“His name was Henry Morrison. He was only two weeks away from retirement when Justice died. Taking the blame for Justice’s death was something he did to make sure our family got the highest possible settlement from the government. It was something he did for us to try to make things right. I’ve spoken with him. He’s a good man. He’s the one you should be sending home-baked cookies to and whose name you should be trying to clear. Not Quentin Ames. Quentin Ames is paying for his sins and he is precisely where he deserves to be. Until you realize that, I don’t have anything more to say to you.”
I accept the silence on the other end of the line and wait patiently for my mother to process everything I’ve said.
Minutes pass before she whispers, “I don’t believe you.”
“I know. And that’s all right. I forgive you anyway.”
“What for, exactly?”
My eyes well up, and through the prisms of the tears, I see Quentin Ames with his face tilted up in rapture and Mama knitting stockings by the fire. I see Mo Laramie’s foot in the pot of water and Justice striding off into the woods with the rifle she stole from the Niccols boy. And then I see the blood, the way it must have looked as it melted craters in the snow. I remember this the most clearly even though it was Agent Morrison who saw it and I accept the memory as a gift that he has given me to make me strong enough to say this single word.
“Everything.”
* * *
—————
I am still shaking long after the phone goes dead. I don’t move. From the living room window I can see the balcony of the top-floor apartment across the street. The door is open to the inside and a small boy appears, sitting on a wheeled animal of some sort. He coasts forward and bangs against the bars of the railing and then pushes himself back into the shadow of his living room. Over and over again he appears only to vanish. There one minute, the next gone.
When my phone buzzes, I cringe and decide to ignore it. I watch the boy. His head turns as if he’s listening to someone speaking from inside. The phone chimes again and this time I glance down and see that there is a text from Essie. I read the message and it is as if the fog that had settled over me since Mike told me that I needed to call Mama has cleared. I feel lighter. Other people’s problems can do that, I guess. They don’t make anything better, but at least they provide a distraction.
I plug in the flash drive and open a folder of documents. Each is labeled with Essie’s name and a number. I open Esther 9 and read about Essie’s ninth birthday party, the chocolate cake and the donkey-shaped piñata. I open Esther 10 and Esther 11 and each of them also starts with a birthday celebration. I realize that she must have started a new journal every year. Presumably they were handwritten, probably on rose-colored paper that had pictures of kittens in the bottom corner of each page, and Essie has transcribed them. There are nine documents in total, some of which are several hundred pages long. The last is Esther 17, which is short compared to those for the rest of her teenage years, less than twenty pages, but that’s probably because it’s unfinished. She’s living those pages now.
I scroll through the documents at random, wondering what it is that Essie means for me to see. I find it after a few hours of reading, buried a hundred pages into Esther 12, the fall that Lissa went away. As my eyes move across the screen, I feel my stomach tighten. I dial without even being aware of what I’m doing, and when Margot answers, I tell her, “You need to come over here right away.” I don’t wait for a response but instead go straight back to reading.
Twenty minutes later, Margot lets herself in and drops onto the couch beside me.
“What gives?” she asks.
I blink and scroll back through the pages I’ve just read until I find the passage I’m looking for. I turn the screen toward Margot so that she can see. Her pupils dilate and she says, “Shit. Why do people have to be so predictable?”
* * *
—————
An hour later, we have printed Essie’s journals, put them onto Margot’s computer as well, and together are combing through the documents.
“What exactly are we looking for? I presume not just the juicy bits,” Margot asks.
“I don’t know. The truth, I guess.”
“You can’t handle the truth.” Margot prides herself on her impressions, and her Jack Nicholson is actually pretty good. I smile wanly since she’s clearly waiting for a response and throw a balled-up piece of paper at her head. Margot catches it deftly and continues, “What do we do with the truth when we find it? Will she really be willing to go on camera and talk about any of this?”
I shrug. I had been wondering the same thing. Then I remember the first time Essie called me. I’ve read your book, she said as I sat in the stairwell. I think it may be time to write another.
“Maybe she wants the truth to be published,” I say quietly and even as I say this out loud, I know it’s true. “What better way to control the narrative? She even told me what she wanted the day we met, but I didn’t understand what she was talking about until just now. She wants me to turn these diaries into a book.”
Margot exhales bitterly. “No wonder she needed to get married. She won’t be able to live at home after that.”
“She didn’t mention anything about timing, but there will never be a better time than now. Right after the wedding. The whole country will have tuned in to watch the fairy tale.”
“And you want to tear the curtain down.”
“How can we not? Especially with the campaign. It’s not just gossip anymore. It’s bigger than that.”
“We have less than a week. That’s not enough time.”
I fall back and let my head nestle between the couch cushions. “Essie’s already done the hard part.”
“That’s an understatement.”
I sit back up and turn toward Margot. “No, I mean she’s already written everything down. This is her book, not mine. It should be in her own words. They’re all right here; we just have to figure out which ones matter.”
