27.
WHEN GREG finally got the information off Sera’s cell phone, two things became clear. One, that Sera Fuller was indeed a fighter. She had given as good as she got from Kelsey Piper. To the Rho Beta president, who had indeed been bullying Sera to keep her quiet, she had never backed down, texting Kelsey, I’m gonna tell and your bf is an asshole and they will kick him off campus for this, maybe you too. And when Kelsey hit back, telling her to Keep yr fucking whore mouth shut, Sera told her she’d gone to the Nacogdoches Police Department to file a report, ending her text with Paper trail, bitch. Darren, when he heard this, had smiled. Sera had stood up for herself. As long as she could… until a month or so without the real medicine she needed caught up with her. The night campus police had come to confirm her report of harassment by Kelsey, she’d been sick for days. So much so, she’d let her battle with Kelsey go. Campus police had had to conduct their interview while she was in bed. The second thing that became clear looking at Sera’s phone records was that she might have known something was wrong with her medicine. “She didn’t want to go home,” Greg told Darren when he recounted the info he’d gotten from his contact at the FBI. “At least that’s what she told her mom.”
Sera had been feeling bad for a few weeks, and she texted her mother that she felt like her body was cutting itself from the inside out. She guiltily confessed that she’d tried alcohol, adding, Please don’t tell Dad. But she wondered if something more serious was going on. She texted her mom a week before she was last seen: Maybe i need to see a new doctor. It’s possible she’d figured out what was happening to her and had reached out for help from the one person who had always made her feel better when she was most ill, who, despite everything, was still her safe space. She’s a daddy’s girl, Iris had said. According to Greg, Sera’s last call on her cell phone was to her father, Joseph.
The case of Seraphine Renee Fuller ended in a hospital room in Conroe, hours south of Nacogdoches, where she’d been for more than two weeks. Darren had missed the hospital by two counties in his first canvass by phone, when he hadn’t believed Sera could get farther than that on her own. He was right: She hadn’t. Conroe had been her idea, but her dad had driven her. It was as far from Nacogdoches County as she could make it in her condition when she and her father spoke on September 13.
She was in a double room when Darren finally found them.
He had to pass by a woman in her fifties with cellulitis so bad, her lower legs were red in spots, a purplish gray in others, with cracks so deep they looked like swollen fruit about to burst with rot. She did not make eye contact with Darren, who had to walk through her “room” to get to the other side of a curtain, where he’d been told he would find Sera Fuller. His was just another of the many faces who passed through by the hour and he was as good as any nurse or medical assistant to ask after the can of apple juice she’d requested “a good long while ago now.” Darren pressed the call button for the woman’s nurse, then turned to the curtain that cut the tiny room in two, behind which he could hear the soft murmur of Joseph Fuller’s voice. He halted. He wouldn’t enter without permission. And maybe if Joseph had known it was him, he wouldn’t have grunted out a yes. Behind the curtain, Sera Fuller was alive, her skin ashen and dry. Her mouth was slack, chin jutted toward heaven. But she was beautifully alive, no matter how weak she looked. Darren scanned the monitors in the room.
“Is she okay?”
Joseph, who sat beside his daughter’s bed holding her hand, didn’t turn his head at the sound of Darren’s voice. Just answered the question softly. “She’s being sedated, to manage the pain.” He said something low in his throat to his daughter, words Darren couldn’t hear. Joseph kept caressing the skin on his daughter’s left arm, kept whispering things to her that Darren couldn’t make out. “I’d hoped we could get her better in time for the KAW fundraiser. I wanted to show off my family, what all this has only ever been about for me. To show folks how far we’d come. From homeless to this little gal here in college, first in our family,” he said. He lifted her hand and kissed it, rubbed the back of it against his cheek. Darren realized he was using her hand to wipe away his own tears. Joseph Fuller’s eyes were red. Beneath them, there were dark, puffy pads of flesh rubbed raw by the crumpled fast-food napkin he pulled from his pocket to wipe his eyes. “This is bad,” Joseph said. “But we’ve been here before. She’s come out of a crisis like this before. She refused to go back to her doctors in town, just flat out refused, begged me to get her to a hospital somewhere. She was so bad off, I didn’t fight her none. I even took out a credit card so I could pay for it, since the only insurance we got comes through Thornhill. But then they found out she was sick, and they offered to pay. I thought she’d get a few days of treatment here and then we could still be at Carey-Ann and Mr. E.J.’s event, telling folks how they changed our lives.”
“And why do you think that is?” Darren said, hearing a nurse enter on the other side of the curtain, reminding the patient she was not allowed apple juice but she would be happy to bring her water. “Why do you think Thornhill is paying for all this?”
