Little Comfort

by Edwin Hill

  And when he stopped talking, Hester listened to him breathe. She closed her eyes and felt like she might sleep for a week.

  “Daphne sent a text earlier,” Morgan said. “She heard the story on the news.”

  “Did she say where she went? Or what she’s been doing?”

  “No. I didn’t ask either.”

  “Is she coming home?”

  “She asked if she should,” Morgan said. “What should I write?”

  Hester looked out the back of the ambulance, at the snowy road unfurling behind them. She thought about Gabe. Of being unwanted. Kate closed her eyes, and her breathing grew steady. She stroked the girl’s curly hair. Kate would be wanted, no matter what the cost.

  “Tell Daphne to come home whenever she wants to,” Hester said. “But that we’ll be fine till then.”

  APRIL

  Hester submitted to the humilities of the courthouse security, signing in and emptying her pockets, walking through the scanner, hoping the whole time to avoid a pat-down. Camera shutters clacked as she picked up her bag. Gaze forward, she told herself. Don’t engage. God, had she zipped her fly? Maybe she should have worn something less casual than jeans?

  She took the arching staircase instead of the elevator to the second floor and looked out over Boston Harbor through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She nodded to Detective White, who stood by the courtroom door texting someone. And then she waited on a hard plastic chair. No one had told her how much waiting there would be in court.

  She hadn’t seen Gabe since the short hearing in March, when he’d plead guilty to all of the federal charges against him—murder, kidnapping, crossing state lines in the act of a felony, etc.—and (thankfully) denied the press the long trial they’d predicted. He’d offered up detailed accounts of each of the six murders, while family members, who’d traveled in from as far away as San Francisco, wept.

  Today, once the proceedings got underway, Hester took a seat at the back of the room, where she felt strangers staring at her and did her best to keep her expression neutral. In the two months since she’d left the hospital, she’d learned that a smile could be interpreted in many ways. Detective White took the seat beside hers. “Almost done,” she said.

  “I can only hope,” Hester said. “Are you back to work?”

  Angela nodded. “You?”

  “Not quite,” Hester said.

  The judge entered. He conferred with the bailiff, and a moment later Gabe shuffled in wearing his orange jumpsuit and chains, escorted by two uniformed officers. His hair had been cut short, and he’d lost the beard. He looked as though he’d shed thirty pounds, and Hester was struck again by how young he was. He joined the court-appointed lawyer at one of the tables. The courtroom artist started in on his first sketch. Later, the sketches would show up on the local news, and in them Gabe’s eyes would flash with evil, his chin would point, his teeth would glint in a barely perceptible smirk.

  The press had had their fun with the story. Hester had managed to go from action hero to accomplice to victim in a matter of about ten days. She’d read countless stories with an unfounded subtext of sexual assault. Plenty of speculation, no matter what she said in interviews, had gone into what actually happened in the cabin on the lake. Now, Lifetime was interested in making a movie of the week about the whole ordeal. A staff writer had even called the other day. She didn’t understand why Hester and Morgan had a dog door inside the house and had finally said that they’d changed it to a laundry chute in the script anyway. “A laundry chute,” Hester had said. “Imagine dropping a child down a laundry chute!”

  *

  The judge read the charges against Gabe and asked if he’d like to make a statement before sentencing. Gabe stood with his lawyer. He shuffled from side to side. He opened his mouth as if to say something.

  “Mr. DiPursio,” the judge said, “please, let’s be mindful of the court’s time.”

  Gabe turned. Hester knew she should feel angry or victimized or thrilled, or that she should at least play the part to satisfy this whole spectacle. She knew she should have been one of those reading a victim statement, one that would somehow make it onto YouTube, one that would empower with its eloquence. But she simply felt sad. She stood almost without thinking and shrugged away the voice that told her to be still. She took a step forward and nearly said Gabe’s name. She still had trouble sleeping and still had panic attacks when Kate was out of her sight or when she heard a trunk slam, but she also knew that Gabe could have killed her at any time, that Sam had sent him to her house to do just that, but that he’d let her go, and that he’d taken her for a reason. She knew that she was the one person on earth who’d shown up for him at any of the hearings—certainly Lila was nowhere to be seen—and that she was the only person to offer him any comfort.

  “I’m very sorry,” Gabe said from the front of the room. He didn’t look at anyone but her when he said it.

  “Anything else?” the judge asked, and Gabe shook his head and listened as the judge told him he spoke for the victims when he handed down a sentence of six consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

  It was the best-case scenario, right?

  It was what Hester should have hoped for. It’s what she’d pleaded for in her op-ed against capital punishment that had run in the Globe, when she’d learned there could be power in playing a victim.

  Afterward, as the lawyers gathered their briefs and legal pads and the other observers filed out of the narrow seats, Hester sat still. A woman paused on her way out to say she thought Hester was an inspiration.

  “Thank you,” Hester said.

  She’d gotten used to having strangers stop her on the street, for good or for bad.

