The first few times, my instinct was to panic. I would think about what if the parachute didn’t open, what if I got tangled up, couldn’t open my arms and legs wide, what if I died. But after a while, I learned to like it. That feeling of letting go. Surrendering.
* * *
I tell Finch to climb in the Bronco.
“Are you going to the police station?”
“Yes, but not yet. We’ll be back—there’s just a quick thing I need to do.”
“Can I take Walt Whitman?”
“Sure.”
“Where are we going?” she asks as she scrambles into the back seat, Walt tucked beneath her arm.
“Need to make a phone call. Get a few things in order.”
We drive to the gate. Unlock it, close it back up. Trundle over the dirt road, soft and rutted from the recent snowmelt: the ground, saturated and soft. On the paved road, Finch asks if we can listen to the radio, so I click on the music. We pull into the gas station, and I grab a handful of coins from my pocket and dial the number Marie wrote on a scrap of paper for me.
I explain to her, best I can, what has transpired, and ask her if she can come. To her credit, she doesn’t ask a bunch of questions, doesn’t tell me I should’ve reported seeing the girl days ago, like I promised. She just says she’ll gather up a few things and be at the cabin by morning, and I think back to that first time Finch and me drove out to the very same pay phone and called Jake to tell him we were staying at the cabin. How he came right away. I hang up the phone and climb back into the Bronco.
“You know when I go in to tell them about the girl,” I say to Finch as we head back home, “I won’t be back.”
In the back seat, she wrinkles her nose. “Well, you might be.”
“No, Finch. I won’t.” Am I ready to tell her? If I go through with this, there won’t be another chance. The world, all the secrets I’ve kept, this strange and precarious and beautiful life we’ve built, it’s crumbling. Fast. I take a deep breath. “There’s something you should know. Something I need to tell you. That thing I did, to keep us together? Well, there’s more to it than that. People took you. And I had to get you back. But in order to do that, I hurt someone. And I tied the people up and left them and brought you here, to the woods. Which means I broke the law. And like I’ve told you, there are consequences for what I did. Serious ones. Years of prison.”
“You did what you had to do.” A line, memorized years ago.
I clear my throat. “There’s more. The people who took you away—the people I tied up and left—they were your mother’s parents. Your grandparents.”
“I have grandparents?”
“You do.”
“You never told me.”
“Well. We didn’t get along, exactly.”
“I wouldn’t get along with them either, then.” She crosses her arms across her chest. There’s reassurance in that gesture of defiance. Her spark: it’s back.
“Nah. Me, they didn’t like. They would’ve treated you different, though. They would’ve loved you, in their way.”
“Still. It was wrong of them to want to take me away from you.”
Was it? I look back now with a degree of clarity that my grief blinded me to, back then. I reach into the back seat and squeeze her knee. “Anyhow. I made choices and there’s no going back on them now. The thing is, there are consequences for those choices, and going to the police means I need to face them. Which I’m ready to do.”
Here’s what I’ve come to realize. If this is the end, if I’m gonna lose Finch, I’d rather it be on my own terms. If that boy is left to his own devices, who knows what kind of madness might unfold. But also, we run, we hide, the authorities find us: it’d be ugly. I’d be arrested, right in front of her. Maybe someone would get hurt. And that will be her final memory of me: fighting, getting carted off, handcuffed. This way, at least I have some control over the situation. Some dignity. At least I can say goodbye.
Finch pats my hand. “I think, Cooper, if you do the right thing, you’ll be back. Everything will be all right.”
“Finch, this isn’t a storybook, where things turn out happy. That’s not how things work out there. So when I tell you I’m not coming back, I need you to get that through your head. I need to know you won’t be here waiting on me.” At first, I told myself that there was a chance that I could go in there and inform them about the body, about the boyfriend, and they’d write stuff down and send me on my way. But of course that’s not how it will go, not with our picture out there in the world. Not once they see me.