He gestured to the hospital room.
“What I just said, they wanted us to speak at the fundraiser thing. They wanted Sera feeling well enough to be there too. They wanted us,” he said. “They wanted us to be the face of the Thornhill way of life.”
“‘Movement,’” Darren mumbled, quoting Carey-Ann.
“Yes.”
“They want to push this kind of thing all over the country.”
“Good,” Joseph said.
“You need to have doctors here run blood tests to see what medications were in her system when she was admitted. I don’t think it’s Lenarix she’s been taking —”
“They think she got behind on it, wasn’t taking it on time or something.”
“Why don’t you have them run a test for exactly what she was taking?”
Joseph gingerly set his daughter’s hand back on the bed. He took the time to rearrange her blankets, tucking her in as he might have when she was a small child. Then he turned and looked directly at Darren. And because, somewhere deep down, it had already occurred to him — which was why he’d agreed to bring her all the way to a hospital in Conroe and not Thornhill — he said, “They would have no reason to harm my child. Carey-Ann has treated my family with nothing but respect since we moved there, has treated me with respect, as a man who can provide for his family. No handouts.”
Darren felt deep sadness for how little Joseph Fuller thought his life should command simply for existing, when part of organizing ourselves into tribes and nations was to lend a hand, to protect each other’s human dignity. It was grace, not charity.
But not for Joseph Fuller.
He insisted, “Everything my family has out there is because of my hands, my body. I spent way too much of my life being treated like I’m begging the world for every little scrap, too much time being looked down on for what I couldn’t give my family. All the talk about what black men can’t do, won’t do, and even Obama talking down to blacks, all while his whole insurance thing put us in the streets. We were homeless, man. I had my family, my children, living in a car.” His voice caught and his face sank with humiliation that he rearranged into anger. He sat up and said, “I’m not gon’ follow any politician who don’t see me as a man with value. They welcomed me at my first Trump rally,” he said, “the one I took my boy to. That’s what I want my son to see. People not looking down on me for what I don’t have, assuming I need a handout to make it in this world. I’m a man,” he said, still arguing with himself. “And that’s what they saw in me, a decent man who just wants to work for what’s his.”
Darren tried to think of words to explain that he was not required to do anything exceptional to deserve his country’s favor. But in the end, he saved his breath.
Joseph Fuller was too far gone.
“They said we might get to speak in front of Congress someday.”
“Sure,” Darren said, nodding in a way that feigned assent as an exit out of this conversation. Then he glanced down at the bed, where Sera slept a peace that was nearly terrifying. He said a small prayer for her, a plea to God not to withhold blessings because of her father’s need to be seen as a man. And he made her a promise. He would turn in her notes, her paper, and the photocopies of the payment structure of Thornhill Industries to… well, he wasn’t sure who yet. He was no longer a Ranger, and Greg was no longer FBI. But he promised someone would see it. He wouldn’t let her investigative work be in vain. On his way out, he looked at Joseph one last time. “Do me a favor, man. Run the blood tests,” he said. “Not for me, not for you. Do it for Sera.”
Camilla
Five Months Later
THE NIGHT before his trial, Darren’s lawyers hosted a dinner for him at the farmhouse, if you could call it hosting when he’d done most of the cooking. A brisket he’d smoked for six hours the morning before, his breath steaming in the February cold, plus a hash of nightshades from his garden done up with garlic and a criminal amount of butter. Randie had put two hens in the oven and made a pitcher of hibiscus tea and raspberry lemonade. And after grace was said by Justin Adler, who had been in rabbinical school before becoming a lawyer, they all gathered in the dining room off the front parlor. It was a room rarely used, and besides Easter and Christmas, he didn’t think the room had ever held this many people. Randie and Darren, Justin and his law partner, Nelson Azarian, two of their aides and a paralegal, plus Greg and a girl he’d started seeing, allowed into this intimate gathering because Darren’s lawyers were trying to juice the numbers for the trial. They wanted the gallery filled with people who knew and loved Darren, or who at least gave the appearance of strong support. Lisa had promised she’d be there tomorrow, but Darren told her it was okay if she couldn’t make it or just didn’t want to. If it felt too weird. Wilson, Darren’s old lieutenant, was noncommittal, and Darren understood. He was aware of the bind it put Wilson in — publicly showing support for a former Ranger who might be fully disgraced when the verdict came in. But privately, he’d told Darren he was in his corner. He believed he was a good Ranger, William Mathews’s nephew after all. William’s twin brother was back in the house tonight, for the first time in years. Darren’s uncle Clayton was uncharacteristically taciturn this evening, quiet and with his head nodded in Naomi’s direction mostly, speaking in low tones to her alone. It was an acknowledgment of the strain between him and his nephew, but it was also age, Darren thought. He hadn’t seen Clayton since he’d had his heart surgery, and his uncle looked diminished, humbled by time. Naomi was by his side, seated to the right of Darren, who sat at the head of the table. He looked at the group of people going into battle with him, not a single one of them knowing that he was living in the gray of guilt over this case: a dull ash when it came to knowing about the weapon Mack had disposed of and a dark charcoal when it came to Bill King’s manufactured confession.
