The message reads: U ok? Not getting sleepy, are u?
It’s from Tim Weathers, our bodyguard for the night, tailing us in his Yukon. Actually, the vehicle doesn’t belong to Tim. It’s the property of Vulcan Asset Management, the Dallas-based security firm that employs him.
I’m fine, I type. Girls sleeping.
They need it, he replies.
Apart from Caitlin’s death, this may be the most difficult adaptation of all. We live surrounded by bodyguards. A necessity, of course, everyone agreed. Total security, twenty-four hours a day. And not the oversized guidos you see guarding pop divas and pro athletes, but retired Special Forces soldiers like my friend Daniel Kelly, who’s been missing in Afghanistan for months now. Men who understand the job of protection and have the skills, restraint, and experience to do it right.
The financial burden of maintaining such protection is crushing. Over the past almost two and a half months, security firms have billed me more than a hundred thousand dollars. But I see no alternative. It’s like hiring round-the-clock nurses for an ailing parent: until you have to do it, you have no idea what ceaseless attention really costs. To my relief, Caitlin’s father has paid half the balance of every bill. He offered to pay every cent, but I still have some pride left. I can’t afford this level of expenditure for long, but every time I wonder whether we might be able to relax our vigilance and stem the hemorrhage of cash, John Masters’s words ring in my ears:
“Penn, if anything were to happen to you or Annie, Caitlin would never forgive me. I accept that my daughter is dead, but I don’t accept that my obligations to her will ever end. So you hire the best and send me the bills. I don’t give one goddamn how high it goes. You killed Snake Knox’s nephew. Until that son of a bitch is pumped full of embalming fluid, I want you living like the president of the United States. I failed to protect my daughter, and I can barely stand to look in the mirror. Don’t make the same mistake with yours.”
I don’t intend to.
Thus we have lived with at least one bodyguard—and sometimes three—within yards of us twenty-four hours a day. Today, during our weekly drive to and from the Pollock prison, we’ve had only Tim, an ex-SEAL from Tennessee. Tim has become like a favorite uncle to Annie, and a brother to Mia and to me. As usual, Annie saw her grandmother first today, and then her grandfather while Mia walked down the road and shared a cheeseburger with me at Wendy’s.
Juvenile, maybe, but that’s the way it is.
More eyeshine flashes out of the empty fields beyond the shoulders of the highway. This drive is like a night tour of some vast wildlife refuge, a southern safari inundated by the sulfurous, miles-long reek of a skunk’s defensive spray. The bright orbs flashing in the darkness run the color spectrum: yellow for raccoons, green for deer, red for foxes and possums, blue for the occasional coyote. The land seems peopled by luminous ghosts, yet the explanation is simple enough. The tapetum lucidum layer of crystals behind all those retinas evolved to enhance night vision by reflecting light back through the eye, so that it can be used twice, not once. But like the TV lights that always blinded me when I arrived at the Walls Unit at Huntsville to witness executions, the blaze of my Audi’s xenon headlamps renders that adaptation useless, blasting all those sensitive eyes sightless—
“Daddy?” Annie’s hand lightly squeezes my right arm. “I need to pee.”
My daughter is eleven years old, but when she speaks from half sleep, her voice sounds exactly as it did when she was three or four.
There are no lights ahead, only blackness. But my brain quickly riffles through its file of stopping points in this near desolate landscape. “I think there’s a gas station about eight minutes ahead, Boo. Can you wait?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t forget and pass it, though. I gotta go bad.”
A voice from behind me says, “I second that sentiment.”
Glancing up at the rearview mirror, I see Mia watching me, a wry smile on her face.
“I’m hungry, too,” she adds. “I’m going to be huge by the time I go back to school.”
Mia must be tired; otherwise she would never mention the prospect of leaving us—not within Annie’s hearing—even though the eventual day of parting is inevitable. Mia’s very presence is a miracle, one based on a generosity I can scarcely comprehend. Two years ago, when she was a superachieving high-school senior at my alma mater, Mia took care of Annie for one summer, then during the school year on afternoons when I was working. She was the perfect babysitter: a smart, vivacious, and motivated girl from a family of modest means, driven to work for the things her private school classmates took for granted. Her drive and practicality rubbed off on Annie every day, and I was thankful.
But late that year, a classmate of Mia’s drowned in a nearby creek, and a childhood friend of mine was charged with killing her. Mia proved instrumental to solving that murder, and as a reward, my grateful friend—a physician—helped her attain something that had proved beyond her reach, no matter how hard she worked: tuition money for her first-choice college, Harvard.
By pure chance, Mia was on her way home for Christmas break when Caitlin was killed. As soon as she heard the news, she came over and did all she could to comfort Annie, who had already begun to regress to the paralyzing, hyper-anxious state she’d experienced after her mother died in Houston. Within a week, Annie developed a worrisome dependence on Mia. I didn’t know how I was going to keep her from losing control when Mia had to return to Massachusetts. To my amazement, though, three days before Mia was scheduled to leave, she sat me down and said she’d decided to take a semester off in order to help Annie “get back to normal.”
I argued, but not too hard or for too long. Mia told me she’d been scheduled to do a semester at an archaeological dig in the Yucatán, so it wasn’t like ditching a real semester. By this time, my mother had already decided to relocate to be near Dad’s prison, and that settled the issue.
“There’s a light,” Mia says. “Up on the left.”
She’s right. What I remember as a solitary service station stands on the edge of the flat fields about a mile ahead, like some radio relay station in the desert. Taking out my cell phone, I speed-dial Tim behind us.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“We’re pulling off at that gas station. Girls need a bathroom.”
“Let me catch up before you turn.”
“Copy that.”
This kind of tactical conversation has become second nature over the past weeks. Sixty seconds’ driving carries us to the turn, and Tim is behind us by the time I roll the wheel left and clunk onto a gravel-studded dirt lot near the concrete pad that supports the old gas station.