was dying. She had relapsed the winter before it began. The insurance wouldn’t cover the trial. It was three hundred thousand dollars, in cash, up front, or she had six months.”
He had his hands flat on the table, the way he had put them against the glass.
“I found out on the fourth of March,” said Jonah. “I saw the bank statement. I saw my own signature on forty-one transfers I’d never made. I went to his house. He was sitting in the kitchen, in the dark, and he said, Jonah, I’m so sorry, I’ll put it back, I’ve got a plan, it’s three months, I swear. And his wife was in the next room. Asleep. I could hear her breathing.”
“You told him,” I said.
“I told him I’d give him a week. Then I gave him another.”
“And the audit?”
“The audit came in the second week of April. They arrested me on the nineteenth.” He did not look away. “I could have said it then. I could have said, it’s Dane. His wife is sick. Here is where the money went.They’d have stopped the treatment in a day. Frozen the account, the clinic, everything. They’d have taken her off the trial. And I did the sum, Nora. I did it in the back of a police car. She had six months with it, maybe two years, and none without.”
“So you said nothing.”
“I said I didn’t know who’d done it.”
There was no sound in the kitchen but the refrigerator.
“You went to prison,” I said, “for her.”
“I thought I’d get three years,” said Jonah. “First offense. Nonviolent. My lawyer said three. And the judge gave me nine, and by then I had promised.” He swallowed. “Dane came to see me, once, in the first month. Through the glass. He said, I’ll tell them when she’s gone. I said, Don’t you dare before. We shook on it. Through a sheet of plexiglass. We shook hands on it by putting our palms on opposite sides of the glass.”
The words were quiet. I felt as if I were standing very close to something that was going to fall.
THE WOMAN IN THE SCARF.
I did not say anything for a long time.
I took the bracelet in both hands and looked at it, the thin white curve, the small black letters. I thought about thirty-six letters in a shoebox. I thought of a slim figure at a window, seen from behind, with a scarf.
“The sketches,” I said.
“She taught me to draw,” said Jonah. “When I was twelve. She was twenty-two, she’d just married Dane, and she sat me down at her kitchen table with a pencil and a box of rubber erasers.” His mouth moved. “I drew her for you. In the margins. I wanted somebody to know she was there. It’s the only way I had of telling you.”
“You told me she was a woman who taught you to draw.”
“I told you the truth.”
“You told me half.“
“Yes,” said Jonah.
I stood up. I did not decide to. The chair went back, and I walked to the window, with the bracelet in my fist, and stood with my back to him in precisely the posture that I had seen on him all week, with my arms folded and my head bent.
“Three years,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I stood outside a courthouse in the wind. For months. I begged. I cried in a car park. I read the same forty-one pages until I could have drawn the signatures.” My voice cracked in half. “You let me do that.”
“I did.”
“You knew. You knew who it was the whole time, and you let me chase it, and you didn’t say.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” said Jonah. “I want to be honest about that. I never asked you to. In the beginning, I thought you’d stop. My mother had paid you to look sympathetic. I thought, she’ll write for a month, she’ll send a card, and the money will run out, and I’ll be allowed my promise. And then you started reading the files.”
I turned.
“The waiver,” I said. “You wouldn’t sign.”
“Claire was in the last cycle that spring.” His voice was very low. “If the clinic had subpoenaed the shell company’s bank, it would have flagged the account. They’d have frozen the transfers. I couldn’t sign it, Nora. I couldn’t. I sat in that cell, five months, and I watched you drive home crying from the visits. And I thought, I am the most contemptible person alive. And I signed in August.”
“Why August?”
“Because she’d stopped responding,” said Jonah. “The doctors had told her there wasn’t another cycle. There wasn’t anything left to protect.”
THE FUNERAL.
He told me the rest in a flat voice, looking at the table.
Claire Larkin died on the sixth of October. She was forty-four. She had gone home at the end, to the kitchen table where she had taught a boy of twelve to draw, and she had died in her own bed in the middle of a thunderstorm.
