In Akron, Ohio, at the apartment he lived in with his aunt Nancy, checks began to arrive made out to Robert Sorley. The amounts were never large—twenty-two dollars here, sixteen dollars there—but they added up. These checks were drawn from the account of a woman named Elaine Nutting. In the cards and letters that accompanied the checks, Elaine wrote to Bobby about his late mother, Jeanette, about the life of kindness and generosity and achievement that she had envisioned for him.
Though Bobby had not known her as well as he had wanted, and because of her crime, had never quite been able to trust her while she was alive, Bobby had loved his mother. The impression she seemed to have made on Elaine Nutting convinced him that she had been good.
Elaine’s daughter, Nana, included drawings with some of her mother’s letters. She was really talented. Bobby asked her to please draw him a picture of a mountain so he could look at it and think of the world beyond Akron, which wasn’t such a bad place but was, you know, Akron.
She did. It was a beauty—streams, a monastery in a crook of a valley, birds circling, clouds lit from above, a winding footpath leading to the unseen far side.
Because you said please, Nana wrote.
Of course I said please, he wrote back to her. Who doesn’t say please?
In her next letter, she wrote, I know a lot of boys who don’t say please. I don’t have room on this paper to write the names of all the boys I know who don’t say please.
In response, he wrote, I’m not one of those boys.
They became regular correspondents, and eventually planned to meet.
Which they did.
12
Clint never asked Lila if she’d taken a lover during her time on the other side of the Tree. It was as though there was a universe inside her husband, an arrangement of meticulously detailed and landscaped planets hanging down from wires. The planets were ideas and people. He explored them and studied them and came to know them. Except they didn’t move, didn’t rotate, didn’t change over time, the way actual bodies, astral and otherwise, did. Lila sort of understood that, knowing that once he’d lived a life where there had been nothing but movement and uncertainty, yet that didn’t mean she had to like it. Or accept it.
And how it felt to have killed Jeanette Sorley, accident though it had been? That was something he could never understand, and the few times he tried, she walked away fast, fists clenched, hating him. She did not know exactly what it was that she wanted, but it was not to be understood.
Upon waking that first afternoon, Lila drove her cruiser from Mrs. Ransom’s driveway directly to the still-smoldering prison. Tiny bits of dissolving cocoon were still clinging to her skin. She organized the removal of the attackers’ bodies and the sweeping up and disposal of police weapons and gear. The helpers she martialed in this task were, primarily, the inmates of Dooling Correctional. These women, convicted criminals who had surrendered their freedom—virtually all of whom were survivors of domestic abuse, or survivors of addiction, or survivors of poverty, or survivors of mental illness, or some combination of all four—were not unaccustomed to distasteful labor. They did what they had to. Evie had given them a choice and they had made it.
When the state authorities finally turned their attention to Dooling Correctional, the cover story had been spread and codified among the people of the town and the prison. Marauders—a heavily armed Blowtorch Brigade—had laid siege, and Dr. Clinton Norcross and his officers had defended their position heroically, assisted by the police and by volunteers such as Barry Holden, Eric Blass, Jack Albertson, and Nate McGee. Given the overarching, inexplicable fact of Aurora, this story held a little less interest than the floating women who’d washed up in Nova Scotia.
After all, it was only Appalachia.
13
“His name’s Andy. His mother died,” Lila said.
Andy was crying when she introduced him to Clint. She had retrieved him from Blanche McIntyre. His face was red and he was hungry. “I’m going to say that he was mine, that I gave birth to him. It’ll be simpler that way. My friend Jolie is a doctor. She’s already filed the paperwork.”
“Hon, people are going to know you weren’t pregnant. They won’t believe it.”
“Most will,” she said, “because time was different over there. For the rest . . . I don’t care.”
Because he saw she meant it, he held out his arms and accepted the wailing child. He rocked Andy back and forth. The baby’s screams became howls. “I think he likes me,” Clint said.
Lila didn’t smile. “He’s constipated.”
Clint didn’t want a child. He wanted a nap. He wanted to forget it all, the blood and death and Evie, especially Evie, who had bent the world, who had bent him. But the videotape was in his head; any time he wanted to do a Warner Wolf and go to it, it ran on a loop.
He remembered Lila, on that awful night when the world was burning down, informing him that she had never wanted the pool.
“Do I get a say in this?” he asked.
“No,” Lila said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” Which was true.
14
Sometimes—usually at night when she lay wakeful, but sometimes even on the brightest afternoons—names would go through Lila’s head. They were the names of white police officers (like her) who had shot innocent black civilians (like Jeanette Sorley). She thought of Richard Haste, who had shot eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham in the bathroom of the youth’s Bronx apartment. She thought of Betty Shelby, who killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa. Most of all she thought of Alfred Olango, shot dead by Officer Richard Gonsalves when Olango playfully pointed a vaping device at him.
Janice Coates and other women from Our Place had tried to convince her that she’d had perfectly valid reasons for what she had done. These exhortations might or might not be true; either way, they were of no help. One question recurred like a maddening earworm: Would she have given a white woman more time? She was terribly, dreadfully afraid she knew the answer to that . . . but knew she would never be sure. The question would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Lila stayed on the job until the situation at the prison was sorted, then handed in her resignation. She brought baby Andy to Tiffany Jones Daycare and stayed to help out.
Clint was commuting to Curly, an extra hour in travel. He was fixated on his patients, especially on those inmates transferred from Dooling who had crossed over, because he was the only person they could talk to about what they’d seen and experienced who wouldn’t label them as crazy.
“Do you regret your choice?” he asked them.
They all said no.