Jared Norcross volunteered at Tiffany Jones Daycare the following summer, and part-time during his senior year. He liked helping out. The kids were sort of demented—they made dirt castles and licked walls and rolled in puddles, and that was just when they were happy—but he was endlessly fascinated, like so many before him, at the easy way the boys and the girls played together. So what changed later on? Why did they suddenly split into largely separate playgroups almost as soon as they began organized school? Was it chemical? Genetic? Jared didn’t accept that. People were more complex; people had root systems, and their root systems had root systems. He had an inkling that in college he might like to study child behavior and eventually become a psychiatrist, like his father.
These thoughts comforted Jared and distracted him when he needed distracting, which was, during that period of his life, almost all the time. His parents’ marriage was breaking up, and Mary was dating Molly Ransom’s older cousin, a lacrosse star at a high school in the next county. He had seen them together once, Mary and her guy. They had been sitting at a picnic table outside an ice cream parlor, feeding each other ice cream cones. It could only have been more horrible if they were having sex.
Molly bird-dogged him once, heading out of his house. “What’s going on, dude? Mary and Jeff are coming over. You want to hang with us?” The little girl had braces now, and it seemed like she’d grown about seven feet. Soon the boys who didn’t want to play with her after school would be chasing her for maybe a kiss.
“I wish I could,” Jared said.
“So why can’t you?” Molly asked.
“Broken heart,” Jared said, and winked. “I know you’ll never love me, Molly.”
“Oh, please, get a life,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
Sometimes Jared’s steps carried him past the empty house where he’d hidden Mary and Molly and Mom. He and Mary had been a sweet team, he thought—but she had put all that firmly into the past. “It’s just a whole different world now, you know,” Mary had told him, as if that was any consolation, or explained anything at all. Jared told himself that she had no idea what she was missing, but decided—gloomily—that she probably wasn’t missing anything.
4
Cocoons, it turned out, could float.
Three women, passengers on the flight that had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, awoke in their webs on a rocky beach in Nova Scotia. Their cocoons were wet, but the women inside them were dry. They walked to an empty rescue station and called directory assistance for help.
This item was relegated to the back pages of newspapers and webzines, if reported at all. In the shadow of that year’s major miracle, such minor ones were of little interest.
5
To find one’s husband dead inside an exhaust-filled garage was a terrible way to return home.
Rita Coombs had some bad moments after that: despair, terror of a single life, and of course her own sleepless nights when it seemed the next day would never come. Terry had been steady, smart, and genial. That he had bogged down in a depression so hideous and encompassing that he had taken his own life was hard to square with her experience of the man who had been her partner and the father of her child. She wept until she was sure all the tears were gone . . . and then more tears came.
A fellow named Geary visited her one afternoon to offer his condolences. Rita knew—though there were conflicting stories, and a desire to protect everyone involved had thrown a hush over the details of the event—that it was Geary who had directed the attack on the prison, but his manner was soft-spoken and kind. He insisted she call him Frank.
“What happened to my husband, Frank?”
Frank Geary said that he believed Terry just couldn’t bear it. “Everything was out of hand and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop it. The only thing he could stop was himself.”
She gathered herself and asked one of the questions that plagued her on her sleepless nights. “Mr. Geary . . . my husband . . . he had a little bit of a drinking problem. Did he . . . was he . . .”
“Sober the whole time,” Frank said. He raised his ringless left hand. “My word on it. Hand to God.”
6
Aurora’s mass outbreaks of violence and property damage, plus the disappearance of so many women, resulted in massive restructuring of the insurance industry nationwide and worldwide. Drew T. Barry, and the team at Drew T. Barry Indemnity, rode it out as well as any company in America, and managed to facilitate life insurance settlements for both Nate McGee’s widow and Eric Blass’s parents. Since both had died in the midst of an unauthorized assault on a penal institution, this had been no small feat, but Drew T. Barry was no mean insurance agent.
It was less difficult to achieve remuneration for the relatives, near and distant, of the Honorable Oscar Silver, Barry and Gerda Holden, Linny Mars, Officer Vern Rangle, Dr. Garth Flickinger, Officer Rand Quigley, Officer Tig Murphy, and Officer Billy Wettermore, all of whom, it could be legitimately claimed, had died under circumstances covered by their respective policies. Not that the various resolutions weren’t a long and involved process. It was the work of years, work that would see Drew T. Barry’s hair turn salty and his skin turn gray, and in the midst of it, during early mornings of emails and late nights of filings, Drew T. Barry lost his taste for hunting. It seemed decadent in juxtaposition to the seriousness of his work on behalf of the abandoned and the aggrieved. He’d sit in a stand, and see, on the other end of his scope, a deer with a ten-point rack wander through the mist, and think to himself, Act of God Insurance. Does that buck have Act of God Insurance? Because to a deer, that’s what getting shot must be, right? Will his children be taken care of? Can a dead buck with good insurance make a little dough? Of course not, the idea was even more ridiculous than the pun. So he sold his Weatherby, and even tried to become a vegetarian, although that didn’t work out so well. Sometimes, after a day in the existential toils of the insurance biz, a man needed a pork chop.
Loss changes you. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.
7