Chapter 15 #2
Imani slides it out, looks at it, goes still, then turns it over and sets it on the table facing me, and the cold I've felt all day walks straight up my spine and settles at the base of my skull.
It's us.
Me and Mila, seven years old, on the Bacani front porch in high summer, sunburned and gap-toothed, and there's a brown dog wedged between us with a stick in his mouth and his whole body mid-wag.
Cricket.
It's me, Mila, and Cricket on her mother's porch the better part of thirty years ago.
I've never laid eyes on this photograph in my life, and Wendell Trask has had it long enough to mail it to my mother in a Christmas card.
I turn it over.
On the back, in the same warm looping hand:
She was always such a sweet girl. So glad she found her way home. Give her my best. — Wen.
Nobody says anything.
I stand behind my mother's chair with a thirty-year-old photograph of my own childhood in my hand, one I didn't know existed, and my hands are shaking hard enough that I have to set it down on the table to keep looking at it.
Because that's her mother's porch, and Rosalba Bacani is probably twenty feet out of frame with a plate in her hand.
Bennie's in there somewhere too, and both of them have been in the ground for two years, and that dog's been dead since I was nineteen.
Everybody in that yard is gone except the two kids on the steps.
And a man in an Arizona prison cell had it in a drawer.
He's been inside the Bacani house, or had a man inside it, and he's had his fingers on the pieces of our lives going back to before any of this started.
Today's the day. Because by last Christmas he knew where she'd landed.
He's known for months.
Known she's alive, that she's with us, all of it, and he did nothing, because nothing is worse.
A man who could move and chooses not to is telling you he isn't afraid of you.
He's telling you he's got all the time in the world and you've got none, and he'll spend his December writing your mother a Christmas card while you lie awake wondering when.
"He's not reacting to us," I say. The room's gone still enough to hear the heater tick over. "We've spent weeks planning this run thinking we're the ones moving. We're not. He's been ahead of us the whole time. He knew she was here before we knew what we had in that ledger."
"Then he might know about the run." Razor's in the doorway. I didn't hear him come in. He's looking at the photograph and his face has gone to stone. "If his reach is that long."
"Maybe." Imani doesn't look up. "Or maybe he can't picture us coming.
Men like Trask, the ones who run on love instead of fear—their blind spot is they can't imagine you'd actually walk through the door.
He thinks he's sent a warning. He thinks Camila reads her name on an envelope and a photo of herself at seven and understands she belongs to him, always has, and the smart move is to vanish and stay small. "
"She's not going to do that," I say.
"No." Imani finally looks up, and her face has gone cold and bright.
"She's going to walk onto his ranch and take his women out of the ground and burn the rest to the slab.
But he doesn't know that about her, because he never knew her.
He knew a sweet girl on a porch." She taps the photograph once.
"He's about to meet what the porch grew. "
I get to Mila before anyone else can.
She's in the room she shares—Marie's got the bed, so Mila's been on a cot under the window—and she sets down the book she isn't reading the second she sees my face.
"Tell me," she says.
So I tell her, and I don't dress it up, because Imani's right that she hates that worse than the truth.
Roy Hoyt's dead. Four months back, a yard fight. Trask has known she's alive since last Christmas. The card. The photo. Her name on the envelope.
She takes the news about Hoyt without her face changing, and I watch her put it somewhere, and I know I'll find out in a week or a year what it cost to put it there.
I hand her the photograph last.
She looks at it for a long time. The two of us on the porch. The dog.
And then her face comes apart, all at once, no warning, the way a wall goes when the water's been behind it too long.
Her eyes go and her mouth goes and she makes a sound I've heard one other time in my life, in a gravel yard at dawn, and she doesn't cover her face, she just holds that photograph in both hands and lets it happen while she looks at it.
I go down on my knees in front of the cot and don't touch her.
"I remember this day," she says, when she can.
Her voice is wrecked and steadier than mine.
"Fourth of July. Your mom took it. Cricket had just stolen a hot dog clean off the grill, and my dad was chasing him around the yard, and your mom yelled hold still, you two, and got the picture when he had a stick in his mouth.
" Her thumb moves across the two kids on the steps.
"That's my mother's porch, Finn. She swept that porch every single day of her life. She'd have been standing right there."
"I know."
"They're all dead." She's still looking at it. "Everybody in that yard but us. And a man I've never met has been carrying it around in his pocket my whole life."
She turns the photo face-down on the cot.
And when she looks up, her face is dry and it's not the dryness of somebody who stopped crying.
She's done grieving. She's started planning.
"He was in our lives before we were grown, Finn." Flat and clear, and it's awful to hear. "My whole childhood. Yours. Sitting in the dark holding pieces of us the entire time, and we never knew, and he wants me to look at this and get so scared I run and stay gone."
"Mila—"
"So which was it, with you," she says, and it takes me a second to hear that she isn't asking me.
She's saying it to herself, to the room, to ten years of it.
"You ran to keep me safe and it cost me everything.
He held still to keep me scared and it's costing me now.
Every man who's ever decided anything about me decided it to keep me somewhere he wanted me.
Safe. Scared. Tucked away where I can't get hurt or get free.
" She stands up off the cot, and I stay down on my knees and look up at her. "I'm done being kept."
She picks the photograph back up and puts it in my hand and closes my fingers around it.
"Burn it flat," she says. "All of it. I want to be standing there when the ground comes open, and I want those women to see my face and know somebody came back, and I want Wendell Trask to learn that the sweet girl on the porch walked onto his ranch and took everything he built and left him one photograph and a hole in the dirt. "
I look up at her from the floor—narrow, scarred, and lit from the inside with everything except fear—and I understand Trask made the one mistake a man like him gets to make.
He sent a warning to a woman who made her peace with dying nine years ago.