I see him consider my question, then appear to decide to give up and give. I have the feeling that whatever he tells me at this point will be the truth, though I don’t know him well enough to be certain.
“As bad as you can imagine,” he says. It’s not what I want to hear.
“You don’t look sick.” The words escape before I can stop myself.
He laughs. A brittle sound.
“I even say that to myself. To my mirror self. It’s foolish, right? Perfect health.”
“And yet …”
“Exactly. I’m told it won’t last, though.”
“The appearance of health?”
“Right. I’m told from here it will get ugly.”
“When?” I ask, but am not sure I really want to know.
“Weeks. Possibly months. Certainly no longer.”
“And so, you ordered a hit.” I am still and my voice is quiet. Not much more than a whisper. I see him lean forward; strain to hear. At my words, I can feel the tears stand in my eyes, but I will myself not to cry.
He looks at me sharply. Is he surprised? Or not surprised at all? I can’t tell, but a part of me hopes he is surprised. That he hasn’t known it was me all along.
“That’s right. It seemed the most humane thing for all concerned.”
“Under the circumstances.”
“That’s right,” he repeats. Slightly defensive now, but who could blame him?
“What were the specifications?” I ask, though I thought I knew the answer. “How did you imagine it would be?”
“Well, obviously, I want it to be fast. Other than that, I’d rather not know.”
“That makes sense.” That’s what I would want, too. To have it be a cessation of now. An unblurred transition. No time to ponder, reflect. No time to try and plead your way back. Just done and dusted.
The waiter arrives with our entrees. Having barely touched our appetizers, we wave the food away, soupçons of lardon and all. We sip some more at the wine and push the food already in front of us around on our plates.
“Where do I fit?” I ask when our quiet has resumed.
We look at each other deeply. Both knowing more than we are saying. Both unwilling to utter the words.
“Well, you were an unexpected element, weren’t you?”
I don’t think that is true, but I play along.
“Was I?”
“Well, yes,” he says, reaching across the table. Takes my hand. I feel the trill of the excitement at his touch that I am beginning to get used to.
“Maybe not entirely,” I say.
“Maybe not,” he agrees. “But certainly aspects.”
He runs two fingers up my arm and smiles, some of the dread off him now.
“I really am very sorry to learn all of this.” I hesitate. Add, “I can’t even tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thanks. And I guess I know.”
“I guess you do.” I hesitate. And then: “So … now?”
“I don’t want to know. Don’t want to see it coming.”
“But now is too soon,” I protest, trying to keep my voice calm. And my heart. What was this?
“I just don’t want to be one of those who goes out flailing.” He says this calmly. Matter-of-fact. “I can’t be.”
“But you’re so far from that. Look at you! It could be years.”
He shakes his head. “Not years, no. Do you think I would do this lightly? Think of the stakes of getting it wrong. I’ve given it all a lot of thought. Thought through all of the angles, keeping in mind my kids, my insurance, the business, everything. This is the best time.”
And suddenly I understand completely. “Things go better if you don’t die of the disease.”
He doesn’t answer me. Not directly. But he looks at me deeply and there is something in his eyes that tells me he appreciates that I have understood this on my own. That I didn’t make him say the words.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SO THIS IS the thing that is. We know now where we stand. Both of us. We put it away for the time being. We have our dinner, though we don’t eat every bite. It is delicious in addition to being both pretentious and expensive. Afterwards, we walk hand in hand down Robson Street, stopping to watch street musicians and performers. He asks if I want my fortune told by an old woman who is reading tarot at a card table she has set up outside Banana Republic. I decline. I feel comfortable that there is nothing in the future that I need or want to know.
That night we make love with a new ferocity. We are clinging to something that can’t be held, that’s how it feels. Afterwards, we collapse into each other’s arms. I dream I am in the ocean, adrift. He is my life raft. I cling to him. If I let go of him, I know that I will drown.
I wake to strong sunlight and the call of gulls. I get up before he does and pull the pieces of myself together. Then I pack my things. It doesn’t take long.
He wakes as I head for the door.
“Will I see you again?” he calls, his voice sounding weaker than I’d heard it before. Not from illness, I’m sure of that. But from something new. Something that grabs for my heart.
I don’t answer. I leave his key on the sideboard in the hall. What is there, really, to say? I think about taking the sculpture. Something to remember him by, and I know he doesn’t want it and additionally has no need of it where he is going. But I leave it, in the end. He has had enough taken from him, and it certainly would not go easily through customs and airport security.
I go to the airport. Get a rental, a tidy European job, small and expensive but all that was available on short notice. I only need it for a few hours.
I pack all of my stuff neatly in the trunk of the car, then park it deep in a neighborhood near his office, in a place where I’ll be able to grab it quickly and go. I lock the rental car carefully and leave it behind, heading out on foot to find what I need.
