Ricky’s face stayed closed off.
There was the sudden pull at the back of my skull, an almost overwhelming desire to draw the information out of him. To reach inside him and extract it by force, have that control over this man who still saw me as a threat to his own power. But we were surrounded by strangers and witnesses. “Somebody’s been following me and the other Homestead survivors,” I said instead. “A man in a maroon sedan. Friend of yours?”
“You can’t use me as a scapegoat for the rest of your life,” Ricky said.
Fine. Enough. Leaning forward, I sought out his gaze and locked eyes with him, feeling his sudden stillness. The dizziness swelled and crested more quickly this time, like it was a muscle I’d been training. “Tell me if you had anything to do with my mother’s disappearance,” I said into the receiver, and imagined the words traveling that brief distance, striking his eardrum, sending the fine vibrations and electric signals crawling up the auditory nerve and landing in his brain. “Tell me,” I repeated, “if you did anything to my mother.”
His face twitched with a quick muscle flinch, like he was trying to shake away a bad memory and couldn’t. His mouth dropped open. “No,” he said, like a sleepwalker. “I didn’t do it. I know nothing about it.”
“Tell me if you set the fire that killed Bellanger,” I said. The dizziness made me clutch the edge of the chair.
“I didn’t set the fire.”
I absorbed the shock quietly. So everything I’d known about my origin story was a lie. It felt like my DNA was untwisting in response, taking me apart. I hesitated for just a moment. “Tell me,” I said slowly, “tell me if my mother threatened Bellanger the evening of the fire.”
“She did,” Ricky said. “She spoke to me just like I told you. I’ll always remember the look in her eyes. That long, dark hair.” He lifted a finger, sketched a line up and down, up and down, as if he were stroking my hair through the plastic.
The visiting time was almost over. To an outside observer, Ricky and I were doing nothing wrong—just two people talking, like any other pair in this room. But I felt conspicuous, wild, reckless.
“Do you know who’s after my mother now?” I asked, and realized too late that I’d phrased it all wrong, a question and not a command. The dizziness fell away, and Ricky began turning his head, responding to the guard’s announcement. Our connection wavered and I was scrambling, ordinary again.
The prisoners were rising. People were hanging up phones, gathering their things, preparing to walk away. I tried to catch Ricky’s eye, but he kept his head lowered. “Sixteen years, Josephine,” he whispered into the phone. “The first plea deal. The deal I turned down. Do you know what my idealism cost me? I could be a free man today. When your mother set that fire, she hurt a lot of people. A lot of people. More than you know.”
“What does that even mean?”
Still, he wouldn’t look at me. “Think it through slowly, Girl One.” Then he was walking away, absorbed back into the bloodstream of jumpsuits as if he’d never been here at all.
27
“Well, if it isn’t the woman of the hour,” Dr. McCarter said. “I walked into the lab today expecting to see you in your usual spot, and yet—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted, leaning against the sun-hot brick of the gas station. “I’m on my way home right now.”
I said it aloud partially to remind myself that this was the right decision. That it was the only decision. I’d felt it in my gut as soon as I’d walked out of the prison: I couldn’t help my mother. I didn’t know who she was anymore. I’d been on the bright verge of abandoning everything—all I’d worked for, all Bellanger had worked for—to rescue a woman who’d never wanted rescuing. I was going home. Within a few days, I’d be back in the lab, goggles humid against my cheekbones, my mother forgotten. Relegated to the past she’d hidden from me.
“I’ve been keeping up with the story about your mother,” Dr. McCarter said. “It sounds to me like you’ve done your best and now you can rest easy.”
“Wait. What are you talking about?” With one fingernail, I traced the clumsy geometric initials carved into the side of the phone booth. Dr. McCarter couldn’t possibly know about my conversation with Ricky, but everything was so scrambled right now that I couldn’t be sure who knew what, all the edges of my life turned soft and pliable.