SECURITY AT THE GREENVILLE FACILITY stricter than at Sussex, with checkpoint after checkpoint, search after search. That was to be expected, Eliza supposed, when someone was visiting a place known as the Death House.
But the building itself was a stark contrast to the grimly named facility, a small jailhouse, with a deputy at a desk and just one cell.
“It’s like the old Andy Griffith Show,”
Eliza said, standing at her taped mark, her eyes fixed on it, not ready to look at the man in the cell. “Where they locked up Otis, the town drunk.”
“If Otis was going to die,” Walter said, his voice pleasant. “If you look to the side, you can see the death chamber.”
She looked to the side. Then-and only then-she looked directly at Walter. Although still quite trim, he was larger than Eliza had expected. Larger and younger. A slight man, he had been obsessed with his height, insisting that he was five nine, when it seemed apparent to five-four Elizabeth that he couldn’t possibly be more than two inches taller than she. Once, Eliza remembered, he had spent a long time studying a catalog photograph of shoes with Cuban heels and asked her what she thought of them. By then, she had spent enough time in his company to know how to disagree with him without seeming to. She told him the shoes were great (they were hideous) but too stylish, so trendy that they would go out of fashion long before he got much wear out of them. Men’s shoes were well made, she told him, parroting something she had heard her father say, choking a little bit at the memory. A man had to buy shoes that endured. Walter and Elizabeth had similar conversations about a cologne he thought would make him irresistible, and whether he should wear a T-shirt and white blazer like Don Johnson on Miami Vice. “Not after Labor Day,” she had advised, wondering if she would be with him when Memorial Day arrived and he once again petitioned for permission to wear linen pants and loafers without socks. He had been a small man and now he seemed to loom above her, despite the chunky heels on her boots. Did adults grow? Had he learned to stand straighter? Or was she drooping in his presence, burrowing into herself?
As for his face-lack of sunlight had its advantages. Walter was pale and remarkably unlined, his green eyes vivid. He had also always insisted, to the point of being boring on the subject, that he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t wrong. Yet he wasn’t right, either. He should have been good-looking. But there was something that caught at the corner of the eye, even when she was fifteen. Not like me, her mind had registered. Not someone I would know.
But then-Holly had made the same judgment about her.
“Hello, Walter,” she said, although she had said it once already, upon entering. “This is my sister.”
Vonnie nodded at him, staring hard, almost rudely. She had never seen him, Eliza realized, not in the flesh. Their parents had, in court, but Vonnie had been away at school.
“Hello, Yvonne,” Walter said, and Eliza was comforted to realize that much of what Walter knew about her came from official documents and newspaper reports and courthouse testimony, where nicknames were seldom used. She had not let Vonnie’s name pass her lips during the thirty-nine days they had spent together. Right now, if he dropped her children’s names to unnerve her, he would probably call them Isobel and Albert. “This is my deputy, who’s also named Walter, although I think you’ll be able to tell us apart. Helpful hint: He’s the one with the gun.”
Walter’s newfound sense of humor. The deputy also was a broad-shouldered African-American and insanely tall, at least a foot taller than Elizabeth.
“We’ve met,” Deputy Walter said, his voice a honeyed drawl that also would have been at home in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, if Andy Griffith’s Mayberry had been the kind of place that employed towering African-American deputies.
“Would you like a chair?” Walter, the original Walter, asked.
“No, that’s okay.”
“This may take a while.”
“You’re standing.”
“That’s because I can’t pull a chair up to the bars. If I could, I would. But there’s no reason for us both to be uncomfortable.”
There’s not a chair in the world that could make me comfortable right now.
“I’m fine.” She watched Vonnie snake her hand into the deep pockets of her jacket, a laughably fashionable wrap that only heightened the dowdiness of Eliza’s suburban mother garb of slacks and sweater. But the pockets were a boon. Vonnie was starting the microcassette recorder.
