Once they’re sitting across from one another, he can see what her profile didn’t reveaclass="underline" eagerness, anxiety, a desperate need to have her fears confirmed. After all, she was the one who gave him the order to infiltrate Caitlin’s home in search of some impossible blossom. The flower he tried to grab didn’t quite fit Nova’s description, but Caitlin’s behavior was stranger than any otherworldly plant.
When Nova senses his hesitation, she says, “I’m sorry about what I said… about John.”
Blake is startled into silence by her use of John’s first name. As far as he knows, Nova never met or laid eyes on John Fuller. She was just a girl when he was murdered, and his relationship with Blake—their secret trysts and desperate make-out sessions; those late nights when John would call Blake and not say anything, just play that new Faith Hill song everyone was so crazy about into the phone; their fumbling sexual experimentation in the shadows of the Lake Pontchartrain levee just a few blocks from Blake’s home—had no public face until after John’s murder.
“What did you say?” he asks.
“The thing about losing the man you loved. It was… it was probably more than I should have…”
“It’s just the way you said his name. It kind of caught me off guard is all,” he whispers.
“We went to the funeral. I remember, ’cause Daddy took me out of school.”
Blake is sidelined by this, more so than by Caitlin’s precise slap. He tries to recall the rows of mourners packed inside the Unitarian church John’s mother had been forced to pick for the service. While there was a good chance her parish church would have overlooked the facts of the case and given her son a proper Catholic burial, by then Deborah Fuller had become an unlikely and hastily assembled gay rights activist whose every public move was scrutinized by a variety of national media outlets. She and Blake were clinging to each other for support every time the cameras swung in their direction, each shot giving credence to the illusion that Blake had been a son-in-law and not a secret.
Now Blake scans the rows of mourners in his memory, searching for a younger, leaner Willie, clean-shaven and muscled as he was in those days, and his bright-eyed young daughter, her hair fastened in two matching braids. Perhaps they were jammed in the back somewhere, or perhaps his memory isn’t what it used to be, because he doesn’t see them. And he can’t recall the funeral with the same clarity with which he sometimes dreams it. All he sees are the stunned faces of his fellow students… and Vernon Fuller—John’s father, Coach Fuller, as he was known to all of their classmates—practically curling into a ball, reeking of bourbon, retreating silently yet entirely from the media spotlight and its incessant demand that he publicly accept his son’s secret life with as much chin-up determination as his wife.
Blake tries to take a breath, but it feels as if his nostrils have been plugged once again with the gauze he woke up with the night of the murder. And then he is blinking back tears, and Nova has bowed her head at the sight of them.
These are the moments when the sense of loss sneaks up on him. He can spend hours lighting candles at John’s mausoleum, engage in all manner of planned rituals designed to purge himself of sadness, and the tears won’t come. Rather, it is in these moments of fatigue and distraction that the grief overtakes him. He knows it’s childish, but there is a belief in him that ever since that terrible night, his is a life half-lived, a desiccated alternative to the fantasies he and John whispered as they held one another on grass kissed by hot winds off the lake. Who cares if the life they plotted for each other once they were free of high school had been nothing but teenage fantasy, devoid of accountability or consequence? That lesson should have been theirs to learn.
“I didn’t know you were there,” he manages quietly.
“We were in the back. Daddy, he thought it was important that we went. Not just for you. But ’cause the… you know, so people could see…” There’s a bitterness in her voice now, and after a few seconds of tasting it, Blake is able to identify its source. Nova’s father wanted them at the funeral because John’s murderers had been black.
Delray Morrison and Xander Higgins. Their mug shots are emblazoned in Blake’s memory with greater clarity than the funeral. Blake had sensed the presence of another assailant that night but he hadn’t seen one with his own two eyes. In light of the head injuries he’d suffered during the attack, he wasn’t willing to cast further doubt on his testimony by insisting on the presence of a ghostly third attacker. Besides, the evidence that Morrison and Higgins had acted in concert was almost impossible to argue with.
It was Troy Mangier, then a young Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy, who had thought to look into several attempted carjackings in Jefferson Parish reported in the weeks before the murder.
Barely a week after John was killed, Troy pulled over two young black men who were carrying materials in their trunk that matched the bindings used to lasso John and Blake to the foot of the electrical tower. The brazenness of this, cruising through the same part of town where they’d committed a deadly assault just a few nights before, would be used by the prosecution to paint both men as remorseless killers.
But they pleaded their innocence until the very end. Didn’t even try to go for a lesser charge. Didn’t try to convince the jury that John’s death had been unintentional. Just kept saying it wasn’t them.
And in a way, they hadn’t been lying.
After all, it was the water that had really killed him. The water that had risen around them with the silent determination of smoke filling a room.
Technically, John Fuller’s murderer was a pumping station, a nondescript one-story white building that plugged a hole in the levee where one of the drainage canals dividing Jefferson Parish entered the lake. You weren’t supposed to swim in Lake Pontchartrain; the water was too polluted, and boats didn’t launch from that spot, so almost no one—not even the affluent white families that lived just on the other side of the levee’s green rise—were all that familiar with the exact rise and ebb of the water along the rocky shoreline, particularly after dark.
The autopsy suggested John’s head injury was so severe he might have wound up in a coma even if Blake had been strong enough to free him before he drowned. But it didn’t matter. The feel of the rope through his desperate, prying fingers, the weight of John’s body, all of it thrummed within Blake like a second heartbeat as he spent hours in the gym, turning himself into a tower of muscle that at present was just shy of cartoonish and a few years away from grotesque.
Delray Morrison. Xander Higgins. They’d made the mistake of forcing a lousy public defender to try to prove they were never there at all, and they’d lost. And now they were dead. One shanked in the prison yard, the other dead of a drug overdose in his prison cell.
Now they seem to hover over the table between Blake and Nova like entangled spirits, and Blake wonders if this is sign of growth on his part, that he can actually feel concern for how Nova might feel that the men who murdered his first boyfriend were black.
“Nova…”
“What?”
“You know, I don’t… That I never…”
“You never what?”
Never held it against you? Your race? How could he say that without sounding like a complete ass? How many times he gritted his teeth in anger over the years when his devout Catholic colleagues would say things like, You’re not like those other gays, Blake. And his people hadn’t been enslaved for hundreds of years.