The Gray Zone (33 page)

Jake pulled Kelly into his arms. She was elastic and warm, like taffy, and she filled his crevices, smoothing into them like a custom fit.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

Relieved, Jake held her closer still.

At last Kelly laughed. “Come on, Mr. Talkative.” Arm in arm they walked beyond the pool, down a little path, and through a gate toward the lake. The sun had glazed over the crystal blue surface of the water, creating a wide platter of white light. The smell of pine was strong in the air as Kelly led Jake down to the small private beach. They nestled into the warm sand, leaning their backs against a boulder, and contemplated the blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the blue-black of the water.

Jake reached out a finger and traced a meandering line from Kelly’s jawbone down her throat, across her collarbone and along her arm. She tipped into him, putting her head on his shoulder, and he watched a droplet of sweat swim down her chest and disappear into the dark channel between her breasts. Jake loved nothing more than the scent of a woman. She turned her face up to him for a kiss. As their mouths moved gently together, he closed his eyes to shut out the sun bouncing off the sand. Every cell in his body wanted to be inside her, but he tenderly took her hand instead.

“We don’t have long,” he whispered.

“The kids are fine,” murmured Kelly. “I’ve been with them all morning. They love Serafina.”

“That’s not what I meant, Kelly. I meant Gillis. I meant …”

Kelly shook her head. “I know what you meant, Jake. But this is our reality right now. Sun. Sand. You. Me. Kevin and Libby are safe. That could all change—in just a few minutes. Maybe you’ll say something. Maybe something’s out of our control. It’s this minute—
this
reality—I’m interested in. I want to be with you. I want
you.
”

Jake didn’t need to hear another word. They rolled over in the sand, and he dove into the warm, salty ferocity of her sea.

KELLY WRAPPED HER ARMS AROUND JAKE’S shoulders and held on. She was grateful, of course, for everything he had done for her. He’d risked everything—his career, his reputation, his life—to protect her. After the night in Las Vegas, he’d done even more to get her away from Gillis, at least temporarily.

She pulled back for a moment and stared at Jake now, memorizing the line of his eyebrows, the cut of his chin, his penetrating gray eyes. A ruffle of wind moved through his hair. He smiled.

“Are you getting ready to impersonate me?” He laughed. “You’ve got that look in your eye.”

Kelly smiled back. “No, just looking.”

Jake—for all his intelligence, his crushing adeptness as an attorney, his power in the courtroom and over the media, the wheels of justice, and the people who came to him—seemed to her like an innocent. He saw, he experienced, he felt—for her, for his clients—but he
didn’t
know.
His sympathy was as acute as that of anyone she’d ever known (even Porter, she’d come to admit), but empathy was a different story. Like racism, pregnancy, the death of a parent—the experience of being abandoned as a child was something you didn’t know unless you’d been through it.

She smiled at Jake again, her eyes shining with unmistakable love.

Jake pulled her back toward him, and they lay against the sand side by side, their arms flung over their eyes to keep out the sun.

A deep melancholy settled over Kelly as she thought about what she had to say, as she watched Jake lie there breathing evenly, companionably.

“This is nice,” he murmured.

“There’s something I want to say,” began Kelly. She sensed a band of electricity run down Jake’s body, but he remained motionless. She pressed on. “I’m going away for a while. With the kids.”

Instantly, Jake sat up. “No,” he said. “No. No. It’s not okay. No.”

Kelly shushed him, placing her hand gently on his mouth as though he were her young son.

“You have to listen to me,” she said.

“No,
you
have to listen to
me
,” said Jake. “We are going to be together. I’m not letting you go. We need each other, and you’re not leaving me.” He stopped abruptly, both of them shocked by his intensity. Neither pointed out how much he sounded like Gillis. How many other men had tried to possess Kelly in the same way?

Jake threw himself back on the sand, and his arm covered his eyes again. He exhaled loudly. “Alright. Continue,” he said petulantly.

“You know I love you,” said Kelly, keeping her voice as even as possible. “I need you too, I really do.” She hesitated, wishing she could see his eyes but at the same time glad he was covering them. “My kids
have always come first. I can’t keep moving from place to place, wondering when their father is going to find me.”

