Seventy miles an hour saw them pull into Morgantown in a little over sixty minutes. The trucker, who never offered his name, dropped Gibson off in front of Mountaineer Station. Gibson offered him forty dollars, the trucker took twenty, and the two men shook hands without ever having spoken more than necessary. Gibson had been grateful for the silence. His brief taste of freedom had exhausted him—every interaction, every decision. Some part of him longed for the inviolate routine of his cell. The irony could not be any more plain—he’d dreamed of escaping constantly, but now, a few hours after his release, all he wished was to be back where he felt safe. Is this what institutionalization did to the mind?
He looked up at the bus station. Only eighteen months behind schedule. He’d been on his way to Morgantown when Lea’s desperate text had brought him back to Niobe. How different his life might be if only he’d ignored her. He would never have met Damon Washburn. Never crossed paths with Charles Merrick.
It had been some detour.
His good luck held—the next bus departed in ten minutes. That gave him only enough time to buy a ticket, use the restroom, and find a seat toward the back of the bus. For a time, he watched the traffic on the highway, but soon enough the bus rocked him to sleep. He woke with a cry, certain he’d find himself back in the confines of his cell, disoriented when he didn’t. A passenger across the aisle stared suspiciously his way. Gibson sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He judged they must be in Maryland by the way the snow had thinned as they moved out of the mountains. So close now. Bear wandered back and sat beside him. They played the alphabet game out the window until he caught the passenger staring at him again.
It was past seven when Gibson got into the serpentine cab line outside Union Station. A mix of holiday travelers and business commuters returning from Philadelphia and New York on this crisp December night—Gibson didn’t belong among them. Above his head, great wreaths hung between the arches of the station. He kept his head down and shuffled forward in line. The attendants who orchestrated the cab line hustled to keep things moving, but it was still twenty minutes before he reached the front. Duke waited in line with him.
“What are you going back there for?” Duke asked. “You really think they want to see you?”
“It’s my family.”
“It’s an ex-wife and a girl who barely knows her deadbeat father who’s been in a CIA black-site prison for eighteen months. Son, that’s not a family, that’s a guest appearance on Maury Povich.” Duke paused to let that sink in. “So . . . what? What do you think is going to happen? You’ll roll up to their door looking like Chewbacca’s prom date, and they’ll welcome you in with open arms? Are you even thinking this through?”
Gibson looked at his father imploringly. “I have nowhere else to go.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to go someplace.”
“What would you have me do?”
“What you promised me.” Duke’s face was inches from Gibson’s. “You want Nicole to respect you again? Then prove to her you’re a man who deserves respect. Damon Washburn has to pay. If you go to her now, looking like this? Nothing good will come of it. I promise you.”
An attendant pointed Gibson toward a waiting cab. The driver protested that he’d been saddled with a bum and wouldn’t unlock the door until Gibson showed him his money. Mollified, the driver punched Gibson’s destination into his GPS and drove up Massachusetts.
The idea of reuniting with his daughter thrilled him, but his father had given voice to all his rawest fears. What if he had been gone too long? What if Ellie didn’t remember him? Maybe he should wait, get himself cleaned up so he didn’t frighten her. Twice he leaned forward to ask the cabbie to take him to a motel and stopped himself. He didn’t have money for such a luxury; more than that, he needed to see Ellie to remind him why he still wanted to be alive.
“It’ll be all right,” Bear said. “Nicole will understand. She knows how much you love Ellie.”
“What if I frighten her?”
“You won’t. You’re her daddy.”
“But what if I do?”
“She’ll get over it,” Bear reassured him.
The thought of Ellie shrinking away from him was too horrible to imagine. Gibson caught the cabbie’s narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror.
“What are you doing?” the cabbie demanded.
“Sorry,” Gibson said. “Just thinking out loud.”
“Don’t.”
“He’s mean,” Bear said.
Gibson gave her a pleading look to keep quiet. He didn’t want to get thrown out of the cab. He was almost home.
“Well, he is,” Bear said, getting in the last word. But after that, she held her peace.
They left the beltway and wound their way up into the residential neighborhood where Nicole and Ellie lived. Where he had lived once. Gibson sat forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, and tried to slow his racing heart. The cab pulled over to the curb. Gibson took a deep breath and looked out the window.
It was the wrong house.
The cabbie had brought him to the wrong house.
The cabbie repeated the address he’d been given—53 Mulberry Court—and showed Gibson on his GPS. Gibson didn’t understand. Could he have forgotten the address of the house that Nicole and he had bought together? The house where Ellie had been born and grown up. The house he’d fought to keep when he couldn’t find a job. Was he that crazy? He tried to think of the right address, but his head was so murky. Gibson tried the handles, but his doors were locked. The driver repeated the fare, and Gibson thrust all the money he had left at the cabbie, who counted it carefully before consenting to unlock the door.
Gibson stumbled out of the cab and spun slowly in a circle. He recognized everything. The houses across the street. The neighbors. The tree with the gashed trunk where a teen driver had jumped the curb and plowed into it. Everything was the same. Except the house. Where was the house?
He really had lost his mind. Or worse, maybe he hadn’t ever left his cell. This was nothing but another of his excursions through the secret passage. He couldn’t countenance how real it all felt, but there was no other explanation for this cruel trick of his mind. All he wanted now was for Bear to lead him back to his cell. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was playing hide-and-seek the way she sometimes did. He ran down the street calling her name and looking behind parked cars.
At the corner, he gave up and slapped himself hard across the face. Trying to wake himself up. Unwilling to remain trapped in this fun-house mirror of his memory, he pinched the skin on the back of his wrist until it bruised. Please take me away from this hell, he begged the evening sky.
“Bear. Please come back. Help me,” he whimpered, hoping she wasn’t too far away to hear him. “Please.”
Nothing. He looked up at the street signs that named this the intersection of Macomb Lane and Mulberry Court. He went back up the street, reading the numbers off the houses: 47, 49, 51 . . . He recognized all these houses. Everything was as he remembered it, but when he stopped outside 53 Mulberry Court, it was still the wrong house. Twice the size of the house he remembered. The wrong color. The wrong style. His head throbbed. Maybe this was the right house. Maybe they were inside waiting for him, and he’d only remembered the house wrong. That had to be it.
A silver car pulled into the driveway. A man in a suit got out. He looked Gibson up and down, not appearing overly impressed. He started toward the front door but reconsidered and crossed the yard and met Gibson at the gate.