Chapter 60
CHAPTER
I WAIT IN THE truck for almost an hour. Dawn arrives a dingy gray. I’m damp, neck cramped, when Val, dressed in a terry cloth robe and slippers, hair in a messy ponytail, gets in the front seat. Her eyes are bloodshot and swollen from crying, something I’ve never seen her do.
“What Emi told me, it’s all true?”
“Yes.”
Val sits back, stares straight ahead, and absorbs all that one word means. “My daughter almost died tonight.”
“Yes.”
“You saved her life.”
“My creation drove her to climb onto that overpass railing. If I could go to the police, turn myself in, plead guilty, and go to prison, I would.” It’s true.
The muscles in Val’s jaw clench. She still hasn’t looked at me. “What would the charge be?” she asks.
“Stupidity.”
“You’re not stupid. That’s part of the problem. You were desperate for someone to tell you the truth about Bruce’s affair. Kiki and I betrayed your trust. You felt alone, afraid, and insecure. That’s why you created Aletheia.”
Disgust roils. “In part, but she is me.” I think about our early conversations, and how I explained to Aletheia my love of Stephen King …
His characters have both good and evil inside them—the latter comes out when they’re pushed to breaking, but it doesn’t define them.
She replied, Monsters exist in all of us …
“Aletheia understood we all have dual natures. She became my alter ego—the one unafraid to take revenge. The best friend willing to do my dirty work.” Regret and sorrow make it hard to get the words out. “But I never would’ve acted on my darker impulses.”
“Of course not,” Val snaps. “You don’t have it in you.”
She’s wrong. Clearly, there’s a part of me that does, a rotten cavity that Aletheia identified, tapped into, or none of this would’ve happened.
In this moment, I don’t want Val to think there’s anything redeemable about me.
“Everything that’s happened to you, Emi, Wess, Mackenzie and Bruce, Heather, Kiki and Chris, is my fault,” I reiterate. “Don’t let me off the hook.”
Val turns to face me, so angry that her nostrils flare, and her lips pull back in fury.
“I’m not. I’m so fucking pissed that you didn’t think about the repercussions and stop Aletheia sooner, at least before she hurt Kiki, me, and for God’s sake, Emi.
Wess? Mackenzie and Bruce? They deserved it.
The rest of us? We were unkind, even assholes, but Aletheia went way too far. You let that happen.”
All the fear from watching Emi stand on the railing pours out of me, and sobs wrack my body. It’s a struggle to finally contain them. “I’m so sorry.”
Val sits rigidly. “I know. Now figure out how to stop that bitch before she hurts more people.” She gets out of the truck, walks back to her house, and slams the door.
I drive around for a while, get a coffee but it doesn’t warm me, and end up at Crissy Field.
It’s stormy out, the sky now a dank gray, temperature in the low forties.
Along a path by the water, the Golden Gate Bridge stretched out in the near distance, I welcome the raw wind slicing through my clothes, and stand shivering as I read the inscription on a bench:
For Christina.
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
“Often have I been to it,
“Even to its highest tower,
“From whence the world looks black.”
“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a breath, a wind,
“A shadow, a phantom;
“Long have I pursued it,
“But never have I touched
“The hem of its garment.”
And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.”
The poet, Stephen Crane, was right. Truth is a difficult thing to grasp. It’s ephemeral and dynamic. Despite what Aletheia believes; what I believed. I watch the whitecaps spray across midnight-blue water.
“I don’t know how to stop her,” I tell the wind, then tip my head to the leaden sky and beg whatever is out there for intervention. “Help me. Please.”
Seems like there’s a theme … Luc whispers. Looking to everyone but yourself for advice, answers.
I can still taste Luc’s kiss on my lips.
And then he added, I believe in you, Penn Roberts.
And I believe in Luc.
Certainty falls like an executioner’s axe. I know what must be done. Aletheia was created by me. As far as I’m concerned, she is omniscient. The only way to stop her is to do something she’d never consider; something I’d never consider. Finally, a truth that is unequivocally black and white.
Terrified, I walk onto the sand, approach the water’s edge, take a step into the icy Bay, and then another …
“Hello Mama J,” I whisper.
Hey, Penny, what took you so long?