The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Jamie shook Owen’s hand and said, “You’re being very gracious. I hope it is a blip.”

  Next, he approached Charlotte, who was scowling and stabbing out hate-texts on her phone.

  “Stop, Char,” he said. “We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep plowing resources into fighting the Pruitts.”

  This sounded naive, Jamie knew, but he didn’t care. The two families kept running each other through with spears, knocking off whoever dared raise their head, the count of ruined lives growing every year.

  It needed to stop. Somebody needed to end the cycle.

  Charlotte raised her brow toward him and, after a final peck of her screen, gave her eyes, too.

  “Couple things,” she said. “One? This isn’t your fault. I designed SmartPodium. I gave you superuser access, which was the height of recklessness—there should’ve never been superuser access, where you could change other people’s documents. Brutal design decision…”

  She momentarily veered into arcane technical details, then broke off with a fzzzt.

  “And two,” she said, raising fingers, “we can keep plowing resources into this fight—because we have more resources to plow. In a war of attrition, they lose. They should know that. I think in fact they do know—I think Rock Pruitt went rogue. But I really don’t care.”

  She finished with a tight, terrible grin. Jamie knew this expression from childhood. It meant she was feeling wronged—in Connect Four, in field hockey, in missing some academic prize or honor. It meant she was going to use this wrong. She was going to motivate off it, drive herself with the memory.

  It meant she was going to win.

  No matter that for a decade, Jamie had observed American politics from afar—he still saw the coming election cycle with perfect clarity. One retaliation after another, hitting and being hit, scandal and counter-scandal. Everyone sucked into the vortex, lower, filthier.

  He had no standing to stop it from the Gallagher side. He hadn’t been around. Whatever buzz his reemergence had created in the clan was forgotten after Owen’s gaffe.

  He could whisper in Charlotte’s ear, but she wouldn’t listen. She’d entered a zone impervious to suggestion.

  Maybe Lem Gallagher would object, write some stark ballad about the pointlessness of ideological conflict.

  Maybe the California wing would nudge the clan off the national tug-of-war, focusing on progressive solutions for the fifth-largest economy in the world rather than keep prosecuting culture wars against the flyover states.

  None of this would matter. These were power centers, but lesser ones. Minor suns to Charlotte’s supernova.

  Should he head back to Juba? There Jamie had been doing unassailable good, improving the lives of disadvantaged children and the infirm. He could keep those missions alive. Physically removing himself from other Gallaghers and Pruitts would guarantee he didn’t cause any further unintended harm—like he’d caused today.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Watching the machinations play out now in the courtyard, Jamie couldn’t be sure. He felt utterly incapable of living—of walking around, inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide—without wreaking damage someplace.

  Look what he’d done with Sam Lessing. Sam, the one pure thing in his life. He had started out cautiously this weekend, exercising discretion, but gotten too close. He’d put her in a compromising position with her family.

  Look at me, Jamie Gallagher! All shiny and new! Money, power, romance without the bother or tarnish of real responsibility! Wouldn’t you rather be here?

  There was no mistaking that Sam and her husband had fought. They’d walked feet apart with their shoulders turned out. In Jamie’s presence, they hadn’t touched once. They talked to Joss in shifts, almost like a tryout for joint custody.

  Jamie needed to do right.

  Full of dread, he walked to Silliman College. Fading sunlight gave campus a mournful tint. Families stood next to bags on curbs, waiting for cars to take them to the airport or train station. The reunion was over. Silliman was in the throes of tearful sendoffs, strong hugs and swapped numbers, promises to keep in touch.

  Jamie found the husband first.

  “What do you want?” the man asked.

  Abe, right?

  “To talk to Sam,” Jamie said, then realized how threatening that sounded. “And you, too. Things ended badly at the ceremony. I want to make it right.”

  “She went for a walk.” Abe pointed north.

  “Maybe up to East Rock?”

  Abe flared a nostril, indifferent, ugly.

  Jamie winced. Of course—he doesn’t know East Rock.

