Fran sits on the sofa with the three books beside her. Isaac is finally asleep. She picks up the parenting book, Raising Icarus, and gives the cover a glance. Still weird, she thinks, that Calvin Cooper, of all people, is recommending parenting books. The mother and son who are pictured on the cover, smiling and confident, definitely do look happy. There’s even something of Cooper’s cockeyed smile on the boy’s beaming face—maybe that’s why Cooper likes this book; he sees something of his former self in this little kid. Or maybe Cooper pushed this book on her to show her an alternate life for her and Isaac. You could be like these two, Fran, smiling and confident.
We’ll never be like them or anyone, she thinks. Not anyone normal.
She puts that book aside.
The cover of the second book with the lengthy title, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, features a photo of a severe-looking woman, a lone streak of gray in her black hair, smiling slightly, as though her mind’s elsewhere, on bigger, more substantial things. Fran wonders what connection she may have once had with this woman, this book, if any. The photo does look familiar, though she can’t say why, or from where.
She turns the book over. Finds the ISBN on the back, above the barcode. Holds her own arm up to check, though she already knows.
1-250-02412-1
She feels a little thrilled and a little sick to find they match.
Save for the last four numbers. The extra numbers on her arm.
4911
Can’t be a year. Not a page number, either—this book isn’t that long. Maybe a chapter?
She flips through the book.
It’s a collection of journals, fragments, stray thoughts.
Fran turns to page 49.
She counts down to line 11.
She’s almost relieved to find it’s just some random reference to a movie, something called Marked Woman. It’s strangely appropriate, actually, and she could certainly try to find meaning in this if she really wanted to. But, out of context, the fragment means nothing to her and she can’t believe this is the message someone left for her to discover. Or that she left for herself.
She flips through the book again.
4911, she thinks.
She riffles through pages all the way to the back.
Finds page 491.
She realizes now that this page does look familiar—or, at least, a different, past version of this page, from a different, past copy of this book. A copy that’s underlined. Dogeared. Highlighted. Circled. The book bent, folded, creased, read and re-read, she can remember it now, she can picture it, as though it’s the page right in front of her.
She counts down one line from the top.
Just one.
Finds a lone sentence and reads it.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
She reads the line again. For the first time. For the millionth time. She feels its warm familiarity. The letters practically vibrate.
This is the message from her past self, she knows it, cast like a letter in a bottle, to be opened on some other shore by her future, stranded self.
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
Forgive who? And exonerate who? And for what?
She looks up, and only then does she notice the title of the second book, the sequel, which she also took out from the library.
Another volume of diaries written by the same woman, with a simpler title.
Reborn
The sky is just starting to consider darkness as Cooper steers his pickup home. He can see the bright dusk on the distant horizon, negotiating the handover from the day. As his truck hums over the two-lane highway, he hasn’t seen another car in at least an hour, and he doesn’t expect to see another one tonight.
This is one benefit to the Blinds, Cooper’s learned—it offers you a cleansing kind of loneliness. It’s the blessing of exile and it’s something he never expected. Life out here on the great flat plains with barely a human whisper to be heard from the outside world. Just you, and the sky in all directions, and the barest scrap of land to hold it all up, to keep you from tumbling into the emptiness of space.
The highway lines zip by hypnotically as he drives. The tires of his truck serenade the road. No street lamps, no houses, no nothing. Just road.
Cooper thinks about Fran, and Isaac, and the great, big world spreading out in all directions, and the dangers, known and unknown, that it harbors.
About how having a kid makes you think constantly about all the ways the world might hurt him. And how tempting it is to hide from all that. At least until the hurtful world finds you.
And it always finds you.
Cooper taps his star.
His finger feels the folded fax that’s tucked in his breast pocket.
And he thinks about the one last thing he has to do tonight.
19.
GERALD DEAN KNOCKS at the door of the police trailer, which is already ajar.
“You wanted to see me, Sheriff?”
It’s late and the town is sleeping. Cooper welcomes him in. The night is cooler, finally, so the lack of air-conditioning in the trailer isn’t nearly so vexing. Robinson’s already home in bed and Dawes isn’t back from her daytrip yet. The two of them, Cooper and Dean, are alone in the trailer.
Cooper pulls Robinson’s chair around to face his desk and offers Dean the seat, then sits down in his swivel chair.
Dean’s always been a skittish sort, keeping mostly to himself. He and Cooper have never had any run-ins before. Dean’s squirrelly manner suggests not so much someone who’s guilty and worried about getting caught, but someone who’s worried about being wrongly blamed for something he didn’t do. As though that was a theme in his life prior to his arrival here, and it somehow seeped into his manner. A learned habit he never could shake.
And one not entirely appropriate to the situation, Cooper thinks.
Cooper’s revolver is sitting on his desktop. He picks it up, flips the barrel open, checks it.
Four bullets.
“Eight years, Gerald, and I never had to carry a loaded weapon,” he says. “Times are changing, and not for the better.”
He flips the barrel shut and puts the gun back on his desk. Dean shifts in his chair uneasily.
Cooper continues. “So I take it you know what’s been happening in the town.”
Dean nods. He’s hefty and his posture resembles that of a toad on a rock. He has thinning hair and a wide speckled forehead and a face that’s inscribed by transgressions that even he can’t recall or recount. Cooper can see all that now. It’s all so obvious, once you know to look for it.
“How long have you been here, Gerald?”
“Nearly eight years. A long stretch.”
“That’s right. You came in the first year, maybe six months after we opened, by my recollection.”
Dean nods. Still waiting to learn why he’s here.
Behind Cooper, the fax machine sparks to life and begins to whir.
“Deputy Dawes—you know Deputy Dawes, right?”—and here Dean nods again, trembling his chin wattle—“Deputy Dawes,” Cooper says, “has a theory. About you.”