It doesn’t take long. I know it as soon as I see it. The car is longer and older than is usually available anymore and it is perfect for my needs. It is solid, like a tree, and the ignition is broken easily. From the time I put my eyes on the vintage car until I start it without a key is under five minutes and then I’m gliding down the street in a full-sized piece of Detroit steel that was old enough to vote long before I was.
I don’t have long to wait outside his building. I know I’ve timed things pretty well. We haven’t known each other long, but I have a handle on his routine.
When he emerges from the building, I try not to analyze the firmness of his step or the jut of his chin, the tilt of his head. I try not to think about how he is feeling. Is this a good day for him or bad? Is he in pain? Has he said all his goodbyes?
I follow him for three blocks before I see the right moment coming up. I wonder if he feels the shadow or the ghost of me, but I discard the thought. It is fanciful, and there is no place for that here.
I begin to accelerate as his feet leave the curb. I admire again the spring in his step, the length of his stride.
He is in the middle of the intersection when I hit him, full on. He slides under the car. I keep going, grimacing at the solid bump bump I feel under the tires. Between the impact and the follow-up, I feel as certain as I can be that he is gone.
I leave the old car running in an alley a few blocks away, slipping off in the other direction, the direction in which I’ve left my rental car. Slipping off unnoticed and unseen.
It all happens very fast.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I GET THROUGH airport security in record time. In the age of racial and social profiling, I don’t come up on any lists. I am someone’s wife, perhaps. Someone’s boss. Someone’s mother/daughter/aunt. I am someone you need not fear. My pale face and gentle demeanor are practically a get-out-of-jail-free card, or so I’ve observed.
I get through security quickly and end up with time to kill before my flight. Despite my profession, that’s never been something I’m very good at. Time is for holding. Cherishing. Time is fo
r saving or even cutting. Killing time is just counterintuitive to me, as ironic as that may seem. But there is a wine bar near my gate and, with my nerves where they are, and some long flights ahead, a glass of wine does not seem like a bad idea.
I order what sounds like a serviceable enough Sauvignon blanc and settle down to watch one of the televisions perched at the corners of the bar space.
It is a local station and top of the hour is the story of a successful local businessman and philanthropist struck down by an unknown motorist. Beloved by his community, missed by his family, respected by his peers; his loss will be felt. It was a hit-and-run and I learn that, though the car was found, the car’s owner was nowhere to be seen. They are searching for him now.
I don’t realize that I am holding my breath until they say the businessman died on impact. The pronouncement leaves me relieved and broken all in one breath. It’s like a light going out. I want it to be true. I don’t want it to be true. I don’t know what to wish for anymore.
I keep my face stoic, but I taste what I am feeling and realize that I am gutted.
I send a text to my contact.
It is complete.
I know there will be a deposit in my Bitcoin account within hours. I do a bit of Googling and find a place that will accept donations in Bitcoin for cancer research. I donate the amount I know I will soon receive. I know it is not even a token gesture, but I do it anyway. It doesn’t make me feel better, but it doesn’t make me feel worse, either. That seems like a start.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ABOUT THE TIME I am finishing donating money, Atwater is mentioned in the news again and my ears perk up. He is still near the top of the news cycle. The tone is different now than it was a few days ago. I sense it right away. More urgent. It is this urgency that catches my ear and it doesn’t take long to determine what the talking heads are all chirping about.
When last I’d tuned in, Atwater’s location was a big question mark. Extrapolations based on where he had last killed and the pattern from where he had killed before. Now there has been a sighting, not 100 percent confirmed but strongly suspected, at a beach community in the southern part of the county in which he normally lives.
The talking heads are happy now. Magpies on a fence. There is a lot of shiny stuff here to go over. Police have leads but also there is speculation that Atwater might not be alive. Dead by his own hand, and don’t let the pearly gates hit you on the way out.
“It is not clear how William Atwater, who has now killed at least sixteen children in and around the San Pasado area, has thus far managed to elude custody.” The county is roughly five thousand square miles, we are told. It incorporates miles of beaches, acre upon acre of rich and fertile farmland, a few lakes large enough to support boating and even fishing, a university town, some mountainous areas, and some densely forested regions.
The area under discussion is not huge, but it is varied enough to provide potential hiding places. And, after all, I remind myself, there is no reason I know of that will make him stay within the boundaries of the area in which he was born.
This brings to mind a picture of some feral creature, forced by nature to stay within a territorial area determined at his birth. Some pull of instinct. Something pure and primal.
Or maybe it’s just all he knows.
The images wash over me. The ones I see on the screen. The ones I recall from the previous week. And then a bunch from my own personal library, supplemented by memory. Children. All of them. I almost can’t bear it. Like the parents I see in the news, in that moment I feel as though I’d have trouble walking. Trouble standing erect.
I sip my wine. Outwardly calm, blinking away the feelings that surface.
