“River, man, please…”
He looked up. Theo was there now too. He held on to Beluga’s shoulder.
“River, drop the gun, my friend. Please, I beg you. Drop the gun, no one wants to hurt you, and you—you will never hurt me. You are not one to hurt others, my friend.” Theo tried to smile. “You are the good guy.”
Maybe that wasn’t true. River suddenly wanted to kill. He wanted to believe that he was at an arcade—that he could shoot them all like ducks on a track; if they were just gone—then their words would be the lie and not his dream.
“River,” Beluga said, “please, other people are coming. Right now … it’s just us. And these men.”
“These men … they’ve been following me,” he said to Theo and Beluga, still at such a loss.
“They’re here to help. I didn’t believe them at first,” Beluga said. “I called … I called your home. They are who they say they are.”
“Fine,” River said, turning to look at the man who had called himself Henley. “Who are you—who the hell are you?” River asked.
“I told you—I’m Henley,” the man said. “That’s Clayton by the base of the statue over there, and Maxwell by me. I’m a private investigator. River, you have a mother and a father who love you very much. You have a sister who is heartbroken.”
River winced. He felt as if he were ripped in two again.
Yes, he had a mother and a father. And they loved him. And his little sister was sweet and beautiful and wisecracking, but …
They didn’t know his pain. They couldn’t live his pain. They couldn’t understand that his soul was broken.
“River!” Theo said. “We love you, man. Beluga and me … you’ve been such a friend. You’ve kept my ugly mug from being trampled, you … we love you. Please, man, drop the gun. You don’t want to hurt people, but you can, and we all know it. Me and Beluga, no—never. But if you see these others as enemies … You gotta drop that gun completely. You must live, man, we need you.”
River almost smiled at that. It was good to be needed. And good to be loved.
He looked at Beluga and Theo, standing arm in arm, both of them with tears running down their faces.
He forced a smile. “How’s Convict?”
“He’s good; he loves you too. He wants you to get well and come back to Brazil,” Beluga said.
They looked so funny—giant Beluga, scrawny little Theo. They were holding on to one another like mismatched twins cast adrift on a lifeboat.
River dropped the gun.
He could see it all now—see it as it had really happened. He hadn’t seen Natal that first morning; he had seen Maria in the room, picking up.
He hadn’t seen an article written by Natal—he had seen an article written by another woman—but Natal had loved to write, and so River had seen her face as that of the author.
Natal hadn’t been at the Laundromat—he had been there by himself. He had played with the children at the arcade by himself.
He’d been alone at the beach … except when he’d crawled on the boat and danced with those partying on it. Of course he had danced with others …
Because Natal had not really been there.
He had been alone at his picnics, in the jungle, at the deserted house …
He pressed his thumbs to his skull.
What had been real?
Anything? Was he capable at all of discerning reality from his fantasies?
Yes. They had forced him.
The man who had attacked him at the restroom had been real; his attacking Reed Amato’s house had been real—but he hadn’t been there because of Natal. He had gone … because he’d known the man had been a murderer.
He thought about walking through the farmland, going to the club—dancing in the street.
He had gone to the park and he had plunged into the lake and slept, tired from swimming beneath the stars and the fireworks …
Dreaming of Natal.
Dreaming; just dreaming.
He cast his head back and screamed; it was a cry to the heavens, long and loud and piercing, filled with agony and anguish.
Natal.
He closed his eyes, and he saw her in memory then. His wife. His beautiful wife. The woman he had loved through high school, married when they’d barely graduated. So young—and yet so in love. And the love had stayed through trials and tribulations, through the birth of their daughter, through every decision they had made.
When he’d gone into the military … and been deployed.
Yes. They dreamed of Brazil. Then, when they talked, they had planned their trip. And before … while they’d lain awake at night in the little apartment they could afford when they’d first married, when the baby had been born, they’d talked about Rio and S?o Paolo and all the other wonders of the country they both longed to see …
Like Natal. Of course, they had longed to see Natal because Natal was her name.
God, yes, they had dreamed of Brazil.
Together.
Then he had come home in bandages, a limb shattered, his head bashed. But he had come home to the hospital … only not before the man had broken into his house. A man who killed for pleasure—a man the police had been seeking, but never caught. And while River had lain in that hospital bed, he’d broken into his house. A monster who had killed the people he loved most in the world, and left them lying in streams of blood.
River had served; he had met the guns and the bombs. It had been Natal and his precious little girl who had died.
The irony …
He had healed.
They had died.
And so, he had come here the minute after he had buried Natal and their beautiful child. He had run away from the truth. Sanity had, at times, tried to slip through to him. Mercifully, it had not often touched him. But there had been moments. Moments when he had heard sounds that didn’t exist. The laughter. The haunting laughter of a child. It had been his child. Killed along with Natal.
He sat there, shaking, too broken to sob.
Beluga came to him to draw him to his feet. “You need help, my friend. You need help. And your mother and your father—they want to see that you get that help. That you can be healed.”
Theo came too, followed by the men in the blue suits.
“You’ll heal, you’ll heal,” Theo promised.
“We’ll get you home,” Henley added, and the other men in blue nodded.
They weren’t police.
The police had never been after him.
Tio Amato had never been after him.
The men in the blue suits had him.
He wasn’t going to a Brazilian jail.
Worse.
He was doomed to the prison of reality.
EPILOGUE
“You brought him back to us—I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” Elizabeth Roulet told Ted Henley.
She stood with her daughter, April, outside the room at the Phoenix Rising Therapeutic Spa—a very fancy name for the facility to which they had brought River. His room had been prepared from the time Henley had called to say that he’d found River.