Sam flashed him a go-figure smile. 'Do we now?' she said.
Thomas looked down. 'Turns out you have to be deluded to be happy.'
Could the world be any more fucked up?
He was crying now, and she was watching. It was okay. Expected. There was the grief that clenched, and the grief that let go, that opened all the little cages hidden in our souls. It seemed he could feel things fall through him in sheets, the remorse, the shame, the rage… All the little animals.
He could feel himself empty.
Sam watched him. When he looked at her, she seemed to shine with a high-altitude clarity. He held out his hand the way a beggar would, his face his only sign.
She laughed, then did what she always did.
She gave.
He awoke to the light of the television, Sam's naked body crowded against his own on the couch. Images of what must have been the latest Chiropractor crime scene floated in the darkness. For a while he remained absolutely still, watching the parade of images the way tired children sometimes do, blinking and staring thoughtlessly, as though stuck between channels.
He remembered Ripley, cursed himself for an idiot, though he was too drowsy, too numb, to feel any real regret. Mia would understand—even with Sam's car in the driveway. A shot of a harnessed German Shepherd snarling at a French eco-protester stirred thoughts of Bartender. He squeezed tears from his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Poor Bart. What was he going to tell Frankie?
His brain wasn't wired the way ours is, son. He had no awareness, no experience. He was just a blind machine that your Uncle Cass broke.
No, he definitely couldn't say that. What? Tell a boy that his dog lacked the neural integration required to possess experience? That he was unconscious through-and-through, dead all along? Most adults couldn't wrap their heads around that one.
Couldn't save him, son. Just like I couldn't save you. The old man was too busy getting laid.
Shame, like a hammer to the chest. Cold and hard.
Too busy being dead weight…
He sobbed into Sam's hair. 'No,' he muttered.
Need to take control…
Sam moaned and arched against him. 'Time for bed,' she murmured.
Need to think… to take control.
She sat up and stared with eyes that refused to focus. She rubbed a palm against her cheek. 'You coming?'
Control! Control!
'Yes,' he gasped.
He turned off the screen and helped steady her up the stairs. But when she turned toward the bedroom, he continued straight into the bathroom. The light pricked his eyes. He tugged open the medicine cabinet and fished with clumsy fingers through old prescriptions and over-the-counter remedies, remembering how Nora had fairly cleaned the cabinet out when she moved, and wondering how the hell he'd managed to fill the damn thing up again.
Then at last he found it. Control.
The label read:
BIBLE, THOMAS
Lorazepram 1mg
90
TAB APX
Dr Bruno, Gene
TAKE HALF TABLET WHEN NEEDED UP TO THREE TIMES DAILY
Once, when things with Nora were real bad, Ripley had caught him taking one. 'Papa's little helpers,' Nora had explained to their daughter, shooting him a scathing glance. Everything had become a pretext by that point. If they weren't sniping, they were scrounging for ammunition.
Thomas cracked the lid and tapped a pill onto his sweaty palm. A jewel of condensed powder against whorls of skin. He popped it and washed it down with water from the tap. He stuffed the bottle behind some Deep Ice, then slapped the mirror shut.
'Nerves of fucking steel,' he promised his haggard reflection.
How Neil would laugh.
There is so much scripture written into little things.
You hear your dog die first, stamped like a can beneath my hard, hard heel. It twitches like a Chinese toy. You come running. Oh-my-God, what's happened? You stop, dumbstruck, when you see me in the living room, unable to make sense of this, me, the stranger in your home. Your mouth opens, moist and hollow, and I decide to fill it when you're dead. Who? you want to cry, but you already know. You were
born
with knowledge of me, just like everyone else. No! you want to scream, but truth brooks no contradiction
.
Truth brooks no contradiction.
I say the words, knowing their meaning will elude you until your final post-coital twitch. Only as your pupils slacken will you see their bulldozer finality, their crowbar penetration…
I have broken into you. There is no refuge remaining.
There never was.
I say the words. 'Just the meat… I promise.'
Then comes the beating. Then comes the blood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
August 30th, 8.55 a.m.
It seemed like his first sleep in years, decades even.
