Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rooster
She's standing in front of me with the worst thing I've ever heard still coming off her.
I don't put my arms around her. She hasn't told me I can, and I'm not going to guess.
So I stand in the garage with grease on my hands and my whole chest caved in.
I let her watch me take it.
"Say something," she says.
"I don't have anything yet." My voice comes out wrong, thin at the edges, and I have to stop and breathe through my nose to get the rest of it. "Give me a second. What's out of my mouth first is going to be about me, and this isn't about me."
Her jaw tightens at that, and her shoulders come down half an inch, both at once.
"It was them the whole time," I say, slower. "Nine years down there, and it was the same men who came for my address. And the one from the night you got out—"
"Roy Hoyt."
"Roy Hoyt." I've never heard the name, and I'll never lose it now. It's already in me somewhere permanent, filed next to the sound of my mother's car going into the ditch. "You're sure?"
"Imani's sure. It's in Ollie's deposition.
" Her voice goes flat and exact, the way it does when she's holding herself together with both hands.
"He knew who I was, Finn. He stood in my mother's kitchen, and months later he had me on his own people's ranch, and he knew, and he did what he did because he knew. None of it was ever random."
And there it is.
Ten years I've carried a weight I thought was mine.
That I ran and it didn't work and her parents died for my address.
And I'd started to set it down.
She let me start to, in the sunroom, when she told me it wasn't Ironwood who took her, that the two halves of her life were separate, that the worst of it had nothing to do with me.
Now she's in a garage telling me she was wrong.
It picks the weight back up and hangs it on me again, heavier, because it's not only her parents now.
It's her. Every day of those nine years.
The same organization, the thread running straight from a boy in a federal building to a woman on a table in a bunker, and I'm the reason the thread exists at all, I'm the first knot in it—
"Stop," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. I can see it climbing up your back."
She steps in close and puts her hand flat on my chest. The warmth of it comes through my shirt and my breathing goes to hell.
"I didn't come here to hang it back on you. I came because I couldn't hold it alone, and you're the only person I want holding the other end."
"Feels the same from where I'm standing."
"I know it does." Her hand presses harder, like she can push it back down into me by force.
"You want to carry something, carry this with me.
Not the guilt. The rest of it. That it was them, they're still standing, and there are still more women in a hole that belongs to the man behind every bit of it, and we're going to go get them. "
I get my hand over hers on my chest and hold it there.
I don't say what I'm thinking, which is that I’ve spent ten years believing the best I could do for this woman was stay a thousand miles from her.
She just walked across a clubhouse to tell me the best I can do is stand next to her while she carries something.
Nobody's ever asked me to carry the other end of anything. My whole life has been people handing me things to hold alone.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay."
She takes her hand back. There's a grease print on her shirt where she pressed against me and neither of us says anything about it.
***
Ollie's file confirms it that afternoon.
Imani's got the deposition and a page off the Arizona Department of Corrections, and she doesn't make me come to her.
She climbs to the roof and hands it up without a word.
Roy Hoyt. Dead four months ago.
Picked up last spring on a parole violation with a weapons charge stacked on it, and he made it eleven weeks inside before a yard fight between two factions turned into a war.
Somebody put a shank in his kidney, and he was gone before the guards locked it down.
Nobody charged. The kind of death that finds men like him and gets a single paragraph.
I read it twice, and both times something in me goes looking for a feeling and doesn't find one.
I wanted to kill him. I've had two days to want it.
And the page says a stranger already did it in a yard over something neither of us will ever know about, and all I've got is my hands going cold on a piece of paper.
"He's already dead," I say.
"He's already dead." Imani sits down on the ledge beside me, which she's never once done. "I wanted to tell you before Mila reads it because I need you thinking about what it means for her, not only what it means for the run."
"It means she doesn't get him."
"It means she never gets him." Imani looks out at the desert going gold.
"The man who did the worst of it. The one she crawled out from under, the one who knew exactly whose girl she was.
He didn't die because of her. He died in a yard fight over something that had nothing to do with her, and she doesn't even get to know what it was about.
