Abandoned

“I don’t know,” AD Jones mutters. “We’ll have to get approval from the attorney general’s office first.”

“We can get it,” I say to him. “Tell someone who’s interested that I’ll owe them a favor. They want me, remember?”

He is quiet for a time. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.” He waves a hand, dismissing us. “Get out of here. I’ll go sell your soul for you.”

Tommy drives us home, as silent and inscrutable on the return as he was on the approach. I have no sense of him right now. Kirby seems untroubled but empathetic, content to keep quiet as long as the radio is on.

We pull into our driveway as the sun is coming up.

“Hop on out and turn over the keys,” Kirby says, fresh-scrubbed and bright, a blond and guiltless Pontius Pilate. “I’ll get rid of this vehicle and the guns and that’ll be that.” She winks. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas right?”

Tommy sits on the edge of the bed, examining his hands. I sit next to him. His silence has become a solidity, something pervasive, like a wall of smoke or a bank of fog.

“Tommy,” I venture. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” He continues to look at his hands. His voice sounds far away.

“Are we okay?” I ask.

His eyes focus on me now, but he seems confused, as if I just shook him awake.

“Of course we’re okay. We’re fine.”

“Then what’s wrong? You’re a quiet guy, but never for this long.”

He goes silent again. Watches the wall. “We almost killed a human being, Smoky,” he murmurs. “We hunted her down and we were prepared to execute her, to bury her body in the desert. That deserves some thought. That deserves my attention. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that’s what we were going to do. I played my part with both eyes open. But we almost took a life, cold-bloodedly. I would have done it too. You pulled us back from the brink, but I would have done it if you hadn’t. I don’t want to hold that under or push it aside or ignore it in any way. I want to feel it.”

I swallow my grief and my pain and my faint self-loathing.

“How does it feel?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer right away. I watch him struggle. I observe evidence of sadness and strength, a mixture of love and loss, and, above these things, endurance. Tommy, I realize, is what my dad called “a laster.”

A laster, Dad told me, is someone who can endure everything without losing who they are. Like this woman I read about recently. She and her family were sent to the concentration camps in World War Two. She was twenty-five, married to her childhood sweetheart, had three children. She was the only one who made it out alive. She healed and went on to find new love and have another two sons. She died surrounded by her children and her grandchildren. A laster. Your mom is one.

What about you?

Me? No. I’m not a laster.

Dreamer though he was, Dad always judged himself honestly. I think that’s one of the reasons Mom let herself love him.

“It feels bad,” Tommy answers. He flexes his hands into fists, releases them. “But it’ll pass.”

I come into his arms, a sign of assent, but in my heart of hearts, that place where we’re always alone, I am less certain.

What does that make me?

Am I a laster?

We nap through the morning. It is a fitful sleep, filled with dreams I forget the minute I jolt awake. Just one image I am allowed to keep: my mother, silent. She watches me, not judging, not sad, warning me even as she understands.

Don’t forget the lighthouse, her eyes seem to say. Swim out too far and you’re too far out. Don’t forget, honey, because that ocean is always dark and always bottomless and when you sink, you sink forever.

I snuggle into my husband and search for whatever peace he can give me.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“What was your father’s name?”

“Thomas Richard Lane. Corporal Thomas Richard Lane.”

Here we are again, I think. Back to the center of the circle.

I am sitting across from Mercy Lane in a cold, concrete interview room. We are alone. The walls soak up all the sound, and this gives me goose bumps, reminding me of the dark and the meadow behind my eyes.

But I hide my discomfort.

“Your father was in the army?”

“He fought in Korea.” She pauses, mulling something. “He was really made for it.”

“For what?”

“Surviving.”

I had reached out to Mercy with the offer of a standard interview, the kind I’d done for the BAU ten or more times before. She’d accepted, whether out of boredom or because she was, in the end, no different from all the rest of them, I don’t know.

It’s an opportunity to try to understand this person who almost turned me into a murderer. It’s also a chance to get the answers to some questions. There are some loose ends. They’ve been gnawing on the soft parts of me at night and interrupting my sleep.

“Why was survival so important to him?”

“Because survival is the only thing that is important. Everything else is a bonus, not a necessity.”

She’s impatient with my question, even a little hostile. I consider her reaction and change gears. “Fair enough,” I say, keeping my voice agreeable. “But your father seemed especially attuned to that truth. Why do you think he was able to recognize it so clearly?”

She relaxes. I’ve told her that her father was not just right but a visionary. This is comfortable ground for her. It doesn’t matter that he hacked off her breasts and twisted her spirit. She’s a cripple who thinks she can run.

“Various reasons. He grew up very poor, I know that. His mother was a prostitute and his father was a drunk who molested him. He had a younger sister and a younger brother. His mother died when he was still young, and then his father pimped out the children to keep himself in booze. It all prepared him for an understanding of the realities of life. He passed those understandings on to me.”

It’s a terrible story, but I find myself unmoved. I’ve heard of worse things happening to good men and women, people who didn’t grow up to abuse their children or become serial killers.

“That must have been difficult,” I allow.

She shrugs. “That’s life. Eat or be eaten.”

“How did they get through that?”

“Two of them didn’t. The sister killed herself. The brother was murdered by a john.”

“And your father?”

A glint of pride appears. “Once his brother died, he decided he’d had enough. He killed his father and buried him in the woods with the rest. Then he went into the army.”

“Why do you think he chose that path? The military, I mean.”

“Pragmatism. The army would house him and feed him and teach him how to kill skillfully. Also, the Korean War was happening.”

“Was that a major factor?”