  “Did she go with anyone?”

  “Our daughter.”

  Abe was standing outside the entryway of Sam and Laurel’s room, leaning into a split-rail fence, not doing much. His shirt was a rag. He smelled.

  Jamie tried for polite conversation. “How is Sam these days? Does she seem happy at WNYC?”

  Abe narrowed his eyes. “It’s not her life’s ambition. But she has peers, friends there.”

  Jamie nodded, his chin’s path to his chest feeling about a mile long. “And how are…you?”

  Should he ask what Abe did for work? About Brooklyn? About what stuff Joss was into these days?

  No. She isn’t some toddler discovering books or gravity.

  He decided to add nothing.

  Abe’s head ticked back and forth.

  Jamie said, “It’s just a friendly question.”

  “Right, real friendly,” Abe said. “You’re a Gallagher so you have to be friendly, right? Some kind of a plank in the platform?”

  Jamie didn’t respond.

  Abe shook out his ratty sleeves. “I’m common as they come, aren’t I? The perfect object of your charity.”

  Jamie took a half-step away. “Fine. We don’t have to talk.”

  “We can just stand here? Stand here together waiting for my wife, you mean?”

  The sallow skin under the man’s eyes trembled. Jamie felt an extreme physical aversion, an urgent need to bolt.

  He made himself stay. “I don’t pretend to know anything about you. Or Sam. I just came to my twenty-year reunion. That’s all I did.”

  “Is it? How innocent of you. How’d you end up chaperoning my wife and daughter all around New Haven?”

  “That…I—I was keeping my distance from my own family.”

  “And Sam was just around?” Abe asked, incredulous. “You just happened to join up and become bosom buddies. Could’ve happened with anybody.”

  Jamie wondered what exactly Sam had told him about the weekend. “I didn’t say that.”

  Abe hurled more accusations and veiled digs at the Gallagher name. He lolled his tongue mockingly and made vaguely effeminate gestures of the wrists. Several classmates were listening.

  Jamie didn’t care about the classmates, but Abe distressed him. Just being near him was oppressive—the constant aggrievement, the mantle of threadbare nobility he kept shoving under your nose.

  What was it like to live with this man 365 days a year? He felt awful on Sam’s behalf.

  Still, Jamie had come here with a mission.

  “I’m not going to argue,” he said. “Things look one way from your perspective—I understand that. I’m sorry. I apologize for whatever I’ve done, or whatever you perceive that I’ve done.”

  The words, which Jamie had meant as an olive branch, seemed to flummox Abe. His sneakers shuffled sideways.

  Jamie realized his extra words—all that “perspective” and “perceive”—had sapped the apology of its force. To compensate, he stepped closer and patted Abe behind the upper arm.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Jamie turned.

  It was Sam.

  “What’re you guys, pals or something?” she said, face tipped severely. “Man. I leave for ten minutes.”

  Jamie looked between husband and wife, feeling something like whiplash. Could he say or do anything without causing
offense?

  “We—I was just apologizing,” he said. “This weekend, you know, I didn’t come here with any big plan, it—things just happened and…”

  He trailed off, realizing he had no idea what he meant to say—and finding his brain useless in the face of Sam’s anger.

  He managed, “You went for a walk?”

  Sam seemed just as mad at her husband, looking between them like co-conspirators.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, just for air. To think.”

  Again, Jamie groped for a safe word or combination of words. Sam was a Sphinx now—quiet, her eyes fused to a laser beam.

  He tried, “Rock Pruitt sabotaged the speech.” Surely we can all unite around this. “It was my fault—he stole my login info and used it to stick that racist stuff in Owen’s speech.”

  Neither Sam nor her husband said anything, nor Joss—who’d stalled out a few paces back.

  Now Jamie felt that had been dumb to say, as though he believed this pinebox blow of the Pruitt’s somehow trumped their insignificant family foibles.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I really am. I’m sorry you got in the middle of the feud, I’m sorry this weekend got complicated. I’m sorry we—”

  “Stop saying you’re sorry!” Sam said. “I don’t care about the feud. I really don’t. I just feel like running that brick to the cops and…I don’t care. Whatever happens happens.”

