Trial, page 26
“I’m glad.”
She hesitated. “I’m just glad you’re OK. You may be white, but you’re not invisible.”
He shrugged. “Maybe for now. I’ve always been lucky, right?”
Across the years, they both heard the echo of irony. “When we were at Harvard,” she said, “who could have imagined this?”
“Which part?”
“Any of it. All of it.” She hesitated. “If you’re still around, maybe you can come back tomorrow. In the evening, after I’m done.”
43
Preparing for her interview, Allie sat in her living room.
Around her the technicians from MSNBC were setting up the video feed with their studio in New York. In roughly twenty minutes, they would connect her with the network’s leading anchor, Rebecca Marks. Though the subject was Malcolm, Allie understood how closely this interview was connected to the worries of Blue Georgia’s donors.
But since the meeting, there had been a nationally televised rally calling for Malcolm’s execution, and the district attorney had refused Jabari’s efforts to investigate George Bullock. Now she was compelled to use the spotlight she had gained from building Blue Georgia to rally support for her son. There was no question of asking her board for permission, only whether the pressure would build for her to step aside.
Silent, she gazed into the camera. She had never liked speaking to a piece of glass instead of a person, and the pressure of conveying her humanity—and, more important, her son’s—felt close to unbearable.
Crisp and professional, Rebecca Marks appeared on the screen, a lawyer-turned-commentator who was MSNBC’s top-rated host. Swiftly and succinctly, Marks introduced Allie and thanked her for appearing. Then she asked her first question, setting the tone for what would follow.
Alone in his hotel room, Chase watched. “As a mother,” Marks asked Allie, “how did you feel watching a former president effectively call for your son’s execution?”
For an instant, Allie looked almost haunted. “Sick to my stomach,” she answered. “Imagine watching a crowd of angry people howling at your son’s face on a giant movie screen—‘Kill him, kill him.’ Imagine hearing a former president speak of him as some sort of animal…”
“I understand,” Marks interjected. “But you must understand the impression some people have from watching the video Malcolm chose to post.”
“Those weren’t Malcolm’s words,” Allie rejoined “They’re not Malcolm’s real thoughts, either.
“You’re suggesting that video said something about Malcolm’s intentions that night. His lawyers have found postings on George Bullock’s Facebook page, complaining that voting rights workers like Malcolm stole the last presidential election. So maybe we should ask whether those postings say anything about Deputy Bullock’s intentions.
“But the district attorney won’t help us explore Bullock’s social media to see what else he may have said or thought, or why he so clearly seemed to have been stalking Malcolm that night.”
Pausing, Allie gazed into the camera. “Unlike the district attorney, I have no power. So all I can do is try to reach anyone who knows something about George Bullock that Malcolm’s lawyer should know, or knows someone who does. If you do, please contact me through Blue Georgia, or Malcolm’s attorney in Freedom, Jabari Ford.
“I know what I’m asking may not be easy,” she implored someone she could not know, and who perhaps did not exist. “But this is about more than fairness. It’s about an eighteen-year-old on a dark road, at the wrong time, at the mercy of the wrong person. Please, help him…”
When it was done and a half hour had passed, Allie called him.
“Can you come out? Tonight, I mean.”
“Especially tonight,” Chase answered.
When Chase arrived, she was waiting, a slim figure in the light of her front porch. As he approached, she came forward to meet him, wordless.
After a moment, he gently clasped her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her since college, and he felt again how slender she was. “How are you?” he asked. “Right now, I mean.”
She shook her head slowly, less to dismiss the question than to acknowledge it. They stood there for a time in a cocoon of shared silence, his hand still resting on her shoulders. Then they went to the porch and sat beside each other, making a space between them. The sounds of night—crickets, a fitful wind stirring the leaves of an oak tree—came through the screen that filtered the light of the quarter moon.
“During the day,” she murmured, “I just keep myself going. But I’m not sleeping much. All I can think of is Malcolm.”
He touched her hand. “Tell me, then.”
“The day he was born,” she said after a time, “we both almost died. But he didn’t. His life, our life, felt like a gift. Now people want to take it, and I don’t know if I can protect him. I always understood some people would hate me, but I never imagined this.” Turning, she looked him in the face. “How has all this been for you?”
“Everything it isn’t for you. You’ve always been his mother, and this has always been your home. I don’t understand this place. I don’t know anything about being a father, and I have a Black son charged with murder who has no idea why I’m here.” Chase paused, and found the essence of their differences. “You’re the only parent he knows. You’ve got no choice but to be here for him, whatever happens and whatever the cost. I do have a choice between Malcolm and the life I lived before knowing he existed. Imagine trying to make it.”
She looked down. “What’s it like to visit him?”
“Hard. I never quite know what to say, or how he’s reacting inside. Except yesterday when I asked about his grandfather.” Chase’s voice softened. “His expression—the best word I can find is ‘desolate,’ and I could see right through this smart, scared young man to the little boy sitting in your father’s lap. In that moment, watching his face, I could feel my own absence. And he had no idea at all.”
