“Why should I trust you?” she asked. “Why should I believe a thing you’ve said to me today?”
“You’re alive to ask that question, are you not?” His face warmed with a soft smile. “Conversely, I already believe that I can trust you. Because you and your friends came here to take action. Not for yourselves, but for others. An admirable sense of mission, and one much lacking in our society today. But you never answered your friend’s question. Will you stay? Will you help?”
She stared at Oliver. “If I do, I get to determine what happens here,” she said. “I’m the boss. Full and final say.”
Oliver nodded. “As long as the technology stays in our hands, and our hands only. I can have it in writing tomorrow. Tell me the language you need.”
“Then yes,” she said. “I’m staying.” She looked at her dad. “He’s the one who needs looking after now, not me. I can look after myself.”
Yes, thought Peter. She sure as hell could.
58
Peter set up his tent beside the cook shack. There was a bathroom nearby, and a kitchen for breakfast, and it was far from the site of the killings, although he could still smell the burning car. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the whole thing. And Sally Sanchez jerking backward beside him, the back of her head gone soft and bloody.
June was with Oliver Bent in the main house, ironing things out.
He unrolled his sleeping pad and thought about that psychologist in Oregon, telling him to learn to meditate. To find a support group. To get on with his life.
Well, hell, he thought. I can do that.
Sometime after midnight, as he lay there thinking in the dark, she came through the flap of the tent, naked as the day she was born, all showered and soap-smelling, her skin cool from the spring air.
It was gentle and slow, and toward the end, she cried.
Afterward, he wondered aloud whether she had walked naked all the way from the main house.
No, she told him. It was too cold. She’d tucked her warm clothes under the tent fly to keep them dry.
? ? ?
THE NEXT MORNING, they walked side by side through the orchard, the buds straining against their casings. He could smell the greenery just aching to burst forth into life.
She said, “I don’t know if you’re ready for domestic life, Peter.”
“I am,” he said. “I really am. Tell me what you need me to do, I’ll do it.”
She stopped and turned to face him.
“I need you to already know what to do,” she said gently. “And you don’t. Not yet. So I want you to go away. Whatever the hell it is you’ve got in your system, work it out.”
Peter opened his mouth, but he didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll wait for you,” she said, “but not forever. Because I need all of you. Not this half-life you’re living now, without work, without a home. I can’t spend my life in a tent. So don’t come back until you’re ready to sleep inside a real house, in a real bed.”
She put a soft hand on his cheek. The spray of freckles across her face, her pixie-cut hair, he thought she’d never been so beautiful.
Then she turned and walked alone, back the way they had come, toward the big farmhouse under the sheltering maples, in the shadow of the black barns.
EPILOGUE
The old green pickup with the mahogany cargo box rumbled down the arrow-straight road. Lewis was behind the wheel. The ache in Peter’s leg had gotten worse.
They both saw him at the same time, an ordinary figure seeming pale and insubstantial in the bright afternoon sun. He’d just left one of the plastic-sheeted greenhouses, walked to the next in line, pushed open the flap and stepped inside.
Lewis hit the brake before Peter could say anything. They both needed to know.
The engine was clearly audible, but they closed their doors with a thump, just to make sure he understood. They weren’t trying to sneak up on him. A few goats nibbled on weeds from the compost piles.
He pushed the flap open with a gun in his hand, but it disappeared so quickly Peter almost doubted it was ever there. He looked at them without speaking.
“Is your name really Shepard?” asked Peter.
Shepard nodded.
“I’m Peter. This is Lewis.”
Shepard just looked at them. His face was impossible to read, but Peter felt something there. Not hostility, but a kind of curiosity. As if Peter was an object of study, and Lewis, too.
“Are you really retired?”
Shepard blinked twice. “I believe so,” he said, as if he hadn’t been entirely sure until that moment. “I’ve lost interest in the work.”
“What else will you do?”
“Recently I’ve developed an interest in gardening.”
Lewis smiled his faint tilted smile. “Vegetables? Or flowers?”
“I’ll start with tomatoes,” said Shepard. “I’ve always liked tomatoes.”
“You know Chip threatened my parents,” said Peter. “Was it you he would have sent?”
“That would have been his intent,” said Shepard.
“I’m curious,” said Peter. “Would you have gone?”
Shepard regarded Peter with the slightest air of disdain. “I’m not an animal.”