Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Luca
The path through the back field is soft from last night's rain.
I can't say sorry. Sorry is nothing. I'll tell her I came to say everything. Every fact I held back, in order, and then whatever she decides after that, I take it. That's the whole speech.
The big tree comes into view first, leaning out over the water the way Nina described. The dock.
Then the man on top of the woman.
He's kneeling over her at the far end, arms straight down, shoulders working. Her legs kick against the boards, and my body is already moving before my head names what I'm looking at.
I run. The field is too long. The dock is still fifty meters out and her legs are slowing down. That's the detail that empties me out. I run through the fence gap and hit the boards at full speed.
He hears me. He starts to turn his head.
I kick it. Full swing, boot to temple. He goes sideways off her body and rolls once. I see the face come around as he rolls.
Voss.
"You," I say, and I'm on him. "You fucking — you put your hands on her—"
My fist connects and his nose folds. He gets one arm up and I go through it. I hit him again and again, and the words come out of me in pieces.
"I'll fucking kill you, you piece of shit — she's mine and the girl is mine and you came here — you came to her father's fucking house—"
His hand claws at my coat. I take his head in both hands.
His eyes find mine. There's blood in his teeth and he's still trying to say a word.
I bring his skull down on the boards. The dock answers with a deep wooden knock.
I lift and bring it down again. And again, until the knock changes sound, until his hand lets go of my coat and slides off, until there's nothing under my hands still fighting me.
He stops.
I hold his head against the boards a moment longer. His eyes stay open. There's no breath in him. I've felt this exact stillness enough times to trust it.
Coughing behind me. Wet, ragged, alive.
I let his head go and turn, and Gemma is on her side on the dock with both hands at her own throat, coughing so hard her whole body folds around it. Her hair is across her face.
I drop to my knees beside her. My hands come up toward her face and stop in the air.
They're red to the wrist. His blood. She's staring at them. Not at me. At the hands. Her whole body has gone still and small on the boards, the coughing quieting into fast shallow breaths, her eyes fixed and glassy. Shock. I know shock.
"Gemma." My voice comes out torn. "You're okay. You're breathing. Just breathe."
She doesn't answer. Her eyes don't leave my hands.
So I move. Two steps to the edge of the dock, down on one knee, and I plunge both hands into the lake.
The water clouds red around my wrists. I scrub one hand with the other, knuckles, palms, under the nails.
Behind me she's still breathing in those small broken pulls and every one of them tightens my chest. I pull my hands out, shake them, wipe them down my coat.
Then I come back to her and slide one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders.
"I've got you," I say. "It's over. He's fucking done. He can't touch you again."
I stand carrying her off the dock and up through the wet grass toward her parents' house.
Her head turns against my chest. She looks up at me and her mouth opens like there's a word coming.
No word comes. Her eyes close instead, and she leans her head into me, all of her weight settling against my chest at once, her fingers curling into my coat.
I keep walking.
Gemma
The sky moves above his shoulder. That's what I watch, because his face is too much right now.
"I've got you," Luca says. "You're alright. Everything's fine now, I swear to God. I've fucking got you."
Words come out of him one after another, filling up the quiet, and I understand somewhere under the fog that the words aren't for me. They're for him. His arms shake around me and I can hear his heart through it, going too fast.
Swallowing hurts. Breathing hurts. Every time I pull air in, my throat clicks where his hands were, and I hear the boards again, my own heels drumming against them, slower and slower.
I lift my eyes to his face. His jaw is set hard and his eyes stay fixed ahead. He's beautiful. That's a stupid thing to notice after what happened, but I notice it anyway, because if this face hadn't come down that dock I'd be face-down in the lake right now.
Dominik wasn't going to stop. His thumbs were pressing in and his face above me was calm, and he was going to keep pressing until I stopped being a problem.
Luca walks faster.
"Almost there," he says. "You're safe. You hear me? Nobody's touching you again. Fucking nobody."
The back door opens before we reach it. My father stands there with the trowel in his hand. The trowel hits the step and he's coming down into the yard with his arms out.
"What did you do?" He's yelling. My father doesn't yell. "Give her to me — what the hell did you do to her?"
He pulls me out of Luca's arms, and Luca lets him.
He just opens his hands and lets me go. He doesn't say a word in his own defense, doesn't say it wasn't me, doesn't say anything at all.
He stands there and takes it. That tells me exactly what's going on inside his head.
He thinks this is his. He thinks every mark on me traces back to him somehow, and he's decided to stand still and let my father believe it.
"Dad." My voice comes out wrong, torn at the edges. "Dad, stop. It wasn't him."
