I know that right now, you feel it’s unjust for me to carry this burden on your behalf. But Cooper, there is a word for such unmerited favor. That word is “grace.” The thing about grace is that you don’t deserve it. You can’t earn it. You can only accept it. Or not.
This was my decision. I know the consequences, and I have no regrets. Doing this for you and Finch—it is my great honor and my final wish, and I hope and pray that you will choose to accept.
Your neighbor and friend,
Marcus Scotland Barnes
P.S. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13.
P.P.S. Sorry for taking Finch’s tooth. It was the only way.
Well.
I fold the letter back up. Tuck it in my pocket. Look for the dog tags and tooth. Of course they aren’t there. And then I start walking. Into the jack pines, my feet quiet on the soft, brown needles. West, up and over the hill behind the house, moving fast and not knowing where, exactly, not having a plan, but on the way there I realize I’m heading toward the valley.
Scotland. All those times he appeared in the yard. All the gifts for Finch. The bones and skulls, gleaming and white. The flesh-eating bugs. The tattoos on his arms. The Bible verses, too. All of it. All the things I’d imagined him to be. All the things I’d said and thought and wanted to do to him. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Had I really misread him for so many years?
I arrive at the overlook, hunker down. Down in the valley, a whole gang of people at work. Parked where the ground is solid are two pickup trucks and a Jeep, which I recognize as the vehicle of the sheriff who was at the gas station when Finch and me did our supply run, who also gave Marie his card that day we hid in the root cellar. There’s yellow caution tape strung around the area where the body was. My eyes scan the gathering, searching for Scotland. At last, in the back seat of one of the pickups, I see the profile of someone sitting, the window open just enough to let in some fresh air. It has to be him.
I slump to the ground. Pull the letter from my pocket, unfold it, and start reading again, wanting to make sense of it. Wanting, too, to take back the years where I looked at him sideways and called him names and got so bent out of shape about him sneaking up on us in the yard.
Rustling in the leaves close by. My heart shoots into my throat.
Whip-poor-will.
Finch emerges from the trees, sweaty and out of breath. She collapses next to me. “I couldn’t keep up,” she says.
“How’d you know where to find me?”
She shrugs. “Where else would you go?”
I sling my arm around her shoulder and pull her closer, and we sit in silence, our backs against a rock. A breeze pushes in, bending the trees overhead.
I think back to what I observed at the campsite. The bloody skillet, the wound. Most likely, the boyfriend’s DNA was all over that place, and Scotland would be cleared when it came to Casey Winters. Down in the valley, where the old logging road ends, an ambulance is parked, and two men are loading a stretcher with a body bag.
“Is he down there?” Finch asks, finally.
“I saw someone sitting in the back of a vehicle. I think it’s him.”
“Cooper?”
“Yeah?”
“I like the poem you picked for me.”
I nod. “I’m glad.”
For a long time, we sit in silence. Then Finch stands up and brushes her pants off, pine needles sticking to them. “You ready to go back?” she asks, reaching out her hand. “Marie’s waiting.”
I’ve always believed that if something was meant to happen, you’d have a second chance at it. But never have I been so bold as to believe in a third or even a fourth chance. Almost like the world was trying to hand you something good after all it had dealt you your whole life was heartache, like it had changed its position on who you were and what you could have. Call it what you will: karma or good luck or maybe something more. Grace.
I pull myself up and take one last glance over the cliff to where, just over a week ago, a young girl showed up and veered into our lives. The ambulance carrying her body is pulling away, disappearing into the pines, the flashing lights and white fading behind the trees. The truck with Scotland remains parked, and I can still see his profile in the back seat. “Thank you,” I mutter, and though I know he can’t hear me, I hope that somehow he can feel it, my acceptance. My gratitude.
Finch holds out her hand, and I wrap my large palm around her smaller one. Days and days and more days. That’s what I thought I didn’t have, and now I do, again. We walk quietly, hand in hand, Finch and me, back through the beds of pine. As we come to where the trees end, Finch stops, gasps. She points ahead, to our yard, to Marie on the steps of the porch, arm stretched out and calling softly to a black bird with a red band on its leg, hovering close and considering a landing: a crow.