“Time doesn’t heal,” I say.
“You’re damn right it doesn’t.” He rubs his forehead. “You know, I studied in Paris when I was about your age.”
I glance at him. “Yeah?”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. “I’ve been carrying this picture in my wallet since my son died. It’s my identification photo my school in Paris took on the first day.”
He holds out the photo between two fingers. The doctor in the photo is much younger than the one in front of me, with a head of bushy, overgrown hair and a collared, striped shirt. He’s standing on a sidewalk with a curve-sided yellow stone building behind him. I flip the photo over. On the back, written in the doctor’s careful cursive, are the words, “Darwin Neil Wilson.”
“Your name’s Darwin?”
He shrugs. “I go by my middle name now.”
I pass the photo back to him. “So what’s Paris got to do with anything?”
“What do you know about Parisians?”
I pause. “They smoke a lot.”
“Yeah, they do. Back then, they allowed smoking in bars. When you walked in, you’d see everything through a blanket of blue smoke. I’d be at a bar stool, alone, and I’d look around and hear all these foreign voices layered over one another and see these people moving around in foreign clothes with foreign faces. And then I’d realize that, actually, I was the foreign one. I was the one who didn’t belong. There’s something about grief that makes you feel like that, like a foreigner. When I lost my son, I became a citizen of a country I never knew existed. And all of the people I ran into on a daily basis were speaking a different language, only they didn’t know it. Because I was the one who’d changed. I’d sit around the office and soak in the sounds and realize that I would never be like them again. And you know the strangest part?”
“What?”
“That idea made me happy. I started carrying this picture around, just to remember the feeling. It felt good to be different. It made me feel closer to my son. Closer to my guilt. The trouble is, though, when you lift your head back up and look around, everything’s different. Things have been moved, people have walked out.”
He flicks the photograph back and forth between his fingers.
“The grief world isn’t closer to where the dead live,” the doctor says. “You only trick yourself into believing that. If you stand up and move around and look at the living world, and start participating again, you’re closer to them anyway.”
He lets the picture fall into the water-filled bowl of the stainless steel toilet beside him. The young Darwin looks up from the shadows of the trough of water. Wilson curls his fingers around the handle and flushes.
I watch the photo spin around and around until it disappears down the drain. I rest my chin on my breastbone. “Constance is dead.”
“And that is that.”
Chapter 58
“What will happen to Waylon?” I ask.
Dr. Wilson shrugs. “We’ve been looking for him for months. He’s been a suspect since the beginning.”
I straighten up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Will you promise me something?” I ask. “If the police ever find Jude, promise you’ll help him.”
“Help him return to the wild?”
“It’s the life he wants,” I say. “He ought to have the choice. Everybody should.”
“So will you be joining him?” he asks. “If you get parole.”
“I’m still deciding.”
He moves his jaw back and forth. “I hear you got into the Bridge Program.”
“How’d you know about that?”
He smiles. “You’re not the only one who talks to Angel.”
I nod, chewing my lip. “Will Waylon go to jail?”
“Who knows if we’ll ever even catch him,” he says. “He hid for twenty years without detection.”
And it seems as though he’s saying it’d be okay if Waylon never was found. It’d be okay if the case got cold and went to bed.
He looks up suddenly and casts his eyes around the ceiling. “Do you hear that?” he asks.
“What?”
“Thunder. I think it’s raining.”
I can hear it now, plinking on the metal roof.
“Storms are so quiet here,” I say. “Thunder was deafening in the Community. Loud as cannon blasts. Sometimes, I’d wake in the night and think the war must’ve started.”
“What war?”
“Between us and the unbelievers. That’s what the Prophet said. A war was coming. The Gentiles were out there with their nuclear weapons and automatic rifles, but we had the greatest weapon of all, God. The war never came, though. Good thing, too.”
“Why?”
“God doesn’t stand up well in the face of a gunshot. Or a hatchet. God can’t protect you against very much at all.”
“Is that how God works?”
“That’s what the Prophet told us.”