Zoe rubbed frenziedly at her eyes, but the tears kept coming.
“I need to know at least a little,” she said. “I mean, it was bad, what he did? Bad, like … bad, like you’re used to?”
X shivered. Every word she spoke pierced him, but the words he was forced to speak in return were worse somehow—because they pierced her.
“Much of it occurred in his youth,” he said. “Yet—”
Zoe could not wait for him to complete the thought.
“Yet what?” she said.
“Yet I have taken souls for less,” he said. “There was blood on his hands when he was still a young man. And there is fresh blood on them today.”
He watched as the last remnants of hope drained out of Zoe.
“What happens now?” she said.
He reached out to her a final time, and this time she let him hold her.
“I regret this answer above all the others,” he said. “What happens now is for you to decide. Either your father goes free—or I do.”
X waited for what felt like years for Zoe to speak.
“Take me to him,” she said finally. “Take me to my father.”
Her voice sounded so hard now. X turned from her. He stared down at the feeble metal fence, which shook and rattled in the wind.
“Please,” she added. “Or I’ll go myself. I’ll find a way. You know I will.”
“Yet what will you say to him, Zoe?” X said. He did not look back at her. He couldn’t. “And what will you have me do? Will you ask me to stop your own father’s breath? Will you watch as I circle his neck with my fingers? And, once I am done, will you ever be able to look at me again?”
Zoe was silent a long time.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I want to see him with my own eyes. I want him to know … I want him to know that I know what he’s done. I don’t want him thinking he got away with this—not for one more second.” She put a hand on X’s shoulder. “Will you take me?” she said. “Even if I don’t have all the answers yet?”
He turned back to her. Her eyes, even in distress, were so familiar. They never failed to unravel him.
“You know that I will,” he said.
Zoe texted her mother: I’m not going to be home tonight. I’m OK, I promise. Please trust me ONE more time.
She turned off her phone so she wouldn’t hear it explode. She nodded to X. She was ready.
He picked her up and pulled her to his chest. He did not bother leaping over the fence—he just let out a howl and kicked it down with his boot.
He carried her up and over the powdery banks and then down the icy road that wandered through the mountains. The moon had broken through the clouds. The snow gave off a faint blue light. Zoe was silent now—overwhelmed by the shock of it all, he imagined. Her eyes were open, but she appeared to see nothing.
He tried to think of a story to tell Zoe as he carried her. He thought that hearing his voice might console her somehow. Talking would never come naturally to him (how many words had he even spoken in his lifetime?), and he realized now that he didn’t know very many stories—and certainly no pleasant ones.
So he told her their story.
He began with her knocking him down on the ice.
He told her that she’d smelled like the dogs, adding nervously that he meant it as a compliment, that he’d liked it. He told her that he was changed the minute she smashed into him, that by stopping him from taking Stan, she’d woken him up—challenged him not to hate himself and to think of himself as something more than a killer. Because that’s all he was when they met, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if you killed only bad men. You were still a killer. Even if Zoe and X had never spoken (never touched, never kissed) he wouldn’t have forgotten her. Couldn’t have. He’d have guarded the memory of her with two cupped hands, like it was a flame in a draft.
Was Zoe listening? He wasn’t sure. But he liked telling the story. It soothed him.
He told her about how they’d argued when her family found him in agony in the garage—how he’d begged her to abandon him, even though he was praying that she wouldn’t. He described riding to the house in Jonah’s sled and sleeping in a bed shaped like a fat insect. Why was it shaped like an insect? He’d worried it was a stupid question, so he had never asked.
X told her how he used to lie waiting for her to fall asleep. He told her that she snored just the tiniest bit—but maybe he shouldn’t have said that? He changed the subject. He talked about Jonah. He said he could feel his hard little hugs even now. He confessed that when he was tiptoeing out of the room one night he’d stepped on one of Jonah’s toy animals and broken its horns. How ashamed he’d been! He’d meant to apologize, but never did. He didn’t know what kind of animal it was. It had horns, so maybe it was a monkey?
Zoe’s lips twitched at this last detail—she nearly smiled.