I don’t have access to that information, Hannah said.
Let me be explicit, Agent Harte said.
Yes, please, Hannah said.
Give us that list and we are done here, he said.
Thank you for taking such good care of me, Hannah said. Shall I report here tomorrow? I think you said five days in total?
Don’t come back without that list, said the man from the back of the room.
Coming home, Billy’s train stopped at Seventy-seventh Street and everyone had to exit. There were no cabs due to the rain, and he walked all the way home with a newspaper over his head. It was a Thursday, and the girls would be around the corner at their nanny’s house. Inside, he found Hannah in the bath, which was no longer warm. She had opened two veins, one in each forearm, but what most people don’t know is that veins will not do the job: it takes arteries. The inquest found nine distinct, smaller incisions before she hit an artery that would serve. Later, the coroner told him she had been dead for three hours by the time he arrived.
34
Billy Quick’s girls were now at an age when they had more or less fully inhabited their names. When they were born, he had had no sense of what they ought to be called, only what they should be like, and it didn’t occur to him that there might be a relationship between the two. He couldn’t say how or why a name becomes immutable, but he was sure that with Ann and Barbara that final bonding was now done. They would never be Annie or Anna and Babs or Bee or anything else lyrical or cavalier: with such dull, middle-aged names he was afraid they were sentenced to a lifetime of sweaters and pearls. And so, weighed down by this lack of parental foresight, his girls frolicked, or rather attempted to frolic, on Seven Island’s mile-long strip of white sand. They did not investigate, collect, capture, shout, or run. Instead, they played hopscotch, which they also did on the sidewalks of Central Park West. Billy blamed himself, although not too much, while he sat rummaging through his picnic basket.
Ann and Barbara had been meant to be placeholders, formal names from the Blackwells’ formal family, and early on Hannah explicitly said that they would give the girls clever nicknames to balance out their stiffness. They put it off, though, and then they realized they disliked people who gave their children clever nicknames. Billy had pointed out the paradox of giving their children names from a family she had abandoned, and Hannah laughed and said she disagreed, that it was her parents and Lila and the others who had strayed from the true Blackwell path.
If the girls had more vivid syllables to live up to, Billy wondered, would they have jumped from the truck there and run screaming into the cold water like demons? Hannah had done that; in fact, that was the thing he saw in his mind’s eye when other people used the word grief: he thought of Hannah running, especially into water, especially here on Seven. But these girls, their girls, Ann and Barbara, were controlled, careful, and precise: they liked tables and chairs, knew the names of fabrics. They were subtle, thoughtful, and endlessly appropriate. Was it normal?
Hannah had not been concerned. She had these blind spots of optimism; she saw the long-term as inevitably just, if you could live or see far enough into the future. She had trusted that Billy would understand, for example, without the maudlin summary of a note. The FBI refused all his inquiries, and when he pushed they went further and denied that she had ever been to their office. They had obviously threatened her and certainly him too, as a way to get to Kallenbach, and in retrospect, Billy thought, it had been just a matter of time before they connected Kallenbach to him. When they did, the FBI would have been convinced Hannah had lied, while she would have thought she was protecting him, protecting the girls. From time to time he had the thought that he had done this to her, which was some part of why Billy had chosen to tell the truth about the event itself. Lila had been his first call and had pleaded with him to invent something else. Anything else. She said, and kept saying, think of the girls, but from his perspective the only way to protect the girls, to keep the FBI away from all of them, was for the truth to be known. Was that not, in the end, the whole point? Was that not obviously what Hannah had wanted? What Kallenbach was involved in, he did not know. Clearly the man was being watched, so Billy could not take sudden steps in any direction—cutting off contact, refunding his money—without looking guilty, as if he were making a signal, which he was not. So he canceled their semiannual lunches at the Hungarian restaurant on Third Avenue. It was all he could do.
He looked down the beach and saw that the girls were now fencing with driftwood, a slight improvement. Behind them, a small pink blur emerged from the dunes and ran down the beach in the other direction.
“Penny!” he shouted, and the pink shirt froze.
Penny did not come any closer, or even move at all. Billy stood up and walked toward her, the girls trailing behind him.
Penny was breathing hard, her hands on her knees. She scanned the horizon over by Sisters Island. It seemed to Billy that she was trying to see around or over the headland and the islands. He had been too detached, he thought, too absorbed while Penny was here, but this was a chance to make amends: he had a basket full of food—salami, Seven Island cheese, tangerines. All children love tangerines.
“Come for a snack,” Billy said. “We have tangerines.”
Penny had thought there was a clear line of sight to Baffin from the Long Beach, but in fact a headland and two different islands blocked her view of Baffin. Fired by the shame of collaboration, she had leapt from the Heron even before the boat touched the dock. She ran the mile to this beach on the main dirt road. She had wanted to build a fire on the beach to signal Catta, and now, if she could escape her uncle, her plan was to cross the woods to find a spot with a clear line of sight to Baffin. She hoped she could see it from somewhere on the other side of that nearby headland, but if not, she would keep going until she figured out the winding geography of this place.
“Where are you going?” Billy said.
If she told him anything, Penny thought, she would lose time and the advantage of surprise. Adults were unpredictable, but she had to assume that her uncle was in league with the Hillsingers. She had to decide, here and now, whether to announce her defection from the tyrant’s regime. It would be satisfying to make them all see her absolute defiance, though at the moment Billy seemed gentle and amused. It occurred to her that he might not know what had happened out on the Heron, so she chose to speak.
“Over there,” Penny said.
“What’s the rush?” Billy said.
“I want to see Baffin.”
Behind her father, Ann rolled her eyes.
“Why?” Billy said.
“They put Catta there.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I was on the boat and they made him get off.”