“Dane rang my mother the next day,” said Jonah. “He rang the prosecutor on the tenth. He walked into the district attorney’s office with a folder, and he sat down, and he said, I forged my cousin’s name. All of it. It’s my fault. He kept his promise to the hour.”
“Eleven days,” I whispered.
“What?”
“It was eleven days after she died. That’s how long it took.” I looked at the bracelet. “I thought it was the clinic. I thought it was Imani’s handwriting analysis. I thought we’d done it.”
“You did,” said Jonah. “You did, Nora. That’s what I want you to hear. If you hadn’t been out there, if Imani hadn’t had the file, it wouldn’t have been a clean exoneration. It would have been a confession and a plea and a messy deal in a back room. Dane’s evidence would have been the only thing. They’d have said he was a grieving man protecting his cousin.” He smiled, very faintly. “You made it impossible to dispute. You gave him the paper to stand on.”
“I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“No.”
“I was racing against a woman I’d never met,” I said. “I was racing her life. And if I’d won, I’d have killed her.”
He did not say anything.
It was the truth. I felt it go through my body like a current.
“If I’d got to the bank records in the second year,” I said, “if Imani had had the waiver—she’d have had three months.”
“Yes.”
“And you knew it.”
“Every Sunday for thirty-four months,” said Jonah.
WHAT I SAID.
I would like to say that I was noble. I was not. I shouted.
I shouted for a long time, in a low voice, because my brother was asleep upstairs. I said that he had no right. I said that nobody had given him the authority to decide what my life was worth. I said that he had sat behind glass for three years and let me think I was fighting a legal system, when I was fighting a clock that he had set himself. I said that I had married him. I said the word married about four times.
He took it. He sat there, with his hands on the table, and he did not defend himself. When I had stopped, he said, quietly:
“You’re right.”
“Don’t say I’m right.”
“You are. I decided for you. I decided for everyone. I was so sure that it was a good thing, and that was the problem. I was so pleased with myself for being the man who carried it.” He shut his eyes. “I’d like you to know that I had no right, and I’d do it again. Both of those are true. I’m not asking you to forgive the second.”
It was the single most honest thing a person had ever said to me.
I sat down. I do not remember crossing the kitchen. I remember that I put the bracelet down on the table, very gently, beside the sugar bowl, and that the lamp caught it, and that it shone.
“I did marry you for money,” I said.
“I know.”
“I told you in a letter.”
“I kept it. I’ve kept all of them.” His voice cracked. “I wanted you to know that I knew. That I’ve known since the first night that you were paid, and I wrote you every week anyway. That I was lying to you from the first sketch. We were both lying. I just didn’t want to be the only one left.”
“Jonah—”
“Now it’s my turn,” said Jonah. “That’s what I meant. You told me the worst of yourself in the fifth month. I’ve been trying to catch up with you ever since.”
THE LAST ITEM.
There was one more thing in the box.
I had not noticed it, under the folded gray cloth. It was a small, plain envelope, sealed, with my name on the front in Jonah’s tidy capitals. Beside my name there was a tiny pencil sketch, so small that I had taken it for a smudge.
It was a door.
I opened it. There was a single card inside.
***Nora. If you decide to stay: I would very much like to begin again, with the truth in the room. If you don’t: the lease on the little house on Pear Street is in your name. I put what was left of my father’s insurance toward it, through Imani’s brother, last month. It’s paid. It’s yours whatever you say. You don’t owe me a word. —J.***
I read it three times.
“The house,” I said.
“I didn’t want you to feel there was a price on the door,” said Jonah.
I put the card down on top of the bracelet. I looked at the man across the table, my husband of three years, whom I had known for eight days, who had a long, ruined, honest face and a pair of hands that, at that moment, were very still.
“You think I’m going to leave,” I said.
“I think,” said Jonah, “that you ought to be allowed to.”
I thought about it. I want you to know that I thought about it honestly, for a long time, for about the length of time it takes a kettle to boil. I thought about thirty-four months and a woman I had never met. I thought about a seventeen-year-old upstairs in a house that had been paid for by a mother I did not trust. I thought about forty-one pages of signatures that were a little too even.