“And then?” Margot asks. “We just call up your old editor?”
I shake my head. “We can’t. Not without Essie’s permission. It’s still possible that when we’re finished, she’ll decide that this manuscript should never see the light of day. If she does want the truth to be out there, we publish it digitally, instantly, the minute she says go.”
Margot looks thoughtful and I wait for her to say something. Finally, she says, “Do you think she realizes what this will do to her family?”
“I do. In fact, I think she’s counting on it.”
* * *
—————
We divide up the early journal entries and highlight the passages to be included. Not a lot, just enough to lay a framework, to pull the reader in, to remind them of the ways they’ve been complicit in what happened by watching Essie’s family on television all these years.
By the time Mike gets home, Margot is on the floor, her back against the couch and her legs stretched out beneath the coffee table. She’s scooping pad Thai into her mouth from a shallow plastic dish while her eyes run across her computer screen. I sit on the couch beside her, a carton of fried rice in one hand.
“What happened here?” Mike asks, gesturing to the empty food containers and the stacks of paper littered across the room. “It looks like a bomb went off.”
I think about how best to bring Mike up to speed. Up until now, I’ve censored what I say to him, mainly just talked about the interviews themselves. I didn’t know how to make him understand why I like Essie so much, why I believe she’s not just a puppet for her family’s brand, but now I have proof that she’s different and that I was right.
“Essie wants to publish a book. She’s given me all her diary entries since she was nine years old. We’re trying to figure out which bits to use.”
Mike snor
ts. “What is it with that family? Is there anything they won’t try to monetize? I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to sell their dryer lint.”
Mike stops. Whatever each of us may have said about the Hicks family in the past, he can tell by the way that Margot and I are looking at him that we are no longer on his side as far as Esther Hicks is concerned.
“The first time Essie’s brother Caleb raped her, she was twelve,” Margot says after a long pause. “She bit him, but it was clear that he liked it, so she didn’t fight much after that.”
Mike lets this sink in. He wipes a hand over his eyes, a gesture that reminds me of my father, and I think how even though none of us really ever escapes our family, Essie has to at least get as far away as she can.
“Fucker,” he whispers. “What can I do to help?”
Margot pushes a stack of pages toward him across the coffee table and Mike immediately drops his school bag in a corner, then sits down on the ottoman and starts to read.
“Are you going to finish that?” he asks me after a while, pointing to my rice.
“I thought you ate at study group.”
“I did,” he answers, “but something tells me that I’m going to need a second wind.”
I pass him the rice and we all go back to reading. It’s quiet apart from the squeaks of highlighters being drawn across paper, the tap of fingers on laptop keys. Margot shows me a page with a few paragraphs that she’s selected and I nod.
After a long while, Mike says, “The relationship with Roarke is a sham.”
“I think we all knew that,” Margot replies.
“Roarke’s family is in a lot of debt. Essie planned to have her mother approach his parents and offer to pay everything off.”
“How much are they getting?” I ask.
“It doesn’t say. It looks like this was written before she knew for sure the deal would be accepted, but I expect it must be a lot.”
I jiggle a pen back and forth between two fingers as I consider this. “That doesn’t paint any of them in a good light, does it? They sound like mercenaries.”
Essie wouldn’t have included this information if she wasn’t comfortable with my sharing it. Still, it won’t exactly endear her to people. They’ll be angry that they were made to believe in a love story that wasn’t real. Victim or not, people will say that Essie could have handled it differently. She could have made Caleb stop without sinking to extortion, without dragging Roarke into it as well. She would have been leaving home anyway, so wouldn’t she have been safe? Why did she need the money? Why did she need to lie?
I start to speak, but Mike holds up his hand, palm facing out. He runs a finger down the margin of the page.
“Oh, God,” he breathes.
“What?” Margot and I both burst out at once.
Mike drops the pages on his lap. The color has drained from his face.
“She’s pregnant.”
Roarke
Dad wakes me early with a sharp rap on my door and tells me that we’re going hunting. It’s still dark. I blink at the ceiling, letting my eyes adjust, until I can make out the small wooden airplanes hanging from the light fixture. It’s a child’s room, but Mom and Dad never had the money to update it. When I turned fifteen, I bought a can of paint myself and covered the walls with what I thought of as a mature gray, but it came out darker than I thought it would and made me feel like I was sleeping in a cave. As soon as I could, I painted it the light shade of green that it still is today.
My ankles crack as my feet hit the floor and I rummage through my closet and pull out my hunting gear. Dad likes to get an early start, but usually he gives me some warning the night before. I grumble as I move around the room, aware that Dad is already downstairs and can’t hear. I dress and then, after double-checking the weather, I add another layer. I carry my boots downstairs so I don’t wake up Mom and then sit down at the bottom of the staircase to put them on.
