‘In Kingston, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Get much swag?’
She finally looked up. ‘Let me read, Billy, I’m almost done.’
So I let her read and we rolled deeper into lowa. No big changes there, just miles of flatland. At last she closed the laptop. I asked her if she’d read it all.
‘Just to where I came into the story. The part where I threw up and almost choked. That was hard to read about, so I stopped. By the way, you forgot to change my name.’
‘I’ll make a note.’
‘The rest I knew.’ She smiles. ‘Remember The Blacklist on Netflix? And how we watered the plants?’
‘Daphne and Walter.’
‘Do you think they lived?’
‘I’m sure they did.’
‘Bullshit. You don’t know if they did or not.’
I admitted that was true.
‘And neither do I. But we can believe they did if we want to, can’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We can.’
‘That’s the advantage of not knowing.’ Alice was staring out the window at miles of cornfields, all brown now and waiting for winter. ‘People can choose to believe any old thing they want. I choose to believe that we’ll get to Montauk Point, and do what we came to do, and get away with it, and live happily ever after.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll choose to believe that, too.’
‘After all, you’ve never been caught yet. All those killings, and you got away with them all.’
‘I’m sorry you had to read about that. But you said I should write down everything.’
She shrugged. ‘They were bad people. They all had that in common. You didn’t shoot any priests or doctors or … or crossing guards.’
That made me laugh and Alice smiled a little, but I could tell she was thinking. I let her do it. The miles rolled by.
‘I’m going back to the mountains,’ she said at last. ‘I might even live with Bucky for awhile. What do you think of that?’
‘I think he’d like it.’
‘Just to get started. Until I can find work and get my own place and start saving up money to go back to school. Because you can start college whenever you want. Sometimes people don’t start college until they’re in their forties or even their sixties, right?’
‘I saw a thing on TV about a man who started when he was seventy-five and got his diploma when he was eighty. My Spidey sense tells me it’s not business school you’re thinking about.’
‘No, regular school. Maybe even the University of Colorado. I could live in Boulder. I liked that town.’
‘Any idea what you’d want to study?’
She hesitated, as if something had occurred to her and she’d changed her mind. ‘History, I think. Or sociology. Maybe even theater arts.’ Then, as if I had objected to the idea: ‘Not for acting, I wouldn’t want to do that, but the other stuff – sets and lighting and all that. There’s so much I’m curious about.’
I said that was good.
‘What about you, Billy? What’s your happily ever after?’
I didn’t have to think about it. ‘Since we’re dreaming, I’d like to write books.’ I tapped the laptop, which she was still holding. ‘Until I wrote that I didn’t know if I could. Now I do.’
‘What about this story? You could fix it up, turn it into fiction …’
I shook my head. ‘No one but you is ever going to see it, and that’s all right. It did its job. It opened the door. And I don’t have to give you an alias.’
Alice was quiet for awhile. Then she said, ‘This is Iowa, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Boring.’
I laughed. ‘I bet the lowans don’t think so.’
‘I bet they do. Especially the kids.’
I couldn’t argue with her there.
‘Tell me something.’
‘I will if I can.’
‘Why would a man in his sixties want to be with a girl as young as Rosalie is supposed to be? I don’t get that. It seems … I don’t know … grotesque.’
‘Insecurity? Or maybe trying to connect with the vitality he’s lost? Reaching back to his own youth and trying to connect with it?’
Alice considered these ideas, but only briefly. ‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’
It did to me too, actually.
‘I mean, think about it. What would Klerke talk about to a sixteen-year-old girl? Politics? World events? His TV stations? And what would she talk about to him? Cheerleading and her Facebook friends?’