Still studying her lap, Allie absorbed this. “Is there anyone you can talk to?”
“About this? No one.”
Glancing up again, Allie tilted her head in inquiry. “Not even your girlfriend?”
Thinking of Kara, Chase found, was painful, like a poignant memory of something lost in another life. “Sometimes I’ve wanted to. But I can’t. He’s not just my son, Allie—he’s ours. How would I ask her to keep this kind of secret?”
“But would she?”
“I’m pretty sure. But it’s not like she and I were married, or going to be. We just enjoy each other.”
Even in the dim light, Chase could make out Allie’s look of curiosity and skepticism. “Does she feel that way?”
For a moment, he remembered the night of Kara’s birthday. “I think so,” he answered. “That aside, I’m trying to imagine our theoretical conversation. Once I start talking about this, where do I stop? What do I say about us, and what do I leave out?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Allie said somewhat tartly. “Whatever you say to all the girls. Seems like there’s been a few.”
“A few. And zero conversations about you.”
For a beat, Allie was quiet. “Ever?”
All at once Chase felt cornered. “Ever,” he responded. “As I said, once I started talking about us, what would I leave out? So maybe you can help me here. When you start reminiscing about old boyfriends, what do you say about us?”
“Nothing.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.” Suddenly Allie felt her own repressed emotions escaping control. “What would I say about us, and what would I leave out? The night we first made love, and I knew right away I couldn’t just put you in a box. The day we nearly drowned, and I realized I loved you so much it hurt. Or the morning I walked out of your room, tears running down my face, using the last ounce of willpower I had not to tell you why. What man wants to hear about that, and why would I tell him?”
Chase stood, looking down at her. “Maybe because you cared for him enough to try? There must have been someone like that.”
Still sitting, Allie remembered with piercing clarity what loving a privileged young man had told her about the foolish insubordination of her own heart—then, and perhaps still. But she had no time, and suddenly no desire, to consider the consequences of honesty. “There was someone, and I wanted to try. But that wasn’t enough.”
“What went wrong?”
“The things that do,” she said impatiently. “At least for me. He resented how buried I got in my work, that I was gone a lot. That was one thing Robert and Malcolm had in common.”
She felt Chase trying to read her face. “That was all? You worked too hard? That couldn’t have come as a big surprise.”
She looked away. “Not all. I couldn’t be with a man who didn’t love my son. Robert didn’t, or couldn’t.”
“Why not? I’ve only met Malcolm three times, under the worst conditions possible. But he doesn’t strike me as all that hard to love.”
Abruptly Allie stood, facing him. “You can look at him and see yourself. So could Robert. Not you specifically, but someone he figured I’d loved—and, worse from his perspective, figured to be white. It didn’t sit right with him.”
“Enough to make a difference?”
She averted her face from the intensity in his. “There were ways in which we weren’t that great, OK? Leave it be.”
She felt him move closer. “Sorry, but I’m kind of curious. What was that about?”
She spun on him, angry. “Do you really need me to say it? OK, I will. No matter how little sense it made, I fell in love with you at Harvard, and never really stopped. How could I, when every time I looked at Malcolm he reminded me of you? Sometimes I’d imagine seeing you again in some made-up world that didn’t exist, and for that minute I’d be happier than I was with anyone in real life.
“But it never stopped hurting, from the day I left until now. Now, especially.” Allie’s eyes welled up. “Is that enough for you, Chase Brevard? Because it’s all I’ve got to give you.”
Gently, he turned her face to his. In that instant, she saw that the searching boy-man she had loved despite herself, now the accomplished man she had imagined he could be and had wanted him to become, was still searching for something that he believed, even now, he had never found. Except with her.
“Not all,” he said, and kissed her.
Kissing him back with an intensity that startled her, she understood that she had won, or lost, the war inside her. All Allie knew for sure was that she wanted him, that all she had to do was tell him without words.
Instead, she leaned her face against his chest, trying to imagine what this moment meant to the man who once had offered to follow her to Georgia, and now had come because of their son. “We can’t do this,” she said softly. “Not now.
“Malcolm deserves all I can give him, including a clear head.” Looking up again, she touched his face. “It’s not just me. You need to decide why you’re still here, for him or for me, and what you want to be to him. I’ve made that confusing enough…”
There was a sudden hiss, then the sound of glass shattering. Instinctively, Chase pulled Allie to the wooden floor; a sharp pain tore through his elbow as he cradled her against the fall.
“Gunshot,” she whispered. “Don’t move.”
Sitting up, she looked around them for some movement in the night, then listened for footsteps. Nothing. All she heard was the crickets; all she saw was a hole in the screen. “Get behind me,” Chase said tightly.
Allie felt her nerves twitching. “Why?”
“You’re his mother, for Chrissake.”
Allie remained very still. “I’m guessing they’re gone,” she murmured.
She took out her cell phone and called Al Garrett.
