“Let’s get help,” Lila said, and Sheila nodded in the empty way that one accepts one’s doom.
Lila ran down the hill to the Cottage, where James and the small boys were laughing around the table. She explained the situation: the small lamb had gone missing, and they must search the clearing from top to bottom. James jumped up and said that he would help—they all would help. How terrible for Sheila, James said. He assigned each boy a sector of the clearing and said he should search it and report back in thirty minutes.
The boys scattered all over, calling out for Colt. The show of force and solidarity seemed to improve Sheila’s spirits. That was something. Diana and Billy and the Templetons and Isa all eventually joined the search, and then the staff joined, too, when they came back on boats and barges from the Migration. They found a wallet and two arrowheads, but not the lamb. Sheila was inconsolable. The girl cried in Lila’s arms for more than an hour.
83
They found the Old Man’s body early that evening, when the nurse from the mainland came to take his blood pressure. His will, which lay on his night-table in a manila envelope, was fantastically detailed, listing more than two hundred separate items to be disbursed: books, lighters, ashtrays, cuff links. It specified a service in the Seven chapel followed by burial in the graveyard here alongside his wife. Lila decided that they would tell the children tomorrow rather than tonight. She thought the news would be less of a shock to them, especially to Isa, if they heard it when the sun was out.
That night, Lila slept in her own bed. She fell effortlessly into the warmth of her duties as the mourner’s wife, and it was a relief to have those decisions ready-made. Arrange for more food than necessary. Hug the children. Et cetera. If she owed Jim anything apart from her public role—one that she had executed to perfection—then it was simply to be present. And here she was. Meanwhile, the larger struggle raged inside her—the war between her body and her mind over Billy Quick. Surprisingly, Lila slept well.
She woke to the sunrise breaking over Jim’s left shoulder. The night before she had fallen asleep convinced that something in her was diseased and the diseased part must be removed. This morning was different. She was not only optimistic—she was ecstatic.
It had taken Lila much too long, she thought, to see the world clearly. It had been hidden from her that she was a born traitor, built to live out some brutal paradox at its farthest possible reach. But now she was home.
84
That afternoon, Lila and Jim went down to the chapel. They sat on the benches next to the water, hand in hand, among the bees. Neither spoke for a long time.
In that prismatic silence, Lila had this one thought: that life lay in a gamble that her heart was vast enough to hold two truths so radically opposed. On the one hand, the solidity and warmth of her existing life. On the other, the velocity she now felt when confronted with Billy Quick, another, darker variant of the truth. Both were necessary; to abandon either would be a catastrophic loss.
“What about Billy?” Lila said, and the hummingbirds scattered.
Jim paused for a long time.
“What do you want?” he said.
All that was left was for Lila to choose. She would not. Instead, she would lie to the worst possible man for her to lie to—the man who knew her so well, who told and spotted lies for a living.
“I want to destroy him,” Lila said.
“Define destroy.”
“I want him,” Lila said, “to have a long period of active and painful distress. I want all of his endeavors to fail. Whatever is just short of shooting himself in the head, and that only for the sake of the girls.”
“Why not,” Jim said, “just leave it alone?”
Her path was narrow here. If the response was either too enthusiastic or too clinical, then Jim, with his infinite subtlety, would immediately see the truth, which was that very public hatred was the best way to hide the obscenity of her true path.
“He hurt us,” Lila said. “I allowed him to hurt us.”
It felt wrong even when she said it. It was a false note—but then again, the world is full of dissonance. What would he say? Had he seen through her? She couldn’t look at him. It was not outlandish to hope that desperation had made her credible.
“It’s possible,” Jim said. “But we’d have to get Kallenbach first.”
It’s working, Lila thought. She and Jim would be partners and coconspirators in their marriage, as she wanted in the past and wanted still, as the world had so obviously intended. Millions now living will never die.
“What do I do?” Lila said, although she knew what his answer would be.
“You won’t like it,” he said.
Lila said nothing, waiting patiently for him to continue.
“He has to think I sold you to him.”
“Billy would?” Lila said.
“Yes.”
Now Lila was laughing.
“Do it,” she said. “Do anything you can think of.”
85
“What did you learn?” his father said to Catta that night after dinner.
They sat in two chairs in the Old Man’s study, in front of the empty desk. His father had not offered him whiskey, but he did give him two things: his grandfather’s binoculars, which were in his will, and an old green leather copy of the Crito, which was not. The book was printed in both Greek and English.
“I learned how to cross Baffin,” Catta said.
He knew that was not the answer, or the type of answer, his father was looking for. He did not care.
“Could you do it again?” his father said.
“If I had to,” Catta said.
“Would you?”
“No,” Catta said.
His grandfather’s study smelled like leather and old smoke, and what Catta liked most about the room was that its peculiar smell was so strong that, when he walked outside, he was resensitized to the salt air again. It was like finally being able to see colors.
“You don’t know this,” his father said, “but in my professional life I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tell who is telling the truth and who is not, often when the stakes are high, in some cases when the stakes are life and death.”
“Why?”
“It was asked of me.”
“And what did you learn?” Catta said.
“Some useful things,” his father said. “For example: I believe you told the truth about most of what happened on Baffin. I also believe that you lied about some of it.”
“You believe,” Catta said.
His father smiled. That surprised him.
“Yes,” his father said. “I also believe that what you did during that period of time was indisputably brave but also reckless. Both the walking and the swimming—neither was strictly necessary. A cynic might call those choices needlessly elaborate.”
“Are you a cynic?” Catta said.