‘Kids, they all think about death. Everyone thinks about it! And the ones that make their way to me – they got their reasons, every one of ’em, so I give ’em what they came for. Children are pure in their wishes – they got courage; they want knowledge, they’re not afraid of it. You were a bold little boy, I remember you. But you didn’t like what you heard. So don’t believe me, then – don’t believe me! Live like you don’t believe me.’
‘I do live like that. I do.’ He’s veering off track. It’s the fatigue and the cold – how does Bruna stand it? – the drive, the thought of Mira finding his cell phone on the floor. ‘Do you know your own future? Your own death?’
Bruna appears to be shuddering until he realizes she’s shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t know it. I can’t see myself.’
‘You can’t see yourself.’ A cruel pleasure blooms in Daniel. ‘That must drive you insane.’
She’s his mother’s age, his mother’s size. But Gertie is robust. Somehow, Bruna looks both bloated and frail.
He aims his gun. ‘What if it’s now?’
The woman gasps. She puts her hands over her ears, and the comforter falls to the floor, revealing her nightgown and bare legs. Her feet are crossed at the ankle and pressed together for warmth.
‘Answer me,’ says Daniel.
She speaks thinly, from the upper register of her throat. ‘If it’s now, it’s now.’
‘It doesn’t have to be now, though,’ he says, fingering the gun. ‘I could do it any time. Show up at your door, you’d never know when I was coming. Which would you rather? Going now, or never knowing when? Waiting, waiting, walking on tiptoes – looking over your shoulder every fucking day, sticking around while everyone around you dies and you wonder whether it should’ve been you, and hating yourself because –’
‘It’s your day!’ shouts Bruna, and Daniel is startled by the change in her voice, how it becomes lower and more confident. ‘Your day, it’s today. That’s why you’re here.’
‘You think I don’t know that? You think I didn’t do this intentionally?’ he says, but Bruna is looking at him with a dubiousness that suggests another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.
No. Simon and Klara were pulled magnetically, unconsciously; Daniel is in full possession of his faculties. Still, the two narratives float like an optical illusion – a vase or two faces? – each as convincing as the other, one perspective sliding out of prominence as soon as he relaxes his hold on it.
But there is one way he can make his own interpretation become permanent, the other fading into what was before, or might have been. He isn’t sure whether the idea just occurred to him or whether it’s been inside him since he saw her photograph.
The woman’s eyes flick to the left, and Daniel goes still. At first, he only hears the rush of the waterfall, but then another noise becomes apparent: the slow, padded crunch of feet in the gorge.
‘Don’t move,’ he says.
He walks to the cab. When his eyes adjust to the dark, he sees a black mass moving quickly through the narrow passage.
‘Get out,’ says Bruna. ‘Go.’
The footsteps are becoming closer now, faster, and his pulse begins to speed.
‘Daniel?’ calls a voice.
The map to West Milton on his computer screen. The business card by the mouse pad. Mira must have found them. She must have called Eddie.
‘Daniel!’ Eddie shouts.
Daniel moans.
‘I told you get out,’ Bruna says.
But Eddie is too close. Daniel sees a figure scrambling up over the edge of the gorge and into the clearing. His stomach rises and turns. He slams Bruna’s folding table up toward the wall so that the boxes fall to the floor. The metal folding chairs collapse on top of them.
‘All right,’ snaps Bruna. ‘That’s enough.’
But Daniel can’t stop. He is alarmed by his own fear, by the deep unstoppable rush of it. It is not him, it is not his: he must cut it out at the root. He walks to the counter beside the sink and uses the barrel of his gun to knock the religious icons to the floor. He empties the boxes in the front seats, dumping their contents – newspapers and canned food, playing cards and tarot cards, old papers and photographs – on the ground. Bruna is shouting now, rising heavily from the couch, but he moves past her to the bedroom door. He rips the wooden cross from its peg and slams it into the wall of the trailer.
‘You got no right to do that,’ Bruna cries, unsteady on her feet. ‘This is my home.’ The whites of her eyes are threaded red, and the bags beneath them gleam. ‘I been here for years, and I’m not going nowhere. You got no right. I’m an American, same as you.’
Daniel grabs her wrist. It feels like a chicken bone.
‘You are not,’ he says, ‘the same as me.’
The door of the Regatta swings open, and Eddie appears in the frame. He’s off duty, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, but his badge is out and his gun drawn.
‘Daniel,’ he says. ‘Drop your weapon.’
Daniel shakes his head. He has so rarely acted with courage. So now he will – for Simon, his sexuality hidden in life, understood only in death. For Klara, wild-eyed, tied to a light on the ceiling. For Saul, who worked twelve-hour days so that his children might not, and for Gertie, who lost them all.
It is, for him, an act of faith. Faith not in God, but in his own agency. Faith not in fate, but in choice. He would live. He will live. Faith in life.
He still holds Bruna’s delicate wrist. He raises the gun to her temple, and she cringes.
‘Daniel,’ roars Eddie. ‘I’ll shoot.’
But Daniel barely hears him. The freedom, the expansiveness, of thinking he is innocent: it fills and lifts him like helium. He looks down at Bruna Costello. Once he believed that responsibility flowed between them like air. Now he can’t remember what he thought they had in common.
‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa.’ Bruna speaks under her breath, a strained mutter. ‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa. I now leave you to God.’
‘Listen to me, Daniel,’ Eddie says. ‘After this, I can’t help you.’
Daniel’s hands are damp. He cocks the gun.
‘Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,’ says Bruna. ‘I now leave you to –’
PART FOUR
Place of Life
2006–2010
Varya
28.
Frida is hungry.
Varya enters the vivarium at seven thirty and already the monkey is standing up in her cage, holding on to the bars. Most of the animals warble and chirp, knowing that Varya’s arrival portends breakfast, but Frida releases the same rapid bark she has for weeks. ‘Shh-shh,’ says Varya. ‘Shh-shh.’ Each monkey receives a puzzle feeder that forces them to work for their food as they would in the wild: they use their fingers to guide a pellet from the top of a yellow plastic maze to a hole at the bottom. Frida’s neighbors scrabble at the feeders, but Frida leaves hers on the cage floor. The puzzle is easy for her; she could have the pellet in seconds. Instead she stares at Varya and calls in alarm, her mouth wide enough to hold an orange.
A flash of dark hair, a hand on the doorway, and Annie Kim pokes her head into the room.