“You look wonderful, Elizabeth.” Her full name hurt in Walter’s mouth. “But then-I saw your photo, I knew how you’d look. How do I look?”
“Well,” she said. He wanted more. “Fit.”
“I’m only forty-six. It’s hard for us to get exercise, but you’d be surprised what you can do in a cell, with no equipment but your own body. Barbara got me into yoga. I’m not much on flexibility, but my strength-I’ll show you.” To Eliza’s surprise-and apparently to the deputy’s consternation, as the man seemed to tense all over-Walter put his palms on the floor and then leaned forward until his knees rested against his elbows, his feet up in the air, his entire weight balanced on his arms.
“The crow,” he said, holding the position nonchalantly. “Hey, do you root for the Ravens or the Redskins?”
“What?”
“I mean, I know you grew up in Baltimore and its environs”-environs-“but now you live in the D.C. area, so it just popped into my head, which football team do you choose?”
“Walter, I don’t think this is an occasion for small talk.”
“Oh, so it’s going to be like that?” Standing up, dusting off his palms, but not particularly offended as far as she could tell. Relieved, almost playful. “Okay, but before we cut to the chase, as people say, there is something else we have to talk about first. The night that Holly died. And what happened after.”
She looked at the deputy, who had the good grace to try and pretend that none of this was happening, that he was watching them because it was his duty, yet unengaged. “I-” She looked at Vonnie, who understood her distress but had no solution.
“Hey, Walter?” That was Walter behind bars, talking to Walter at the desk.
“Yes, Walter?”
“Do you need to hear what we’re going to talk about?”
“I need to watch. You know that. I have to watch.”
“Watching’s okay. Do you have to hear?”
The deputy thought for a moment, nodded, took an MP3 player from his desk drawer, and plugged in the earbuds. Eliza couldn’t identify the music, but she could tell it was loud, loud enough so she could hear a tinny buzz. But he kept his eyes fastened on them, and she was not sorry for that.
“Tit for tat,” Walter said, inclining his head toward Vonnie.
“But-?”
“Just us. That’s nonnegotiable. She can go back to wherever they want to hold her, but she can’t stay here.”
The two sisters exchanged glances, but it was hopeless. Vonnie had secreted the microcassette player in her pocket precisely so her purse could be examined by the deputy as Walter looked on. They had made a great show of having their bags examined when they entered. They would have to forgo the taping. Vonnie knocked on the door, and another deputy came to escort her away.
“Hush, hush,” Walter said. When she looked at him, stony-faced, he added: “It was a joke, Elizabeth. Remember how much you liked that song?”
“I did. I liked a lot of songs that summer. I don’t like them now.”
“I ruined them, I guess.”
She selected her words with care. “When you hear a song, it’s natural to remember where you were when it was popular.”
“I ruined the songs.” He looked genuinely contrite. “I hadn’t thought about that. I may have ruined the songs, but I didn’t ruin you. Look at you, Elizabeth.”
She considered this. Her life had not been destroyed by Walter, far from it. She had an unusually good life, especially for these uncertain times. She had Peter, she had Albie and Iso. She had her parents-hale and hearty into their seventies. And, as the past forty-eight hours had reminded her, she could even rely on Vonnie, impossible, exasperating Vonnie. What did she lack, what had been denied her?
The world at large. No truly close friends, just Peter’s friends and some acquaintances. And this wasn’t a function of the multiple relocations or the temperaments of the women she had met in Houston and London and now Bethesda. It wasn’t, as she had always rationalized, because she was too eastern in Texas, too American in London, too Baltimore for Washington-centric Montgomery County. She couldn’t even blame her lack of friends on being the mother of the girl who might be renowned as the subtle bully and sneak thief of North Bethesda Middle. Eliza didn’t have friends because friendship led to trust and confidences. The thick black line drawn through her life, demarcating where Elizabeth ended and Eliza began, had always made that impossible, at least in her mind.
