She steps toward Marcus.
“Back!” he yells. He doesn’t raise the gun. He only raises his voice, but it is effective. She holds her ground and before she can speak, Irv—the talking tree—lays it out plainly:
“Option one, Marcus. You raise that gun and we kill you. Option two, you toss it far into the water and we arrest you for this specifically and then we see what we think of the Lydia Jones situation separately. Because at this point, you are threatening the lives of police officers and I have cause to lock you up. In fact, I have cause to do whatever I want. Option three is you sit there too long and we all start getting ants in our pants and start making bad decisions and this whole thing becomes subject to human nature, which is not a pretty thing. So what’s it going to be?”
Marcus reaches down to the lake water between his feet, cups his hand, and pulls up the water to wet his face and neck. “Option three.”
“Fuck you, Marcus.”
“Yeah,” he replies.
“How about,” says Sigrid, sitting down on the dry floor of the forest, “you tell us about Lydia. Tell us what happened.”
“It was me. I did it.”
“I’ve heard all that,” Sigrid says. “I want the details. What were you doing at Eighty-Six Brookmeyer Road? What is that place, anyway?”
“It’s an unfinished office building a few blocks from my house. It’s supposed to be boarded up but the neighborhood kids broke into it years ago.”
“How is that place connected to your life or Lydia’s?”
“It isn’t.”
“What were you doing there?”
“She was trying to make a point.”
“What point was she trying to make?”
“Something about perspective,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“Tell us all about it.”
“I told you that Mom committed suicide and you still want to talk about this?”
“I don’t think Mom did commit suicide. I think the men with the guns are here and they don’t want to hear our family history. I’d like to stay on topic.”
Sigrid runs her hand over her face and wipes away the first beads of sweat. Irv looks like he’s suffering from the heat. His uniform doesn’t look like cotton. That kind of discomfort can affect a person’s judgment.
Irv wishes he hadn’t ruined his hat already. It would feel great to use it as a fan or for slapping Marcus. “Hey, Al!” Irv yells. “I’m parched. Throw me some water.”
From a cloud, from a shadow, from a wormhole straight from Maine, comes a flying bottle of Poland Spring that bumps between Irv’s feet, somersaults, and lands upright.
“Thanks.”
He picks it up and drinks it all.
“Marcus,” Irv says, wiping his face and flicking the sweat from his head to the ground, “this is that moment when you tell us what happened. And I’ll tell you why. It’s not because every bad guy has to confess his sins. It’s not because we need some deep sense of resolution. Personally, I’m just as happy not knowing and going back to my dozen other cases. It isn’t even because you owe it to Lydia, though I think you do. You want to know the real reason, Marcus?”
“No.”
“Because talking about it feels good. Talking, Marcus, is the American way. Talking is how you become reborn. Are you ready to be reborn, Marcus? Are you ready to be spiritually renewed?”
“No.”
“Of course you are, who wouldn’t be. Sigrid was reborn last night, weren’t you?”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you. Sigrid was over at my place last night—”
“No. We were at—”
“. . . and we talked and emoted and shared war stories and cried to Bob Seger songs and wondered where the years had gone. She told me all about putting two slugs from a semiautomatic into a semi-innocent kid and how she feels like she did something wrong, something painful, something unnecessary, maybe even sinful, but her higher authority, the institutions she believes in, said she did not. And as a result she does not feel better but feels worse, because the hearts and heads of this world are not aligned. Your poor sister felt like she was being torn apart by horses like poor Saint Hippolytus. You remember that story?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. And while we talked, Marcus, a mighty weight was lifted from her. Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior, Marcus?”
“No.”
“That doesn’t matter either, because here’s what I learned by studying theology. I learned that we were not studying God. I learned that we were studying the study of God. And now I am a master of that, according to Loyola. So while I still know nothing about God per se, I know a few things about the people who tried to come to terms with God before me. Want to know what I learned, Marcus?”
“No.”
“I learned that when faced with the maker of the universe, when faced with the bringer of the moral order, when faced with a force beyond the wildest reckoning of the human imagination, which is itself barely a whisper in the symphony of the cosmos, we are—at some very fundamental level, Marcus—out of our depth. We, in our puny and meek state of sweaty bipedalism, are in no way equipped to understand the mind of our maker. I, Sheriff Irving Wylie, am a very smart man. I’m even smarter than your sister, who’s pretty damned smart—”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am, and I have concluded that if Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas couldn’t crack the nut on some of the divine comedies that had Dante giggling in his highchair, then I sure as shit can’t do it from my seat of power here in upstate New York. So has it all simply been an orgasmic waste of time? No. Because what I learned from the Jesuits—which is not exactly what they intended for me to learn, but so be it—is one big ironic conclusion. Want to know what that irony is?”
Marcus does not answer.
“The irony, Marcus, is that we came to know nothing about God but a great deal about