" Her mouth goes tight. "Some people need the one who hurt them to be afraid at the end.
She doesn't get that sort of closure. He was probably worried about his commissary account. "
I sit with it.
She was nothing to him at the end. She was nothing to him the whole way through.
That's what I can't get past, sitting up there.
Not that he's dead.
That she spent nine years being the center of the worst thing in the world, and to the man who did it she didn’t mean a damn thing.
"How do I tell her?" I say.
"You don't dress it up. She hates that worse than the truth.
" Imani stands. "You tell her he's dead, he died, and it was never going to be him at the end of this anyway.
Because it wasn't. It was never one man.
You kill Roy Hoyt and Trask hires the next one by Friday.
That's how a place like La Nada works. The men are interchangeable. "
She goes back down the ladder and leaves me with a page off the Department of Corrections, the cold coming up out of the ground, and I understand what she's telling me.
This was never going to end with a body I could hand Mila.
It ends with a building, or it doesn't end.
***
My mother brings the cards out that night.
She doesn't want to. I can see it in her hands, my mother, at the table in the main room with both of them folded on top of a shoebox like it might spring open, Imani across from her being careful, me behind my mother's chair with a hand on her shoulder.
"I never opened them," Marie says. "Ten years.
Every December one comes, and I know the hand before I see the postmark.
I couldn't throw them out and I couldn't open them.
Throwing them out would've told him I was scared.
Opening them meant reading whatever he—" She stops.
Her thumb works at a corner of the lid. "So I put them in a box.
And when Finn said grab one bag, I don't know why, but I grabbed the box. "
"You grabbed it because some part of you knew we'd need it," Imani says. "May I?"
Marie pushes the box across, and then she puts both hands in her lap where I can't see them.
Imani opens them oldest first, and they're Christmas cards, and that's what crawls under my skin. They're only Christmas cards. A cardinal on a snowed-in branch. A lit-up church at dusk. Inside every one, the same warm looping hand:
Thinking of you this season, Marie. Wishing you peace. — Wen.
Years of a man who took everything from my mother, mailing her a Hallmark card every December like an old friend who moved away and got sentimental about it.
I look down at the top of my mother's head.
There's more gray in the part than there was ten years ago and I wasn't there for any of it.
She's been sitting alone in a house in Sierra Vista every December opening her mailbox and finding him in it, and she never told me.
Years of Sunday phone calls and she never once said, he sent another one.
Because she knew what I'd do.
Because protecting me was the only thing she had left to do for me, and she did it the same way I did it for Mila, by keeping her mouth shut and keeping it to herself.
We're a family of people who go quiet to keep each other safe. And look what it built.
"There's nothing in them," I say. "He never says anything. It's—"
"It's the reminder," Imani says, low. "Every year.
That he knows where she lives. That he can reach her mailbox whenever he feels like it.
He doesn't have to threaten her. The card is the threat.
The card says I know exactly where you are, and this year I'm choosing to only send a card.
" She lays another one down. "He's showing her the leash without pulling it. Ten years running."
My mother's gone gray in the face, and I tighten my grip on her shoulder. She reaches up without looking and puts her hand over mine and holds on hard.
Then Imani reaches the last one.
Last Christmas. And she stops before she opens it, because she's looking at the envelope. "Marie. Did you ever look at these? Even the front of them?"
"No." My mother's barely breathing. "Never the front. I couldn't."
Imani turns the envelope around so I can see.
Ten years of envelopes that read Marie Kincaid.
This one reads Marie & Camila.
The bottom drops out of the whole room.
"That's—" My mother's hand flies to her mouth. "That's not—how does he even—"
"He knows." Imani's voice has gone flat and slow and deliberate. "By last Christmas he knew Camila was alive, and he knew she'd found her way back to you. That's months ago, Marie. He's known for months."
"Open it," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine.
Imani opens it.
A cabin in the snow, warm light in the windows. Inside, the same steady hand:
A blessing to have family found again. — Wen.
And a photograph is tucked inside it.