“No, you didn’t ruin me. But the fact that you didn’t destroy me doesn’t mitigate what you did.”
“I’ll say it: I raped you.” Walter’s voice was low, as if to ensure these words would be heard by her, and her alone. Out of consideration or shame? “I did. I would never deny your experience. You were raped, and I did it. But can you see that it felt like love to me, Elizabeth? Just a little.”
She shook her head. “This is not what we’re supposed to be discussing. There is no point in talking about this.”
“Actually, there is. Because before I can tell you anything, you need to understand this-that night with you was the first and only time in my life that I had sex.”
“No-” She wanted to turn her back on him, hide her face as she sorted through her emotions. It was a lie, it couldn’t be, why was he doing this to her? “You’ve said…I read…”
“I lied. I lied because I was ashamed. That’s how screwed up I was. I was more ashamed of my lack of sexual experience than I was about the things I’d done. I made up this whole story about how I’d done it back home and everyone assumed I’d done it to the other girls. The true first time-the only time-was with you. Remember? That hotel near the Blue Ridge Mountains?”
IT WAS THE NIGHT after Holly had died. Walter had barely spoken throughout the day. He was dazed, semicatatonic, and Eliza had to prompt him to do the smallest things. Moving forward when lights turned green, speaking up when the waitress asked his order at dinner that night.
The hotel was a nice one, an actual hotel, with a restaurant, the kind of place that had linen tablecloths and an elaborate mural that showed people in old-fashioned clothes picnicking. Had there been that much money in Holly’s little tin box? A credit card? Walter urged Elizabeth to order whatever she wanted, but her stomach was sour, and she knew he would be angry if she wasted this food, expensive as it was. Yet Walter wasn’t eating at all. He cut his steak into ever smaller pieces, mashed his baked potato as if it were something he wanted to kill.
“Your dad eats even less than you,” remarked the waitress.
“I’m not her dad,” Walter said, and something in his voice made the waitress flinch. He softened his tone. “I’m her brother. She was a change-of-life baby, and now our parents are dead and all we have is each other.”
“That’s…nice. Real nice.”
They went upstairs. Eliza reveled in the shower, the nicest she’d had in weeks, although she had to put back on her dirty old clothes. The bedspread was wonderful, too, an old-fashioned white one with a raised design. It had been almost a week since she had been in a real bed, and she fell asleep quickly, the television humming in the background. She wasn’t sure what time it was when she awoke to find Walter standing over her.
“Turn over,” he said.
She did, even as she said, “Please don’t, Walter. Please?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to. But I’ll put some music on.” He picked up the remote, flicking through the channels until he found MTV. Madonna singing “Lucky Star.” “You like this one, right?” He turned her so she could face it, but she shut her eyes tight, not wanting to see anything, remember anything.
He was behind her. She had read a book one time, one of the best dirty books ever, where a woman’s boyfriend was always turning her over, and it was revealed that he really liked boys. But she didn’t think that was what was going on with Walter. He was having trouble. He was having a lot of trouble. “Dammit,” he said a time or two, arranging and rearranging her limbs, talking to her body the way he sometimes berated his tools during one of his handyman jobs. Eventually, he found his way. It hurt so much that she could not imagine that it ever wouldn’t, that anyone would do this voluntarily. His mouth was next to her ear, her neck, but he didn’t kiss her, and his arms were braced on either side of her, as if he were doing push-ups. He seemed to be holding his breath. Finally, he gave a little yelp, more surprised than anything else. Madonna was still singing, rolling across the floor, sending up thanks for her lucky star.
“I’m sorry,” he said for the second time. She was crying, her face pressed into what had been the most wonderful bed in the world and was now the worst.
The next day, he was absentminded again, but she stopped helping him, retreating into her own trancelike state. They stopped at a grocery store and ended up having a fight over a box of cookies. He relented and let her have them, but not before pushing her hard enough that she stumbled and went down to her knees. Shortly after they crossed the Potomac into Maryland, he was pulled over for driving too slowly, and if he thought he had anything to fear from the state police, he sure didn’t act that way.
