“It’s out of town, up the road.”
“That’s not an address, honey. I can’t help you without an address.”
I saw my mother moving up the aisles, craning her head to look for me.
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Robin Carson.”
I had to hang up, running to grab the meat and head my mother off before she saw the pay phone. My whole body tingled with relief.
I’d saved us. I’d saved my mother from my father. My father from Jay. I had saved Jay from himself. Killing a deer had cut a valley through me, opening a dark hollow of despair I could barely stand. Imagine what it would be to kill your own father.
The police would find us, and take my father to the hospital. And then my mother would be free. We would all be free.
That’s what I believed as we drove back home.
“Things are going to get better and better,” my mother said in the truck as we turned onto the property.
“You’ll see.”
“I know, Mom,” I told her. I took her delicate hand. “It’s okay.”
But weeks went by, and things got worse and worse, and no one came.
thirty-four
Now
Dear Unforgiven,
Maybe I’ve frightened you. Please show yourself to her. All of you. True love sees past the ugliness, past the disease of what it means to be human in this dark world. If she belongs to you, and you to her, nothing you’ve done, nothing that you are will make her turn away from you. I promise.
Yours,
Dear Birdie
Will you buy this, Adam? Or will you see it for what it is?
“Do you think that will do it?” Bailey asks.
Bailey Kirk is sitting in the wingback chair by the fireplace in my room at The Blue House Inn, on his own laptop. We’ve fallen into a kind of reluctant partnership, each of us with things the other needs.
I’ve given him everything I gave the internet fixer—all the information I had on Adam—and he’s submitting it all to his team at Turner and Ives. He knows everything about me now, and he knows everything I know about you.
“Maybe.”
You’re no dummy. Maybe you’ll see this missive for what it is. A trap.
“Is it true?” asks Bailey. “Do you think that real love forgives all things?”
The question makes me think of my father. The war hero. The monster. The murderer. The prison preacher, according to Jones Cooper. The damaged man who asked for forgiveness from his daughter and was denied.
“I don’t know the answer to that either.”
“I don’t think it is true,” he says, answering his own question. “Maybe in an idealized sense. Or maybe a mother’s love can forgive. But love—grown-up love—has to be conditional, right? Otherwise it means you don’t love yourself.”
I’m only half listening, trying to convince Jax via text not to come up here, assuring her that she can do Dear Birdie without my help for one day, I’m sure of it. Please, Jax. Just one more day.
“That’s awfully deep, Detective.”
A shrug. “I have a lot of time to think about these things.”
He’s staring at his screen, his angular face washed in its white glow. I cannot figure this guy out.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I say. “It only matters if he believes it.”
A blink, a glance up at me, then back to the screen.
“It matters if you believe it,” he says, voice deep.
Now, he’s watching me from over the lid of his own laptop. He shifts his weight, puts one leg up on the hassock. I notice that he keeps his shoe off it, though. That means he had a good mother, one who taught him about the value of things, how to keep things clean.
“Do you mean could I love him if he really hurt those women?”
“Could you?”
I find the question insulting, don’t even bother answering. Fuck you, Detective, I think but don’t say. He must see it on my face, lifts his palms.
“I’m just asking.”
I’ve managed to quiet my phone. Jax seems to be satisfied. I told Marty I’d call him tomorrow. No more Rilke verses. Maybe you’re gone. Maybe that last message was goodbye. Maybe we’ll both have to let you go.
Bailey snaps the lid closed on his laptop, stares into the fireplace.
“It’s all vapor, isn’t it? All this information we have—fake names, digital images, profile pages, ghost email accounts, a company that may or may not exist.”
“That’s why you call him the ghost.”