He knocked on my door early in the morning. I quickly pulled on shorts and a T-shirt to answer.
“Hi there, Luna. Can we talk?”
I was suddenly aware of my lack of a bra.
“Uh, sure. What’s up?”
“Why don’t you get dressed and meet me downstairs,” he said.
His tone frightened me. But it was a maybe-I’m-in-trouble kind of fear, not a maybe-he’ll-kill-me kind of fear. I did what he said.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, when I met him in the kitchen.
In the backyard, violets and dandelions and moon daisies pushed up through the grass, which was still wet from rain. Katherine’s rosebushes hummed with the activity of insects. The leaves of the trees, almost obscenely green, rustled like silk skirts. It occurred to me that I was in a truly dangerous situation.
“I’m not going into the woods with you,” I said.
“We don’t have to,” he answered. “I just thought we should talk privately.”
“This is private enough,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“OK, Luna.”
The way he said my name, I knew that he knew. He sighed deeply and handed me the copy of Jane Eyre. I held it tightly to my chest.
We stared at each other for a moment.
“I was suspicious,” he said, finally. “Just a weird feeling. Also, you told us you were studying for the GRE, but you don’t own a single prep book.”
Shit, I thought. I forgot that I had told Katherine that I was planning to go to graduate school, that I wanted to be a child psychologist. It wasn’t totally a lie—I didn’t not want to be a child psychologist—but clearly I hadn’t thought it through.
I said nothing.
“You don’t look like her,” he told me.
“No. I did, a little, when I dyed my hair brown.”
“Was that on purpose?”
Why lie? “Yes.”
“I guess I can see it. Now that I know.”
It was so hot that day. I wanted to be back inside, in the air-conditioning, but I knew neither of us wanted Katherine—or Ruby, for that matter—to hear what we were saying.
“Oh,” I said. And then, stupidly, “Are you angry with me?”
He actually laughed at that, but it was not a friendly laugh.
“I’m surprised, and confused. But I don’t think ‘angry’ is what I feel. In a way, it’s nice to finally meet you. Sara talked about you a lot.”
This made my heart shudder in my chest. “Really?”
“I mean, there wasn’t a lot to say, because you were just a baby. She was nervous when you were first born, that your father would forget about her, or something. But she really liked you, thought you were adorable. She showed me a picture of you, at a pumpkin patch. She thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”
I knew which photo he was talking about. I was only a year old, very chubby, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. I looked exactly like the pumpkin I was sitting on. My mother had it in a silver frame by her bedside table.
Dizzy, I sat down on the grass, which was still wet from the rain. Blake sat down a few feet away from me. He is trying not to scare me, I thought.
“Why are you here, Luna?”
“I want to know the truth,” I said. “No one talks about Sara. No one will tell me what I need to know.”
“And what is that?”
If I could put it into words, I thought, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“Why did you kill her?”
He sighed. “It wasn’t on purpose. You probably already know that. I was out of my mind. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing.”
“That’s what you told the police. Is it really true?”
“It is. Think about it this way. I admitted it right away. If I wanted to kill her, wouldn’t I have tried to get away with it?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. We were silent for a long time.
“Do you know who John Logan is?” he asked me.
“The name sounds familiar.” I knew a lot about Logan, actually, because I researched him after I read an article about a vigil that was held for his victims as well as for Sara.
“He’s a serial killer. Killed six women. The night I spent in jail, he was in the cell next to mine.”
“Oh, wow.”
“I was pretty out of it at the time, but I remember thinking how dumb he was. Friendly, but stupid, in a very obvious way. I didn’t find out what he did until later, and it really shocked me. That someone so stupid could kill six people. Anyway, when my mom found out about this guy, she was like, thrilled. She thought maybe he had killed Sara, not me.”
“Did he?”
“No. He was arrested two weeks before Sara went missing. That’s a pretty solid alibi.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll admit, I wish it was him. Do you think that’s terrible?”
“Kind of.”
“I never got to grieve for her. It wasn’t allowed. No one wanted to hear about how much I missed her, when I was the one who took her away.”
Took her away where? I wanted to ask, but instead I said: “I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“I don’t expect you to. I’m telling you the truth, as per your request. I’m not sure how to make you believe me, because I think you’d rather not. I think it’s easier for you to believe that I am the evil man who destroyed your family and got away with it. I did not want to kill Sara. I did not want her to die. I loved her so much. Nothing in my life has ever resembled that kind of love. I was out of my mind. I would not have hurt her otherwise.”
I thought his words sounded rehearsed, but I had to consider that he was right, that I didn’t want to believe him.
I took a deep breath.
“My father has never been angry with you. At least not as far as I know. I think it’s—” I struggled for the right word and eventually settled on “—perverse. He should want you dead. If it was me who was killed, I would want someone to avenge me. And if not my father, then who?”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“What?”
“You wouldn’t want someone to avenge you if you were killed. You wouldn’t want anything, because you’d be dead.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“That’s the awful paradox of it. We’re all left trying to figure out what the dead person would want, and you can never really figure it out, because they’re dead. And even if you did somehow figure it out, you couldn’t give it to them.”