He had been prepared to confess to his attorneys if the trial prep included any discovery that suggested that Vaughn was going to bring up evidence specifically about Bill King. Darren worried that to get an obstruction conviction against him, Vaughn was going to reopen the Ronnie Malvo murder case, which would lead to him challenging Bill King’s confession. But Justin and Nelson suggested that Vaughn’s strategy was to tell a jury he needed to convict Darren in order to reopen the Malvo case. Months of prep told them so. As did the fact that Frank Vaughn was spending most of his time making cable news appearances and campaign stops, frequently bringing up his intolerance for Black Lives Matter rhetoric, even and especially when it was coming from inside the heart of law enforcement. Since Darren’s arrest, there had been a failed impeachment trial against the president, and it both emboldened and made sloppy men like Vaughn, who Darren’s lawyers decided was out over his skis. They had grown increasingly confident that this case was just as they’d originally believed: an elaborate campaign stunt. After grace, they stood and toasted to Frank Vaughn’s folly.
The morning of, he woke at dawn.
Randie was awake and holding his hand. She kissed his knuckles and ran her thumb over his skin, which was damp and clammy. In rising sunlight coming through the window on her side of the bed, he saw his grandmother’s ring on her left hand, and he broke into a smile he felt deep in his chest. It parted bones. Uncaged him in every way. He thought back to the first time he’d laid eyes on her in Lark, Texas, the way her presence made him feel both undone and yet settled somewhere deep inside himself. She had adopted his lawyers’ optimism and rose to make them coffee. She would be with him in court all day, had cleared her schedule for the next month or so, though Darren’s lawyers had told them they couldn’t imagine the case going more than three days. She was borderline cheerful this morning, kissing his shoulder in the kitchen.
The first half of day one of the trial was a mere reestablishing of the facts of the Ronnie Malvo homicide case, the case file read aloud by the investigating officer, a sheriff’s deputy with as much finesse as a fifth-grader called on to recite a passage from Huck Finn cold. Behind Darren sat his posse: Greg along with his girlfriend, plus Clayton and Naomi. Lisa was sitting in the back, clearly on the defense side but many rows behind Randie. Rutherford “Mack” McMillan had left about twenty minutes into testimony that brought back some of the worst days of his life, when he’d been suspected of murder. It was too much for him.
Darren was numb through most of the proceedings.
The courtroom was ice cold, air-conditioning running in the dead of winter. Even the ceiling fans turned overhead, blowing cool air over the defense table, stiffening his muscles. He was aware of hope in his peripheral vision, felt its presence in the air, but he was too scared to reach for it, to dare turn his head, even when he felt Randie’s reassuring hand on his shoulder as Judge Pickens called the lunch recess. She’d prepared sandwiches with roasted peppers and turkey, and the plan had been for the same configuration of supporters to have lunch together at the farmhouse, as there was hardly a restaurant in the tiny town of Coldspring that could hold them all. Darren spent much of the lunch break in his bedroom alone, his nervous system shot to hell.
He had thought to just close his eyes for a few minutes.
But he woke an hour later with his boots hanging off the edge of the bed, curled over on his side, his left arm asleep. He heard someone calling his name. It was his uncle Clayton, saying, “I’m sorry, son.” Darren sat up, his face hot and creased. What?
He walked on stiff legs into the living room, where they were all standing around the kitchen table laden with lunch plates greasy with oil and the dust of kettle chips. No one was speaking. They were each of them, the lawyers and their team members, Lisa, Greg, and Naomi, staring at Darren, who stood with his uncle’s hand resting on his shoulder, the part he could reach. Darren had been taller than him since the tenth grade. It was seeing the look of dread on Randie’s face that made it finally hit him that something had gone terribly wrong. His first thought was someone had died. But wasn’t everyone he loved in this room? Clayton sighed. “It’s your mother, son.”
Darren felt as if the floor were coming up to his face.
He felt his knees buckle, felt a sting in his eyes.
