I shake my head. “Yes, you do,” I say. “He likes Thomas Hardy. His name’s Jonah.”
“I did have a son named Jonah,” he agrees. “And now I don’t have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”
The air vibrates numbly, the way it did in the forest the moment before a lightning strike.
“I said that to myself a lot at first, after it happened. Like an affirmation. I had a son named Jonah. And now I don’t have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”
“What happened?”
“I bought my son a car for his sixteenth birthday. You even got that part right. How did you guess? Carol—that’s my wife—didn’t want him to have it. He’d barely passed his driving test and anyone could’ve seen he wasn’t ready. But I bought it for him anyway, because it was his birthday and because I could. And because my father didn’t for me. And that night he wrapped the car around the trunk of a tree.”
The room grows perfectly quiet. I look away.
“So how do you deal with it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “God, I can’t answer that. You don’t. Or, time heals. Or, you get used to it. I don’t know.”
“Time doesn’t heal,” I say.
“You’re damn right it doesn’t.” He rubs his forehead. “You know, I studied in Paris when I was about your age.”
I glance at him. “Yeah?”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. “I’ve been carrying this picture in my wallet since my son died. It’s my identification photo my school in Paris took on the first day.”
He holds out the photo between two fingers. The doctor in the photo is much younger than the one in front of me, with a head of bushy, overgrown hair and a collared, striped shirt. He’s standing on a sidewalk with a curve-sided yellow stone building behind him. I flip the photo over. On the back, written in the doctor’s careful cursive, are the words, “Darwin Neil Wilson.”
“Your name’s Darwin?”
He shrugs. “I go by my middle name now.”
I pass the photo back to him. “So what’s Paris got to do with anything?”
“What do you know about Parisians?”
I pause. “They smoke a lot.”
“Yeah, they do. Back then, they allowed smoking in bars. When you walked in, you’d see everything through a blanket of blue smoke. I’d be at a bar stool, alone, and I’d look around and hear all these foreign voices layered over one another and see these people moving around in foreign clothes with foreign faces. And then I’d realize that, actually, I was the foreign one. I was the one who didn’t belong. There’s something about grief that makes you feel like that, like a foreigner. When I lost my son, I became a citizen of a country I never knew existed. And all of the people I ran into on a daily basis were speaking a different language, only they didn’t know it. Because I was the one who’d changed. I’d sit around the office and soak in the sounds and realize that I would never be like them again. And you know the strangest part?”
“What?”
“That idea made me happy. I started carrying this picture around, just to remember the feeling. It felt good to be different. It made me feel closer to my son. Closer to my guilt. The trouble is, though, when you lift your head back up and look around, everything’s different. Things have been moved, people have walked out.”
He flicks the photograph back and forth between his fingers.
“The grief world isn’t closer to where the dead live,” the doctor says. “You only trick yourself into believing that. If you stand up and move around and look at the living world, and start participating again, you’re closer to them anyway.”
He lets the picture fall into the water-filled bowl of the stainless steel toilet beside him. The young Darwin looks up from the shadows of the trough of water. Wilson curls his fingers around the handle and flushes.
I watch the photo spin around and around until it disappears down the drain. I rest my chin on my breastbone. “Constance is dead.”
“And that is that.”
Chapter 58
“What will happen to Waylon?” I ask.
Dr. Wilson shrugs. “We’ve been looking for him for months. He’s been a suspect since the beginning.”
I straighten up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Will you promise me something?” I ask. “If the police ever find Jude, promise you’ll help him.”
“Help him return to the wild?”
“It’s the life he wants,” I say. “He ought to have the choice. Everybody should.”
“So will you be joining him?” he asks. “If you get parole.”
“I’m still deciding.”
He moves his jaw back and forth. “I hear you got into the Bridge Program.”
“How’d you know about that?”
He smiles. “You’re not the only one who talks to Angel.”
I nod, chewing my lip. “Will Waylon go to jail?”
“Who knows if we’ll ever even catch him,” he says. “He hid for twenty years without detection.”
And it seems as though he’s saying it’d be okay if Waylon never was found. It’d be okay if the case got cold and went to bed.
He looks up suddenly and casts his eyes around the ceiling. “Do you hear that?” he asks.
“What?”
“Thunder. I think it’s raining.”
I can hear it now, plinking on the metal roof.
“Storms are so quiet here,” I say. “Thunder was deafening in the Community. Loud as cannon blasts. Sometimes, I’d wake in the night and think the war must’ve started.”
“What war?”
“Between us and the unbelievers. That’s what the Prophet said. A war was coming. The Gentiles were out there with their nuclear weapons and automatic rifles, but we had the greatest weapon of all, God. The war never came, though. Good thing, too.”
