“That is not true. It wasn’t that simple,” Johnny Lyncook says. “I had no choice.”
“No choice!”
Byron grabs the cane from the old man’s hand and flings it to the ground.
“Byron!” Benny says.
“Do you have any idea what you put your daughter through?” Byron says. “Do you know how our mother had to struggle to survive?” He turns to point at Marble. “This woman,” he says, “was your daughter’s first child. Do you know how your daughter ended up pregnant with her?”
“Enough, Byron,” Benny says.
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“By-RON!” Benny says, raising her voice, using a tone that she has never used toward her big brother. Byron looks at Benny now, and then at Marble, who is looking at him with her brows pulled together, her lips twisted apart. He wipes the perspiration from his nose. He shouldn’t have said that, not that way. Not in front of Marble. He wants to take back what he said. He wants to take back the whole day but he can’t do that, so he walks out of the room, heads straight for the front door.
Fifteen minutes later, Byron is halfway across the causeway when it occurs to him that Etta, Benny, and Marble have no car and he has all their luggage.
Shit.
Byron turns back at the end of the crossing. When he gets back to Johnny Lyncook’s house, the three women are standing at the edge of the driveway like travelers waiting at the end of a dock for a ferry boat. Benny and Etta each have an arm wrapped around Marble’s waist. Marisol stands at the door, watching, until they get into the car and slam the doors shut.
Unthinkable
Because some things are unthinkable, Lin’s brain will do what it must. It will fire a signal to block the flow of oxygen that carries unthinkable thoughts. It will flood its own backyard with blood and short-circuit the idea that is trying to push its way across Lin’s cortex. It will leave Lin with only this: the memory of Covey at age ten, scrambling out of the back of his station wagon with Bunny and the neighbor kids, squealing as she rushes toward the waterfall, whooping as she crashes through the curtain of water, the sound of her laughter, and Look at me, Pa! mixing with the boom of the cascade and echoing off the grotto behind her.
Look at me, Pa!
When Marisol walks back into the house where she has been employed for the past ten years, she will find Lin’s head tilted at a forty-five-degree angle against the hibiscus-patterned cushion on the wicker couch, one side of his face in a droop. She will check his pulse then pick up the phone and dial 911 and, as she speaks to the dispatcher on the other end of the line, she will sit down next to Lin and pat his arm.
“Hang on, Mister Lin,” she will say, “they’re coming to help.” Then she’ll lift her hands to his head, shift his hairpiece back into place, and smooth it behind his ears.
Plunder
Lin had paid a private investigator. He had learned almost everything about his daughter’s life over the years. But until Byron’s outburst in his living room, Lin did not know what had happened to Covey in Britain. He still didn’t know, exactly, but he could make a fairly good guess.
The beauty of a thing justified its plunder.
And nothing was more beautiful than a girl who was fearless.
Byron
They don’t tell you how to live with this kind of anger, this prickly feeling under your skin. That’s the thing about false narratives that ultimately define your life. When you finally learn that you’ve been lied to for years by the people you’ve trusted the most, even when you can see why they might have done it, that awareness contaminates every other relationship you have.
You begin to revisit all those actions and comments you never fully understood, the things people never said, the times you were sure that someone acted a certain way for a certain reason, only you couldn’t prove it. And then you get to thinking about all the lies you’ve been telling yourself over the years. About how good everything’s been, about how much you’ve been appreciated, about how much people have cared. About being friends, about being one big team, about how certain things were just business, Byron, nothing personal at all.
Then everything shifts.
And you can’t push it back.
One day, you wake up and you find yourself standing at the mouth of something wide and howling, like the open door of an airplane, the kind you jump out of with a parachute for fun, only it’s not any fun, you can’t see the ground, you don’t know what you’re doing, but you know you’re going to have to fling yourself out there and you don’t know exactly where Out There is, you only know that it’s where your life is going to be from now on.