The sheriff and three deputies found them as they were, sitting on the wooden floor, Allie leaning back against Chase. She saw Al Garrett register the scene—the two of them, close together, the lateness of the hour. “You all right?” he asked her.
“Now I am. I’m thinking someone fired from the road, trying to scare me.”
“Unless they took off your head. You only get to be scared because they didn’t.” Briefly, Garrett glanced around them. “I’m putting a deputy near the house, another where your driveway meets the road. I don’t want anyone thinking they can just walk in here.”
“Good idea,” Chase said. “Allie goes on TV seeking information about your late deputy, and somebody takes a shot at her.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Garrett responded brusquely. “But how do you know they weren’t shooting at you? I don’t know what you were doing at that rally the other night. But maybe it’s time to be thinking about home.”
The other deputies began searching the grounds. Sliding out of Chase’s arms, Allie stood and walked over to Garrett. “Thanks, Al,” she said in a quiet undertone. “I’m more grateful than I can tell you, for everything. But as best you can manage it, as a favor to me, Congressman Brevard was never here.”
Garrett’s eyes narrowed, as though registering what she chose not to say. “Don’t know that you agree, but from where I sit that’s something to hope for.” Turning to Chase, he said, “Seeing as how you aren’t here, I’ll have a deputy follow you back to town.”
44
The next morning, over toast and coffee in the ornate dining room of the Winthrop Hotel, Chase Brevard contemplated the crosscurrents overtaking his life.
They were impossible to reconcile: Allie. Malcolm. The conflict between the course he had charted since Harvard, a steady climb through law and politics driven by long hours, hard work, and dedication to issues he thought mattered, and an emotional reckoning that had awaited him in the ambush of time—the wholly unanticipated reopening of a chapter in his youth so compelling that the simple act of holding Allie Hill again had upended everything since.
Last night, someone had fired a bullet into her home. That moment, too, had changed something within him. He believed that she, not he, had been the target; he took no comfort in hoping that it was a warning shot. This place was awash in guns, including weapons of war in the hands of white nationalists like Charles and Molly Parnell. Chase understood that they might kill her—or anyone they decided was the enemy of the primitive white America whose unreasoning rage he had experienced at the rally. Intuitively, he sensed that these forces were connected to the events that had blighted Malcolm’s life.
Compared to the dangers surrounding Malcolm and Allie, his own considerations were trivial. But whatever he decided would come at a cost that could not be undone. To walk away from Malcolm and his mother, concealing their connection to preserve his ambitions and perhaps his safety, would haunt him irretrievably; to do otherwise could mean that his life had been redefined by the existence of a son he had never known.
He had no illusions about his enemies in the media or politics; given the chance, they would use Malcolm and Allie to end his career, even as they were trying to destroy Allie by destroying her and Chase’s son. Malcolm’s trial in Cade County, should it come, could be defined by forces woven into the fabric of this place, and in this country, which had nothing to do with law or fairness.
Nor, realistically, was there anything Chase could do to change the outcome. The elements that would govern his son’s fate were beyond his control. His central choices—who he was, what he could live with, what he feared, and who he cared about most—were matters of the heart not susceptible to reason or calculation. They went too deep.
In four days, Congress would be back in session. Chase tried to imagine himself restored to the company of his staff and his party colleagues—working, strategizing, and exchanging favors and quips—as if the discovery of a son, and the rediscovery of a lover, had happened in a dream. He remembered something Jack Raskin had said: Politics, like rust, never sleeps. Nor, it seemed, did the prosecution of Malcolm Hill.
Back in his room, Chase found several new emails—the first draft of a speech to an environmental group, a list of pending legislation, and a schedule of appearances across Massachusetts to raise his visibility for a prospective Senate race. Somewhat fitfully, he began scanning the speech, even as he found himself thinking of Malcolm and Allie. Perhaps he would call her.
His cell phone rang.
“Dalton Harris just called me,” Ford told him. “He’s appearing in court this afternoon to give formal notice that the sovereign state of Georgia is seeking the death penalty.”
Though he was not surprised, the reality hit Chase hard. “Have you told Allie?”
“I have. I’m on the way to tell Malcolm.”
Chase thought for a moment. “Will he be at the hearing?”
“Yeah,” Ford answered grimly. “I’ll do my best to prepare him. But nothing really prepares you for hearing a prosecutor tell a judge that the state wants to kill you by lethal injection. I’ve seen it before—that look on a defendant’s face when they feel the machinery of death kicking in.”
Chase found himself imagining the look on Malcolm’s face, and the feelings beneath it. “For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “tell Malcolm I’m coming by to see him.”
When Chase entered the visiting room, Malcolm did not stand.
Silent, he looked up at Chase with the dark, expressive eyes he had inherited from Allie. Sitting across from him, Chase put aside the books he had carefully chosen just a couple of days before: Matterhorn, a novel about the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes, and Harlem Shuffle, in which Colson Whitehead applied his considerable gifts with a lighter touch that, Chase had hoped, might at least for a moment serve to distract Malcolm from the darkness of his circumstances.