“Why?”
“God doesn’t stand up well in the face of a gunshot. Or a hatchet. God can’t protect you against very much at all.”
“Is that how God works?”
“That’s what the Prophet told us.”
“But what do you think?” he asks. And he looks at me with an expression that tells me the question means something. And so does the answer.
“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.”
Chapter 59
Ask anybody and they’ll tell you I got sent here because of a boy. Because I kicked his face in, and sat down on the hard snow beside the result, and didn’t cry.
That it was a boy who planted the seeds of rebellion in my mind, who helped turn my own thoughts into weapons. The boy I loved and didn’t understand simultaneously.
Or maybe it was the Prophet who got me here with his rules and edicts, his mystic justice that threaded through every pore until I was a walking prayer shawl, and the prayers were all his.
Or my father who sold me away on that first day beside the fist-tight apple tree when I was five, when he told me to listen to the Prophet and do whatever he said.
It wasn’t any of them, you know.
“It was in the stars,” is an expression Miss Bailey taught me the other day, and by that she means that it was fated this way.
What if it was in the stars for me to be here? That I was hurtling toward this inevitability for my entire life, because now that I’m about to leave it, everything about this place seems entirely meant to be.
• • •
Benny visits as Dr. Wilson is leaving, an oversize brown paper sack under her arm. She rolls down the top of the sack and pulls out the outfit I wore to court, six months ago, the skirt and blouse and belt.
She lifts out the last item carefully, like she’s holding an ancient relic. Jude’s shirt. I wore it every da
y for a month after he died. It’s stained with coin-sized blotches of blood and decomposed down to threads, but the shoulder seams are there. I could wear it. It would still fit.
“Keep?” she asks.
Slowly, I pick the shirt up between my stumps. I hold it out to her. “Not anymore.”
• • •
There is a place in Missoula where goldfinches swoop yellow and plentiful as sunflowers. It is beyond this cell. Soon, I will find it. The day will be spring, I’ll make sure of that, when the trees are perfect with new green that stuns the eyes, and robins stuffed in branches, and mice flying down little mice trails that only they can see. I’ll be out meandering through streets and, without meaning to, happen across a park in the center of the city. I’ll sit among the people and the noises of basketballs smacking concrete and children screaming in a way that means joy.
And I’ll walk through a stand of white trees that’ll be rediscovering themselves, feeling they are maybe more than white, maybe they are something like green. And they’ll push green from their fingers as if to prove it to themselves. The air will smell equally of gasoline dust and greenness like it does in the city.
There will be a feeling that anything is possible this springtime. There will be a feeling that I am more than a girl in a wool dress not of her choosing. There will be an atmosphere of decision making that day. The power to understand myself, finally. To believe or not believe, to know which it is.
I will crane my neck to the sky, the kind of odd evening sky that allows for sunlight and stars at the same time. I’ll find a star and hang on to it with my eyes. The periphery of greenery will swish away as my vision rises and rises and rises to greet that star. I will feel my body left behind.
When I tear my eyes away and shake my head, my brain will become bleary with the suddenness of my soul sailing through the atmosphere, back into the spacious cavern of my skull. For a moment, my head will feel heavy with it. How much heavier than I’d ever imagined. How much sturdier.
Acknowledgments
I never realized just how many people shape a book. This book would not exist without the dedicated efforts of many professionals, friends, and family members. I’m especially grateful to the amazing team at Dial who worked so passionately to get this book made. My editors, Stacey Friedberg and Nancy Conescu, deserve the highest acclaim for their tireless work on this book. From our first phone call, it was clear you believed in Minnow and understood her like you’d known her forever.
I’m also eternally grateful to my enthusiastic and hilarious agent, Jennifer Laughran, who saw the potential in this book and believed in it before almost anybody. You’re the reason Minnow is meeting the world.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone at the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, particularly my poetry cohort and my poetry professors, Christopher Howell, Jonathan Johnson, and Melissa Kwasny.
Thanks to the educators and students at Mercer Middle School in Seattle and Libby Center in Spokane for being so over-the-moon about this book, especially the wonderful Kristin, Larry, Priscilla, Susannah, Maggie, and Alex for the Minnow party, complete with goldfish crackers. Thanks to the Chetty family for your support and the awesome cake, to Fran Bahr for the good chats and great feedback, and to the incredible Christa Desir who read multiple versions and has been my staunch ally through this entire process.
Finally, thanks to my entire family for your wholehearted support for my dreams. Especially thanks to my mom, Annie Oakes, who has been the most enthusiastic cheerleader that anyone could ask for. You have inspired me and shown me it’s never a waste of time to dream big and stare at the computer screen for hours on end.
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