  Jamie folded his hands behind his back. Sam was peeved, no doubt, but he couldn’t tell precisely what about. Did she think Charlotte had been dismissive earlier at the ceremony? Was this still about his seeming chummy with Abe?

  For a while, everybody stood staring past one another in a circle of rancor.

  The sounds of the courtyard were becoming diffuse, a caterer’s hand truck scraping stone, a child whining for one last turn on the rope swing. Up Orange Street, a car horn faded.

  It put Jamie in mind of another ending—twenty years earlier, their last night as undergraduates. That one, too, had turned at the very end.

  Jamie had entered college with no plan, yet those four years still managed to feel like a series of ramblings away from some preset path. He paid lip service to his parents’ advice to study history or political science for a semester, and then changed majors to philosophy. Outside class, he blundered from one mistake to the next, finding false purpose, correcting it, refocusing every few months on a new aspect of himself or the community.

  Senior spring, it was people: these lovely people he was preparing to leave behind—and none lovelier than Sam Lessing. Jamie felt the subconscious restraint he’d always exercised around Laurel Trowbridge sloughing off, and Sam’s too. As second semester wound down, he visualized a dozen ways it might happen.

  On a bike trail, stopped for squirts of water.

  Their knees touching at the dining hall—accidentally, then not.

  Sitting in a rowboat at New Haven Harbor under a stone moon.

  With each day none of these came to pass, his panic grew. Would it happen at all? Should he force the issue with some contrived meeting or declaration of feelings?

  Instinct told him no, such clumsiness didn’t fit Sam’s style. It would end in a big botch-up, spoiling everything that’d grown up between them.

  Could he really not try, though? Just let things whimper out? How cowardly was that?

  Then, that final night in the courtyard, it put itself together. Their legs and hands intertwining, their Davenport classmates around like a chorus—some engaged in their own private heart-wrench, others acting young and dumb—as they followed the inexorable moment.

  Jamie thought the entryway kiss might go further. His imaginings sure had. When it didn’t, though, when Sam squeezed his hand and said, “You’re perfect” before backing into her room, he felt no disappointment. He felt graced—by Sam, by this university he loved, by having graduated, which his classmates all took for granted.

  Not Jamie. The kiss drove home this truth: everything in his life was a gift, one more golden bar on a pile that’d already risen to greater heights than he—than anyone—deserved.

  College had worked out after all. If he got to kiss Sam Lessing tonight and fly to Macedonia to work on intransigent poverty in the morning? “Perfect” was exactly right.

  He reached out to touch Sam’s closed door. He laid two fingers against it, then rested his face against those knuckles and cried—with joy and relief and release and knowing life was pivoting on, moving ahead, and bringing Jamie Gallagher along.

  Now, a minor lifetime later, he faced another sort of closed door. Sam’s anger.

  Reunion weekend was nearly over. This thing he’d forged with Sam must end, or shift, or snowball—but something. And right now, looking at this crease splitting Sam’s forehead like black lightning, he didn’t like his odds.

  Sam was the reason he’d come to New Haven. The reason he’d resurfaced at all. Leaning against the grass-thatched mud, imagining the pain of returning to the States and giving up the life he’d enjoyed in Juba, Jamie had pushed through with visions of Sam.

  Sam had gotten him on that flight to Khartoum.

  He broke the group silence. “I refuse to be a negative. I refuse to hurt you, or be the reason—”

  “Again, damn it!” Sam interrupted. “Again? Really?”

  “All I’m trying to explain—”

  “Hurt me! Hurt him!” Sam jabbed a finger toward her husband. “Or get mad at Rock Pruitt and help me nail him. Aren’t you enraged at him?”

  Jamie felt her breath’s force across the circle.

  Sam continued, “Life sucks. It sucks a lot—it’s messy and soul crushing, but you still have to live it. You can’t float through like mist and think you’re never gonna upset people, or…you know, brush against anything.”