"Gemma—"
"It was Dominik." Saying the name scrapes my throat raw. "Dominik did this. Luca pulled him off me."
My father's arms tighten around me.
"Why are you holding Mommy like a baby?"
Nina. She's got dirt on her knees, holding the railing with one hand. Her eyes go from me, to my father, to Luca, and I watch her start to shrink.
Luca crosses the yard and kneels in front of her before I can find my voice. He comes down to her height, both knees in the wet grass, and his voice comes out steady and low.
"Mommy fell on the dock," he says. "Her foot hurts. That's all. Grandpa's going to carry her so she doesn't have to walk on it."
Nina studies him. She looks at his face a long time, and something in it must pass her test, because her shoulders come back down.
"I fell off the swing once," she says. "Mariela put a cold thing on it." She lifts her chin. "I'll be her personal nurse."
"Good," Luca says.
My father shifts me in his arms and I turn my face into his shoulder, into flannel, soil and the smell of my whole childhood. That's when the tears come.
Because Nina is standing in that doorway offering to nurse me, and minutes ago her own father stood over the water and put her name in a threat. His own kid.
The tears run down into my father's collar and I can't stop them.
"Dad." I get it out in pieces. "Take me upstairs. Please."
He carries me through the door. Past Nina, who pats my ribs as I go by, past the kitchen where my mother's voice is already rising, asking what happened, what's wrong, who is that man. On the stairs I look back once.
Luca is still in the yard. He hasn't followed us in. He stands in the grass with his wet sleeves and his empty hands, watching me go up.
Luca
The pin drops on the map with a soft blue pulse. Dock behind the property, north end of the lake. I type under it: One on the boards. Cleanup before dark. Nobody sees you, nobody hears you, and it never happened. Marco answers in eleven seconds. On it.
I put the phone on my knee and look at my hands. The water got most of the blood off, but the skin over two knuckles is split.
The living room is small and warm. School photos climb the wall by the stairs in a straight line.
A boy with a hockey stick, then Gemma at six or seven with a gap where her front teeth should be, grinning.
There's a golden retriever in three of the frames.
Nina's crayons sit in a plastic cup on the coffee table, next to a drawing of a garden.
I don't belong in this room.
From the kitchen, Nina's voice carries through the wall, bright and fast, telling Gerald about a worm she found by the garlic. Gerald answers her in a low voice. He hasn't looked at me since he carried his daughter up the stairs.
It was Nina who told them who I am. That's Luca. He lives with us. He makes me the best pancakes. Four years old, and she gave me a character reference in one breath. That's the only reason Susan Holt opened the door and told me to come in and sit down instead of telling me to get off her land.
Susan comes down from the stairs now. She sits in the chair across from me, straight-backed, hands folded in her lap.
She doesn't speak for a while. I've been interrogated by professionals on two continents, and none of them made a silence work this hard.
"My husband wanted to call the police," she says.
"That'd be a fucking mistake." It's out before I can sand it down. "Sorry. But it would."
"Mm." She looks at my knuckles, then back at my face. "Gemma says you saved her life. Gerald says you came up from the water carrying her with blood on your shirt that wasn't hers. I'm putting all of that together, and I don't love the picture it makes."
There's nothing to say to that, so I don't say anything. Nina laughs in the kitchen.
"I don't really know what world my daughter walked into," Susan says.
"I know she didn't tell us a thing for years because she thought we'd judge her for it, which breaks my heart worse than anything you could do.
And I know that whatever this world is, you're standing in the middle of it.
" Her voice doesn't rise. "So no, I'm not happy.
I want that said out loud, once, so there's no confusion later. "
"Understood," I say. "For what it's worth, I'm not happy about what she walked into either. I'd burn the whole thing down if it got her out clean."
Susan studies me. Then she leans forward with her elbows on her knees.
"Here's the part that matters. My daughter is upstairs with hand marks on her neck, and the first thing she did when she could talk again was ask for you.
" She lets that land. It lands hard. "So you're going to think, right now, in this room, before you touch that staircase.
Whether you're staying in her life or leaving it.
Because if you go up there, hold her hand and then disappear back into whatever you came out of, I will find you, and I don't care how many guns your friends have. "
I nod. I already know the answer and have known it since the two of them got into my miserable life.
"I'm staying," I say. "I don't know if I'm any good for her — I've got no fucking evidence that I am. But I'm staying as long as she'll have me, and if she won't have me, I'll stay close enough to keep her safe anyway."
Something in Susan's face shifts — not softening, exactly. Settling. Like she's marked a box on a form.
"She's asking for you," she says. "Right now."
I'm on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
"Where's her room?"