These Silent Woods: A Novel(66)
“You know when I go in to tell them about the girl,” I say to Finch as we head back home, “I won’t be back.”
In the back seat, she wrinkles her nose. “Well, you might be.”
“No, Finch. I won’t.” Am I ready to tell her? If I go through with this, there won’t be another chance. The world, all the secrets I’ve kept, this strange and precarious and beautiful life we’ve built, it’s crumbling. Fast. I take a deep breath. “There’s something you should know. Something I need to tell you. That thing I did, to keep us together? Well, there’s more to it than that. People took you. And I had to get you back. But in order to do that, I hurt someone. And I tied the people up and left them and brought you here, to the woods. Which means I broke the law. And like I’ve told you, there are consequences for what I did. Serious ones. Years of prison.”
“You did what you had to do.” A line, memorized years ago.
I clear my throat. “There’s more. The people who took you away—the people I tied up and left—they were your mother’s parents. Your grandparents.”
“I have grandparents?”
“You do.”
“You never told me.”
“Well. We didn’t get along, exactly.”
“I wouldn’t get along with them either, then.” She crosses her arms across her chest. There’s reassurance in that gesture of defiance. Her spark: it’s back.
“Nah. Me, they didn’t like. They would’ve treated you different, though. They would’ve loved you, in their way.”
“Still. It was wrong of them to want to take me away from you.”
Was it? I look back now with a degree of clarity that my grief blinded me to, back then. I reach into the back seat and squeeze her knee. “Anyhow. I made choices and there’s no going back on them now. The thing is, there are consequences for those choices, and going to the police means I need to face them. Which I’m ready to do.”
Here’s what I’ve come to realize. If this is the end, if I’m gonna lose Finch, I’d rather it be on my own terms. If that boy is left to his own devices, who knows what kind of madness might unfold. But also, we run, we hide, the authorities find us: it’d be ugly. I’d be arrested, right in front of her. Maybe someone would get hurt. And that will be her final memory of me: fighting, getting carted off, handcuffed. This way, at least I have some control over the situation. Some dignity. At least I can say goodbye.
Finch pats my hand. “I think, Cooper, if you do the right thing, you’ll be back. Everything will be all right.”
“Finch, this isn’t a storybook, where things turn out happy. That’s not how things work out there. So when I tell you I’m not coming back, I need you to get that through your head. I need to know you won’t be here waiting on me.” At first, I told myself that there was a chance that I could go in there and inform them about the body, about the boyfriend, and they’d write stuff down and send me on my way. But of course that’s not how it will go, not with our picture out there in the world. Not once they see me.
I won’t be back. There’s no returning to this life in the woods, and I need Finch to come to terms with that, to the degree that she can. The thought of her looking out the window, waiting, like she did for Jake, for the sound of my truck rounding the bend—
“Marie will be here in the morning,” I tell her. “Once I’m gone, you’ll pack up your things. Marie will drive you to your grandparents’. You’ll be all right. Marie will make sure. And sugar, I want you to know that getting to live here in this place, getting to raise you—I wouldn’t trade that for the world. All the things I’ve done in my life.” The words catch in my throat. “Getting to be your dad, that is my greatest accomplishment.”
* * *
I realize: I need to find Finch a poem. Something beautiful. Something she can lean into, once I’m gone. That’s what she would pick: a poem. And so I look. Once she’s tucked in—and tonight, it’s a short process, though I want it to last. I want her to beg me to tell her a story of Cindy, or read a long time, but she’s spent, and she kisses me on the cheek and turns over in her bed, back to me. I sit there awhile and take her in. The curvature of her spine, the small shoulders, the tangled blond hair. Can I really leave her? Is it really the right thing to do? Because at the moment, it sure as heck doesn’t feel right.
I sneak out to the main room, leave the door cracked and secretly hope that she calls me back in for some reason, needs me. I add a fat piece of oak and stoke the fire. I open the cupboards and trace the rims of the plates and then run my hands along the red countertop. I start leafing through the books on the shelf in the main room. Page after page. Nothing is right. Nothing is perfect. And in this case, it has to be. It has to be precisely right. It can’t be depressing. It can’t be about the wrong type of love. It has to offer some kind of advice, even if it’s not overt. It has to be about me, somehow. It has to be about Finch. It has to create a world. “Oh, little girl, my stringbean.” No Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath, I set to the side as well.
From the top shelf I pull a small book with a simple cover. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver and somehow in my eight years here I’ve never read it. I crack the spine. Jake’s name on the inside cover. I begin leafing through the pages. Then, “The Summer Day.”