The balance of the day of traveling and seething make things worse not better, and by the time I get home, I pad around the tiny rooms of my little cottage like a caged panther or some other cat too large to be constrained by the walls of a house. I’d expected coming home to soothe me, but it doesn’t, and the walls seemed to reverberate with voices that aren’t there. I feel awash in a sea of uselessness. Even the things that had previously given me some pleasure leave me feeling empty. It’s as though I no longer have a place or purpose. Or maybe more like, I haven’t had those things for such a long time, but something has now made it violently clear. I feel on the edge of something that is spiraling out of control.
I think of that pure column of happy I felt briefly in Vancouver. That tiny slice that felt like infinite possibility. Is it him that I miss? And what we’d shared in Vancouver? Or what had been possible—for a moment—for us? I found him, then I lost him. I want to howl at the moon.
If it were only that, it would be enough. But that is only a single facet of this diamond and each facet reflects on the others with a razor sharpness. Alone, one facet could cut. Together, they threaten to rip my insides to shreds. And each one is about loss. Loss of love. Loss of life. Loss of humanity. It feels like I could go on citing these facets, riding them down: a death spiral of loss leading to a sea of helplessness because, of course, there is nothing that can be done.
And then I realize that I’m wrong. Of course, there is something I can do. Something that both my profession and my background have combined to make me better equipped for than maybe anyone else on Earth. It is a ridiculous thought—I know that as soon as it hits. And beyond the rational, certainly. But even just the thought of it gives me purpose. And, with that, it gives me direction. I am in motion almost before I know what I’m doing. And rational hasn’t had a lot to do with me for a long time, in any case.
I begin to research. Before long, I am more of an expert on William Atwater than the world probably needs. Like most people in the West in the 21st century, Atwater has left an electronic trace as long as he’s been packing some sort of device, which has been his entire adult life. I come quickly to believe that somewhere, in all that electronic detritus, I will find a clue to where he is. And why do I need to find him? I’m not sure of that, but I know that I must and am equally certain that I will. Confident. I know he is somewhere. It is just a matter of narrowing down the where.
And so I settle in, at first searching for the electronic trail, then putting energy towards trying to read and understand it. There was a brief time when he had toyed with both Twitter and Instagram at the same time a lot of others had done so. Both feeds have long been neglected, but here one can see glimpses of forests and the occasional lunch. No real clues there, other than a location. For everything he’d tweeted or Instagrammed, perhaps five years before, he’d been in the north part of his county. This is a slim clue, hardly worth noting. I keep it anyway.
A plain old identity search on the major engines produces an equally thin stream. He played baseball in high school, but only for one year and that was early on and he didn’t finish: he was notably absent from a team photo of the state champions at the end of the season, even though his name comes up on a team roster early in the year. The search also reveals some adjacent Atwaters who I don’t figure have much to do with his family at all. They have better addresses in posher parts of the county. William Atwater’s immediate family had definitely been from a poorer branch: a foreclosure notice to his childhood address in his sophomore year confirms this idea. There is more in this vein: things that are almost interesting but that together don’t produce a very clear picture.
While I do this work, I don’t think about what I will do if I encounter him. When. A part of me is certain that will take care of itself. It is locating him, that’s the thing. Nor do I allow myself to dwell on the fact that platoons of professional hunters have thus far not turned him up. I have the feeling that part does not truly matter. At one point he will be found. And when he is, I’ll be nearby and ready. And by then I’ll know what to do—that’s the one thing I know for sure. I don’t know now, but I will. Then.
The search doesn’t make me feel any better, but it makes me feel a little less empty. Like I am doing something. Moving something
ahead.
To get things going in that direction, I read a book about a serial killer and discover the author had close contact with everyone close to him as she was doing the research and then writing the book. She’d had access to his family and friends and even, once he was incarcerated, with the killer himself.
I think about that for a while and realize that it is another—albeit low-tech—route to information. Apparently, for the author of the book I’d read, everyone was prepared to crawl all over each other in their enthusiasm to talk with her. Everyone has a story. Everyone wants to be heard. And, in our culture, authors are respected. So after a few days of trying to contact people and getting nowhere, I start saying I am writing a book. It’s a lie, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Everything changes. Doors start opening and suddenly no one will shut up.
With sudden access to the key people in his past as well as a lot of nearby bystanders, I begin to get a more complete picture of William Atwater. A loner, in school and as a young adult. Possibly abused by at least one of several stepfathers, according to a couple of his former classmates. That sophomore year appears to have been significant. Maybe things had been lost that can never be regained. But of course, at this stage, all of that is unverifiable. He is broken. Clearly. Beyond that, we don’t know for sure.
His real father was dead or lost. Stories vary and it seems impossible to determine which is true. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. His mother mostly raised him and is still alive. She had three other children, all with different dads, and it seems to me that she will have information to add.
Her phone number is listed. In all of this, that fact surprises me for some reason: How many people can still be reached on a landline? How many people still have a phone number that is on public record? Maybe that will change, I think, now that he is well known. Maybe these are the last days some of these phones will ring. It seems likely that the Atwater phone rings a lot. These days.
Endings Page 8