He knew he’d made a mistake, knew it before the kid even hit the ground.
It was that smile, for one, the openmouthed taunt. But also the peculiar circumstances of the breakin, the staged scene downstairs and the feeling he’d had that someone was playing games with him. And now that someone was gone, had slipped off into a night already dampening at this hour into a wide, white fog that would cover the city by dawn. There was a dagger of glass still hanging from the top of the window frame, and in the harsh white light of the conference room, Jay caught a glimpse of his own reflection. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the curls on his chin were coming in a steel gray. His eyes had gone flat and dull with age, like two coals forgotten in a fire. Jay hardly flinched at the sight. He was four years shy of fifty, he had two kids who deserved a hell of a lot better than they’d been handed in this life, and his wife had been dead a year.
He was going home.
Part One
CHAPTER 1
The first time Jay hears the name Alicia Nowell he’s sitting in his car, at a stoplight, Thursday morning on his way to take Ellie to school. Ten-year-old Ben gets dropped off first. He’s had a hard time with school, almost since his first days of kindergarten, and by the third grade Bernie had pulled some strings at the school district, where she was working at the time, and got him enrolled in a special program at Poe Elementary, which starts a half hour before Ellie’s classes at Lamar High School, another placement Bernie orchestrated. It’s just the two of them in the car, Jay and his daughter, the station set to KCOH. Ellie has control of the dial Mondays and Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Jay’s turn. Fridays are theoretically Ben’s to program the radio, but he’s claimed, more than once, not to care what they listen to, and Jay usually cedes those mornings to his daughter as well. She’s quiet today, face pointed to the passenger window, her arms folded across the puffy expanse of her black Starter jacket, her chin and the bottom half of her face tucked below the zipped collar. She’s hardly spoken since they left the house, just a few mumbled words as Ben climbed out of the Land Cruiser, reminding him not to forget his lunch. To Jay, there hasn’t been so much as a “Good morning.” They got into it yesterday after school, over this business with the telephone. Jay was short with her, he knows. He has only two settings when it comes to his daughter: either calm and solicitous, gentle in any inquiry about her thoughts and concerns, or else he becomes stony and impassive: the more words come out of her mouth that he finds misguided or unreasonable in some way, the more he thinks she’s pointedly dismissing the wisdom of his judgment, the way he would do things. It is an ugly trait of his that Bernie often called out, managing with just a few words to bring him back to his better self. But his wife knew him better than his daughter does, and he knew his wife better than he knows his teenage daughter. There are things she knew about her family, not secrets so much as hard-earned intimacies, that she inadvertently took with her, leaving the rest of them to fend for themselves in this new, foreign land, meeting daily at the kitchen table, or passing in the hallway, without their shared interpreter. She, more than anyone else, knew Jay’s tendency to mask fear with brooding, knew his panic too often takes the form of withholding, a silence that can suck the air out of any room. With his daughter, it’s something he’s still working on.