“Who’s the young lady?” the officer asked.
“Elizabeth Lerner,” Walter said. “I’m taking her home. She’s been missing, a runaway, but I’ve convinced her to go home.”
Did he expect the trooper to wave him through? He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed as the trooper walked back to his car, made a call on his radio. Before Elizabeth knew what was happening, Walter was on the ground, his hands above his head, and the state trooper was shouting at him not to move, even as he assured Elizabeth that she was going to be all right, that she was safe now.
And she started to cry. Because she was safe. Or, perhaps, because she realized she would never be safe again.
“THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE,” told Walter now. “You raped Maude. You tried to rape Holly.” Walter was gripping the bars. She wished she had something to grip. She wished she hadn’t refused the offer of a chair, but it would be weak to ask for it now. Besides, she didn’t want to engage the deputy. It was strange enough that he was watching them.
“I couldn’t. With the others. I tried, but it never worked. The first one-she laughed at me, and after that, I never could. Except with you.”
This was her opening. “Maude wasn’t the first one.” Tentative, yet determined.
“No.”
“Who was?”
He held up a hand. “Before I tell you what I promised to tell you, Elizabeth, I want you to think about the penultimate night.” He was obviously pleased with himself, if only for the use of penultimate.
“I’d really prefer not to.”
“It’s important.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Important to me, then. You went to sit in the truck.”
“You told me to go sit in the truck.”
“I gave you the keys. You locked yourself in. The doors were still locked when I came back to the truck. I knocked on the window, and you let me in. You sat there the entire time.”
“What else could I have done? I couldn’t drive, and I couldn’t climb down that mountain in the dark.”
“You told the prosecutors that you saw Holly running, me following.”
“Yes. First I heard her-she screamed. Then you shouted, like you were in pain. I always assumed she had done something to you.”
“Clawed at my eyes. Someone taught her that. Some women, they go for the-” It was almost comical, how he gestured at his crotch, failing to find a word he considered proper or impressive enough. “It’s better to go for the eyes. Tell your daughter that.”
“Do not talk about my daughter.”
“Okay, okay. Just trying to be helpful.” He held up his hands to signal his supplication. “Yes, I probably did scream, although I don’t remember that. Here’s what I do remember, that’s a lot more important: I didn’t go after Holly.”
“You did. I saw you.”
“No you didn’t. Not if you were locked in that truck. The truck was parked on the far side of the tent, Elizabeth, away from the flap. Holly didn’t run toward it-probably because she didn’t trust you to help her-”
“That’s not fair, Walter.”
“We’re way beyond fair now. She ran toward the trees, toward the darkness. You couldn’t have seen her. And you didn’t see me chase her, because I didn’t. I was trying to find her, to help her-”
“You called her name. I heard that. And then she screamed. I heard that, too.”
“But you didn’t see me chase her, because I didn’t. All these years, that never occurred to me. I didn’t think about where the truck was. And you were so adamant in your testimony, so unwavering.”
And so determined to say what the adults wanted to hear. This was true. She had resolved not to disappoint anyone again, not to let anyone know how cowardly she had been. Yet there was the image in her mind’s eye, an image that had tortured her for years, that flash of white, Holly’s streaming hair. Walter had been right behind her, almost close enough to grab that banner of hair. Hadn’t he?
“She fell off that mountain, just like I said. All these years, I didn’t see how I could get anyone to believe me, because there you were, telling people I chased her, that you saw it. But then Barbara came along, began looking at things, reconstructing things. She was the one who realized it couldn’t be the way you said. She was the one who said I had to find you, get you to tell the truth. You probably didn’t even know you weren’t telling the truth. They brainwashed you.”