  Jamie didn’t shrink from this, though his heart was twisting and numbness had overtaken his fingertips.

  He met her eyes. He swallowed.

  He needed to answer, but what could he say? Was there a word or even a single syllable that wouldn’t provoke another torrent?

  “You can’t even speak,” Sam said, and stormed off, gone again from his life.

  Chapter 16

  Sam crossed the courtyard in a dozen livid strides.

  She was getting the brick from underneath her bed and taking it to a police station. Any police station. She wasn’t going to think about which precinct or what timing would produce maximum impact. She wasn’t going to wait. Jamie’s hesitancy—and Charlotte Gallagher’s skepticism—had confused the issue in her mind, fuzzed up her thoughts. But no more.

  The brick wasn’t theirs to hem and haw over. It belonged to her. Her and Joss. Maybe it would make Sam famous. She had plenty of footage and skill to produce a devastating expose on Rock Pruitt. The brick—and whatever legal action it spawned—would propel her work onto the national stage. Sam might end up on Fresh Air or The Today Show.

  She didn’t care if her thoughts were crass. She felt like being crass and selfish and letting everybody react to her for a change.

  In the room, she found Laurel zipping her last suitcase.

  “Aww,” Sam said, her mood blunted. “When do you fly?”

  “Nine thirty.” Laurel stood and situated luggage over her shoulders, adjusting straps, balancing weight front to back. “Red-eye was the cheapest way to get home.”

  They embraced. Both sniffled at first, then chuckled when Sam couldn’t find a way to wrap her arms around Laurel without upsetting a bag.

  Sam asked if she was good getting to the airport.

  “Uber’s on the way,” Laurel said. “Are you catching a train tonight? You and…Joss, I guess?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I guess.”

  She didn’t know what Laurel had heard of the courtyard blowup. Even if she had been packing and missed it all, she’d witnessed enough dysfunction from the Lessing-Isaacson family unit to know their situation had gotten royally scrambled.

  “We should talk m
ore,” Laurel said. “I could really use it. Plus I need to hear all about your documentary and what Joss’s dance teacher thinks about quarks.”

  Sam smiled and agreed.

  Holding the door for her friend, Sam felt encouraged at the reset between them. When she’d imagined good outcomes from this weekend, Laurel had never figured into the picture. Their relationship had seemed beyond change, like some high-mileage car whose faults and maintenance costs you just learned to accept.

  Laurel asked, “Did you hear if Jamie’s sticking around? Or for how long?”

  Sam shook her head. “I’m not sure he knows that himself.”

  Both their mouths turned down. Sam still felt anger toward Jamie, but saying goodbye to Laurel was filing off its sharpest barbs.

  Sam shouldn’t judge him. Jamie Gallagher was damaged. The pinebox vendetta had chewed him up, gripped him by its furious, hurricane arms and whipped him around and around until something broke inside. He wasn’t the person she’d known at Yale.

  Did that person still exist? Buried somehow, repairable? Sam didn’t know.

  Laurel stopped in the entryway. “Oh, did you need me to leave my key?”

  Sam patted her front pocket. “No, I’m good—got mine right here. Why, did you find an extra somewhere?”

  Laurel’s expression turned quizzical. “I found the door unlocked earlier, when I came back. I thought maybe you’d lost your key and left it open?”

  Sam narrowed her eyes.

  Laurel went on, “I’ll go find Joss and say goodbye. I have a few minutes before the car gets here.”

  As she disappeared to the courtyard, Sam felt her stomach bottoming out.

  She started on shaky legs for the bedroom she and Joss had shared the past two nights. She’d been preparing to look up the address for the New Haven Police on her phone when she’d run into Laurel. Now she wasn’t thinking about addresses or transportation or what hours the precinct was open.

  She dropped to her knees on the hardwood floor. The bed skirt hung straight down—stiff, bulldog blue. She raised it.

  Below the box spring was nothing but empty space.