What would Sara have thought of me being here, speaking to him? I had no way of knowing, of even making an educated guess. Blake knew so much more about her than I ever would. I felt my old fury making my hands ache.
“You moved on,” I said. “You got married. You have a job. You have a kid.”
“Well, yes. Isn’t that what you want me to do?”
“No. I think it’s incredibly fucking unfair that you have this whole life and she’s just dead.”
“Would you have preferred for me to stay in prison for my whole life? Or some mental hospital? Would that help? Don’t you want me to be a good husband and father, to give back to my community?”
“I think you’re mocking me.”
“I most definitely am not. I promise.”
I looked at my watch. It was almost eight A.M.
“Ruby will be waking up soon,” I said.
“Luna,” he answered. “I’m sure you understand, I can’t let you stay here.”
“Why not?”
“You lied to us. I don’t feel safe leaving my kid with you.”
“I would never, ever hurt Ruby.”
He said nothing. He didn’t believe me, I realized. It made me furious. It made me wonder if I was telling the truth.
“That’s bizarre,” I said. “You don’t feel safe. At least I’ve never killed anyone.
He said nothing.
“I’m not the crazy one here!” I was yelling now. “
It’s not crazy for me to want justice for my sister.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Luna. And you’re not going to believe me when I say this, but I want you to listen anyway. Can you do that?”
“Fine.”
“There is no such thing as justice. It’s an idea that makes people feel better, that’s all. There is only revenge, or mercy. And you can’t have both.”
We were both silent for a long time. Eventually he stood up and handed me an envelope.
“Here’s the money we owe you, and then some. Made out to Luna Morgan.”
I was tempted to tear it up in front of him, but instead I shoved it in my back pocket.
“Does Katherine know?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“I’m not sure how. But yes.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “Tell her something else. That I have mono. That I was stealing her jewelry. Anything.”
“Why?”
Because I like her. Because I want to protect her from this sickness. “I just don’t want her to know.”
He sighed. “We’ll see. I don’t like lying to her.”
We walked toward the house in silence.
“I’ll pack up and leave right away,” I told him.
“Do you want to say good-bye to Ruby?”
I was surprised to find tears welling in my eyes. “No. I think it’s better if I don’t.”
He watched me as I walked up the stairs. I turned around.
“What do you feel, when you think of Sara now?”
He was silent for a long time, not meeting my eyes. Finally he said: “I miss her. Every single day I think of something I wish I could tell her. A bird I saw, a joke I heard. And if I close my eyes, I can see her face with perfect clarity. But when I try to hear her voice, my heart goes blank.”
I went home. I slept through most of August. In September, to my mother’s delight, I started studying for the LSAT. I didn’t particularly care about going to law school, but I did like the logic problems. I liked how they made it impossible to think of anything else. Six men in six boats. That was all that mattered.
I also started working at the makeup counter of a department store. It was mostly boring, but I was occasionally thrilled by the intimacy of putting makeup on someone else’s face. These women, total strangers, allowed me to touch their lips, their eyelids. It was an odd power. My mother stopped by quite often, ostensibly to use my employee discount, but also, I think, because she was worried about me. I didn’t tell her or my father why I had left my nanny job so suddenly. I felt bad about leaving it to their imagination, but I didn’t know how to explain it to them, either.
One day a co-worker asked me to cover her shift in the children’s shoe department, and I agreed. The store was quiet that day. Around noon, a tall, red-haired woman walked in, holding the hand of a little girl. Katherine, I thought, and my whole body went cold. What had Blake told her, in the end? Did she hate me? And what had they told Ruby? Did either of them miss me? As the woman approached, I was ready to weep.
“Hi,” she said. “We’re looking for some party shoes. Can you help us?”
It was not Katherine. Up close, I could see that her hair wasn’t even really red, but blonde. The girl holding her hand was closer to three or four. It was not them. It was not them. I felt tears drip down my face.
“Are you OK?” the woman asked, alarmed.
“Yes,” I said, wiping my face with my sleeve. “Allergies, I’m sorry.” I knelt down so that I was eye level with the little girl. “Now, what are we looking for today?”
Sara
Maggie and Jessica’s dad, Robert, gets home a full hour after he said he would. He is divorced and his daughters only spend the weekends with him, so he says he feels bad about leaving them with a babysitter, but he had to go to a work thing. Sara thinks this probably means a date, and the fact that he came home late, and looking dejected, makes her think so even more. She’s an expert in the foibles of divorced parents, her own having been separated for almost five years. An amicable divorce, according to them.
Sara’s father remarried, a very nice, normal woman named Colleen. They recently had a cute little baby named Luna. Sara expected to resent Luna, but she adores her, even offers to babysit for free. Sara loves babies. They’re like dolls and puppies combined. Colleen keeps declining the offer, probably afraid that Sara is secretly jealous and will smother Luna in her crib.
