“I know,” she said.
“I could have helped him.”
Lydia’s hand shot out of her lap and clasped Raj’s shoulder. She shook him gently.
“Hey. Let’s not overdo this. We’ll figure it out, okay? I’ll talk to Irene first thing—”
“I’ve already talked to Irene,” he said, “and she’s told me all she’s ever going to.”
“But I’ll talk to her, Raj, and—”
“You need to ask someone who might actually know something, Lydia. You need to ask your dad. He was around back then. And he’s the only person connected to everyone involved. Including Joey.”
Lydia felt the mile of height between this step and the earth’s sea level begin to give way to space. She felt herself plummet. She felt herself fall. She felt air— “That’s why I thought you should drive here,” Raj added, “so you could go straight from here to see him. So you could go to the mountains and ask your dad what he knows.”
“I can’t do that, Raj.”
“You can.”
Between gaps in the skyline Lydia could see the dark form of the distant mountains where Raj was trying to steer her. From this vantage the Rockies appeared as a spiky black wall, majestic and fearful, a remnant of an ancient time. She felt she understood those early roaming Denverites who’d hit that wall and couldn’t take another step, so they stabbed some buildings into the prairie, rolled out some railroad tracks, and began their century of sprawl. It was so much easier to stay put.
“What I really want to do is go straight to the doughnut shop,” Raj said, “and hear what my parents have to say about all of this. But I should wait until it’s all verified, right? Besides which, if I go over there now—”
“You should not go over there now,” she said, looking at how tensely he was clenching his fists. “I don’t want to have to bail you out of jail.”
“Please go see your dad, Lydia. If you don’t want to go alone, I could go with you.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Or I can go see him by myself,” Raj said.
“Just slow down, Raj. All of this has got to be a mistake. There’s no point in me—”
“Stop saying it’s a mistake,” he said, with an edge in his voice that surprised her. He stood and looked at the sky and began to drop down the capitol’s stone steps, one at a time. “I think you’re forgetting something, Lydia: you weren’t the only one in Joey’s photo. I was in there, too. Me. Right at your side, as always. It’s not a mistake.”
Lydia watched Raj walk between the barren trees and across the walkways in the direction of downtown. Once he was out of sight she wandered back toward Plath’s car. Traffic inched brightly down Broadway, and she knew he was right: Lydia may have been blowing out birthday candles in the center of the photo that Joey had died with, but the ten-year-old Raj was at her side, as loyal as always. With small embarrassment, she recognized that Joey would have been more likely to die holding a photo of his big brother than a photo of the woman who sold him books. And Raj had been right about something else, as well: her dad—the source of Joey’s photo—was the only person she knew who might just have the answers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After leaving the capitol Lydia made a quick stop at her apartment to grab the birthday party photo and throw some crackers into her satchel. David was in the shower when she came in, and though part of her was tempted to disappear in there with him, she knew if she did, this journey would screech to a comforting halt. Besides, she was still hurt by the fact that he’d known about the Hammerman for years, yet had kept his knowledge secret from her. She knew that her reaction didn’t make sense—it wasn’t David’s fault that he’d figured out her past, and she’d been just as secretive—but the betrayal she felt was real.
She could hear him humming to himself in the shower as she scrawled him a note on the back of a student loan envelope: Going to see Dad in Rio Vista (if I don’t chicken out). Be home tomorrow, latest. I’ll call.
Wish me luck.
L
As she read the note she was surprised to notice the absence of a single word: love. She didn’t want to think too much about why she’d omitted it, but it was an easy fix: Wish me luck.
Love,
L
There.
The night was cold and windy as Lydia drove. Stars crowded the windshield, and ovals of ice glowed on the road like pools of oil. The drive was long, the mountains desolate. And then came Rio Vista.
Lydia hunkered low in the Volvo as she rolled onto Main Street. A lot had changed since she’d left town at seventeen—Elmo’s Drugs was now a bistro pub, Hot Dog Heaven a massage therapist’s office—and passing through the empty streets she felt little more than a maudlin familiarity. As she reached the long snowy driveway north of town that led to her father’s cabin, she didn’t see any tire tracks or footprints, which meant he hadn’t left his property in a while. She parked and began to walk up the crusty slope, weaving a trail between pine trees and brush.
Up the stretch of hillside, twenty yards down from his A-frame cabin, she could see the light box of his workshop shining between the pines. The shop had been built with weathered lumber salvaged from a fallen barn, and from here it looked warm and inviting, the only glow on the entire frozen mountainside. Soon she was standing in a pile of snow and peering into one of its windows. The glass was so drizzled with dirt that it looked as if the shop had some sort of striped paneling covering its inner walls. She scratched an ice clod against the pane to see better and realized that the walls of the shop, all the walls, were lined with books. Thousands of them.
Her hand pressed the splintery siding. She felt a glint of hope.
As she soft-stepped into a slightly open door, the warmth of a woodstove poured through her and into the cold. Her father was standing at a long workbench with his back to her. He was wearing an oversized flannel shirt over a black hoodie, and the back of his hood was bisected by the elastic straps of a white work mask. His hands were covered by purple latex gloves and he was slathering some kind of stain over a row of wooden planks.
“I was wondering when,” he said, pausing his brush but not turning around. His voice was deeper and hoarser than it had been on the phone, maybe because of the mask. “I guess I was wondering if more than when. But I’m glad you came.”
She couldn’t speak.
“I’ve been waiting for you forever,” he added.
He still hadn’t turned around. Maybe because she couldn’t read his expression, she focused on reading the space around him. The shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, twenty feet high and equally wide, and they covered every inch of wall space except where they framed the windows and doors. It was as if his books had replaced the structure entirely.