Mother slows the car to wave at Mr. Leonid, who is walking his dog, and then pulls over to compliment Betty Melmer on her geraniums and to ask her to please send over her lemon cake recipe when she finds the time. Mrs. Melmer tells Mother that it was her great-aunt’s recipe and promises to copy it out and have it in the mail by the end of the day. We continue to roll slowly through town, with Mother shouting something out of her window every block or so. A woman I don’t know rushes over to tell Mother that the Hartnetts might be getting a divorce. Mother nods sagely and then we continue on our way.
Finally, we pull into our driveway. I make no move to get out of the car, assuming that Mother will want to say something to me first, but she opens her door without even looking in my direction and walks toward the house. There will be shouting, then, shouting that she doesn’t want anyone to hear. I gather my things and bow my head and follow her inside.
Still, I am somehow unprepared when she fixes me with her eyes and quietly says, “What the hell was that?”
It is not just the swear—a word I have never heard come from her mouth—it is the fact that she does not even trust herself to yell. She is that angry.
“What?” I ask, even though I know it will only make her all the more furious.
Mother practically snarls, “Don’t you even try to play dumb with me. What was she doing there?”
“She told you herself. She wanted to see the dress, that’s all.” I shrug and try to walk away, but Mother grabs my arm, her bony fingers pressing into my flesh.
“Careful,” I say evenly. “You wouldn’t want any bruises to show up on the live wedding feed.”
Mother gasps and takes a step back. I have never talked to her that way before. She looks frightened of me and there is a part of me that wants nothing more than to show her just how frightening I can be, but I also know that I am not yet out of danger and I won’t be until the wedding airs.
“Isn’t it better this way?” I try instead. “I mean, how exactly were we going to explain it if she didn’t even come to the wedding? People may have been satisfied these past three and a half years that she just wanted to concentrate on school, but surely there would be questions if she couldn’t manage to make it down from Chicago for something as important as this.”
“Yes, but even so, how did she know? How did she know about today?”
I see that I need to calm Mother down, so I say, “Gretchen has been live tweeting everything about the wedding, hasn’t she? You asked her to keep the fans informed every step along the way. I’ll bet she tweeted something about the fitting. That must be how Lissa knew exactly where we’d be.”
Mother’s shoulders relax visibly.
“Yes, that must be it.”
I should leave it here, I know, but I cannot resist. I kiss Mother on the cheek.
“Thank you for asking her to be a bridesmaid. Thank you for knowing how important that is to me.”
I do not give Mother a chance to say that it was Lissa herself who volunteered for the role, who strong-armed Mother into it by doing so on camera. Instead I race up the stairs to my room and turn on the radio. When I am sure that Mother has not followed me, I take out Margot’s phone and type a note to Libby.
I hope you found what I left for you. It’s every page of every diary I ever kept. The wedding will only be the beginning. People are going to want to know the rest. I trust you.
Once I am sure the message has been delivered, I hide the phone again, then skip lightly back downstairs. Mother looks startled as I enter the kitchen. She is sitting at the counter with her hands wrapped around her favorite coffee cup, the one that Daddy bought her at Hershey Park. She is not doing anything but sitting, which is unusual. She must still be shaken over seeing Lissa.
“I’m famished,” I tell her cheerfully. “I think I’ll make some French toast. Do you want any?”
“No, thank you,” she answers primly and stands to go. Then from the hallway I hear, “Be careful you don’t eat too much. Mrs. Riley is a miracle worker, but I don’t think she can make your dress get any bigger.”
Liberty
The flash drive is on my bedside table where I left it when Mike pulls open the curtains, a towel around his waist and his toothbrush tucked inside his cheek. He looks down in the direction of the courtyard, grunts, and shuffles back toward the bathroom.
“Mr. Danziger is torturing his dog again,” he manages around the toothbrush. I hear him spit, then he says more clearly, “We really ought to call someone.”
I tuck my head down underneath the covers so that I’m looking at the flash drive as if from within a tunnel.
“Who exactly are we supposed to call? I don’t think animal cruelty laws apply to people who dress their pets up like Ewoks.”
“Well, they should,” Mike proclaims and starts riffling through his closet to find something to wear. “You working from home today?”
I nod, then realize that Mike cannot see my head and reluctantly pull back the covers and sit up.
“I have some documents to go through. I really should have started on it last night.”
I yawn.
“But you were avoiding calling your mother,” Mike says pointedly. “Understood.”
After Mike had gone to sleep, I stayed up and binge-watched Netflix with a carton of ice cream to keep me company. Whatever secrets Essie had entrusted me with, I did not want them, at least not yet. My head felt like it was too crowded already and I needed some time to decompress. If I couldn’t visit the horses, well, old episodes of Gilmore Girls would have to do. When Mike wandered through the living room around two a.m. to get a drink of water, he just rolled his eyes and went back to bed.
Now he pulls on a sweatshirt and begins fishing through his drawer for socks.
“I have study group for dinner. Will you be all right?”
