A moment drifts by, neither of them speaking.
“I promise you,” he repeats.
The whispering voices come to her again, like insects buzzing around her head. Murder, she hears, no accident, murder.
“It was not an accident,” she tells Mark.
*
Mark, Lara, and Hannah stood awkwardly on the porch of Mark’s house. Hannah Perino was medicated—not heavily, just enough so her expression seemed as though she was hearing pleasant music in her head.
What truly infuriated Hannah was the loss of her thick, lustrous strawberry-blond hair, taken by the radiation and chemo. She had a face as pale and beautiful as any Lara had seen. Even with the silk black scarf covering her head, you could see this. Hannah Perino’s eyes locked with hers and all at once something shifted inside Lara. She remembered that her mother was gone and felt a horrible thrill of grief.
“Lara will be staying with us for a bit,” Mark said.
“Well then, c’mon in, sweetie.” Hannah held the door for Lara.
Up close Hannah smelled familiar. White Linen, Lara’s mother’s favorite. Inside the large colonial room with a fireplace and bookshelves, a sad Sinatra song played. She was aware of the exhaustion now. After a short time, she followed Mark to the guest room.
Mark explained to Hannah that Lara’s parents had been killed that morning. He told her, “She saw her parents burn alive.”
“The poor child,” she said, “my God.”
“There is no family. Do you know what the system will do with her?”
“We can’t keep her forever,” Hannah told him.
“No, just long enough for me to figure out my next move.”
“I’ll be okay. You’ll do what you have to do, what is right. You talked to them, the police and the Bureau?”
“They talked to me.”
“And you’re going to try to hang onto the girl?”
“For the time being.”
Hannah seemed to understand.
*
Lara rested for a few days, Mark made clear that they needed the solitude, he did and Hannah did and certainly Lara did. They pretended that in time life could go on in an almost normal fashion. Within a day or two, Mark found that Lara was no ordinary twelve-year-old. There was a touch of caution and a certain menace in her.
After the third day, Hannah asked, “Do you think we can keep her?” Mark liked the question and liked the way Hannah smiled when she asked it.
On their fifth night together, not quite a week after the bombing, Lara sat at the dinner table and said, “I think you know something you’re not telling me.”
“Like what?”
“Like who killed my mother and father. I mean, you’re an FBI agent.”
Mark explained that he couldn’t be positive, not yet, but he’d know soon enough. It was proof, Lara thought. The murder of her parents was proof positive that what the nuns had told her was true. Satan’s evil grip was running free in the world. The voices confirmed it.
Hannah complained that rainy night—her sickness, the awful pain of it, drained her of all faith, all belief, she told them.
In the ensuing weeks Mark got himself an expensive and cunning lawyer; together they fought off all attempts to turn Lara over to the state.
In Lara’s heart there was space set aside for her mother and father; as things began to go bad for Hannah, she found space for her as well.
In Lara’s teetering mind all this was one bad dream. “Why?” she asked Hannah over and over again. “Why you?”
Drugs were Hannah’s only answer for her pain. Morphine was good, but the Olneyville street heroin was better. Carboplatin was forced on her. Poison. It killed cells, all her cells. It was a magnificent killer. The doctors said that it was up to her to go on with this.
With what?
For many months Hannah had been a fighter; then abruptly the battle was over. She could no longer take the pain in her back and stomach. Her day was: lay down, vomit, get up, diarrhea, again and again. Everything closing down, the last stages. Mark shouting at God: “Heartless bastard! You do this to a good woman?” The shouting made Lara cry.
Near the end, they kept her at home. Lara and Mark together held her close, turned up the morphine and the heroin. Then in the center of one night, a sudden storm, fingers of lightning, thunder; in the excruciating rapture of a heroin OD, Hannah reached out and grabbed Mark’s and Lara’s hands. She looked at their tear-lined faces and smiled a medicated smile. Sinatra sang in the background, and Hannah, just like that, was gone.
The following morning, Brendan McKenna, the narcotics officer, called. He was beside himself. “You better sit down,” he said. “We identified the bombers.”
Mark told him that during the night, they had lost Hannah.
“Oh Mark,” Brendan gasped over the phone, “I am so sorry, what a horror.” For years after Brendan had stopped drinking he could be easily brought to tears. “Would you like me to come by?” he asked.
“We’re okay, I’ve been expecting this for a while,” Mark told him.