The Book of James (21 page)

“I said I’d go with you, what’re you so upset about?”

My eyes shifted upward to meet his. “Nothing. I’ll meet you

here around seven tomorrow night, then?”

He let go of my arm and instead put both hands on my shoul-

ders. “Mackenzie?”

I just wanted to get out of there. I had this feeling that if I met his eyes, he would be able to read my mind. “What?”

“Seven o’clock is perfect. Just come over.”

I nodded. I could feel his eyes following me as I walked out the

door and down the driveway.

A woman I didn’t recognize responded to my knocks at the Cooper

door. She was tall and heavyset, with mousy brown hair cut close

to her head. She was dressed in street clothes but had a lab coat overtop. She introduced herself to me as El a, Ginny’s nurse. So

Harrison had put a guard on Ginny to quell her violent urges.

Ginny was sitting on the living-room sofa, looking out the

window. She glanced up at me when I walked in but said nothing.

Her eyes went back to the window.

“Ginny, do you remember me?” She eyed me up and down

again, taking in my white sweater and blue jeans. I must not have made much of an impression, because again she said nothing. Her

eyes were blank. I sat down and leaned toward her.

“Did you bring me a present?” She motioned to the large enve-

lope in my lap.

“Why don’t we go to your room and I’ll show you.” The nurse

was hovering over us and followed as Ginny led me up the stairs to her bedroom. The older woman went in and took a seat in a chaise

by the window.

“We need some privacy,” I said to El a.

172

ELLEN J. GREEN

“I’m not supposed to leave her side.”

I smiled. “I think we’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you.”

For a minute I thought she was going to refuse to leave us, but

she turned and went back down the stairs. Dr. Cooper had hired a

nurse-bodyguard, but I got the feeling that El a wasn’t going to be too much of a problem. She didn’t give me the impression that she was overly invested in keeping people away from Ginny. She just

wanted a paycheck.

I closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed. “Ginny, I need

you to help me with something, if you could.” She didn’t reply, but her eyebrows went up questioningly. “I have some personal things

of Nick’s. I thought you might want to look at them.”

“Nick went away when he was sixteen.” She was looking out

the window. She turned back to me suddenly. Her eyes were sad.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

I sucked in my breath. I hadn’t expected this. I wasn’t going to

lie. “Yes, he was in a car accident.” Tears made their way down the grooves of her wrinkled face, and I took her hand.

“You were his wife?” she asked.

I nodded. My own eyes were filling up.

“Such a pretty girl.” She reached out and touched my face.

“I always pictured the girl Nick would end up with.” She smiled.

“Such red hair. No children?”

“No children.”

“Cora has no one.” It was almost a whisper. She wasn’t even

looking at me when she said it; she was looking through the win-

dow toward Cora’s house. “I thought Nick would have children,

that it would somehow all be okay, but now she’s got no one.” I was sitting right next to her, but she wasn’t talking to me. Her voice had trailed to a whisper. She was talking to herself.

“I want to show you some things that Nick kept all these years.”

I pulled out the photograph of her.

THE BOOK
of
JAMES

173

She took it from me; now her eyes were clearer, more focused.

“He kept this of me?”

I nodded. “He kept some other things too. Do you wanna

see?” I opened the manila envelope and gave her the green coin.

Her face turned ashen white. “What? Ginny, this was found in with Nick’s things. What’s wrong?”

She reached out for the token. “I haven’t seen this in years.” She turned it over in her hand. “Bradford gave this to Nick. Got it from some vending machine in the old Reading Terminal train station.

They closed the station down long ago when they built the new

one. It’s just a trinket, but to Nick it was something special from his father. Nick didn’t spend much time with Bradford, but I think he thought he was somehow close to his dad when he carried this

with him.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand as she

spoke.

“And Nick kept a copy of that picture from that same day in

your book. Look.” I put the black-and-white photograph in her

hand. “Who are these kids?”

Ginny squinted down at the picture. “Nick and some friends.”

She started to hand it back to me. “No, who is this?” I pointed

to the boy in the back row. “And this?” My finger ran across the

face of the toddler. Ginny said nothing. Her mouth had turned

downward into a sad frown. “When Nick was dying, before they

took him into the operating room, he talked about this house.” I

knew she was listening, though her head was still down, her fin-

gers clasping the edge of the picture. “He told me that I had to

come here. To find James. Is one of these boys James?”

She sucked in her breath and lifted her head. Her eyes were red

and teary. “He talked about James? What did he say?”

“His very last words were, ‘Find James.’ Who was James? And

how can I do that?”

Ginny’s chest rose and fell quickly. Her hands trembled. “I don’t think you can. No one talks about this. No one even knows . . .

174

ELLEN J. GREEN

Nick spent the last few minutes of his life still trying to punish his mother.”

She dropped the photograph and hunched down in her chair.

Her entire body started sobbing.

“Stop that!” El a entered the room and pushed me aside,

attaching a blood-pressure cuff to Ginny’s upper arm. “Leave now.”

I stared at the old woman for a second before getting up. This

woman had answers—but getting her clear, stable, and talking

again wasn’t going to be easy.

“Go.” El a’s voice rose in anger.

I left without another word. Once outside, I walked along

the fence that bordered Cora’s property and looked through the

iron bars at the woods on the other side, squinting to catch sight of the bench where I’d found my journal page the other day. The

trees were so thick I could only see a few feet in. My gaze returned briefly to the Cooper house. Ginny’s face was in the upstairs window; she stared down at me. I waved. She didn’t wave back.

After squeezing through the makeshift gate onto the Monroe

property, I stood undecided on the path. I wanted to find that

bench again, but getting there meant either going all the way to

the clearing and around, or forging my way through the brush and

taking my chances.