“Sure. It’s not as if she’s going to come up here and hunt me down.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed, socks in hand.
“I’ll be fine,” I reassure him.
He leans across the bed to kiss me and then goes. I stare at the ceiling for a while longer, not yet ready to face the day. Finally, I get up and slip my arms into my robe, drop the flash drive into my pocket, and move in the direction of the kitchen in search of caffeine. Since my espresso yesterday had kept me up half the night, I settle for tea.
Pulling a blanket around my shoulders, I sit on the couch and open up my laptop. But instead of plugging in the flash drive, I find myself on my mother’s website, the one dedicated to advocating for the release of Quentin Ames. It’s been updated since I last visited it. She must have recruited someone with a fairly decent graphic design background. She was good at that, recruiting. Quentin Ames was why we stayed at Black Rock well into the winter, but Mama was the reason people came in the first place. They trusted her. And if Mama believed that Ames was right about the Second Coming of Christ, they figured they should show up to see for sure. Then, when the Feds arrived, it became more than that; it became an “us versus them” situation. We were up against the world. There was no backing down from that. At least not until Justice was shot.
Mama’s website is chock-full of testimonials from those who’ve been touched by Quentin Ames’s ministry. It seems he’s continued to preach from within the penitentiary. He writes a weekly sermon and sends it to Mama and then she posts it online. There’s a delay, of course, and sometimes his letters are lost. Censored, Mama would say. Other times, he preaches to her directly during their visits and she writes down what he’s saying as best she can. She even took a class in shorthand specially, so that what she posts later more accurately reflects what Quentin Ames has said.
Mama isn’t the only one who visits him, but she’s the only one who’s allowed to be a conduit for his word. Most of the testimonials are fr
om women, many of whom have driven hours to see him in person. They write about how it feels to be in his presence and, though I don’t want to admit it, I remember and I know that much of what they write is true.
Quentin Ames was—is—a narcissist and probably a sociopath as well. But when he looked at you, the world seemed brighter; the sun shone hotter. Even as a child, I felt it. Even on the worst days we had at Black Rock, the coldest, the ones when there was not enough food to eat or Mo Laramie was in a temper or the ice had gotten up underneath the roof in the back corner of the visitor center and it had started to leak, a look from Quentin Ames could make it all feel worth it.
I remember that Justice had gotten into a fight with one of the Niccols boys about why they didn’t bring back more game when they went out hunting. She had taken to counting their bullets in secret and finally came out and accused them of wasting ammunition on target practice or else being terrible shots. I’m not sure which one she thought was worse, but it had been made clear to the teenagers that if they were to be allowed to go out hunting on their own, there shouldn’t be any fooling about. Even then, before the snows, it was getting harder to sneak out to get supplies. Quentin Ames and Pa had both said that bullets needed to be rationed the same as anything else, so what Justice was accusing the Niccols brothers of doing would have repercussions with the grown-ups if any of it were true.
The older boy, whose name I can’t remember, said that he shouldn’t have to answer to a little girl. Justice’s eyes flared. Her chin jutted out and the younger of the brothers laughed and pointed and teased her about looking like she might cry. But he misunderstood her expression, because Justice wasn’t a crybaby. The glint in her eye was anger, not the welling up of tears. Without a word, Justice snatched the rifle out of the hand of the closer of the two boys and stormed out of the visitor center. After trading a look of surprise, the Niccols boys chased her outside, with Ginny and me tagging along behind them. But Justice was already gone. She had disappeared into the woods. Not long after, we heard a single shot and Justice appeared a short time later, dragging a wild turkey by its neck. She threw it down at the feet of Niccols the Older and handed back the gun.
She stormed back toward the visitor center without a word and that was when Quentin Ames appeared. He knelt before her and I saw the knots go out of her shoulders, saw her tightly clenched fists relax. Quentin Ames placed his palms on Justice’s cheeks. He kissed the top of her head. Then he spun her narrow body around and she walked back to the Niccols boys.
“I shouldn’t have taken your rifle without permission. I’m sorry.”
Justice never apologized without a lingering note of resentment, but on this occasion there was none. That was what Quentin Ames did. He took all the anger that existed in your body and simply drained it away.
“We’re sorry too,” one of the Niccols boys replied. “We shouldn’t have made fun.”
If it had always been like that, then I might have grown up to be like those women who visited Quentin Ames in prison. I might have believed in his goodness too. But what I slowly realized was that every time he did something like he did that day with Justice, every time he soothed and relieved a person of their fury, leaving them with calm, he did not destroy it. Instead he gathered all that bile, that wrath, and held on to it. He was saving it for later. For when the Feds surrounded us. For when he wanted us to be ready for a fight. He wanted to go down in a blaze of glory. He just chickened out in the end.
