Abandoned

She smiles at this, and then she stretches, her bones creaking comfortably. She settles back, regarding me. She seems as she has since I came here: relaxed, patient, neither striving nor avoiding. “The thing is,” she says after a moment, “I’ve answered your question, but I don’t think you’ll ever understand it. Not really.”

It’s an echo of my own earlier doubts. I want to understand, I really do. I’ve spent my life hunting these creatures. In the end, whatever the twists or turns involved, I’ve always come to that understanding, deep and intimate, of who they are. It’s what’s kept me sane. Shine the sun on them and they lose their power over you. Fail to drag them out of the shadows …

“Try me,” I say.

She leans forward, intent. “All we are is our next breath, and joy is everything that comes after survival. As long as I had sufficient funds to keep a roof above my head and to eat my next meal, time wasn’t important. It wasn’t about acquiring wealth quickly. It was about knowing it would be there one day and not getting caught in the meantime.”

The last part of that gets my attention, and I pounce on it. “Where does freedom fit with your philosophy, Mercy? If it’s all about meals and a roof, what’s the big deal about jail? You’ll go on breathing, sleeping. You have your three hots and a cot right here.”

Regret flashes in her eyes. “I was right,” she says, shaking her head at my apparent obtuseness. “You’ll never understand.” She rubs her eyes with one hand, like a teacher with a difficult student, searching for patience. “We’ll try it one more time. Listen. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

She speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if she were talking to someone a little slow on the draw. “The only thing wrong with prison happens to be the most important thing that can be wrong: It’s an environment you can’t control. A lack of control always includes the possibility of death. It’s not about the freedom, it’s about the variables and how they could affect your ability to draw that next breath.”

I stare at her, and suddenly I do understand. The sun bursts out, and the shadows die, and there she is: strange, but no longer scary. I understand why she was trapped by her own brilliance. I grasp her endless need to calculate every variable and why she needs to control every factor to the point of obsession. Mercy was a new kind of monster, that’s all. It had taken me a little more time.

“You’re a machine,” I murmur, a little bit amazed, a little bit sickened. “A machine tasked with reducing the factors that could result in nonsurvival to as close to zero as possible.”

She blinks, surprised. Then she smiles, and it’s the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her. It’s almost beautiful. Maybe it just seems that way because it hints at the truth: Once upon a time, this was human.

“Yes!” she says. “That’s exactly right.”

I spend the next few hours asking about her childhood and her life, but they only serve to confirm what I already know. She is an empty box of air, a moving mannequin, three dimensions outside, two dimensions in. She has become what she preaches and what she was made: just meat, devoid of love or hatred, a machine with legs, calculating the problem of bare survival for as long as she continues to breathe.

She’s lost her power over me. I will file her away with the others, in that vault inside my mind. Her folder will be crisper and newer at first, but it will fade in time.

I finish and gather my papers into my satchel. I stand up to leave but turn around before reaching the door.

“One last question.”

“Go ahead,” she answers, endlessly agreeable.

“Did you love your father?”

I know the answer, but I want to hear it spoken.

“Thanks to what my father taught me, I am still alive. I’ll go to sleep tonight. I’ll get up tomorrow. I’ll eat three meals. I’ll piss and shit and breathe. I’ll do that the next day and the next, until the day I don’t.” She smiles. “I’m surviving. It’s all that matters. To answer your question directly, I didn’t love him, because there is no such thing as love. But I am thankful.”

I walk out the door, leaving her with her perversity of peace.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Heather Hollister sits across from me, dressed in hospital clothes. Her hair has started to come back, a light fuzz on her head. Her eyes have stopped darting, but they are hollow and deep, filled with too much thinking.

She got worse before getting better, while I was locked away. She required restraints for weeks, both actual and chemical, as she raved, and wept, and screamed. Her doctor had advised strongly against telling her about Avery’s death, saying that it could drive her over an edge she’d never return from. Shielding her from the fact of Avery’s death had also required keeping her from the hope of Dylan’s life.

But she has begun to settle, and now, after much debate and arguing, the doctor has agreed that it’s time to offer her the truth of both.

Daryl Burns waits in the hallway. He is not up to the beginning of this task. Some part of me wants to curse him for this, for his weakness, but I have long been aware that in some ways, key ways, women have a strength greater than men. When it comes to family, especially to our children, we are able to do and stand almost anything.

I met a woman once who’d come very close to being the sixth victim of a serial killer who targeted escorts. He would set a date, and then he’d show up and torture them with cigarettes before killing them with a butcher knife. She was an Asian woman, and her husband had killed himself after losing all of their money gambling. He left her and their six-month-old son with nothing, and they were poor already. She was finding it impossible to make ends meet and was a month away from eviction when she decided to start selling herself.

I remember her with such clarity because she was such a proud woman. Not arrogant but dignified. She had a sense of herself, of her own hopes and of what was right and wrong. Selling her body was something that degraded her in the deepest ways, so I broke my own rules and I asked her why.

“I’d live in a box on the street and eat dog food before doing this, if it were just me,” she’d said. “But I have my son, you see? He’ll have a good home and good clothes and go to school and his children will prosper. Yes.” She’d smiled at me, a heartbreaking mix of serenity and sadness. “God will forgive me if my son lives a better life. It’s enough.”

Her husband had solved his poverty and his shame by jumping from a building. The woman remained, suffering, and her son was healthy and never hungry.

“She shaved your head too?” Heather asks, startling me.

I had told her about Dali as Mercy Lane.

“Yes. She did.”

She sighs, looks away. Her eyes crawl back to mine again. “Did you …” She hesitates, dreading the question but fascinated nonetheless. “Did you see the darkness?”

I shiver. My mouth goes dry. “Yes.”

She closes her eyes once, then opens them, a gesture of shared pain, and in this instant I understand the binding power behind support groups. Heather Hollister understands what I’ve been through. She knows. No one else does, not really. We are all alone, in the deep-down places, but sometimes others are alone with us.

I take a single deep breath and attempt to empty my mind. This will be a terrible, terrible moment, but it will also be a moment of hope. Will the mix of the two make the other more powerful, or will they lessen each other?

“Heather, I need to tell you some things. One of those things is very, very bad. One of them is very, very good.”

She regards me with her hollowed eyes. “Will it make a difference which one you tell me first?”