We sat a minute, both of us lost in our own thoughts. I caught him looking at me in that sad, musing way he had.
“Hey, Zoey,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“Is there any way you can just—I don’t know—let this go?” Seth said. “Move on. Live a life.”
It wasn’t just my dad standing there now. Didion was there, too. Grim and pale, staring, his front soaked with blood, drip, dripping on the floor. If I’d known what I know now, maybe.
I got up. “It’s too late,” I said.
He stood at the top of the stairs as I jogged down to leave.
“Remember,” he said. “You’re one of the good guys.”
I wasn’t so sure. Anyway, it seems like a pretty outdated concept. Overly simplistic, the idea of the good guys versus the bad guys, Mike’s position on justice versus revenge. I’m not sure anything is so black and white. Does anyone think he’s purely evil? Does anyone ever believe she’s purely good? Even terrorists think they’re the good guys. Did the men who killed my parents intend to commit a heinous act? How did they justify what happened afterward?
Am I evil because I killed John Didion, because I ran him through in cold blood? He was an old man. One I suspected, convicted, and punished without judge or jury. I knew. My body knew him. But did I have the right to exact revenge, deliver a form of justice? I don’t know the answer. It could go either way. Anyway, it’s too late now. Some acts are forever. My point is that I’m not sure that there are any good guys, not in the real world. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t justice, a kind of code.
? ? ?
I HADN’T BEEN BACK TO the house since that day with Paul. I never claimed our things, the detritus of my parents’ lives. Mr. Bishop, the owner, died a couple of years later. And the house, Paul told me, sat empty. No one ever lived there after us until recently. I had no reason to think our stuff hadn’t gone to the junkyard long ago except that Seth said that the house, the property had sat fallow, no one living there since us. He’d been out to the property a couple of times, wondering, always wondering if there was something that the police missed—on purpose or by accident. And, of course, there was the matter of the missing money.
And then the Bishop woman moved in, Seth and I following her blog, wondering what she’d find. She and the house were right for each other. If ever a place needed a rebirth.
It was afternoon by the time I rolled into Lost Valley. When I’d pulled over for gas, it took me a while to get the Suburban started again. My father and John Didion sat grimly silent in the backseat. Did I feel it? An electricity in the air? Did the sun seem too low in the sky, the sky too dark? I don’t know. Maybe.
thirty
Paul was waiting for Heather in the parking lot, just as he said he would be. She never doubted him. He was one of those rare men who always said exactly what he meant, always did exactly as he promised. There was a hard lump in her throat as she pulled in beside him, and her gut was a roil of guilt, sadness, dread. He smiled at her, something sad and sweet.
She’d bought a few things. A sundress, a new bathing suit and cover-up, some pretty lingerie. She’d used cash from her savings account, the one that Chad didn’t know about until recently. She owed herself that, this trip. It was only a week ago, a little more, that she’d learned what kind of trouble they were in. She’d known money was tight, of course. But she’d had no idea the mountain of debt that had accrued. She felt like a fool, one of those stupid women who let her husband handle the money. But he had always done, and she trusted him. He worked so hard, all that overtime. He never once told her or even hinted that they were buried, suffocating.
Her credit card had been declined—online, thank goodness, and not in a local shop somewhere. She checked their account and was amazed to see that not only was the card maxed out, but the payment was past due. She went to Chad’s desk in the basement, started sifting through the stack of bills, his files. How was it possible? She logged on to their bank accounts, between savings and checking, there was only a couple hundred dollars. Zoey’s college fund was empty, closed in fact. He’d taken a loan out against his pension. There was no other way to say it. They were broke. She could see what he’d done, as she followed the paper trail. Ran a card up, then opened another account to transfer the balance for a lower interest rate, then ran them both up again. Then he did it again, and again. He took out a loan against the pension to pay off the cards, then ran the cards up again. There were slips for payroll advances; there was a balance on their overdraft line of credit. Her chest felt tight; her breathing came ragged. How? How could this happen?
If he missed a paycheck, they’d have about two weeks before they were out of money altogether, with no credit to carry them over, if not for her small savings account. Thank God, he hadn’t known about it. Or had forgotten about it.
She was alone the afternoon she found out. It was raining, and she felt as if her whole life had crumbled around her. She couldn’t have been more crushed if she had discovered him cheating, if he was in love with someone else. Financial infidelity; he’d kept secrets, mismanaged their money, taken out a loan against their future, one he had no way of paying. She felt a hard stab of guilt; she never should have stopped working.
Her small account was all they had. Money she’d inherited as a teenager from her grandmother. She’d used it mostly for her education. But she kept it, contributing to it from the subbing jobs she took sometimes, things she’d sold on eBay. She’d hoped one day to surprise him—part of the down payment on a house, covering some of Zoey’s education costs.
She went to the bank, deposited some money into their checking and paid down some balances, bringing them at least current on everything. She sent him a text:
Can you come home early?
What’s wrong?
I need to talk before Zoey gets home.
Can it wait?
No.
He’d wept at the kitchen table. She tried to understand, to feel for him. She tried not to hate him, herself. But there was more. Withdrawals, cash advances that she didn’t understand, that didn’t correspond with their payments due and normal expenses. How could she have been so na?ve?
She had the printouts, the last six months of banking statements, credit cards, pension. It was all easy to get to; she knew all the passwords, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t had access all this time. She just simply hadn’t looked.
She told him about the account she had. He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“How much?”
“A little over ten thousand,” she said. “A bit less. I paid down some balances, made us current at least.”