Only a hundred yards off the beaten path, I realized I’d made

a mistake. The ground was uneven, and I had to watch my footing,

crawling in spots that were impassable. When I final y found the

bench I had been using the other day, my hair and clothes were

dotted with small burrs. I picked a few off and tossed them aside, then plopped down onto the cushioned seat. I wasn’t sure what I

hoped to find here. The rest of my journal. Some tattered papers

that chronicled the past years of my life. My history. Ever since I’d found those pages, I’d imagined the rest of it was just blowing about among these trees. I wanted it back.

THE BOOK
of
JAMES

175

After twenty dirty minutes of searching, the only things I’d

found were more frustration and anger welling up inside myself.

—

“Can I come in?” I asked. “I’m only ten minutes late. You said

seven, right?”

Dylan backed up to let me pass but said nothing. I went into

the bathroom and looked at myself. Hundreds of tiny little burrs, each no bigger than a pea, dotted my hair. My once-clean white

sweater was now smeared with brown patches. Dylan watched

from the doorway of the bathroom. His eyes were big and ques-

tioning. The burrs were tangled and knotted deep in my hair; it

hurt when I pulled them.

“Are you going to help me or just laugh at me?” I was annoyed.

He shook his head. “You know it’s always an experience when

you come here. Gravel from your hand. Now this. What the hell

were you doing?”

“I was in the woods.”

“On your hands and knees?”

“In some places, I guess I was. Ouch.”

“And what were you doing? No, don’t answer that.”

In the end, Dylan patiently pulled the burrs from my hair, one

by one. I couldn’t tell if he was mad or not. His expression was one of extreme concentration. He stood back and surveyed his work.

“You may be finding them for weeks, but I did the best I could.

If we’re going to see someone, I suggest you change your shirt. It’s filthy. You can borrow something of mine if you want.” I followed him to his bedroom. He dug through his drawers, occasional y

tossing things onto the bed. “You can wear any of those, unless

you want to go home and change?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ll find something here.”

176

ELLEN J. GREEN

“Help yourself. If you don’t want any of those, there’s more in

the drawer.” He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

I pulled my sweater over my head and looked at the selection

in front of me. Most were T-shirts and came down almost to my

knees. I went through his drawers until I saw a small shirt, plain white, ribbed, with short sleeves and a low scoop neck. I pulled it over my head. It fit perfectly. Maybe a little more formfitting and low cut than I would have usual y worn, but it would do. I folded everything up and put it back where it belonged. I was looking

in the mirror, trying to fix my hair with my fingers, when Dylan

came out of the bathroom. He watched me for a second from the

doorway. I looked up and caught his eye.

“That was Meghan’s.” A fleeting look of surprise crossed his

face. I turned around. “Do you want me to change?”

“No. It’s fine.”

“I should’ve known.” He didn’t move. I cursed at myself for

being such an idiot. It obviously wasn’t a man’s shirt. “Why don’t I go home and change, and I’ll meet you back here in half an hour?”

When I walked past him, he took my arm. “Given the current

state of things, maybe we should reschedule this for tomorrow.

Look at yourself.” He turned me toward the mirror.

I was still a mess—pea-sized burrs were still embedded in

my hair. My jeans were dark with mud. “But what about work

tomorrow?”

He folded his arms. “I’m working from home tomorrow morn-

ing. So I guess I’ll be going with you instead of reading briefs.”

“Okay?” It was a question.

He smiled. “Yes. Okay.” I thought he was going to say some-

thing else, but he just dropped my arm, turned around, and went

back into the bathroom.

I practiced a speech while I waited for Dylan in my Jeep the next morning. It swirled in my head, so when he came out a few minutes later with his hair still wet, dressed in sweats, I recited it quickly without taking a breath.

“Dylan, I’m sorry about everything. I mean, you and I only

met by coincidence. If another lawyer had been in the office that day, I probably never would’ve met you. It was just chance that

you were there, and then I dragged you into all this crap, and what makes it worse is that you only live a few minutes away. If you lived downtown I wouldn’t bother you the way I do, and I understand

if I annoy you. I come uninvited, I ask you to pull stuff out of my hair, I bother you day and night, and I’m sure you have your own

problems. So, if you want me to leave you alone, I wil . Just tell me. And I should’ve known that was Meghan’s shirt. It was real y

stupid of me.” I took a breath.

“I do have something to say.” I waited for the worst. “Do we

have to take this piece of shit of a car of yours? I mean, it’s rusted—

it looks like it’s falling apart.” He opened the door and slammed it again. “The door doesn’t even close right.”

178

ELLEN J. GREEN

“Did you hear anything I just said?”

“If you bothered me, I’d let you know. You think I’m some

kind of pushover? And I don’t care about the shirt. If I were at your house and I put on Nick’s shirt, would you care?”

I thought about it and smiled. “No, it wouldn’t bother me. But

Cora has a whole drawer full of them if you’re interested.”

His lips moved upward into a smile. “Okay, so we’re back to

the Jeep.” I shifted gears and backed up. He jerked forward and

almost hit his head on the dash. “Do you have any shocks in this

thing?”

“Not good ones. It gets a little bumpy.”

The annoyance was clear on his face. We rode along in silence

except for the few directions he gave me, trying to ignore the loud engine sounds and the bumps in the road. At one point he reached

over to roll down the window. I smiled. It was off track and rolled down crooked. You had to hold the glass with one hand and roll it with the other or it wouldn’t work. He stared at it.

“Forget the gardener. Let’s go to a car dealership. We can get

you a nice car, whatever you want. BMW, a Lexus, even a Mercedes.

If we go now we’ll be out of there in a few hours. All you have to do is write a check, no paperwork. You can afford it. I can take care of transferring the money to your account so your check clears.”

I glanced over at him. He was serious. “This car is fine. When