Morning light filtered through the sheers. He simply breathed at first, blinking and staring at the swirls of white across the bedroom ceiling. From the tangle of cool sheets beside him, he knew Sam was already up. Images of a Toyota commercial he saw somewhere—one of many aimed against the New Environmental Accountability Act—plagued him while he dozed. When he closed his eyes, he saw a fleet of vehicles driving across the back of a great fissured glacier. '
Because tomorrow
,' the voiceover purred, '
is the most important destination of all
…'
Then he remembered Frankie. By time he rolled clear of the blankets, he was shaking.
He took another lorazepram before jumping into the shower. By time he was dressed, he could feel the pharmaceutical calm steeping through him, shrinking the horror to a vague uncertainty, the kind that makes you continually check your pockets for your keys. Thomas had always been one to lose things in his pockets, to toss the house looking for things hidden on his person. Always forgetting to remember.
Sam was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper in lemon morning sunlight. Though dressed in her FBI best—a charcoal skirt and jacket—she still had that fresh out-of-the-shower look. Her hair blonded around the edges as it dried.
'Sooooo?' she asked with an apprehensive smile. Illuminated from behind, the page she held sported the shadow of a giant, inverted 0.9%.
'Fucking forgot Ripley,' he croaked, making for the coffee pot.
Her expression confirmed that she was referring to their argument from the previous afternoon. She was looking, Thomas supposed, for some flicker of something. Determination or resolution.
Not more dead weight.
'I'm sure Mia doesn't mind,' she said as he poured his coffee.
'It's not Mia I'm worried about,' he replied, doing his best to purge the accusation from his tone. 'The last thing Ripley needs is to be d-ditched…' His throat seemed to spasm about the word. 'Ditched,' he repeated like an idiot.
The doorbell interrupted her sigh.
Mia, no doubt.
'Time to take my medicine,' Thomas muttered, setting down his coffee. But he heard the doorknob twisting before he'd taken his second step. Mia never tested the door—never. He paused, looked to Sam in alarm. The buried crunch of the key was nothing short of thunderous.
'Does he—' was the most Sam managed to say before the lock clicked. Thomas didn't need to ask who she meant by 'he'. The door swung open on a pale band of sunlight, and for a mad instant the shadow it revealed simply
was
the man who had haunted his every thought since that mad morning mere weeks ago.
Neil…
Until it became Nora, digging through her purse as she stepped into the living room. She gasped in surprise when she saw them.
'Tommy,' she said, swallowing, drawing her hand down from her breastbone. Then, after a pause, she added, 'Agent Logan.'
'What are you doing, Nora?' Thomas asked.
There was a long, racing silence. This was bad, Thomas realized—catastrophic, even. Sam could lose her job.
She's going to fuck us
, he thought. That was what Nora did. Even when their marriage was good, he used to joke that if she were a nuclear power, the world would have been destroyed at some point in her early twenties. Hand her a lash and she would find an out.
Nora laughed nervously. 'I'm here to pick up Ripley… So that we could show her Frankie together like we said…' She blinked, brought a finger to her fluttering left eye. 'Remember?'
He did remember—now. Ripley needed to visit her brother before any of her wilder imaginings could take hold. She had always been such a wonderfully skeptical brat, even before the divorce. Words would not be enough. They had thought that if they both brought her, they could cushion the shock somewhat. Even at the time, Thomas couldn't fathom precisely why he had thought it would help. Perhaps he had hoped the illusion of something mended—Mommy and Daddy together—could compensate for the reality of her broken brother.
'Tommy?' Nora asked.
'I'm sorry, Nora. I forgot all about it.' He cleared his throat. 'Rip's over at Mia's.'
'I see.' She looked directly at Sam. 'Too busy, I suppose.'
'It's not what you, think, Nora.'
Nora laughed in the caustic way that always made him ball his fists. 'Now
that's
a relief,' she said. 'Here I was thinking you'd left Ripley at Mia's so that you could bang the lovely agent here.'
Dead silence. Thomas glanced at Sam, thanked Christ she was staring at the floor.
'You have a choice here, Nora.'
'Don't I know it,' she snapped. 'I can't decide which to do first. Call Agent Atta and let her know that one of her underlings is fucking one of the victims' fathers.' She smiled with cheerful malice. 'Or spit in your face.'