* * *
—————
The phone rings and rings and no one answers. Mama got rid of the answering machine after Justice died and they never got another. I should hang up, but for some reason I find the sound comforting and so I let it ring. I can picture it, the phone. It’s mounted to the side of the pantry in the kitchen, the wire stapled against the wall and disappearing into the basement through a small hole in the floor. Yellow plastic casing. A real metal bell inside. The sort of spiraling cord that you could pull and stretch and twist between your fingers, could wrap around your wrist and body and then unwrap again. I’m taken by surprise when she does pick up after all that unanswered ringing.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” I say. I’m met by silence. I wonder if it’s been so long that my mother doesn’t recognize my voice. Then, because there’s still nothing but the sound of my mother breathing, I venture, “I didn’t think anyone was home.”
“Your father is just out with Topher running the north fence. Had a storm last week that brought some branches down and the fence didn’t fare so well in places. They’ll get it fixed up right by nightfall, though, I reckon.”
“Is Topher’s shoulder still bothering him?”
“It’s much better. I mixed him up a salve that seems to have finally got the inflammation down. He tell you about that himself or have you been chatting with Penny again?” I don’t answer. Topher’s daughter, Penelope, is only one of the ways I keep tabs on my parents and the goings-on at the ranch, and she wasn’t actually the source of this particular piece of information. My mother doesn’t seem to care, though, because she continues on, “No matter. I’ll let him know you asked after him. He’ll be tickled. I suppose you’re calling to tell me why you don’t have time to write a letter to the parole board. You needn’t bother. I’ve seen you on the television. They must have you booked from dawn till dusk. How could you possibly have time to sit down and write one little letter?”
“It’s not that,” I insist.
“Oh no? Then your little bit of fame must really be getting to your head. Have you forgotten what Quentin has sacrificed for us?”
She’s referring to the fact that Ames took the fall for the entire occupation, that he made certain that no one else who was at Black Rock went to jail. It’s this selflessness that makes so many women bake him cookies and write him letters. They even send him pairs of their own underwear, or so Mama once let slip before I left for college, her voice dripping with scorn.
“I haven’t forgotten,” I answer truthfully. As difficult as it is to admit, I know that even though I lost my sister at Black Rock, I could easily have lost both my parents as well.
“Then why would you deny him a few minutes of your time? He would do the same for any one of us.”
“No he wouldn’t. He killed Justice.”
“Oh, honey, no he didn’t. The government killed your sister. Quentin was the one who tried to save her. He just wasn’t fast enough.”
“He pushed her.”
“No,” Mama says. Her voice is brittle. “He didn’t. I won’t let you say such a thing.”
In the hottest part of summer, Justice and I would sneak down to the creek and climb a tree that curved up over the water. Then we would jump. Each time, until I was falling, I was never sure that I was actually going to go through with it. That’s what this feels like, that moment before the fall, but then the words start coming out of me.
“When Ames brought Justice out of the visitor center, there was a protest happening. Birders mad that the park had been closed so long, angry about the damage we must be doing to the birds’ breeding grounds. It was being broadcast live on the local news.”
I wait for my mother to object to what I have told her, but she is silent and so I take a breath and go on. “It’s not what I thought I’d find when I drove over to the station, but I remembered how the cameras had sometimes been out by the entrance. I figured they might have some footage of her, of Justice. Do you remember how Ames used to make us play outside when people were watching? I got it in my head that there might be video of all of us playing hopscotch, and if there was, then finding it would be the closest I would ever get to seeing her alive again.
“That was how I tracked down the tape. It never got picked up nationally. The FBI had taken a copy, of course, in case they ever needed it at trial. But the station still had the original footage. There was no
cover-up, no government conspiracy. It was in a closet less than an hour away from where Justice died, less than forty-five minutes from our house. All those years and you never even went looking for answers. It was almost as if you didn’t want to know.”
I pause again, but my mother is still silent. She’s been silent for almost twenty years. “Quentin Ames held Justice up in front of him to stop the bullet. It would have missed her otherwise. He lifted her up when he saw Derrick Cumberland motion to the sniper. And when Justice was hit, he dropped her and left her bleeding. He could have surrendered then, but he didn’t. He kept his rifle pointed at the protesters and just stood there and watched her die. Finally, they shot Ames in the shoulder and Derrick rushed forward to put his hands over the hole in Justice’s neck.”
I stop to catch my breath and listen hard for any sign that my mother is still on the other end. Then I realize that it doesn’t matter if she has hung up. I need to say it all. “It took two hundred and thirteen seconds for Derrick to reach Justice and put pressure on the wound. By then the camera wasn’t pointed in the right direction. The cameraman must have been getting jostled around. But you can hear the moment when Derrick reached Justice and called out for help. I still wonder sometimes if it wasn’t the bullet hole that killed her but those two hundred and thirteen seconds. That’s time that Quentin Ames stole from her. Even after he used her body as a shield, it’s worse somehow that he couldn’t even spare her the decency of taking off the scarf you knitted him to press it against your dying child’s neck. I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. He didn’t try to save her. In fact, it was just the opposite. Please don’t ever mention that man’s name to me again.”
“The FBI agent admitted culpability,” Mama says next, but her voice is small.
The Book of Essie Page 21