Because he feels bad about being late, Robert gives Sara ten dollars more than he owes her. He also offers to give her a ride home.
“I have my bike,” she says.
“We can put it in the trunk. Come on, I don’t like you being out alone this late.”
Exactly how old does he think she is? Sara is amused. She’s been eighteen for two weeks now. Still, she accepts his offer. She’s a sucker for old-fashioned male protectiveness, probably because her father is one of those new-age feminist guys who would never threaten to shoot a guy for looking at his daughter the wrong way. This analysis is courtesy of Sara’s best friend, Dawn, who considers herself a kind of genius when it comes to daddy issues.
Sara has known Dawn since they were in elementary school. They took ballet classes together. Sara just liked the tutus and the ribbons, but Dawn was into the discipline, the way the dull pain made her mind sharper. They didn’t really become friends until tenth grade. At the beginning of high school Dawn was one of the cool girls. Her star fell after a rumor circulated that she had Done It with two guys at the same time. This lowered Dawn to the same rung of the food chain that Sara occupied. First they were lab partners, badly screwing up chemistry experiments together, and then they were friends.
Being a teenage girl is hard, because you have to become sexual at the exact right time, in the exact right way. If you do it wrong, or too early, no one will want you anymore. But if you’re too slow, then you’ll get left behind, and no one will want you then, either. Sara got it more or less right because of her boyfriend, Jack. Dawn once described him—“like a witch turned a golden retriever into a person.” He’s very sweet, almost handsome, not that smart. Sara likes him. She even likes having sex with him, but she’s glad college will give her an easy way to break up with him.
Robert’s car is such a dad car, Sara observes. She wonders if he and his date fucked in the backseat. If they did, he probably wouldn’t have looked so sad when he came home. Sara doesn’t like the idea of adults having sex the way teenagers do. Either they should fuck in five-star hotels, or they should be as celibate as monks. Otherwise it’s just depressing.
She watches Robert as he drives. He is kind of handsome, but mostly generic. He could be an illustration in a textbook for learning English. Father, dad, daddy, papa.
“You’re going to have to give me directions,” he says.
“Oh. Left at Bolton.”
He obeys.
“So,” he asks her, “what grade are you in?”
“I just graduated, actually.”
“Wow. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Sara thinks it’s stupid that people keep congratulating her for graduating from high school. It would be one thing if she was the first person in her family to do so, or if she had a disability, or something like that. But Sara went to a private school with less than a hundred kids per grade. Not graduating would be remarkable. At the moment, all she’s done is meet expectations.
“What’s next?”
“Uh, college, I guess. You’re going to turn right on Bryant.”
“Where?”
“Crawford. So pretty close by.”
“Crawford. That’s like, art school, right?”
“Pretty much.”
She wants to tell him that she got into SAIC, and CalArts as well, but chose Crawford because she didn’t want to be too far away from her mother. Why does she want to impress him? Just some suburban dad. What does he know about art, or her, or anything?
“
You’re going to stay on here for a while, and then it’s a right on North Street,” she tells him.
“Gotcha.”
Sara leans against the window. The cold glass feels good against her forehead.
“So did the girls give you any trouble?”
“No, never. They’re angels.”
He laughs. “With you, maybe. With me, Jesus, you’d think it was like I’m marching them off to war every time I try to get them in the car. To do anything, swimming, summer camp, whatever, it’s always a fight. God forbid I have to take them to the dentist, because then it’s a full-scale rebellion.”
Sara laughs. She suspects it’s usually Maggie and Jessica’s mother who takes them to the dentist.
“Well, they’re always well behaved with me,” she says.
“You must have magic powers.”
“I don’t think so! One of the kids I look after, he’s seven, and the only way I can get him to brush his teeth and go to bed is to threaten him with his own water gun.”
Robert laughs. It is not like Jack’s laugh, but coarser, and quieter.
They pull up in front of Sara’s house. She really could have taken her bike.
“Thanks for the ride. Give me a call if you need me to look after them again.”
He helps her get her bike out of the trunk. As she walks it into her garage and puts it in its place, she can feel him watching her. She could just go inside, but it seems rude not to say good-bye. She walks back to the car.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says again.
“Wait,” he says. “I’m going to give you an extra ten, for being so flexible about staying late.”
“You already—” she starts to say, but he’s already sliding the bill into the back pocket of her shorts. His hand stays there for a few seconds, during which Sara becomes unusually aware of her own heartbeat, its rhythm and strength. Then he squeezes her ass. She turns around, shocked, and he kisses her, hard, but not so forcefully that she can’t pull away.
“What the fuck!” she says.
She looks at him, expecting to see embarrassment, or even surprise: I can’t believe I just did that! But Robert looks angry, as if he wants to hit her. Sara takes a step backward. She’s only a few yards from her house. The light in her mother’s bedroom is still on. Her neighborhood, always so still and quiet, is suddenly humming with life. She can hear every radio playing, every dishwasher running, every blade of grass murmuring with ants and mosquitos.
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