We both know I don’t belong in Barrens. Condor has his whole life here; I have my little sterile condo waiting for me in Chicago. Who knows? Maybe I’ll hang a photo or two. Maybe I’ll make Joe buy me dollar oysters. Maybe I’ll let him buy me dollar oysters for a year, with a big side of groveling—he’s promised he owes me a lifetime supply.
Maybe I’ll finally get through my inbox, and all the new complaints, environmental reports, and potential new cases awaiting my attention. You want a clean world, someone’s got to filter out the crap.
Good thing I’ve gotten used to getting my hands dirty.
I clear my throat. “She seems so much better,” I say.
When he smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Kids are amazing, aren’t they? Resilient as hell.”
I flip through the book of drawings again. She’s actually very good—she has a talent that reminds me of Kaycee’s at her age. “Not a spot of blood,” I say.
“No loose body parts, either,” Condor says dryly. After that night on the reservoir, Hannah couldn’t stop drawing the terrible things she had seen: flames and blood, a body broken on the deck of a foundering boat.
It was Hannah I saw in the woods, Hannah who in my exhaustion and terror I’d mistaken for Kaycee as a child. The crack I heard just before going under was a gunshot: a single rifle shot, aimed from the shoreline one hundred feet away at a target moving fast in a motorboat.
Condor was born and bred in Barrens, and Barrens taught its boys how to play football, and how to aim a gun. One shot was all it took.
He’d told me the whole story in the hospital the day after it happened—how he’d grown worried after seeing my calls, especially when I didn’t answer his. How, after several hours, he’d become so agitated he decided to drive to my father’s house to make sure I was okay. He hadn’t wanted to leave Hannah by herself—but she was a fussy sleeper, prone to nightmares, and he was worried she might wake up and discover him gone. So he’d woken her and packed her in the back seat of the car.
“I was sure I was just being paranoid,” he told me. “I figured we’d find you tucked into bed, turn around, and go home.”
“Then why did you bring your shotgun?” I’d asked him.
He’d simply shrugged. “You ever gone camping without a flashlight?”
I shook my head.
He smiled. “Me neither.”
Later, I heard the story repeated by the news channels, on websites, blogs, and late-night segments. Everyone was captivated by my narrow escape on the reservoir—and more than a little enamored of Condor, the gruff good-looking single dad who played the role of the hero.
The story was embellished, edited, and exaggerated, but the basic facts remained the same: arriving at my father’s house, he’d found Brent’s car, and mine, but the door hanging open and tracks off the back porch, leading across the grass, suggesting something—or someone—had been dragged into the woods.
He had commanded Hannah to stay in the car. He hardly ever gave direct orders, and she never disobeyed them.
That night, she did.
When I got out of the hospital, I tried returning to my dad’s house, which had been cleared by then of the police tape that for days had encircled it. But already, curious tourists were arriving. I would wake in the middle of the night to a sudden flash, only to see a stranger at the window and be pulled into a well of panic, replaying the entire event over and over in my head.
When Condor suggested I stay with him, I agreed right away. I made coffee in the mornings. He made eggs. I slept in his bed. He took the foldout couch. Hannah and I drank warm milk at midnight when the nightmares had startled us awake. Condor and I sat on the couch, watching old episodes of sitcoms without paying any attention to them, after endless hours of giving evidence, interviews, help to a tidal wave of federal investigators and prosecutors, sexual assault survivors’ advocates, corporate watchdogs. It was as if exposing Optimal and its economy of teens used for entertainment, and nearly getting killed in the process, had all been part of some master plan to snag my fifteen minutes of fame. Barrens, and its dirty not-so-little secrets, was suddenly everywhere. The fall of a multimillion-dollar company, the exploitation, the corruption, the girls, the ten-year-old murder—it was a ratings jackpot.
But the attention would fade—it already had begun to—and so would whatever this was between Condor and me. It was never meant to last, at least not in that way. Condor and I had already made lives in different places. That’s the funny thing about home: you’ve always arrived just as soon as you stop checking the compass.
“I’m going to miss you,” Condor says now, his mouth all twisted up, like it always is when he has to say something serious.
I give him a quick hug. Barely a squeeze—anything longer, anything more, and my thoughts spin down places too murky and lonesome to understand.
He raises a hand. Framed by a huge billow of Indiana sky, he looks truly beautiful. I will always remember this moment, I tell myself, but already know that I won’t.
He pivots just before he gets to the front door as I slide into the car. “Try to stay far away from boats.”
“Try not to shoot anyone,” I call back. He blows me a kiss.
I key on the ignition.
Before heading out of town, I take a familiar turn toward my dad’s house. As I get closer I can see the same ever-so-slightly crooked split-level and the gravel driveway, but the brown and overgrown yard has been cleared of weeds. The house, with TJ’s help, shines with a fresh coat of pale blue paint.
I hardly recognize it.
This isn’t home anymore.
A For Sale sign juts from the mown lawn at an angle, optimistic, and perhaps absurdly so.
Eventually a new family will move into this house; a new child will run through its halls, stare out at the line of trees in the forest from her bedroom, ride her bike down the path to the reservoir, collect little items that are important to her, and maybe, sit down to dinner and hold hands with her parents as they say grace.
Or maybe there won’t be any kind of grace in that house again.
I roll down my window and breathe in the smell of the reservoir through the wood line for what I know will be the last and final time.
A formation of crows pinwheels on invisible currents through the sky. Together, they form an arrow, pointing north.
I turn my car to follow them.
Barrens grows smaller in my rearview mirror until, at last, it disappears.