  It was time to move on, and yet she still edged up the aisle to where the court artist dabbed the finishing touches on his latest sketch. It featured Gabe gazing lovingly toward the back of the court.

  “Do you have one of me?” Hester asked, and the artist had the decency to blush as he flipped to the previous page. It was a good drawing, one that would run on the local news later that night with a caption that read, Victim shows conflicted emotions. And like all the drawings of Hester that had appeared on the news, she looked tiny and weak, almost forlorn.

  “Can I buy it from you?” she asked.

  “I can’t,” the artist said.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks.” And when he shook his head and put the pad away, she offered a thousand. Surely there had to be something physical to remember this whole thing by, something to press between the pages of a book. Something besides a pinkie left permanently numb from frostbite.

  *

  Outside the courthouse, Hester breathed in fresh air. It was filled with the sweet, piney scent of mulch. Today, on the last day of April, the sun shone. Beds of daffodils and a line of budding pink dogwoods announced that spring, after a few false starts, was finally, truly here. Detective White met her by the door. “Need me to walk with you?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” Hester said. “But I think I have this.”

  A handful of photographers lurked, and a single reporter asked her for a comment, but as she left the detective and marched past them with a practiced step, it was as though she could feel the story finally flittering away. Something more exciting would happen soon enough to make Hester Thursby another sordid footnote in local history. She thought about Gabe, who’d be shackled in a van headed toward the rest of his life by now.

  She followed the path along the water to where Jamie waited on a park bench. The dogs—Waffles and Butch—ran in a circle on the grass with Kate at the very center. Kate broke away to run to Hester, and Hester crouched to hug her. “We playing tag!” Kate said.

  “Who’s winning?”

  “Me!”

  Hester watched the girl run to the dogs. Kate had survived everything unscathed. Once in a while now she mentioned “the bad man” but nothing else, and Hester and Morgan had vowed never to speak of what had happened in
front of her.

  “You survived,” Jamie said, choosing the words as carefully as usual.

  It had taken him a month to get out of the hospital after the shooting, a month in which Hester had visited him nearly every day. He was still recovering, and he had a new scar on his chest to join the one he’d received in combat. Hester had gone to pick him up at the hospital, and then brought him to the house, where he moved into Daphne’s empty first-floor apartment. “It’s better this way,” she’d said when he’d tried to protest. “It’s better than being alone.”

  Now, she rested her head on his shoulder and let him put his big arm around her. “It wasn’t that bad,” she said.

  Morgan could have come to the hearing too, but Hester had told him to go to work instead. He’d been supportive. Really, he had. So supportive that he’d taken a sledgehammer to the wall between their apartments where the dog door used to be. “You should have a second egress,” he’d said as he’d sat on his closet floor and sucked in air. Hester wondered whether he believed any of the stories the press had hinted at, lurid stories of sex and conspiracy. She still worried that that belief might fester into something bigger and dangerous and much more difficult to destroy, but she’d deal with that if and when it came.

  “Why do I feel so bad right now?” she asked Jamie. “I should hate Gabe.”

  “We should hate a lot of people,” Jamie said.

  “Who do you hate?”

  Jamie thought about it for a moment. As far as Hester was concerned, he had plenty of people to choose from. The police. The Afghanis. Gabe and Sam. Even Hester, in a way. “No one,” he said, finally.

  “You’re a better person than me.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  Kate broke away from the dogs and ran over to them. Hester lifted the girl onto the bench beside her as her phone beeped. It was a text from Wendy Richards, asking about the hearing. Wendy had come to visit Hester in the hospital, distraught over “Aaron’s” death, and the two women had somehow struck up a friendship. Her generosity had come in handy, especially during the worst of the media coverage, and Hester had found herself not only grateful, but liking the woman too.

  Now, she tapped a message into her phone, and then read it off to Jamie. “All okay.”

  “All okay,” Jamie said.

  “All okay,” Kate said.

  Hester pulled Kate onto her lap and then lifted her into the air, toward a sky the color of delphiniums. It was hard to leave her, hard to trust that nothing terrible would happen the moment the girl was out of her sight. But it was even more important that Hester find a way to do just that, to trust again. She took a deep breath. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked Jamie. “Could you watch Kate for the day? There’s something I need to do.”

  *

  The chain blocking the driveway was gone, and the overgrown path behind it cleared. A sign hanging on the trunk of a tree said that the property had sold. Hester turned off the main street and drove into the woods. The birches were budding and the snow replaced by patches of fiddleheads poking through the fragrant forest floor. As she crested the hill and rode down toward the lakeshore, she barely recognized Little Comfort. She recognized even less of it as she pulled in beside the footprint of the old cabin, a shallow stone foundation and a pile of pine boards were all that remained of the little house. She was surprised by how little connection she felt to the place as she climbed out of the truck, but, really, the winter, the cold, that smell of smoke she thought would never wash off her skin, the terror, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t this day. It was far off, a distant nightmare that would somehow, someday, fade away.