The regret struck even before he opened his mouth. 'But that's what you always do, isn't it? Make things worse.'
Her hesitation told him he'd succeeded, struck bone, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. Nora had more than her measure of secret self-undermining fears. In marriage you shared everything, even the keys to the gun cabinet.
'If that was true,' Nora said blankly, 'I would have told
her'—
she made a point of gazing directly at Sam—'how you fucked me just last week.'
The two women locked eyes. A truck passed outside. The roar tumbled through the open door, the rattle of ancient cylinders and shafts, then drained away.
Still seated, Sam remained very still, her expression inscrutable save for a look of concentration. Nora sneered, as though unsettled by the woman's refusal to retaliate.
'Nora…' Thomas tried once again.
'
Hellooooooo?'
a masculine voice called from the front porch. Mia?
'Mommy!' Ripley cried, her skirts flouncing as she raced through the door. She flew at Nora, wrapped herself about her waist. 'Mia let me watch
Aliens
! Is it true you named me after her, Mommy? The
hero
? Is it?'
Mia followed after a ceremonial knock, dressed in cutoffs and an orange tank. 'Ooooh,' he cooed in his best Alabama gay, 'what
dooo
we have here? A
pawwteee
?' Then he turned to see Thomas and Sam in the kitchen. 'Oh…'
Nora crumbled in her daughter's arms. Grimacing, she tried to fumble free of Ripley's embrace. A sob kicked through her, then another. '
S-sorry, hon-honey
,' she gasped as she pulled clear of Ripley's arms. '
Mum-m-mummy can't-can't
…'
She fled through the door.
Thomas stood dumbstruck. Somewhere, it seemed, he could feel the remorse, as fingers-to-toes as nausea. But the greater part of him remained remote, as though he were really just part of the audience disguised in the lead's costume.
Control was good.
'Hi, Sam,' Mia said haplessly. He waved with the nervousness of a pear-shaped fourteen-year-old.
Without acknowledging him, Sam stood and walked to the front window, pulled aside the sheers to better look out. She was watching Nora, Thomas realized. Through the gauze he glimpsed the shadow of his ex-wife disappear into the shadow of her Nissan.
'Will she be all right?' Sam asked as Thomas joined her.
'Aw, fuck,' Mia said, breaking for the open door. For some reason, Thomas lacked the will to pull the cotton sheers aside. He watched his neighbor's gracile shadow lope across the lawn toward Nora's car. There was a burst of shrill voices as Mia's form closed on the car. Then the overgunned Nissan pulled away. His Number One Neighbor waved his arms in exasperation, then turned to the house, scratching his head. After a moment's hesitation, he began walking toward the property line, becoming more and more ghostlike with every step.
'Aw, fuck,' Ripley repeated in a small voice. She was sitting on the welcome mat, her legs pulled to the side, her eyes wide and empty.
'She won't say anything,' Thomas heard himself say to Sam.
Agent Logan turned from the window, blinking tears from her eyes. 'How can I be such an idiot?' she murmured.
Suddenly Control was nowhere to be found.
'What's wrong with Mom?' Ripley asked, not the way a child might, but like an adult, with all the cynical intonations of 'wrong'.
'Sam… Are you okay?'
She gathered her things with hand-wringing haste. She made a point of avoiding his gaze.
Thomas reached out to press a palm against the wall, did his best to make it look casual. Suddenly his living room felt like the edge of a cliff. 'We should talk about this, don't you think?'
Sam sniffled, paused to pull a tissue from her purse. She did her best to smile at Ripley while she pulled on her heels.
'Sam… Please…'
She paused for an instant while still looking down. The aura of contrived briskness dissolved. When she looked up, two silver tracks etched her cheeks. She shook her head and smiled in a queer, apologetic way that Thomas found terrifying. 'Sorry, professor,' she said. 'I can't do this.'
Then she was upright, straightening her jacket and skirt with her palms. 'I never could,' she said as she stepped through the door. Thomas listened to her heels tap across the concrete.
Rather than meeting her father's plaintive gaze, Ripley sat listless in the oblong of sunlight, picking fluff from the mat.