“If anyone brainwashed me, it was you,” she said. “You intimidated me to the point that you could trust me to do anything. I was scared all the time. Scared enough that I went and sat in the truck because you told me to. So scared that I didn’t try to get away from you, no matter how many chances I had.”
“Well, if you could be brainwashed by me, you could be convinced by other people, too, right? You always were susceptible, Elizabeth. You wanted to do what other people wanted you to do. First me, then the lawyers. There’s no shame in that.”
Then why did it feel as if he wanted her to feel exactly that, as if he was trying to find a way to push those buttons. “The prosecutors didn’t threaten to kill my parents and my sister if I didn’t cooperate with them. The prosecutors didn’t hit me, early on, when I didn’t do their bidding, or tie me up. The prosecutors didn’t rape me.”
“Didn’t they? They got you to tell a lie. That’s perjury, Elizabeth, and perjury is a felony. Same as rape.”
“Not quite. Not at all.”
“Still, it’s wrong to lie in court. I don’t think you lied consciously, but you were wrong. She really did fall, Elizabeth. I didn’t push her. Even if you did see me chase her-and you couldn’t because I didn’t-you couldn’t see what happened, how far I was from her when she fell.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
For a moment, he looked angry, and Eliza could feel the deputy tightening, coiling, ready to leap in, although she was still on her mark, several inches behind it, in fact. Walter had planned out a version of this conversation in his head, and it wasn’t going his way, any more than any of his conversations with grown women had ever gone his way. She wasn’t a girl anymore, and she was thwarting him. It felt good.
His voice tried for a cajoling tone. “That’s your right, isn’t it? To believe me or not believe me, based on the facts. That was my right, too. To have a jury hear the facts. To have them decide, based on the facts, if I did what I was accused of doing. My rights were denied me, because of your testimony. My lawyer wouldn’t put me on the stand, wouldn’t let me contradict the star witness, because you were so convincing.”
“Walter-I told the truth.”
“You thought you did, but it couldn’t be.” He lined up his left forearm on the bars. “There’s the truck, see? With the headlights where my fingers are.” He wiggled his fingers. “The tent was behind it. Holly ran in the other direction. Barbara drove to the campsite, and it’s the same, after all these years. She even went at the right time of year, last fall, almost to the day, so everything lined up. You couldn’t have seen what you said you saw.”
“Last year-you’ve been looking for me all this time, haven’t you? It wasn’t an accident. You didn’t just find me in the pages of Washingtonian. It wasn’t destiny, or serendipity.”
“Well, yes and no. I mean, yes, we were looking. But it was an accident, how I found you, and that’s a kind of serendipity. That’s how I knew you were supposed to help me. I turned the page, and there you were.” He paused. “You got so pretty, Elizabeth. I always knew you would. You weren’t my type, when you were young. I liked those tall blondes. Can you blame me? That’s what a young man likes. But it’s right, about beauty being skin deep. You’re beautiful inside, and it finally got to the outside. And you’re too good inside to let the lie stand. Not when it could cost me my life.”
“The governor doesn’t want to issue you a stay under any circumstances.”
Walter raised his eyebrows. “Funny that you should know that. I mean, I know that. Barbara and Jeff know that. This governor would prefer not to be dragged into this at all. But how do you know that, Elizabeth?”
She looked at the floor, at the masking tape, reminding herself that she was safe. She would not cross the creek again. He could not grab her wrists, force her into a truck. So why were her knees shaking?
“Just common sense,” she said. “He almost never does.”
“You still can’t lie. That’s why I’m not mad at you.”
He wasn’t mad at her? That was rich.
“I know you believe what you testified to. At any rate, you’re right. He’s not going to commute my sentence unless something really big happens. Like, the star witness against me recanting her testimony. I wouldn’t get a new trial, under Virginia law. But if you told him that you had come to realize you were mistaken, or that the prosecutor put words in your mouth-he would have to listen, give me a stay.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I can think of three reasons. One, it’s the right thing to do. Can’t believe I need to give you more, but here goes.” He had been holding up his index finger, and now he added the middle one. “Two, I don’t see why I should share any information with you unless you prove you’re a trustworthy person. Truth for truth, Elizabeth. If I owe those other families the truth, then you owe me the same.”
