“Stop,” I whispered. “It’s all right, all right.”
“Your difference,” she said, but by now I knew what she meant. “Your difference. In the end it mattered. And I turned away from you. But here you are. Here you are when I need you.”
Bobby moved from the kitchen onto the back porch. He wasn’t investigating a suspicious noise, and he wasn’t stepping outside to give us privacy. His slacker indifference was a shell inside which was concealed a snail- soft sentimental Bobby Halloway that he thought was unknown to everyone, even to me.
Sasha started to follow Bobby. When she glanced at me, I shook my head, encouraging her to stay.
Visibly discomfited, she busied herself by brewing another serving of tea to replace the one that had cooled, untouched, in the cup on the table.
“You never turned away from me, never, never,” I told Lilly, holding her, smoothing her hair with one hand, and wishing that life had never brought us to a moment where she felt compelled to speak of this.
For four years, beginning when we were sixteen, we hoped to build a life together, but we grew up. For one thing, we realized that any children we conceived would be at too high a risk of XP. I’ve made peace with my limitations, but I couldn’t justify creating a child who would be burdened with them. And if the child was born without XP, he — or she — would be fatherless at a young age, for I wasn’t likely to survive far into his teenage years. Though I would have been content to live childless with Lilly, she longed to have a family, which was natural and right. She struggled, too, with the certainty of being a young widow — and with the awful prospect of the increasing physical and neurological disorders that were likely to plague me during my final few years: slurred speech, hearing loss, uncontrollable tremors of the head and the hands, perhaps even mental impairment.
“We both knew it had to end, both of us,” I told Lilly, which was true, because belatedly I’d recognized the horrendous obligation that I would eventually become to her, all in the name of love.
To be honest, I might selfishly have seduced her into marriage and allowed her to suffer with me during my eventual descent into infirmity and disability, because the comfort and companionship she could have provided would have made my decline less frightening and more tolerable. I might have closed my mind to the realization that I was ruining her life in order to improve mine. I am not adequate material for sainthood; I am not selfless. She had voiced the first doubts, tentative and apologetic; listening to her, over a period of weeks, I’d reluctantly arrived at the realization that although she would make any sacrifice for me — and though I wanted to let her make those sacrifices — what love she still had for me after my death would inevitably be corroded with resentment and with a justified bitterness. Because I am not going to have a long life, I have a deep and thoroughly selfish need to want those who have known me to keep me alive in memory. And I am vain enough to want those memories to be cherished, to be full of affection and laughter. Finally I had understood that, for my sake as much as Lilly’s, we had to forgo our dream of a life together — or risk watching the dream devolve into a nightmare.
Now, with Lilly in my arms, I realized that because she had been the first to express doubts about our relationship, she felt the full responsibility for its collapse. When we’d ceased to be lovers and decided to settle for friendship, my continued longing for her and my melancholy about the end of our dream must have been dismally apparent, because I’d been neither kind enough nor man enough to spare her from them. Unwittingly, I had sharpened the thorn of guilt in her heart, and eight years too late, I needed to heal the wound that I had caused.
When I began to tell her all this, Lilly attempted to protest. By habit, she blamed herself, and over the years she had learned to take a masochistic solace in her imagined culpability, which she was now reluctant to do without. Earlier, I’d incorrectly believed that her inability to meet my eyes resulted from my failure to find Jimmy; like her, I’d been quick to torture myself with blame. This side of Eden, whether we realize it or not, we feel the stain on our souls, and at every opportunity, we try to scrub it away with steel-wool guilt.
I held fast to this dear woman, talking her into accepting exoneration, trying to make her see me for the needy fool that I am, insisting that she understand how close I had come, eight years ago, to manipulating her into sacrificing her future for me. Diligently, I tarnished the shining image she held of me. This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do…because as I held her and quieted her tears, I realized how much I still cherished her, treasured her, and how desperately I wanted her to think only well of me, though we would never be lovers again.
“We did what was right. Both of us. If we hadn’t made the decision we made eight years ago,” I concluded, “you wouldn’t have found Ben, and I would never have found Sasha. Those are precious moments in our lives — your meeting Ben, my meeting Sasha. Sacred moments.”
“I love you, Chris.”
“I love you, too.”
“Not like I once loved you.”
“I know.”
“Better than that.”
“I know,” I said.
“Purer than that.”
“You don’t need to say this.”
“Not because it makes me feel rebellious and noble to love you with all your troubles. Not because you’re different. I love you because you’re who you are.”
“Badger?” I said.
“What?”
I smiled. “Shut up.”
She let out a sound that was more laugh than sob, though it was composed of both. She kissed me on the cheek and settled into her chair, weak with relief but also still weak with fear for her missing son.
Sasha brought a fresh cup of tea to the table, and Lilly took her hand, held it tightly. “Do you know
“Didn’t until I met Chris,” Sasha said, and even in the dim and fluttering candlelight, I saw the tracks of tears on her face.
“He called me Badger because I stood up for him. But he’s my Badger now, your Badger. And you’re his, aren’t you?”
“She swings a hell of a mean cudgel,” I said.
“We’re going to find Jimmy,” Sasha promised her, relieving me of the terrible weight of repeating that impossible promise, “and we’re going to bring him home to you.”
“What about the crow?” Lilly asked Sasha.
From a pocket, Sasha produced a sheet of drawing paper, which she unfolded. “After the cops left, I searched Jimmy’s bedroom. They hadn’t been thorough. I thought we might find something they overlooked. This was under one of the pillows.”
When I held the paper to the candlelight, I saw an ink sketch of a bird in flight, side view, wings back. Beneath the bird was a neatly hand-lettered message:
“What does your father-in-law have to do with this?” I asked Lilly.
Fresh misery darkened her face. “I don’t know.”
Bobby stepped inside from the porch. “Got to split, bro.”
By now the coming dawn was evident to all of us. The sun had not yet appeared above the eastern hills, but the night was doing a fade, from blackest soot to gray dust. Beyond the windows, the backyard was no longer a landscape in shades of black but a pencil sketch.
I showed him the drawing of the crow. “Maybe this isn’t about Wyvern, after all. Maybe someone has a grudge against Louis.”
Bobby studied the paper, but he wasn’t convinced that this proved the kidnapping was merely a crime of vengeance. “Everything goes back to Wyvern, one way or another.”
“When did Louis leave the police department?” I asked.
Lilly said, “He retired about four years ago, a year before Ben died.”
“And before everything went wrong at Wyvern,” Sasha noted. “So maybe this
“It’s connected,” Bobby insisted. He tapped one finger against the crow. “It’s too radically weird not to be connected.”