Jake grunted. “That’s what I’m saying too. You’ve got
me
now. I—we—have ways to keep him away from the three of you.” But they could both hear the truth hidden behind his words. It would always be a struggle. Jake’s throat went dry. Porter had probably said exactly the same sorts of things to Kelly, even promising her the power of his office, his position as a congressman, to keep her sociopathic husband at bay. And that had done no good. No good at all.

For a split second, Kelly considered telling Jake what she knew. She wondered whether it would do them any good—either to help her leave or to help Jake save her. Because when it came right down to it, Kelly really did want to be saved. Her personal hell was her hope—she had always desperately wanted the salvation she knew would never come. But she knew she couldn’t tell Jake the whole truth. What was the point? All that mattered was that she knew the truth now, knew the only way to escape it, and that was that. Her kids would never know. Jake would never know. The secret would die with her.

She had known for seven months now, but the weight of it felt like seven lifetimes. Back in November, two weeks after that night on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Kelly had gone by herself to Houston. Jake was embroiled in getting Gillis put behind a chain-link fence, and Kelly had left her children once more in the safekeeping of Frank and Holly.

As she had driven up to the house in a rental car, she could see that the place was just as she’d remembered it. The long driveway, the leafless autumn trees. She rang the bell, waiting many long minutes before the door opened. A tiny woman, her brown face wrinkled like creased paper, stood before her. A flicker of recognition sparked
in the woman’s eyes when she saw Kelly, her brain computing the passing of years.

“Griselda. I need to come in.”

Wordlessly, the maid widened the door, and Kelly stepped over the threshold. She stopped in the entryway and glanced around. The house had never been warm, but in its abandoned state, it was in purgatory—soulless, but not quite dead.

Griselda opened her mouth as if to speak and shut it again. Kelly swept past her and climbed the stairs to the second story. In truth, the housekeeper disgusted her. This was not a reunion of similarly tortured souls who could finally break through years of missed opportunities to show a tenderness that had always existed below the surface. This was a meeting of a jail guard and her former prisoner.

Kelly felt nothing for this wizened old woman and what she may have suffered in Gillis’s employ. Just fifteen when Gillis first brought her there, Kelly had blocked out so much of the daily life of the place. One thing she knew was that not once had another adult tried to help or intervene. They all knew that what was going on wasn’t right. But they all owed him something. They were too afraid of him—and eventually too complicit themselves, too guilty—to do the right thing.

Kelly held her duffel bag tightly over her shoulder and entered the master suite. She didn’t wait for her eyes to adjust to the darkness; she strode over to the window and tore back the heavy drapes. Diffuse light poured in through the sheers. The room, like everything else she had seen, was exactly the same. The black bedspread—surely not the same one from so many years ago?—adorned the king-sized bed. The snow-white carpeting. Kelly willed herself not to feel anything as she walked through the bedroom, past the cavernous closets, and into Gillis’s study.

When she had lived here as his wife, she hadn’t been allowed to enter this room. Even when Gillis was in it, she was forbidden entry.
She felt a wave of dread as she stepped into it and had to remind herself that Gillis was still incarcerated. Even with his power and the strings he could pull, he would be behind bars for a whole nine months. Still, she sensed a prickle on the back of her neck as though she were being watched, and she spun around.

Griselda stared at her, eyes narrowed.

Kelly hissed at her the way one might hiss at a cat. The little woman jumped and scurried away. Kelly moved toward Gillis’s desk.

The top of the desk contained two items: a black telephone, somewhat outdated, and a chrome picture frame. Coming around the vast tabletop, Kelly saw that the frame contained a photo of her on her wedding day, looking over her shoulder as if surprised, her unsmiling face framed by a white veil. She remembered Gillis snapping the photograph. He’d ushered her ahead of him into the city hall, then called her name. Kelly felt a wave of pity for the teenager she had been, seeing the combination of expectancy and fear on her younger face and remembering all too well her feelings at that exact moment: choosing a life with Gillis as her best option for getting out of the foster system, sensing but not fully comprehending the misery her naïve choice would bring her.

