Jimmy’s sake? And if I won’t stop? If I won’t be silent?”
“How much has Sasha told you?” I asked.
Lilly’s eyes fixed on mine, then moved at once away. “Something happened at Wyvern. Something strange. Bad. In some way it affects us. Everyone in Moonlight Bay. They’re trying to keep it quiet. It might explain Jimmy’s disappearance. Somehow.”
I turned to look at Sasha, who had retreated to the farther side of the kitchen. “That’s all?”
“Isn’t she in greater danger if she knows more?” Sasha asked.
“Definitely,” Bobby said from his watch position at the rear door.
Considering the depth of Lilly’s distress, I agreed that it was not wise to tell her every detail of what we knew. If she understood the apocalyptic threat looming over us, over all humanity, she might lose her last desperate faith that she would see her little boy alive again. I would never be the one who robbed her of that remaining hope.
Besides, I detected a dusting of gray in the night beyond the kitchen windows, a precursor of dawn so subtle that anyone without my heightened appreciation for shades of darkness was not likely to notice. We were running out of time. Soon I would have to hide from the sun, which I preferred to do in the well-prepared sanctuary of my own home.
Lilly said, “I deserve to know. To know everything.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Everything.”
“But there’s not enough time now. We—”
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
I pushed aside her cup of tea and reached across the table with both hands. “You aren’t alone.”
She looked at my hands but didn’t take them, perhaps because she was afraid that by putting her hands in mine, she would lose her grip on her emotions.
Keeping my hands on the table, palms up, I said, “Knowing more now won’t help you. Later, I’ll tell you everything. Everything. But now…If whoever took Jimmy has nothing to do with…the mess at Wyvern, Manuel will try hard to bring him back to you. I know he will. But if it
“This is so wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Crazy.”
“Yes.”
“So wrong,” she repeated, and her flat voice was increasingly eerie. Her effort to maintain her composure left her face clenched as tight as a fist.
I couldn’t bear the sight of her in such acute pain, but I did not avert my gaze. When she was able to look at me, I wanted her to see the commitment in my eyes; perhaps she could take some comfort from it.
“You’ve got to stay here,” I said, “so we’ll know where to get hold of you if…when we find Jimmy.”
“What hope do you have?” she said, and though her voice remained flat, a flutter passed through it. “You against…who? The police? The army? The government? You against all of them?”
“It isn’t hopeless. Nothing’s hopeless in this world — unless we want it to be. But, Lilly…you’ve got to stay here. Because if this isn’t about Wyvern, isn’t connected, then the police might need your help. Or might bring you good news. Even the police.”
“But you shouldn’t be alone,” Sasha said.
“When we leave,” Bobby said, “I’ll bring Jenna here.” Jenna Wing was Lilly’s mother-in-law. “Would that be okay?”
Lilly nodded.
She was not going to take my hands, so I folded them on the table, as hers were folded.
I said, “You asked what they could do if you decided not to be silent, not to play this their way. Anything. That’s what they can do.” I hesitated. Then: “I don’t know where my mother was going on the day she died. She was driving out of town. Maybe to break this conspiracy wide open. Because she knew, Lilly. She knew what had happened at Wyvern. She never got where she was going. Neither would you.”
Her eyes widened. “The accident, the car crash.”
“No accident.”
For the first time since I’d sat across the table from her, Lilly met my eyes and held my gaze for longer than two or three words: “Your mother. Genetics. Her work. That’s how you know so much about this.”
I didn’t take the opportunity to explain more to Lilly, for fear she might reach the correct conclusion that my mother was not merely a righteous whistle-blower, that she was among those fundamentally responsible for what had gone wrong at Wyvern. And if what happened to Jimmy was related to the Wyvern cover-up, Lilly might take the next step in logic, concluding that her son was in jeopardy as a direct result of my mother’s work. While this was probably true, she might leap thereafter into the realm of the illogical, assume that I was one of the conspirators, one of the enemy, and withdraw from me. Regardless of what my mother could have done, I was Lilly’s friend and her best hope of finding her child.
“Your best chance, Jimmy’s best chance, is to trust us. Me, Bobby, Sasha. Trust us, Lilly.”
“There’s nothing I can do. Nothing,” she said bitterly.
Her clenched face changed, though it didn’t relax with relief at being able to share this burden with friends. Instead, the wretched twist of pain that distorted her features drew tighter, into a hard knot of anger, as she was overcome by a simultaneously dispiriting and infuriating recognition of her helplessness.
When her husband, Ben, died three years ago, Lilly had left her job as a teacher’s aide, because she couldn’t support Jimmy on that income, and she had risked the life-insurance money to open a gift shop in an area of the harbor popular with tourists. With hard work, she made the business viable. To overcome loneliness and grief at the loss of Ben, she filled her spare hours with Jimmy and with self-education: She learned to lay bricks, installing the walkways around her bungalow; she built a fine picket fence, stripped and refinished the cabinets in her kitchen, and became a first-class gardener, with the best landscaping in her neighborhood. She was accustomed to taking care of herself, to coping. Even in adversity, she had always before remained an optimist; she was a doer, a fighter, all but incapable of thinking of herself as a victim.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, Lilly felt entirely helpless, pitted against forces she could neither fully understand nor successfully defy. This time self-reliance was not enough; worse, there seemed to be no positive action that she could take. Because it was not in her nature to embrace victimhood, she could not find solace in self-pity, either. She could only wait. Wait for Jimmy to be found alive. Wait for him to be found dead. Or, perhaps worst of all, wait all her life without knowing what had happened to him. Because of this intolerable helplessness, she was racked equally by anger, terror, and a portentous grief.
At last she unclasped her hands.
Her eyes blurred with tears that she struggled not to shed.
Because I thought she was going to reach out to me, I reached toward her again.
Instead, she covered her face with her hands and, sobbing, said, “Oh, Chris, I’m so ashamed.”
I didn’t know whether she meant that her helplessness shamed her or that she was ashamed of losing control, of weeping.
I went around the table and tried to pull her into my arms.
She resisted for a moment, then rose from her chair and hugged me. Burying her face against my shoulder, voice raw with anguish, she said, “I was so…oh, God…I was so cruel to you.”
Stunned, confused, I said, “No, no. Lilly, Badger, no, not you, not ever.”
“I didn’t have…the guts.” She was shaking as if in the thrall of a fever, words stuttering out of her, teeth chattering, clutching at me with the desperation of a lost and terrified child.
I held her tight, unable to speak because her pain tore at me. I remained baffled by her declaration of shame; yet, in retrospect, I believe an understanding was beginning to come to me.
“All my big talk,” she said, her voice becoming even less clear, distorted by a choking remorse. “Just talk. But I wasn’t…couldn’t…when it counted…couldn’t.” She gasped for breath and held me tighter than ever. “I told you the difference didn’t matter to me, but in the end it did.”
