“I know you did,” said my dad. “I’m sorry, Zoey. I made so many mistakes—with you, with your mom, with my life. I fucked up. But the only thing that matters is that you got out of there. That’s all she would have cared about, your mom. We would both happily die if it meant that you lived and went on to live a happy life.”
But I didn’t do that. Trauma was a wrecking ball that moved through my world. The pieces never fit back together quite right. I was a zombie, or had been, the walking dead.
“I’m sorry,” my dad said again. “I love you. Forgive me.”
Then he turned and walked into the dark. Didion was gone, too.
“Dad,” I called. “Daddy, don’t leave me.”
But he was gone, and I knew he wasn’t coming back. It was just me and Mike, who shook his head with pity.
“I didn’t want it to be like this,” said Mike. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The gun glinted silver in his hand.
When you seek revenge, dig two graves. One of them for yourself.
forty-two
Claudia watched, disbelieving, as great plumes of white showered her house, dousing the flames that shot up through the roof. Troy under one arm, Raven under the other, they watched from the bed of the pickup. Raven softly wept. Troy just looked stunned. And Claudia—well.
You never understood the power of things. You saw a lot on television—raging forest fires, tsunamis, hurricanes. You knew that people got raped, beaten—killed, murdered, life wrested from them in all kinds of horrible ways. But there was a kind of safe distance—the sense that it was happening elsewhere to others. Until you had a violent man’s hands on you, until your body was violated. Until you felt the massive, frightening heat of fire, knew its roar, how it sucked the air from a place and replaced it with poison. How just its nearness could overcome you. How you couldn’t fight. That was the hardest thing to learn, that sometimes, some things—you just can’t fight them.
“They got away,” said Raven. “With all that money.”
“Shh,” said Claudia. “The important thing is that we’re all alive and okay. Nothing else matters.”
“It doesn’t matter that the house burned down?” said Raven, reaching for sarcasm through her tears.
“No,” said Claudia. “Not really.”
She even believed it.
Josh Beckham sat in the back of a squad car. They’d all been questioned. Claudia, Raven, and Troy each gave their version of what happened. Claudia told Officer Dilbert about Zoey Drake running off on her own to stop Rhett Beckham, that Josh knew where she’d gone. And he promised to find her, to help her.
Josh Beckham had asked for a lawyer, said he had information about the case ten years ago, was ready to come clean. She felt bad for him—in a way. You can’t carry a secret like that around without it doing some damage, even though he was probably just a kid at the time—maybe too stupid to know what was happening until it was too late. He didn’t seem like a bad man, but really—what did she know? She was literally the worst judge of character imaginable.
Claudia saw the headlights of an approaching car and recognized the sleek lines of Ayers’s Mercedes as it came to a stop and he burst out of the front door.
“Daddy!” Raven shrieked, pulled away, and shimmied herself out of the truck, ran for her father. He grabbed her and held on tight, but he was looking at Claudia.
“What happened?” he said. “What on earth happened here?”
What had happened?
One minute she was young and beautiful and happily married, trying to have a baby with her handsome, sweet husband. The next minute, she was sitting in the back of a pickup truck, watching the house she’d been trying to renovate go up in flames. How had she gotten here? How many accidents and mistakes and choices had she made? How many of them had been wrong or right, good or bad? Maybe that’s all life was, this impossibly complicated helix of choice and accident, things you could control and couldn’t. And when the day was done, the only measure of success was how happy you were, how much you loved and were loved.
“Is he her father?” asked Troy. The kid seemed stunned. They’d wrapped him in a blanket, and she swore he looked just like he did when he was seven years old, curled up in his X-Men sleeping bag. Claudia remembered that it was the whole reason poor Troy was here, because he was trying to help his friend uncover the mystery of her identity. Poor kid.
Claudia looked at the sweet boy who loved her daughter. It was so obvious. She touched the still soft skin of his cheek, felt with surprise the stubble on his jaw.
“Of course, he is,” she said. “Look at them.”
Ayers and Raven walked over toward the truck, their steps wobbling as Raven clung to Ayers and he held her with a strong arm. She could hear Raven talking—tunnel, bag of money, these men came, locked us in. We were trapped. She was rambling, not making sense. Ayers looked confused, worried. Claudia shifted herself out of the truck, came to stand before Ayers.
“Let me tell him,” said Claudia. Raven looked between them and nodded. She went to Troy, and the two of them walked off.
“Don’t go far,” Claudia called. “Stay away from the fire. And the woods.”
Raven nodded, for once without snark or comment.
“What in God’s name happened?” whispered Ayers. “Claudia.”
He put a gentle hand to the bandage on her nose, to her jaw.
She sat, and he sat beside her. And she told him everything.
forty-three
Still lying on the ground, I stared at the gun he had pointed at me. I had to admit, it was disappointing.
“You’re going to shoot me?” I said. “What a cop-out.”
I literally didn’t have the strength to lift myself up. I always figured it would end like this, with me on the ground, bested by some thug with a gun. Maybe Beckham or Didion, maybe some thug on the street. I didn’t expect it to be a man I trusted and loved. But that’s the statistic, right? A leading cause of death in young women is homicide. Most of which were perpetrated by men they knew.
“You’re a good fighter, Zoey,” he said. He was breathless and, I could tell, hurt. I’d gotten some good strikes in. “I taught you well—a little too well. And you have youth on your side.”
He chuckled, as if we were just on the dojo floor discussing a sparring session.
“So how do you want this to go?” he said.
“How do you want it to go?” Another voice.
He came out of the darkness, resting heavily on his cane. He had a portable oxygen concentrator in a sling around his chest, the nasal cannula in his nostrils. It emitted a strange rhythmic squeak like a hamster slowly turning a wheel. In his free hand, he held his revolver.
Paul.
He did not look well, pale and sweating. Seeing him gave me the strength I needed to get up. I limped over to him, wrapped him up, and he held on tight. He felt so thin.
“Zoey,” he said. He kissed my head.
“Christ on the cross,” said Mike. “How did you get here, man?”
“In all these years,” said Paul. “I never once suspected you. You know that?”