“And the clothes, the toiletries? You had all this stuff? Why’d you let me think you didn’t?” She touched the plastic inside his toiletries bag, the travel-size items she loved to buy before vacation.
“I don’t have pajamas or anything as comfortable as what you gave me. I didn’t intend to mislead you.”
“Do you have an ID?” Tallie asked, scanning the table and looking inside his backpack.
“Not on me,” he said.
“But you have a license?”
“Yes.”
“Not with you?”
“No, not with me,” Emmett said.
“So you told the police officer what, earlier?”
“Exactly what I said. I told him the truth. My name, my Social Security number. They can look that stuff up.”
“And what’s your name?”
“Emmett.”
“Emmett what?” Tallie asked, annoyed.
“Emmett Aaron Baker,” he said a little slowly, watching her face.
Client Name: Baker, Emmett Aaron.
“Emmett Aaron Baker,” she repeated, lighting up. There it was. Her stomach Ferris-wheeled hearing him say his full name, echoing it in its entirety for the first time. She envisioned herself tapping his full name into Google. “I looked up Emmett and Clementine, Kentucky, and couldn’t find anything. What would happen if I looked up Emmett Aaron Baker?” she asked.
“Nothing would come up,” he said with his eyes stuck to hers.
“You’re the one ungoogleable man left on earth?”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t put myself out there,” Emmett said. He took his right hand and raked his hair to the left, off his forehead. A move Tallie loved on men.
“I scanned the list of America’s Most Wanted, Kentucky’s Most Wanted, and a few more,” she confessed.
“Good. Sure you did. But you didn’t see me,” he said confidently.
“Right. I did not.”
They drank their tea in silence. The rain fell across her windows like the car wash Emmett had compared it to. She imagined him clapping the ladder against her house, cleaning out the gutters. She imagined telling Lionel. He would’ve noticed they were full next time he stopped by when it was raining. Lionel would’ve looked up and told her in his booming alpha-male, king-of-the-mountain, big-brother voice, “Either I can do it or you need to have someone come clean out your gutters.” She was proud of herself for taking care of it before Lionel could fuss at her.
“And these?” she asked, touching the butterfly wings.
“I’m not ready to talk about those. Or this,” he said, pointing to the coloring-book paper—a treasure from a child.
“What about this?” She lifted the little Bible.
“My grandfather’s, given to him by his parents on the day he was born,” he said, opening to show her the inscription written inside.
To Samuel. Welcome to Earth. March 29, 1933.
“You were raised religious?”
“Baptist,” he said.
“Me, too.”
For someone who’d felt such intense emotion the day before and who had wanted to end his life, Emmett had an aggressive calm about him. Whatever sent him to the bridge must’ve really been truly unbearable. Thinking of what it could have been was like staring into a too-bright light without blinking. Tallie’s eyes watered.
“Does it bother you, talking about God? About religion?”
“Not really,” he said.
“So yesterday you said, ‘What if there’s no God’…Is that what you believe?”
“I think God is there, but indifferent.”
“Feels too cruel to me. Him being there, but not caring. I can’t believe in that kind of God,” she said.
“But when things get dark and hopeless…that’s exactly what it feels like.”
Tallie took in his response. She knew healing—if and when it happened—happened in increments, the same sneaky way the days got longer and shorter. Barely noticeable at times, slow. Tallie had been treading water of her own, in that estuary where sadness spilled out into healing and joy. Believing in God came easy for her, even in her worst moments. Even when she sat there and listened to her clients tell her their secrets—the hidden, terrifying demons some people kept locked away for so long that when they finally did talk about them, it was as if a cloud of black death wanted to swallow them whole. She’d seen people come out at the other end of that darkness. She knew God was real.