“I’m angry,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m going to be angry for a long time. I’m not going to pretend that it’s gone.”
“I wouldn’t want you to.”
“And you don’t get to decide things for me. Ever. Not to protect me. Not a single thing.” I could hear my own voice trembling. “If you ever make a decision about my life without telling me, I’ll walk out of that door, and I’ll take Theo, and I’ll never come back, and I will not be argued with.”
“Yes,” said Jonah.
“Say it properly.”
“I will never decide anything for you again,” said Jonah Prentiss. “I swear it.”
I took the card, and I picked up a pencil from the pile of my brother’s homework. On the back, in the corner, in a poor hand, I drew a little sketch of a kettle.
I pushed it across the table.
He looked at it for a long time. Then, for the first time that week, Jonah laughed. It came out as a sort of sob.
“Is that yes?” he said.
“It’s a kettle,” I said. “Make some tea.”
DANE.
I will tell you how the rest of it went, briefly, as the newspapers did.
Dane Larkin pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud and one of forgery. The judge was a stern woman of sixty, with half-moon glasses, who looked at the folder of invoices for an unusually long time before she spoke. She said that she could find no evidence that he had spent one cent on himself. She said that this was not a defense, and was, in some ways, an aggravating factor, because he had known exactly what he was doing and who it would harm. She gave him four years.
Jonah spoke at the sentencing. I had not known he would. He stood up in his one good suit and said that the Larkin Family Fund had been established to help the parents of sick children, and that, in his view, it had done so. He said that he did not wish to minimize what had been done to him. He said that he had signed a promise on a pane of glass, and that he intended to keep it.
Evelyn did not speak to him for two months. When she did, it was in my kitchen, standing very straight in her gray wool coat, with her bag held in front of her in both hands.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“You’d have gone to the district attorney,” said Jonah.
“Of course I would have!”
“That’s why.”
She stared at him. Then she turned to me, and I saw something that I had not seen on that face in three years. It was something very like shame.
“I paid you to be a wife on paper,” said Evelyn Prentiss. “I did not know, when I did it, that I was buying a daughter.”
“You didn’t buy anything,” I said. “I took the money. I’d like to give it back.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“I kept the receipts. Thirty-six months, through the end of the year you came home. It’s seventy-two thousand dollars. I’d like to give it to the clinic.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she took a cheque book from her bag, and she wrote, in a firm and angular hand, a figure.
“Seventy-two thousand,” she said. “From me. To the Second Look Clinic. In your name.”
I did not argue. I have learned when not to.
THE LAST THING.
It has been a year and a half.
We live on Pear Street, in a small gray house with a crooked gate. Theo has a room at the back with a window, and is applying to colleges, and says that he wants to do law. Imani Brooks has hired me three days a week, to answer telephones and read files; I am, it turns out, very good at it. I know what a signature looks like when it is a little too even.
Jonah draws again. He has sold some of the sketches. He does the illustrations for a small press that publishes children’s books about hospitals.
He does not keep secrets. I will not claim it is easy. On Thursdays, after supper, we sit at the kitchen table, with tea, and he tells me, in order, anything he has been tempted not to say. Some weeks it is nothing. Some weeks it is that he saw Dane’s mother on the street, and that he was ashamed, and that he did not know why.
I tell him mine.
In the spring, I found a hospital bracelet in a drawer. I had forgotten I’d put it there. It was the thin white curve, with the small black letters. I stood for a while in the bedroom, holding it.
Then I took it down to the kitchen. Jonah was at the table, with a pencil.
“I’d like to give this back,” I said. “To the right person.”
“Dane’s still inside.”
“He gets out in two years. I thought we might go. When he does.” I put it down by his hand. “I thought we might take her some flowers.”
Jonah looked at it for a long time.
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He picked up the pencil and, on the edge of the paper, in a margin, he began to sketch. It was a slim figure at a kitchen table, in a headscarf, bent over a boy of twelve with a pencil in his fist.
She was laughing. She was not seen from behind.
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