  By the shoreline, she looked out over the water. “Ice out” had happened on the lake two weeks ago; still, she closed her eyes and could imagine that gray sheet stretching to the horizon. For a moment, she could feel the cold seeping to her bones. She opened her eyes and took in the still, blue water, the chartreuse of the budding trees, the calls of the songbirds, the hope of spring. She felt warm sun on her face and believed she could remember this day, these images, instead. Eventually, at least.

  Behind her, a twig snapped. “You didn’t bring the kid with you?” she heard Lila say.

  “No,” Hester said. “I learned my lesson. She won’t come to work with me anymore. You never know who the dangerous ones are, do you?”

  “Sometimes it’s obvious.”

  Lila sat on an outcropping of stone. Her left arm where her hand had been amputated was tucked into her coat sleeve.

  “How have you been?” Hester asked.

  “You mean this?” Lila asked, holding up her arm. “It’s taking some time to get used to, I won’t lie. I have a prosthetic, but sometimes it’s easier to go bare. How about you?”

  Hester shrugged. Her scars were invisible. “Kate started using pronouns.”

  Lila laughed.

  “I kept wondering when it would happen, and then it did and I wasn’t expecting it. There are only so many firsts, and they’re exciting. But why didn’t someone warn me about the lasts? Why didn’t someone tell me how much these changes would hurt?” Hester finally looked away from the water to where the woman sat beside her. “I was surprised you didn’t come to court today.”

  “I followed it online. I didn’t have the heart to show up in person. Or the courage.”

  “It’s over now. Or at least mostly.”

  “As over as it will ever be. Is that why you wanted to meet here today?”

  “In a way. I guess I wanted to see Little Comfort one last time. In its glory. I wanted to wash away the winter.”

  “You picked a good day, though summer is even better. When the loons are out. When it’s warm enough to swim.”

  Hester brushed dried lichen and pine needles from her jeans. She crouched at the shore and swept her hand through gin-clear water, and then let the droplets trail onto her tongue. It was still too cold to swim, but even as she thought that she found herself stripping off her clothes and tossing them to the forest floor. She stepped into the water, and then dove forward, the shock of the cold pressing on her chest and forcing the air from her lungs, but, as she surfaced, she felt cleansed. She dove again, into the silence, into another world, and pulled herself forward as long as she could, till her lungs felt as though they’d burst. She surfaced and looked up to the sky.

  Back on shore, she shivered as she dried off with a t-shirt and then struggled into her clothes.

  “You’re crazy,” Lila said with a smile. “It’s already starting to feel different to me. The sale closed last week. We shouldn’t even be here. I’ll miss this place. So much.”

  Hester dug her keys from her pocket. It was time to go. “Will you?” she asked.

  “Of course. I grew up here.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Someplace else. North Carolina, maybe. Or Seattle.” Lila bit her lower lip to squelch a smile. “It hasn’t sunk in yet, but I can do anything. Anything I want.”

  “How much did you get for it in the sale?” Hester asked, though she already knew. Property sales were public record. Lila had sold for over two million dollars. Undeveloped lots on the lake rarely came up for sale, and the investment banker from Boston who’d bought it had already filed the paperwork to replace the cabin with a mansion.

  Wills were public record too.

  “I looked up your parents’ will,” Hester said. “I should have done that when I first met you. They left the property to you and Sam in trust. Both of you had to sign off to sell.”

  “I told you that when I first met you,” Lila said.

  “I thought that too, but then I went through my notes to see what you’d actually said. You told me to tell Sam that you planned to sell the property. But you couldn’t do that without his consent. And he couldn’t give his consent without coming out of hiding. You also didn’t tell me that you’d petitioned the probate court to have the terms of the will changed and had been denied. You didn’t tell me a lot of thing
s, but mostly I think you knew he was dangerous and you hoped that he’d come looking for you when he found out you’d hired me.”

  “You think I planned all of this?” Lila held up the stump of her left arm.

  “I don’t know,” Hester said. She backed up till she was at the truck’s door. “All I know is that you said you’d kept his secrets. You said that to him while I was right there. And this worked out for you, and you’re glad your brother’s gone. And I helped make it happen.”

  “You can’t prove anything.”

  “I know. And know that I know. Of all the awful people I met during this whole thing, I wonder if you might have been the worst. A little generosity, and you could have saved Gabe from all of this. One bit of grace. Enjoy the money. You earned it. Maybe we both did.”

  Hester stepped onto the running board and into the truck, and then started the engine. In the rearview mirror, she saw Lila’s stony face, an expression that confirmed Hester had gotten it all, or at least most of it, right. Any other secrets, Lila could keep for herself.

  Hester turned the corner. Little Comfort disappeared behind the budding trees. She revved the engine, barreling out of the woods and onto the road. She thought about Morgan and Jamie and Waffles. Even Daphne. She imagined Kate’s laugh, her perfect little peals of delight. Her pronouns.

  It was time to go home.