Kelly brought the photo closer to her face and studied it. She could see how guarded her green eyes were, a look she’d seen in every foster child she’d known; a look she was proud to say she had never seen in her own children’s eyes. Abruptly, Kelly tossed the frame on the desk. She was pleased to see the chrome corner nick the polished wood. The frame’s glass trembled, too, and the photo was knocked askew.

Kelly started with the desk drawers. She wasn’t surprised to find them filled with useless things: opened packs of gum, now stale; a hand-grip exerciser to tone the forearms or to release stress. The few papers she found were meaningless as well: pro forma letters from
insurers, a few anonymous holiday cards from business toadies, old phone books, real estate specs, year-end reports. Kelly removed a rubber band from a stack of business cards and shuffled through them. She didn’t recognize any names, but she banded them again and dropped them in her duffel bag anyway.

She shut the drawers and spread her hands on the top of the desk. Their warmth left a ghostly impression in the polish. She pulled her hands back to her lap and watched the handprints fade. Sitting back in the chair, she let her gaze travel around the room. She wasn’t sure what it was she was looking for. She had come here expecting to find remnants of her past, to rescue a few shreds of her life, and, with any luck, to exorcise the memories. The moment she’d walked through the door, however, she’d realized she wanted nothing from this time of her life. It was better to forget it all than to try to memorialize it.

From the looks of things, Gillis hadn’t spent much time here either. Clearly he kept his business details elsewhere. Kelly wondered why he even bothered to keep this house. The answer came to her immediately. Gillis never gave up anything that he had made his own. Businesses he bought and sold, but people, houses, these were his forever, even when he no longer needed them.

Kelly eyed a tornado of dust motes spiraling in a shaft of light thrown by the window. The constant motion, the sparkle, the minuteness of it mesmerized her. How many worlds were contained in each tiny speck of dust? How deep did their ignorance go, of the larger world that contained them, with its horror and its beauty?

Her gaze fell again upon the wedding picture on the desk. Her hand reached out and pulled the frame toward her—and at that moment she saw it. The picture had shifted inside the frame, and the corner of another picture was poking out from underneath. Turning
the frame over, Kelly pushed aside the brackets and removed the back. She lifted out the other print.

It was another image of her, from about the same time of her life, at fifteen or sixteen years old. Her blonde hair hanging over her shoulders, her green eyes clear, she stared at the camera with a wide, relaxed smile. She wore a polo shirt with the collar turned up and pink pants that flared out at the knee.

Kelly stared. She didn’t recognize the clothes. When had she ever worn them? She also didn’t remember ever feeling as relaxed and happy as she looked in the picture. But the strangest thing was that she was sitting in a group of other teens, and they were all smiling and looking happy. A boy sat on either side of her, and Kelly had an arm draped companionably around the shoulders of each of them.

Kelly squinted.
I don’t remember this picture
, she thought. She studied the unfamiliar clothes, the smiles—put on? No, the happiness on their faces seemed genuine. Maybe it was taken in one of the group homes or at a school play? But Kelly knew she had never been in a school play. She had finished high school while she was living with Gillis, but she had always gone straight to school and come straight home. She had never socialized with other children her age. She knew this scene had not happened to her.

She felt a rising panic. Had she blocked even more of her life than she knew? Had she somehow led a double life?

Kelly leaned into the picture again. The boy on her right looked familiar. His was an easy smile, his hair curly and brown, and she noticed with surprise that his hand was on her knee. The boy on the left was stiffer, his smile incomplete, his hands rigidly on his own knees. Kelly looked closer at him, and her insides turned to water.

The second boy was Gillis. Younger, in his teens, but unmistakably Gillis. Kelly’s brain strained to resolve the discrepancy. This
was impossible. She flipped the picture over. Faintly, in blue ink, was written,
MICHELLE AND ME
. Next to that was written
AND MICHAEL
. But
MICHAEL
was crossed out with the straight lines of an
X.