Right now, I am talking to Ricky, as we’ve been encouraged to do. I am trying out what it would feel like to ask my big brother for advice. “Amir is in town,” I tell him. “He’s mentioned meeting for coffee, just to catch up, but I don’t think Jason would like that. I was just getting ready to tell Jason that I’m ready for us to live together, which is a big step for me. For us. I think he wants to marry me. Or he did. But then I messed things up.”
I should feel relieved, whispering these words to my brother, admitting out loud that I have a decision to make.
I keep talking. I tell him that when he’s better, he might be my best man. “But you’re still a jerk,” I assure him. “Brenda has every right to hate you, yet she’s here every day, so you can’t be all bad. At least not as bad as I used to think. But you already know that. I hope you do.”
And then I start crying. Not the silent tears I’ve shed so often in recent weeks, but huge, wracking sobs that shake my entire body.
“Come back,” I choke out. “Come back.”
I’m not sure who I’m talking to anymore. On the surface, it’s obviously my brother. But I can still see Amy Nessor climbing into that car and I think I might be crying out to her too, because I want so desperately to save her and to save myself, to save the little girl I used to be before witnessing an act that made me believe the worst of my brother. That made me believe the worst of myself.
I STOPPED FOLLOWING THE CASE. It’s in all the papers and on every news station and website, but I stubbornly turn a blind eye. When I am not at the hospital or at work, I hide away in my darkroom, finishing the final prints for Parker’s collection. I am not completely immune to the details as they emerge, however. I’ve seen some of the headlines and Mom cannot stop herself from letting certain particulars slip. I know, for example, that Marcus Daley had a dog with him in the car, a great big lab, when he encouraged Amy to climb in. That dog must have been the shadowy figure I mistook for a second person. Apparently, he told Amy he was taking her to see the dog’s puppies, or at least that’s what he said in his long confession. I also know that before going to jail for armed robbery, he lived with his mother who described him as emotionally stunted and needy. “But he was a good boy,” she was quoted as saying. “Most of the time he was a good boy.”
“He couldn’t go back to his mother when he got out of jail,” Mom told me, “because she’d just moved into a seniors’ home. I guess he couldn’t cope with being on his own. And maybe he knew, deep down, that he deserved to stay in jail. That that’s where he belongs.”
“His mom didn’t know anything about Amy? She didn’t suspect anything, all this time?”
I had once made excuses for my own mom, but was less willing to make them for Marcus Daley’s. I still faulted Mom, to some degree, for failing over and over to acknowledge what I saw as Ricky’s shortcomings; yet, I found it impossible to believe that Marcus’s mother could be so willfully blind when it came to her own son. That she could maintain he was a “good boy” even after finding out he’d strangled a little girl.
“By the time the police were looking for Amy, he’d already killed her and driven back to Port Sitsworth. As far as his mom knew, he’d never left the house.”
I don’t want to know the rest of the details. I have already wasted too much of my life imagining them.
I wonder if when Ricky wakes up and sees me, he will notice that I am different. That, despite the uncertainty with which this accident has blindsided our family — that despite everything — I am less afraid.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
•
It’s hard to know where to begin. There are so many people who, somewhere along the line, played a role in my journey with this novel. I want to offer a heartfelt thank you to everyone who offered encouragement, feedback, advice, information, or simply a listening ear. You know who you are.
I do, however, need to recognize a few individuals by name. When I first began piecing together the details of this story, one of my grade seven students, Jake Randall, acted as my research assistant for car-related information. Joseph Kuriger gave me a tour of the Dunnville Water Treatment Plant and Peter Clarke did the same at the Kitchener Water Treatment Plant; both were extremely generous with their time and about answering follow-up e-mail questions. I am indebted to Monica Pyear and Matt Cain for reading an early draft and offering valuable insights that helped shape the current story; as well as to the wonderful women from my soccer team/book club (Tina Butt, Laura Martin, Karyn Hynes, and Missy Cowburn) for reading a much later version and discussing it at one of our book clubs like it was already a real book. Later, those same amazing gals sent support in the form of wine and M&Ms. I also received crucial encouragement from my writing