'What's wrong with Mommy?' Ripley asked again, this time from the safety of the television's circus glare. To her credit, she had let several minutes pass before repeating the question, apparently every bit as content as he was watching the riot of soundless images.
So much life from so many angles. Explorations of a sea-wrecked world.
'Mom misses Frankie, honey,' Thomas said, somewhat amazed he could say his son's name aloud. Apparently Control was back online.
'But Frankie's just sleeping in the hospital. You said he wasn't dead yet.'
Thomas blinked.
He knelt before his daughter. 'What about you, Ripley? Don't you miss Frankie?'
'Naw,' she said with a shrug. 'It usually takes a week or so for me to miss his sorry ass…' Then she exploded in tears.
Thomas picked her up and rocked her in his arms, whispered loving reassurances in her ear. When she finally stopped crying, he sat with her in the recliner for a time, saying nothing. Soon sorrow became boredom and she began picking at his thumb. He made her giggle by pretending it was an animal ducking in and out of his palm for cover.
'Come,' he said finally, hoisting her into the air as he stood. 'Do you want to join me in my office? Color or something?'
'You gotta work?' she asked.
'Yep,' he said. 'I gotta save Frankie.'
At first, it seemed he had simply awakened with the revelation. But in retrospect, he realized that it had dawned on him talking to Gyges the previous day, only he'd been too rattled to make much sense of it. And even then, he wasn't sure it qualified as a revelation at all.
Ripley swung from his arm as though it were a swimming-hole rope as they turned into the office. She raced ahead to fetch her pencils and books, plopping stomach-first in the middle of the floor. He paused at the doorway, absently studied the great poster of the earth on the far wall.
Neil had loved the thing. He would stand in front of it, his profile turned so that Florida dangled like an obscene goblin dick from his fly, and call out: 'Nora! Ever been to Disney World?'
'Too many times,' she would answer.
Haw-fucking-haw. How many winks had they traded between them? Neil and Nora… Thomas wondered how long he'd be rewriting his history. He'd be bled white before it was done, he knew that much.
'Verbal,' he said, settling before the computer. 'Class files… Starting from about, ah, five years ago.'
Columns of folder icons unfolded across the screen. Thomas peered at them, looking for likely suspects.
'
Ten
years!' Ripley yelled with a giggle. Everything onscreen flickered out, instantaneously replaced. Thomas scowled at his daughter. She played innocent, smiling down at a blob of poppy red.
'Little bitch,' he muttered with a smile. A 'REPEAT REQUEST' window popped onto the screen.
'Starting from five years ago,' Thomas said.
He studied the icons for a moment. It had to be one of the bigger classes, he decided, the ones he and his colleagues jokingly called the 'hatcheries', where teaching played second fiddle to wowing freshmen into becoming psych majors.
'Open Intro 104a 2010,' he said.
A list of folders, each with a student's name, appeared. He scanned through them.
Nothing.
'Open Intro 104b 2011.'
Again he scanned down the list. Two-thirds the way down, his heart stopped at:
POWSKI, CYNTHIA 792-11-473
She had been his student.
Which meant he had been linked to all of them—all of Neil's victims.
He had once voted for Peter Halasz, had once participated in a pro-labor demonstration against Theodoros Gyges, and had argued several times with Nora over one of Jackie Forrest's books. He supposed he'd never made the link because of the tenuousness of these relationships. They seemed random. Meaningless.
But then this morning it had dawned on him: perhaps
that
was the point. Neil's point.
Only Cynthia Powski had seemed to argue against it.
'Display Cynthia Powski.'
A youthful, innocent version of her face materialized on the screen. Though motionless, it seemed to lean back, eyes fluttering, lips curling…
He pushed his chair back on its rollers, ran both hands across his scalp.
'Dad?' Ripley asked. 'Will Sam be coming over tonight?'
Ripley liked Sam. She adored anyone who treated her like a little adult.
'I'm not sure, honey,'
A memory, as insubstantial as gauze in water, came to him: a younger Cynthia, looking Midwest fresh, leaning against his desk and confessing her confusion with the term 'gestalt'. He remembered making a joke—something harmless and clever, he had thought—then immediately regretting it. How frightened she had looked! Bewildered and despairing. It was so easy to forget how vulnerable…