“I have always been truthful.”
“Okay, then three. I still have time to give Jared Garrett an exclusive. I’ve written pages and pages and pages, which are in Barbara’s possession. He always thought things were different with us. Maybe he was right. Maybe that’s a truth that needs to go out there in the world, that we were boyfriend and girlfriend and you got jealous when I fell for Holly.”
There it was, the thing she feared most. She would be outed. Her past would become present, truth and lie would mingle, and she would spend the rest of her life explaining herself. She would have to explain to her children what happened to her, yet persuade them that they could still feel safe in this world, that their parents could protect them. Albie’s nightmares, Iso’s secrecy-this wasn’t going to help. And if Jared Garrett published Walter’s version of their relationship, how would she convince Iso that her clandestine flirtation with a seventeen-year-old was out of bounds? It was everything Eliza had feared-and, she realized, she could handle it.
Still-she was disappointed in Walter. She really had wanted to believe that he had changed. And she didn’t feel naive or stupid for the hope he had stirred up in her, the ruses he had used to lure her here. This was the way she wanted to be, the way she would continue to be. Like her college-essay role model, Anne Frank, she believed that people were basically good. Most people, at least.
“You’re not going to tell me about the others, are you?”
“I will if you call the governor and my sentence is commuted to life. Then I’ll tell you everything.”
“No you won’t. Because even if you failed to rape them, you tried, and that would mean the death penalty in those cases, too.”
“Let me worry about that. Isn’t living with my crimes, as an aware and remorseful person, more of a real punishment than killing me? Every day I’m alive, I have to think about what I did.”
“But do you?”
“What?”
“Do you? I mean, yes, every day is an opportunity for you to think about your victims, that doesn’t mean it happens. I have a feeling, Walter, that the only person you’ve ever really thought about is yourself.”
He lowered his voice, and she almost crossed the invisible barrier despite herself.
“I think about you. Every day. The time we spent together-that’s about as happy as I ever was.”
“Then I’m sorry for you. Because that was not a happy time, Walter.”
“You’re the only woman I ever made love to.”
“I was the fifteen-year-old girl you forced yourself on sexually. It’s not the same thing.”
“I cared about you. I still care about you. This is as much for you as for me, Elizabeth. I know you. You always did the right thing. You couldn’t tell a lie to save your life. They tricked you into believing their lies.”
“Walter, I believe you killed Holly.”
“But do you believe that I deserve to die for that? You and your family, that’s not your way.”
“It wasn’t our choice. The prosecutor asked the Tacketts what they wanted. He asked twelve citizens of Virginia if they thought it was fair. They said yes, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“But there is.” His voice scaling up, strangled. “All you have to do is pick up a phone, say you’ve realized, talking to me all these weeks, what you got wrong. I’m not asking to go free, Elizabeth. I’m asking not to die. You can save me. Only you can save me.”
“No, I can’t, and I never could. I’m sorry, Walter, I really am. But you’re asking me to lie.”
“Quite the opposite.”
Worse, he was asking her to do the most unnatural thing in the world, to comb over her memories of that night. What if she had unwittingly perjured herself? What if, in her refusal to relive that night, she had gotten it wrong? What if-and then it came to her. She saw herself on the country road with Iso and Albie, her heart in her throat as she wrested the car back into the correct lane, the ghostly deer disappearing behind them, the white tail triggering the image she was always trying to bury. She had slid across the seat to turn the key, so she could have heat and music, then she had looked up as she returned to her own seat-
She almost wept from relief.
“Walter, I could see you. I saw you in the rearview mirror.”
“That’s a nice story to tell yourself, isn’t it? Maybe you can lie, after all.”
