I watched the press conference on the early evening news, standing in the living room of my house as my daughter, Sam, finished her milk and sandwich in the kitchen. Rachel, Sam’s mother and my ex-girlfriend, sat on the edge of an armchair, her eyes fixed on the screen. She and Sam were on their way to Boston to catch a flight to LA, where Rachel was due to address a symposium on clinical advances in cognitive psychotherapy. She had tried to explain the substance of these advances to me earlier, but I could only assume that the attendees at the symposium were smarter than I was, and had longer attention spans. Rachel had friends in Orange County with whom she planned to stay, and their daughter was a few months older than Sam. The symposium would take up only one day, and the rest of their time in California was to be devoted to long-promised trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios.
Sam and Rachel lived on Rachel’s parents’ property in Burlington, Vermont. I spent time with Sam as often as I could, but not as often as I should, a situation complicated, or so I told myself, by the fact that Rachel had been seeing someone else for more than a year now. Jeff Reid was an older man, a former executive with the capital markets division of a major bank who had retired early, thereby nicely avoiding the fallout of the various scandals and collapses to which he had probably contributed. I didn’t know that for sure, but I was petty enough to envy him his place in Rachel and Sam’s life. I’d bumped into him once when I was visiting Sam for her birthday, and he’d tried to overwhelm me with bonhomie. He had all the moves of one who has spent a large portion of his life and career making others trust him, justifiably or not: the wide smile, the firm handshake, the left hand on my upper arm to make me feel valued. Seconds after meeting him, I was checking to make sure that I still had my wallet and my watch.
I studied Rachel as she took in the details of the conference. She had allowed a little gray to creep into her red hair, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth that I could not recall from before, but she was still very beautiful. I felt an ache in my heart for her, and I salved it with the knowledge that all was as it should be, however much I missed them both.
‘What do you think?’ I said.
‘Her body language is wrong,’ said Rachel. ‘She doesn’t want to be there, and not just because she’s trapped in every mother’s nightmare. She looks frightened, and I don’t think it’s because of the reporters. I’d hazard a guess that she’s hiding something. Have you heard anything about the case?’
‘No, but then I haven’t been asking.’
The coverage of the news conference ended, and the anchorwoman moved on to foreign wars. I heard a noise behind me, and saw that Sam had been watching the news from the hall. She was tall for her age, with a lighter version of her mother’s hair, and serious brown eyes.
‘What happened to the girl?’ she asked as she entered the room. She had what was left of her sandwich in her right hand, and was chewing on a mouthful of it. There were crumbs on her sweater, and I brushed them off. She looked unhappy about it. Maybe she’d been planning to save them for later.
‘They don’t know,’ I said. ‘She disappeared, and now they’re trying to find her.’
‘Did she run away? Sometimes people run away.’
‘Could be, honey.’
She handed the remains of the sandwich to me. ‘I don’t want any more.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll have it framed.’
Sam looked at me oddly, then asked if she could go outside.
‘Sure,’ said Rachel. ‘But stay where we can see you.’
Sam turned to go, then paused.
‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘you find people, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I find people.’
‘You should go find the girl,’ she said, then trotted off. Moments later, the top of her head appeared at the window as she began exploring the flower beds. On her last visit she had helped me plant native perennials in all of the beds, for I had let the garden go a little since she and her mother left. Now there was goatsbeard and harebell, turtleheads and shooting stars, all carefully labeled so that Sam would know which was which. It was not yet dark, but the lights outside were motion-activated, and Sam enjoyed setting them off by dancing beneath them. Rachel walked to the window and waved at her. I killed the TV and joined her.
‘There are times when I look at her and I see you,’ said Rachel. ‘Or when she talks and I hear your voice. She’s more like you than me, I think. Isn’t that strange, when she sees so little of you?’
I couldn’t help but react, and instantly Rachel apologized. She touched my arm gently with her right hand.
‘I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I’m not blaming you. It’s just a statement of fact.’ She returned to watching our daughter. ‘She likes being with you, you know. Jeff is good with her, and spoils her, but she always keeps a little distance from him.’
