His Third Wife

“Jamison!” I ran to him. “Jamison! Jamison!”

I probably should’ve noticed the man with the gun still pointed at me, inching in and threatening me. But I saw only my beloved, his legs, his shoes, go over the ledge as I ran to him, not thinking for a minute about what going over the ledge myself might mean.

I reached for him. Tried to catch him, but it was too late. He was flying. Already dead when he was still in the sky.

“Jamison!”

I left myself. Went to some safe little place in my body. Where else could I go? I didn’t want to see. Or to hear. I di

dn’t want to know anymore of the truth. Give me another lie. The lie from the day before. The lie from a week before. Anything but the truth of that moment. There was no wanting that moment. No knowing that moment. I couldn’t be there. We couldn’t be there.

The next thing I heard was the door I’d come through banging open again behind me. I turned around screaming for help thinking it was the gunman trying to get away, but when I looked at the door there was more than one gun pointed at me and the man was nowhere around. The men in front of me were in blue suits. Silver badges. Screaming. “Put your hands up!”

“Jamison! He—” I tried to point toward the gunman, but I was alone then on the roof. I pointed to the ledge. “He needs your help. He fell!”

“Step away from the ledge!”

“Okay, okay!” I tried. “I just need help. I just need your help.” I stepped toward the officers and they came in toward me, one going for every limb to capture me. “Wait! Wait! What?” I hollered. “It’s Jamison. He fell! The man was here! He pushed him!” I was pointing over the ledge as they pulled me into a circle where someone cuffed my wrists together. “Wait! My husband!”

“Are you Kerry Jackson?” a man with short gray hair asked Kerry.

“Yes?”

“We need you to come with us.”

“What? Why? I didn’t do anything,” Kerry said.

Two other officers came funneling about the maze of faces around Kerry.

“Chief, we shut down the hotel. I spoke to the couple next-door to the room where Mayor Taylor was staying. They said they heard arguing. Cursing coming from the room not over an hour ago,” one said. “And the valet downstairs confirms that Ms. Jackson checked her car downstairs late last night.”

“That was Jamison on the phone—” Kerry tried to explain. “He was arguing with Coreen. That’s who did this. Who sent the man with the gun here to kill Jamison. You have to find him. If you shut down the hotel. He’s still in here!”

The other officer added, “A witness downstairs said she saw a woman on the roof right after Mayor Taylor was pushed. Some guy in the restaurant described Ms. Jackson as the woman who’d been up here earlier.”

He pointed to the guy Kerry had talked to in the restaurant standing in the back of the crowd of blue suits pointing at Kerry.

“No! It wasn’t me! I’m being set up,” Kerry said. “There was someone else up here. You have to believe me. You have to find him!”

“Kerry Jackson, you’re under arrest for the murder of your ex-husband, Jamison Taylor,” the chief with the gray hair started. He read Kerry her rights and men led her down to the lobby, through the front doors of the hotel and into the flood of lights and eyes gathered in the middle of Peachtree Street. The ambulance that would carry Jamison’s body was on one side of the spectacle. The car that would take who would’ve been his third wife to jail was on the other.

Coreen

I was never a wife. Not in Jamison’s eyes. Not ever good enough to be that. But still he lied. He followed me to Los Angeles. Showed up at my doorstep and begged me to let him in. Told me Kerry was a crazy bitch. He was leaving her. Wanted to be with me. Start a life with me. I believed him. In what we could be. And when there was a new life growing inside of me, the only thing that could always keep him tied to me, I knew it was real. But then, when I got too comfortable, I was the crazy bitch again and he wanted to leave and go home to her. Back to her? Again? Come and go. Go and come. And every time I’m supposed to just take it. Bend over and spread and not do anything. I know every woman feels that way in her life with a man. Or maybe every person who’s ever been fucked over by someone. But you can’t play with people and not expect them to react. Reaction is nature. A pack of lions setting a trap. In revenge. In retaliation. Because sometimes you won’t be all right. And you know it. And getting even—no, not just getting even—getting back what was taken from you will require a fresh kill. A reminder that you’re flesh and blood. That you’re a real person and you bleed. I told Jamison that. Showed Jamison that. He only ever listened to himself. Only saw himself in my eyes and never cared enough to look and really see me. At once a pure heart now made into an angry bitch I never asked to be.

I was tired of being someone’s not-good-enough. And when I realized a dead Jamison would mean I wouldn’t have to keep begging to be good enough in his eyes and my son would be good enough to get his father’s fortune, my decision was easy. And Kerry ending up on the roof, that wasn’t part of the plan. That was luck.

Epilogue

There would be no casket at Jamison’s funeral. The coroner, after shaking his head at the muddle of once living parts now dismembered permanently by the weight of the hardest fall, scratched his head at the mess of blood and guts and organs on his table and thought to suggest to the family that cremation would be most efficient. There was nothing for a mortician at a funeral parlor to string together of the man that once was. Only the bones. The skin, a bag burst open and spilling out memories.

When the next of kin was called into the room to see, to confirm by looking only at a single left hand that had survived the weight of the tumble downward and looked recognizable as something that wouldn’t cause nightmares to any eyes set upon it, there was a tear and acceptance.

Only flowers, white and red and yellow, sat on the altar as the city mourned the demise of a man who could’ve been great. A procession of wailers and mothers with wide hips and long, silken handkerchiefs pressed to their swollen eyes, sat tight together in pews at the back of the chosen sanctuary right across the street from the crypt that held the body of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In front of them sat the children. Little black boys in cheap suits commonly reserved for church whose mother’s woke them up early that morning and said they were going to say good-bye to a man who’d wanted to do something to change the world they lived in. Closer to the front sat the dignitaries. Politicians. Brothers. And then family and friends. In the front, there was a mourner no one expected to see. His wife. The woman Jamison died married to. The new widow who now inherited his fortune. His story. Val. Beside her: Mama Fee.

By then, the headlines had turned the death of the Georgia son into a scandal of the haves taking from the have-nots in a consistent and deliberate and historical and traditional plot to stamp out progress from the under. From the west end. From the south end. From the would be’s and seekers.

But little of this fight reached through the concrete walls and metal bars that became the home of Kerry Jackson. She’d been charged with murder and placed in a cage to rot as an example of how swiftly and efficiently the Atlanta Police Department could do its work to avenge the murder of its leader. The chief, the brother who’d been put in office by the mayor himself, congratulated his team on a job well done. He handed out certificates, medals, raises, and promotions and closed the book on the right side of justice.