Our Little Secret(60)
“Uh, yes you did.”
“Do you know anything about loneliness, Detective Novak?”
“That’s enough. Let’s go.”
A man in a gray suit passes by and Novak backs out into the corridor again, wedging his shiny shoe into the gap of the doorjamb. I hear the deep pitch of their voices, the lilt of it low, like mooing. Above the door, the video camera continues to log every move I make. Who’s on the other side of that machine? Forty or so hours of my life captured on tape. I stand still with my face turned up to the lens.
Tate says there’s hope yet; he says it like we’re winners. What he doesn’t understand, though, is how steadily people decay. We all look the same on the outside while sadness eats at our core. Dad, HP, Ezra, Mom, Freddy—even Olive—there’s absence tunneling out of each of them. Freddy will walk free—he’ll have the best lawyers money can buy. He won’t contact me again. Mom will creep around Cove in her silk scarf and claim no knowledge whatsoever of any wrongdoing. If the forensics team actually does their job, maybe they’ll find her DNA on Saskia. Maybe they’ll see that more than one person killed her. Mom will spit all the way to jail, trying with every step to take me there with her. If it comes to it and she’s incarcerated, she’ll find some way to create a prison hierarchy, placing herself on top of the rancid peak.
Tate will stick with me. He’ll look me dead in the eye, perhaps because he’s at home on the road of loss. Maybe there’s something still to be learned from him. Buck up! he’ll say, as the days sag towards the trial. You never know what might happen! But that’s the problem: I know exactly what the world can do to a person.
I miss Olive. There’s a certainty in children, a belief that gets lost in adults. Tell a kid there’s a monster in the bathroom and they’ll ask you what color it is. They accept everything and it makes them powerful, not vulnerable. We should elevate our children’s capacity to believe things. Olive Parker, stay pristine: don’t grow up at the mercy of anything, especially false optimism. I’ll write you letters you’ll never read. I’m your godmother, don’t forget! Your mother turned me into that, too.
Novak steps back into the room, holding the door open with his foot. “Let’s go,” he says again. “It’s time.”
He leads me out into a corridor where the air is cooler. The walls are painted yellow and covered in posters with faces I’d like to spend more time studying. We move quietly along, leaving my fetid room behind.
Novak thinks he’s won and I’m defeated, but the truth is I let something go in that space—all that frantic want, all the obsessiveness—it’s like I’ve talked away a grand tapestry of wrongs. The farther I move now from the interview room, the more the dark thread unravels. I loved one person my whole life, and while everyone else postured and jigged and reefed their feelings into hostility, here I am emerging with that love intact. I may carry all of the blame, but I still have the memory of true happiness.
I didn’t hurt anybody, not really, not the real kind of hurt. The tapestry of my sins is small. Can’t you see the filament, Novak, looping heavy along the corridor as it comes undone? Let it unwind, let it unspool around me, because wherever we’re going, Novak, whatever dark little hole you put me in, I’ll close my eyes and know that I’m free. The spiders aren’t crawling anymore.
chapter
* * *
29
It was warm as we drove out to Elbow Lake. A warm night, full of the leftover heat of the day. Mom’s CD blared as she spoke to me of peace, of letting toxicity go, all the ways I could forgive and forget.
At the bottom of the bumpy, tufted hill, Saskia was already sitting on the dock. We parked and Freddy greeted us, his face flushed with possible absolution. He rubbed his hands together as if it were cold. “I know it’s not your top choice, but you’ll feel so much better once you’ve spoken with her. At times like this, Angie, it’s important to just do what needs to be done.”
Near the shoreline, the mud was wet underfoot. Saskia’s shirt billowed out behind her, her frame thin and vulnerable. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
She waved from our dock—an uncertain wave, but there was still hope in her fingers as they trailed the air.
“Off you go, dear.” Mom released me towards the water like a dove. “Do everything we told you. Say all the words we’ve practiced, and it’ll all be fine. You’ll be amazed how easily you can let go once you’ve properly apologized.” She nodded with her eyebrows raised. How proud she would be of me if only I’d do this one thing.
I walked past the char of the old stone fire pit, blackened with fires of grads I no longer knew, and crossed the slats as they stretched out over the water. My legs were stiff, my joints rigid. Rusted nails jagged out of the wood, the grain fibrous and mealy and damp.
“Thanks for coming. I was hoping you would,” I said, and she shook her head, her eyes so giving, so trusting, so evolved. She held a pebble in her cupped palm, rolling it around against her loveline and lifeline. She looked at me then, almost apologetic, almost contrite. I didn’t move closer.
“Freddy said you wanted to chat,” she said.
“That’s right. More or less.” I turned to see Mom and Freddy leaving, my mother’s arm threaded through his. They walked back up the hill to Freddy’s car and both got in. How sure they were of the power of forgiving and forgetting. Saskia and I watched the car creep up the bumpy ground and then gather speed as it found the road and was gone. I took a deep breath and turned back to Saskia.