Chapter 7 #2
Marlowe put a hand out and then remembered and pulled it back and stood there with her arm halfway up like a woman hailing a very slow cab.
"Your—"
"Dawn Marsh." My voice came out of somebody standing behind me. "My father's sister. She ran a diner on Route 9 and she died on Route 9 in 1994 and everybody in my family says the words car accident in the same tone they use for cancer, which is the tone that means don't ask."
"Sunday—"
"She's on the map," I said. "She's on my map. She's number — she's got a card, Marlowe, I made her a card, she's the one at Mile 66.2 and I put a cross out there for her with my own hands and I did not know."
"How did you not know?"
"Because the reports have her as D. E. Marsh and I have four hundred relatives and the only Dawn anybody ever talked about was Aunt Dawn who passed, and because I was eleven, and because I have never once looked at that woman's face."
I sat down on the floor of the Nye County records annex.
"That's why I started," I said. "That's what I couldn't ever explain to anybody, why this road, why these thirty-one — there's a hundred roads.
Marlowe, I picked this one two years ago off a call log and I thought it was random.
It was never random. I have been walking around inside my own family's grave for two years arranging flowers. "
Marlowe crouched down about six feet away, which was the closest she could get, and put both her hands flat on the linoleum like she was steadying the building.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Say the rest."
"There is no rest."
"There's rest. There's always rest, I do this for a living."
"The rest is a question."
"Ask it."
I looked up at her.
"If it's writing her name," I said, "is she the one writing it?"
"Do you want the real answer or the comforting one?"
"When have I ever wanted the comforting one."
"Fair." Marlowe sat back on her heels. "The real answer is that in my experience the dead don't have plans. They have ruts. A woman who was killed does not spend eleven years arranging a mural, she stands in the same doorway saying the same four words until somebody says the right thing back."
"So it's not her."
"So it's probably not her, and I want to be honest that 'probably' is doing a lot of work, because I've been doing this two years and the field has no textbook and the last time I was certain about something I was standing in a hallway in Idaho being extremely wrong about a wall.
" She pushed her hair back. "Here's what I'd bet on.
Somebody's writing her name. And the two reasons anybody writes a name are remember her and look what I did. "
"That's a hell of a fork."
"It's the only fork," Marlowe said. "And you can't tell them apart from a map. You can only tell them apart from about four feet away, looking at whatever's holding the pen."
I sat on the floor of the annex and understood, several days before I would admit it out loud, exactly how this was going to end.
Marlowe Quinn didn't answer that.
She didn't answer it in the car, and she didn't answer it at the light, and she didn't answer it for the whole forty minutes back, and when we pulled into the lot she finally said, "I don't know. But I've met a lot of dead people and I'll tell you the thing nobody wants to hear."
"What."
"They're not better than they were," she said. "Dying doesn't fix anybody. It just takes away all the reasons to behave."
"That's not comforting."
"It's not meant to be. It's meant to keep you from walking up to something with your hand out because it used to be somebody's aunt." A long pause on the radio. "Sunday. Say what you're planning."
"I'm not planning anything."
"You went quiet at the annex for eleven minutes and then you asked me whether the dead lie. Nobody asks that in the abstract."
"Marlowe."
"I'm not going to stop you. I've had six people try to stop me and it's never once worked and it made me lie to all of them." Another pause. "I'm asking you to tell Rafferty. That's it. That's the whole ask. Whatever it is, don't let him find out from a map."
I said, "Okay."
And I meant it at the time, which is the part I'd like on the record, because eleven minutes later I pulled into a gravel lot and did the exact opposite.
Rafferty was in the lot when we got out.
He took one look at my face.
"What," he said.
And I opened my mouth and heard myself say, in a voice that was perfectly steady and belonged to a stranger:
"Nothing. There's no name on the permit. It's a dead end."
I don't know why I did it.
That's not true. I know exactly why I did it, and it's this: he'd told me in a diner that the only thing he wanted in the world was to be some use to somebody before the breaking, and I had just found out the breaking had my last name on it, and I could already feel myself doing the thing I'd promised him I'd do in two weeks.
I just did it in three days.
"Huh," said Rafferty.
And behind me, Marlowe Quinn — who had heard every word, and who could have ended the whole thing right there — said nothing at all, and pulled her blanket up around her shoulders, and gave me the worst look I've ever been given by a woman who was on my side.