She drops her head, looks away. I want to pull her back. I want to apologize for all of it—for making her lie, for lying, for not telling her the truth about us—because I trust her. I want to, at least. But I can’t. Something deep behind my breastbone pangs and sways. That hollow feeling that is always there but has somehow subsided since her arrival. Knowing that I’ve hurt someone, again, and realizing that this is how things go with me. I wound and destroy.
“This week.” She shakes her head. “This week, I thought maybe something was happening. I thought maybe something was there. Something felt different in me. At least I thought it did. But the truth is, I’m a librarian whose husband has been cheating on her for years. I’m a person who’s so lonely that I have no one to spend the holidays with, who’s so desperate that I go and buy groceries for people I don’t even know because honestly, I didn’t have anything better to do. Really. It’s the holidays and I literally have nothing on my calendar for the foreseeable future.”
“Marie.”
“You know the worst part? I actually started to picture myself here. You and me and Finch, the three of us together. The life my dad pictured.” She wipes her eyes. “Me and my wild imagination. I think I’m out of my mind.”
“You’re not out of your mind.” I take a step closer. “I thought it, too.”
“But you can’t tell me why you’re really here, living in my family’s cabin, using a different name. Why my brother brought you supplies, all these years. Why Finch has never been inside a store. You can’t tell me why the two of you have to hide.”
“I want to. Believe me, I do. But I can’t. It’s for your own good. For your protection.”
“I can’t do it. Be with a person who lies. Who keeps secrets. I’ve spent the last decade of my life doing that, living with someone who lied to me, and I won’t do it again.”
“I understand,” I tell her, and I do, but the whole thing is more complicated than that. “It’s not the same, you know that. It’s not the same, what your husband did and what’s going on here. What he did, he knew it would hurt you, and he did it anyway. What I’m doing is different. What I’m doing is to keep you safe. I need you to trust me.”
The bedroom door creaks open. “I need to talk to you, Coop.”
“We need a few more minutes.”
She ignores me. “It’s urgent.” She walks up to me and holds out the flyer. “Cooper, it’s her.”
I look at Marie, who is standing there with her hand at her throat, biting her lip and sporting a look that makes me remember how once, a sparrow flew into Lincoln’s shed, and fluttered about the window, trying to get out. I cornered it, and it was so worn out that when I scooped it into my hands, it didn’t fight. I just held it there, and I could feel its tiny heart drumming against my fingertips, its body so light it felt like nothing. Those hollow bones.
“Look,” Finch says.
I let it go, the sparrow. Carried it out of the shed and then kneeled down and slowly opened up my palms and the thing sort of tumbled out and onto the ground and stood there for a minute, stunned, and I’m telling you: it looked at me, with its small, darting eyes. It looked right at me as if to say thank you.
“Cooper, look.” Finch holds out the flyer, and I take it.
The girl we saw, in one of those senior-portrait-style poses. Arms crossed, smiling, leaning against an old brick building. She looks confident, kind, happy. Just a picture and yet looking at it—at her—seems to knock something loose in me. I sink into the chair. “Tonight,” I say at last, placing the flyer facedown on the table. “I’ll tell you everything tonight.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Finch puts up a fight about going to bed, one excuse after another, anything to keep us from closing the bedroom door and continuing the night without her. When it’s just me and her here, I read to her, or she reads to me, and I kiss her good night and pull her blanket up to her chin and that’s it. She doesn’t mind me going out into the main room because she knows she’s not missing out on anything, just me sitting there with a book or working on her quilt. But with a guest here, and with the day’s excitement, that’s not the case. Her belly hurts, she thinks she may have sprained her ankle, she has a hangnail. Well, finally we get Finch settled, with Marie proffering a bribe about if Finch goes right to sleep, she’ll make pancakes in the morning, and that’s enough to motivate her to keep quiet and stay in the room.