“Mother was a seamstress, father was a carpenter. They lived off the grid though, up there, farming and hunting. Luke went to school with my boy. After high school, he left this place. I heard he joined the army. When I saw him again, all the light in him had gone out. I think he just wanted to go back to that place, to that life. The world wouldn’t let him.”
I feel a rare glimmer of compassion for my father—a sunshiny boy who went away with ideals and dreams and came home broken, diseased—but hammer it down hard. His face as I last saw him, bloodied and monstrous with rage, swims. That sunshiny boy this old man remembers is not known to me.
“Did you tell all of this to Bailey Kirk?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I told him the truth, which is I didn’t remember much and that there was someone else who might know more.”
“Who’s that?”
“Joy at The Hollows Historical Society. More than her job, it’s her calling to keep the record of this place. Maybe you should pay her a visit.”
“I didn’t get your name,” I say, rising to reach over for his hand.
“Bob Shaw.” We shake; his grip is surprisingly strong. A clean, fresh scent of his laundry detergent wafts into the air.
“I’m Wren.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he says in the silence, and returns to his spot behind his desk, where he picks up his book and goes back to his reading. I stand, and stay there stupidly for a moment, all my questions jammed up in my throat.
Didn’t I come here looking for you?
Or am I looking for something else?
Outside, the sky has suddenly shifted darker.
My phone is a catalog of missed texts and calls, most of them from Jax, one from my accountant’s office. There’s one from an unknown number with this:
I’m slipping, I’m slipping away/like sand/slipping through fingers. All/my cells…
Rilke.
Drawing in a breath, I stare at the words, and then find myself looking around. The motel rooms, the trees across the street, the parked cars. Are you here? Are you watching me? My whole body is cold, nerves frayed and tingling. Maybe your tall, dark form will slip from the trees or come from behind the dumpster.
A red car races past, kicking up dirt and leaves.
I am alone.
How to answer? I could answer with a Rilke verse of my own:
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you./Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
Don’t go. Come back to me. Let me see all of you.
Instead, I don’t respond at all, my heart racing, my hands shaking.
You are slipping away. And I should let you go.
But I can’t and I don’t. I walk to room 12.
thirty-one
I have some gifts. Gifts I don’t generally employ. I can use a gun. I can dissemble, clean, and reassemble a number of firearms. I can hunt with a crossbow. I can plant and raise a vegetable garden. I can fish. I can scale and clean my catch. I can build a fire without a match. If called upon to survive in the world my father imagined, I’d probably be okay.
It’s the modern world I’ve had the most trouble with.
I can also pick a simple lock—the type on this motel room door—with a credit card. I move in close and slide my American Express platinum card, a thick heavy thing, in between the door and the jamb. Finding the latch, wedging in the card and pushing it back into its home, the door eases open for me. Not every lock, but this kind might as well not be on the door at all.
The room inside is dark, the curtains drawn. I shouldn’t be here. This is wrong. Regardless, I step inside and close the door behind me, hoping Bob wasn’t watching me and then called the police.
Bailey Kirk’s suitcase is open on a chair next to a small table. The case is compact and black; inside, things are perfectly folded into tight rectangles of gray and black and blue, the only color palate I’ve seen him wear.
The bed is neatly made; there’s a stack of books on the end table, one about the dark web, a thick volume on identity theft, and the Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes. Which makes me smile because most PIs are very into their thing, imagining themselves as the hero of an ongoing detective story. Not Jones Cooper, though. He’s a rare breed, into the work, the people, doing the right thing. He’s never thinking about himself from the outside in. I kind of got that feeling from Bailey Kirk; that they might be cut from the same cloth. But the Sherlock Holmes tome makes me wonder.
In the bathroom, there’s a tidy Dopp kit, with a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, deodorant all precisely placed inside. Surfaces are wiped clean. There’s no trace of grime, or disorder. I noticed that about you, too, Adam; nothing out of place, everything carefully arranged. I know most men are slobs, but my father was meticulous like that, my brother, too. I am drawn to order, the careful arrangement of the objects that we possess. I don’t touch anything.