Speaking In Tongues

“Susan was married. Her husband, you remember him.”

“Uncle Harris.”

“You were right in your letter, Megan. Your mother did spend a lot of time caring for her sister Harris and your mother both did.”

“No” Megan said abruptly. “I don’t believe it.”

“They’d go to the hospital together, Harris and Bett. They’d have lunch, di

“She told you all this?” Megan asked. “Mom?”

His face was a blank mask as he said slowly, “No. Harris did, The day of his funeral.”

Tate had been upstairs on that eerily warm November night years ago. The funeral reception, at the Collier farm, was over.

Standing at a bedroom window, Tate had looked out over the yard. Felt the hot air, filled with leaf dust. Smelled cedar from the closet.

He’d just checked on three-year-old Megan, asleep in her room, and he’d come here to open windows to air out the upstairs bedrooms; several relatives would be spending the night.

He’d looked down at the backyard, gazing at Bett in her long black dress. She hiked up the hem and climbed onto the new picnic table to unhook the Japanese lanterns.

Tate had tried to open the window but it was stuck. He took off his jacket to get a better grip and heard the crinkle of paper in the pocket. At the funeral service one of Harris’s attorneys had given him an envelope, hand-addressed to him from Harris, marked Personal, apparently written just before the man had shot himself. He’d forgotten about it. He opened the envelope and read the brief letter inside.

Tate had nodded to himself, folded the note slowly and walked downstairs, then outside.

He remembered hearing a Loretta Ly

He remembered hearing the rustling of the hot wind over the brown grass and sedge, stirring pumpkin vines and the refuse of the corn harvest.

He remembered watching the arc of Bett’s narrow arm as she reached for an orange lantern. She glanced down at him.

“I have something to tell you,” he’d said.

“What?” she’d whispered. Then, seeing the look in his eyes, Bett had asked desperately: “What, what?”

She’d climbed down from the bench. Tate came up close, and instead of putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders, as a husband might do late at night in a house of death, he handed her the letter.

She read it.

“Oh my. Oh.”

Bett didn’t deny anything that was contained in the note: Harris’s declaration of intense love for her, the affair, his fathering Megan, Bett’s refusal to marry him and her threat to take the girl away from him forever if Harris told Bett’s sister of the infidelity. At the end the words had degenerated into mad rambling and his chillingly lucid acknowledgment that the pain was simply too much.

Neither of them cried that night as Tate had packed a suitcase and left. They never spent another night under the same roof.

Despite the presence of a madman now, holding a knife, hovering a few feet from them, Tate’s concentration was wholly on the girl. To his surprise her face blossomed not with horror or shock or anger but with sympathy. She touched his leg. “And you’re the one that got hurt so bad. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

Tate looked at Matthews. He said, “So that’s why your argument doesn’t work, Aaron. Taking her away from me won’t do what you want.”

Matthews didn’t speak. His eyes were turned out the window, gazing into the blue dawn.

Tate said, “You know the classic reasons given for punishing crimes, Aaron? To condition away bad behavior-doesn’t work. A deterrent- useless. To rehabilitate-that’s a joke. To protect society-well, only if we execute the bad guys or keep them locked up forever. No, you know the real reason why we punish? We’re ashamed to admit it. But, oh, how we love it. Good old biblical retribution. Bloody revenge is the only honest motive for punishment. Why? Because its purpose is to take away the victim’s pain.

“That’s what you want, Aaron, but there’s only one way you’ll have that. By killing me. It’s not perfect but it’ll have to do.”

Megan was sobbing.

Matthews leaned his head against the window. The sun was up now and flashed on and off as strips of liver-colored clouds moved quickly east. He seemed diminished and changed. As if he were beyond disappointment or sorrow.

“Let her go,” Tate whispered. “It doesn’t even make sense to kill her because she’s a witness. They know about you anyway.”

Matthews crouched beside Megan. Put the back of his hand against her cheek, lifted it away and looked at the glistening streak left by her tears on his skin. He kissed her hair.

“All right. I agree.”

Megan started to protest.

But Tate knew that he’d won. Nothing she could say or do at this point would change his decision.

“I’ll call the dogs to the run. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

31

“Is it true?” she asked, tears glistening on her cheeks.

“Oh, yes, honey, it’s true.”

“You never said anything.”

“Your mother and I decided not to. Until after Susan died. You know how close Bett is to your aunt. She wanted her never to find out about the affair-it would’ve been too hard for her. The doctors only gave her a year or two to live, We were going to wait to tell you until she’d passed away.”

“But…“ Megan whispered.

He smiled wanly “That’s right. She’s still alive.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last year, or two years ago? I was old enough not to say anything to Aunt Susan.”

Tate examined the wounds on her palms. Pressed his hands against them. He couldn’t speak at first. Finally he said, ‘The moment passed.”

“All these years,” she whispered, “I thought I must’ve done something.” She lowered her head to his shoulder. “What a terrible thing I must have been for you. What a reminder.”

“Honey, I wish I could tell you different. But I can’t. You were half the person I loved most in the world and half the person I most hated.”

“One time I said something to Mom,” she said, weeping softly. “I’d been with you for the weekend and Mom asked how it went. I said I’d had an okay time but what could you expect? You were just an adequate father. I thought she was going to whip me. She freaked out totally. She said you were the best man she’d ever met and I was never, ever supposed to say that again.”

Tate smiled. “An adequate father for an inconvenient daughter.”

“Why didn’t you ever try it again, the two of you?”

He echoed, “The moment passed.”

“How much you must love her.”

Tate laughed sourly to himself at the irony. The child who drove husband and wife apart had now brought them back together-if only for one day.

How scarce love is, he thought. How rarely does it all come together: the pledge, the assurance, the need, the circumstance, the hungry desire to share minutes with someone else. And the dear desperation too. It’s miraculous when love actually works.

He looked her over and decided that the two of them, his ex-wife and her daughter, would be fine-now that the truth had been dumped between them. A long time coming but better than never. Oh, yes, they’d do fine.

Gritty footsteps approached.

“Now, listen to me,” he said urgently. “When he lets you out find a phone and call Ted Beauridge at Fairfax County Police. Tell him your mother’s probably in jail in Luray or Front Royal-”

‘What?”

“No time to explain. But she’s there. Tell him to get cops out here. She told them you were here but they might not’ve believed her.”

The girl looked at him with eyes that reminded him of her mother’s. Not the violet shade, of course-those were Bett’s and Bett’s alone- but the unique mix of the ethereal and the earthy