Go Sam, I thought. He’d probably advise you to invest your allowance in weapons and Big Tobacco.
‘She’s such a self-contained kid,’ Rachel continued. ‘She’s got friends, and she’s doing well in pre-school – better than well: She’s ahead of her class in just about every way imaginable – but there’s a part of her that she keeps for, and to, herself; a secret part. That doesn’t come from me. That’s you in her.’
‘You don’t sound like you’re convinced it’s a good thing.’
She smiled. ‘I don’t know what it is, so I can’t say.’
Her hand was still touching my arm. She suddenly seemed to notice, and let it fall, but it was an unhurried movement. What existed between us was different now. There was sadness there, and regret, but not pain, or not so much of it that it affected how we were together.
‘Try to see a little more of her,’ said Rachel. ‘We can work it out.’
I didn’t respond. I thought of Valerie Kore and her missing daughter. I thought of my late wife, and my first daughter, wrenched violently from this existence only to linger in another form. I had witnessed the blurring of worlds, watching as elements of what once was, and what was to come, seeped into this life like dark ink through water. I knew of the existence of a form of evil that was beyond human capacities, the wellspring from which all other evil sipped. And I knew that I was marked, although to what end I did not yet understand. So I had kept my distance from my child, for fear of what I might draw upon her.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I lied.
Rachel lifted her hand again, but this time she touched my face, tracing the lineaments of the bones beneath, and I felt my eyes grow hot. I closed them for a moment, and in that instant I lived another life.
‘I know that you’re trying to protect her by staying away, but I’ve thought about this a lot,’ said Rachel. ‘At the start, I wanted you gone from our lives. You frightened me, both because of what you were capable of doing and because of the men and women who forced you to act as you did, but there has to be a balance, and that balance isn’t here now. You’re her father, and by keeping your distance from her you’re hurting her. We’re hurting her, because I was complicit in what happened. We both need to try harder, for her sake. So, are we clear?’
‘We’re clear,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘You won’t be thanking me when she’s dragging you around the American Girl store. Your wallet won’t be thanking me either.’
Sam was crouching by the woods, collecting branches and twigs and twisting them into shapes.
‘What brought this on?’ I asked.
‘Sam did,’ said Rachel. ‘She asked me if you were a good man, because you found bad men and put them in jail.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told her the truth: that you are a good man. But I was worried in case her knowledge of what you do meant that she connected it with its risks, and I asked her if she was frightened for you. She told me that she wasn’t, and I believed her.’
‘Did she say why she wasn’t frightened?’
‘No.’ Rachel frowned. ‘She just said the strangest thing – not the words but the way she said them. She said that the bad men should be frightened of you, but she wasn’t joking, and it wasn’t bravado. She was very solemn, and very certain. Then she just turned over and went to sleep. That was a couple of nights back, and afterward I was the one who couldn’t sleep. It was like talking to an oracle, if that makes any sense.’
‘I’d keep quiet about it if she is an oracle,’ I said. ‘You’ll have half of New England coming to her for the Powerball numbers, and Jeff would probably charge them ten bucks a head for the consultation.’
Rachel punched me on the arm and headed for the door. It was time for them to leave.
‘Go date somebody,’ she said. ‘You’re a step away from taking holy orders.’
‘It’s the wrong time of year,’ I replied. ‘You never date going into winter. Too many layers. It’s hard to figure out what you’re getting until it’s too late.’
‘Spoken like a true cynic.’
‘All cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.’
‘God, it’s like talking to a bargain-basement philosopher.’
I helped her put on her coat, and she kissed me on the cheek. ‘Remember what we talked about.’
‘I will.’
She called out to Sam, who was now sitting on the bench outside. She had something beneath her coat as she walked back, but she kept it hidden until after we had hugged, then carefully withdrew it and handed it to me.
It was a cross. She had made it from thin twigs, intertwined where she could fix them together, but otherwise held together with strands of ivy.
‘For when the bad men come,’ she said.
Rachel and I exchanged a glance but said nothing, and it was only when they were gone that I was struck by the oddness of Sam’s words. She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.