Dad hands me a coffee when I reach the kitchen and watches me as I down it. I look at the clock. It’s just after five. When I’ve set the empty mug in the sink, Dad passes me a thermos so that I can have my second cup on the road. The cool air hits me when the door opens and I pull my jacket up around my neck. Dad leaves footprints in the dew as he walks across the driveway and I see that a few of Mom’s tulips must have bloomed without my noticing, though they’ve closed their cups up tightly overnight.
Dad starts to climb directly into the cab. His truck is already packed. He must’ve done it the night before, so there’s no way this trip is a last-minute whim. I shoot him an accusing glance and he shrugs heavily.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”
There’s no place open this early, so Dad has packed breakfast as well. I gnaw on a bagel as morning bleeds into the sky.
“Where’re we headed?” I ask him.
“Someplace new,” he answers. “Some private woods. I put the address into the GPS. The others are meeting us there.”
“What others?”
“That politician brother of your fiancée’s. Probably some folks we haven’t met. They told me it would be good for the store. Everyone will be using guns we sell.”
“So they’ll be filming?”
“That’s what they said.”
I swallow hard. The wedding is coming up fast. I went along with attending Caleb’s campaign event because Essie asked me to, because it seemed like it was just something we had to get through. Then in no time we would be married and once that happened, we would be free of him. We would be free of them all. Now I see that I’m wrong and that the budding politician means to capitalize on the popularity of Essie’s and my little love story as much as possible before we earn the right to tell him no. I worry about how I’ll make it through the day. Once I was up onstage with Caleb, it was all I could do not to punch him in the face. It probably had something to do with the way he smiled and shook hands with the crowd like a normal person even though he’s actually the lowest form of human scum.
I say, “Good for the store? More likely it’ll be good for his image to be seen with me. My likability numbers are much higher than his.”
“Your likability numbers? That’s a thing?”
“When you’re in the Hicks family it is. This is what you signed me up for, or don’t you remember?”
Dad looks embarrassed and covers up the silence with a cough. He takes a sip from his thermos and fiddles with the radio.
“I hope you know how much I—” Dad starts to say, but I cut him off.
“Don’t worry about it. Essie’s likability numbers are the highest you can get. It won’t be so bad, being saddled with the likes of her.”
Dad lets out a “Huh” and concentrates on driving. Though I haven’t really been paying attention, I think we’re heading in almost the exact opposite direction of the lake. When we reach the town limits, he turns onto a country highway I’ve never been down and from there onto a one-lane dirt road labeled Private. The cornfields and rows of soy give way to trees. Through the branches ahead, the sky is fading from orange to a thinner yellow light. The ribbon of dirt we bump along seems to go on forever.
“How much land does this guy own?” I wonder aloud.
“Probably half the county. The person I spoke to—I think it was his secretary or else his personal assistant or something—said the camp would be a ways up on the left and that there was no way to miss it.”
This turns out to be an understatement, since the camp is really nothing of the sort. It’s a compound with a three-story log house at the center that is reached by a crushed-gravel drive. The house sits near the center of a grassy clearing with several other smaller buildings set on either side. A line of Adirondack chairs is visible on a porch and more are scattered across the lawn. Dad lets out a low whistle.
“Is this the sort of place you get whe
n your likability numbers are high?” he asks.
“I think it’s the sort of place you get when your net worth is high, regardless of whether you’re likable or not.”
“I never knew this was back here,” he says as the tires begin to crunch over the drive.
“I’m pretty sure that was the idea.”
We are greeted, almost immediately, by two lumbering coonhounds who snap and bite at the tires until we’ve stopped. Then they sit down, tails wagging while they wait for Dad and me to climb out of the truck. I let the dog closest to me sniff at my hand and then give him a scratch behind the ears. The door to the house opens and his head swings around at the sound.
“I see you’ve met Ringo,” a man calls out from the porch. “And that rascal over there is Starr.”
Starr looks balefully up at Dad and is rewarded with a perfunctory pat on his head.
“Come on, boys,” the man says, and for a few seconds I’m not sure if he’s talking to the dogs or to Dad and me. But then Ringo and Starr take off and bolt through the door the man is holding open. He lets it bang shut and then steps heavily off the porch and moves to greet us.
“Welcome. I recognize you, Roarke, from all those interviews you’ve been doing. I guess that makes you Mr. Richards. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Gulliver Lester. You can call me Gull. Most everybody does. I’m Ellory’s old man. This here’s my place. Come on in and I’ll introduce you around. I think there are a few people you don’t already know.”
Gulliver starts back toward the house and we follow. He walks with just a trace of a limp and at one point I almost bump into him when he stops suddenly to hike up his trousers, so I give him kind of a wide berth after that. When we reach the door, Ringo and Starr are waiting, noses pressed to the screen, but they back off when Gulliver waves them away and retreat to a pair of low cushions next to the stone fireplace. Caleb stands quickly as we enter the room and extends his hand.
The Book of Essie Page 22