“I do.”
“But honestly I’m a little hurt that you don’t feel like you can share this stuff with me. It makes me feel like the asshole boyfriend, like you can’t trust me, or like I’m doing something to keep you in your place. I’m not that guy, Lydia.”
“I know you’re not,” she said, staring out at the streets, lamp-lit and cold and empty of life.
“Besides which,” he said, “your dad didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know.”
“You really already knew?” she managed to say, unable to take her eyes off the taillights glowing like embers in the darkness ahead.
“About Little Lydia? I really did.”
“That’s shitty, David. It’s humiliating.”
“I grew up here too. The Hammerman was part of my childhood. More than Blinky the Clown or John Elway. I was terrified of him. We all were.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“Two years ago, maybe? I saw one of those ‘On This Day in Denver’ segments on the news. As soon as they showed that famous picture, the one from Life magazine, I could tell the girl was you. You look totally different now, of course, but I’ve seen that same expression on your face. I think you were at the bookstore, so I called you right away but you weren’t free. I guess I decided not to call back.”
She waited for him to go on, but he left it alone.
“Is that why you’ve been so nice to me?” she asked.
“I hope not.”
Lydia wasn’t sure if this made David a better or worse person, or what this now meant for them as a couple.
“Was it on one of your work trips?” she asked, more meekly than she’d intended. “When you met my father?”
“I didn’t plan it. He’d been calling a lot, so when I found myself driving near Rio Vista an impulse carried me to a phone book. It seemed the right thing to do. I asked him to meet me at an ice-cream shop on Main Street. I bought him a coffee. He didn’t have any money. Scratch that. He had four cents.”
“Four cents.”
“He emptied his pockets to show me. He didn’t know there was an ice-cream shop in town. I got the impression he hadn’t been out in public anywhere except maybe the grocery store. I mean in years. He hasn’t worked in a while, apparently.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. He seems like a really lonely, isolated guy. He really needs someone.”
“You shouldn’t have snuck around me like that.”
“I know,” he said, “but he’s your only family. I wanted to meet him.”
Lydia touched the cold window glass. David glanced sidelong at her as he drove.
“He said he was going to keep calling,” he continued. “He really wants to see you. What if we were to go visit him together? Take a weekend—”
“You know,” she said, “I’m just not ready for this.”
“I just think—”
“I’m really not ready for this, David.”
“Fine.”
They stopped at a red light and waited for it to change. The manholes steamed below.
“Are you going to tell me about the guy who’s been calling?” David said. “After you ran out tonight he left a bunch of messages on the machine, wanting to know if you were okay.”
She kept staring straight ahead.
“His name is Raj,” she said. “I’m not screwing him.”
“Raj,” he said. “Okay.”
“We’ve held hands. As friends. He slept in your sleeping bag one night. On the floor.”
“Of our bedroom?”
“We’re friends, David. As kids we spent every day together.”
“Before?”
“Before.”
David rolled his shoulders and breathed through his nose.
“Joey had a picture of the two of us,” she said, as if it were a natural fact. “Of Raj and me, when we were ten.”
David didn’t respond.
“When he died, he did,” she added. “In his pocket.”
Now it sunk in. David dropped his gaze from the windshield and his hands went limp on the wheel.
“Watch the road,” she said, “watch the road.”
“Am I hearing this right?” he said, squinting into the dark. “This guy Joey dies with a photo of you and your pal Raj, then Raj comes barging into our lives, interrupting everything, and you don’t think that’s suspicious? You actually trust this guy?”
“Of course I trust him,” she said, though in truth she’d never given such skepticism any thought. “Besides. It wasn’t just the two of us in the photo. It was Carol O’Toole, too. The girl who—”
“I know who Carol O’Toole is. Everyone knows who Carol O’Toole is.” He looked at Lydia sideways. “How did he get a photo of you?”
“How did Joey? He was in prison in Rio Vista. One of my dad’s inmates, apparently.”
“So your dad—?”
“Knew him. Yeah.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Seriously? I mean, why would this con have a photo of you as a kid? That’s warped. If I was you, I’d—”
“Stop. Stop.” She felt a rising panic and thought she might be sick. “Pull over, David. Please. Now. Now.”
David whipped onto a side street and parked in front of a small brick house with a flickering porch light.
“What is it? You okay?”
Lydia was having a hard time catching her breath. She unbuckled her seat belt and gripped the door handle.
“Hey,” David said. “Hey. What is it?”
She rolled down the window. Took a few deep breaths. David tried to wrap her in a protective hug, and after a time she tried to hug him back, but her muscles refused to loosen. She realized she hadn’t been this scared in ages, not even when Joey— “Hey,” he said. “You’re fine. We’ll be fine.”
But she knew she wasn’t fine, knew they wouldn’t be fine.
He tried to hand her a water bottle, but she lifted the beer from between her thighs and drank from it instead. As she did, she noticed that his windshield was growing little laces of ice, the night outside working its way in.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face and closing her eyes as he drove her safely home.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The first time Tomas ever spoke to Joey was in the middle of the night, when he was patrolling the prison’s echoing corridors. Because Joey had been charged as an adult but was still a juvenile when he came in—not quite seventeen when his sentence began—he was kept on an unpopulated block of level three that was separate from the other prisoners. He wasn’t totally isolated, but his nearest neighbor was eight or ten cells away. During meals and exercise he was segregated from the adult population as much as possible.
When Tomas shined his passing light into Joey’s cell on that first night, he saw the young man sitting on his pillow in the corner of his cot, huddled in a gray wool blanket. His black hair was draped along his forehead, not quite covering the bumpy acne beneath.