“I’m not lying. I looked up, I saw you both. Did I see you push her? No, but I never said I did. I saw you chase her. You were right behind her, almost on her heels. If she had run off that mountain as you claim, you would have been right on top of her.”
Walter’s eyes slid sideways. It was his eyes, that was the tell, what was off in his otherwise handsome face. Narrow and small, they were never looking where they should be. They eeled away when a direct gaze was required, fastened on another’s eyes when it was inappropriate, got caught studying cleavage and legs.
“But it’s plausible, what I’m saying. Worthy of reconsideration.”
“I won’t lie for you.”
“You’d do it for your kids, for your husband. You’d lie for them.”
“I suppose I might, if it came to that. But that’s different. Even you have to realize it’s different.”
He extended his hand through the bars, and the deputy was on his feet, just that fast, shoulder to shoulder with Eliza. He needn’t have worried. She had no intention of moving closer to Walter, although it was hard not to collapse against Deputy Walter, use his bulk.
“I love you,” Walter said, and even the earbudded deputy had to be able to hear that, or read his lips. The deputy shook his head in disgust.
“Walter, you’re lying or you think that’s true. Either way, it’s sad.”
She walked away, gathered her things from the deputy’s desk, turned back. “The others,” she said. “It would be a comfort to their loved ones, if you could make a clean breast of things. I wish you would.”
“Well, that was up to you.” Petulant as Iso.
“No, it was always up to you. I admit it. I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to come out of here with all the names and details. I thought if I could set the record straight about the other girls, I might finally forgive myself about Holly.”
“You did have a chance to save her.” Green eyes glinting. What happens when beauty doesn’t free the beast, doesn’t release him from his curse, knows him but still cannot love him?
“I couldn’t see that at the time. I wish I had, but I didn’t. But I couldn’t save her that night, Walter. What I saw might be contestable, but what I heard wasn’t. You pushed her off the side of that mountain. Pushed her because she fought back.”
“That’s right,” he said, triumphant. “You’re alive because you were weak. Because you weren’t worth killing. After I had sex with you, all I wanted to do was take you home, because it wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all. How do you like knowing that? You’re alive because there’s nothing special about you, because I didn’t want you. You’re the one I got stuck with, not one of the ones I chose. How do you feel, knowing that?”
Eliza assumed he didn’t want an answer, but she took his question seriously all the same. “Well, I’m truly glad I’m alive, so I guess I’m glad for the reason, whatever it was.”
She nodded to the deputy, ready to leave. Steps from the threshold, she dropped her purse, all but flung it to the floor, and its contents, a remarkable collection of items that screamed mom-messy, disorganized mom at that-went skittering across the floor. Phone, Kleenex, wallet, change, checkbook, lipstick, comb. Deputy Walter fell to his knees, gathering it all up. She had known she could count on his automatic courtesy.
And in that instance, she stepped back toward the bars, passed her taped mark on the floor, kept going until she was inches from Walter’s face. They were almost eye to eye, he had not grown at all. She brought her arm up and saw Walter flinch, enjoying the look of unease on his face, the fact that he didn’t know what she was going to do. But she didn’t hit him. She placed her hand on his shoulder and said: “I know you’re scared, Walter. You have every right to be. There’s no shame in being scared to die. But I couldn’t save Holly, and I can’t save you.”
He was sobbing as she left. Partly out of frustration, she would guess. He had poured his energy into finding her, taking care to seduce her this time, and he had come so close to getting what he wanted. But he might be crying from fear, too, the overwhelming realization that he had no options, no out. She understood how he felt, was inside his head, experiencing the cold slap of fear and frustration. She knew him as well as she had ever known anyone, including her husband and children. Walter was all the gaps within her, the connective tissue that joined the two halves of her life. He was the neighborhood where she could never live again. He was the missing syllable, dropped from her name, yet forever a part of her, with her always, no matter what she called herself.
God help her, she would know him anywhere.