“I do have to be here,” she said.
And Hector just nodded at her. He had a thick brown face with wide features and sharp eyes. He was looking at her with those eyes that were neither warm nor cold, neither kind nor cruel. They were eyes that saw things the way they were and didn’t judge. She turned away from him and watched as the island approached, looking into the murky choppy water of the Long Island Sound. And she thought about her recent breakdown of motivations. She thought about Julian and James and their twisted love for each other. A love they thought excused them from moral behavior, a love that made it okay to lie and scheme and murder to be together. And how it had ended with Julian a broken mess of herself on a city sidewalk. James Ross was still at large.
She thought about Maura and Annabelle Hodge, so warped by a legacy of revenge and hatred, by jealousy and greed, that they allowed themselves to be drawn into a plot that would end lives they considered less worthy than their own and children to grow up without parents. The righteous anger of their ancestor so many years ago, thwarted and used for their own selfish means. Lydia still wondered about Annabelle’s father, who he was, why he had disappeared. Lydia had her suspicions, thinking perhaps it was Paul, Eleanor’s brother. It was the way Maura had talked of him, the dedication in her book. Maybe she knew Eleanor had killed him, maybe she knew no one would ever believe her even if she told. Maybe all of this gave her a nudge a little further down the road to insanity. But it was just a guess and Lydia would probably never know the truth.
She thought about Orlando DiMarco. Of all of them, he was the one who confused her the most. When he returned from Switzerland with the children for Julian’s funeral, Lydia had visited him at his gallery. He was in the process of closing it down and moving to Switzerland permanently with Nathaniel and Lola, of whom now he was guardian.
“I think part of me always knew it would end like this for them,” he said when he saw her.
“You knew,” she said.
“I had an idea.”
“But you never implicated her… or him.”
“I loved her,” he said simply. “And they were one. Anything I’d done to harm him would have harmed her. Did you ever love anyone that much… that you’d do anything, no matter how wrong it was? Even if you knew they could never love you the same way?”
She didn’t want to judge him or say to him that she didn’t consider that love. That when love asked you to betray yourself and betray others, it was only need or fear in a clever masquerade. She only shook her head.
Lola and Nathaniel were chasing each other around the empty gallery space, their laughter echoing against the walls. To look at them, one would never know what they had endured over the last several weeks of their young lives. They seemed happy, normal.
“Do they ever talk about that night?”
“They told their therapist that they were playing a game with their nanny that night. I don’t know that they’ve quite connected that event with the death of their father. They don’t blame themselves. Anyway, they’ll be in therapy for a while.”
“Why did Julian ask you to take the twins?”
“I don’t know, really. She came to the gallery a couple of months ago and asked me if I would take the twins should anything happen to her and Richard. I told her yes, of course. I thought it was odd, but I wouldn’t have considered turning her down,” he said, looking past Lydia at the memory of that day.
“I think part of her suspected that all this would end in tragedy,” he went on. “She wanted to be sure that they’d be cared for. That’s as close as I can come to a guess.”
“And what about James? Do you think he’ll come for them?”
“It would be suicide. They’ll be watched by Interpol for a little while and then by a security team I’ve hired in Switzerland. If he comes near them, he’ll be arrested and charged with murder.”
Lydia nodded.
“It’s funny,” he said as she began to leave. “In Lola and Nathaniel, I have more of her in death than I did while she was alive. They are so much like her… it’s a joy and torture. I think they’ll bring me great pleasure and great sadness for the rest of my life, just like their mother before them.”
There was something beautiful and something ugly about what he’d said, something almost Gothic in its romance, its utter selflessness, and something sick about it, too.
As she left the gallery, she saw the twins peeking around a wall to look at her. They were beautiful children, but there was something old in their eyes. She knelt down and they came to her, each of them hugging her in turn.
“Remember what I told you, Lola,” Lydia said, releasing her. “You, too, Nathaniel.”
“You lose the giver, not the gift,” said Lola obediently. And Nathaniel nodded uncertainly. Lydia wasn’t sure that they understood yet the meaning of what she’d told them that night, but she believed that they might one day. She knew what it was like to go through life without parents; she hoped that her words would come back to them on the tough days and give them comfort.
When the ferry had docked and the gate opened, Hector handed her a piece of paper with a number on it and pointed toward the east.
“You got ten minutes. Don’t hold us up. You’ll get me in trouble,” he said. The other men, on the boat and on the shore, even the priest, all had their eyes on her. They were all curious, but no one asked any questions.
It was a dead place. There were no shading branches or grassy lanes lined with flowers, only black dirt paths and anemic trees scattered among the graves. She made her way on a rough walkway, through the maze of small white stone markers. No names, only numbers. And Lydia couldn’t believe how many there were. Hector had told her that there were between 750,000 and a million graves here. There were layers of them-the workers buried coffin on top of coffin-and Lydia felt unspeakably sad. Prisoners, indigents, orphans, and unknowns… all these lost souls. She thought of Rain and all the people below the subways who had helped them and wondered if most of them wouldn’t end up here like this. What path do you take that leads you to this end? She only knew the answer for one of them.
Across a vista of open grass, Lydia could see the ruins of old abandoned buildings, a hospital, a reformatory, a house. All once served a function for the city, now nameless and abandoned like the dead surrounding them.
She came upon the fresh grave with Jed McIntyre’s serial number on it and she reflected on why she’d come. It wasn’t to see him dead in the ground, as one might imagine. It wasn’t even for a sense of closure to the reign of terror he’d had over her life. She did not come to cry for her mother or for herself.
From a pocket of her long black cashmere coat, she removed the letter that Agent Goban had given her from Rebecca Helms’s crime scene. It had been opened and read by the people at the scene. But Lydia had never opened it. The letters she had received from him over the years had been like missives of reassurance that he was locked away. She didn’t need them anymore. She removed that pile now from another pocket and placed his most recent letter on top. She bent to pick up a rock she found by the path and she laid the letters on the earth, placed the rock on top to weight them down, and stood again.
She was here to give him back everything he had given her, all his pain, all his hatred, all his terror, all his letters. All the ugly parts of himself that she had allowed to become parts of her, she wanted him to have. For good. That was all. She turned away and walked back down the path toward the ferry.
When the ferry returned to the pier, Lydia saw Jeffrey standing on the dock. A gull screamed above her and a bell clanged in the wind as she approached him. He wore faded jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt underneath his distressed leather jacket. His nose and cheeks were pink, as though he’d been standing in the cold for a while.
“You followed me,” she said, trying to sound disapproving.
“You lied to me,” he answered simply.
She shrugged. It was true. She couldn’t argue.
“I had to come alone.”
He nodded his understanding. “Did you get what you wanted?”
“I
She turned to look as though she might see those things waving there at her like flags, but there was nothing. Just the murky water and the flat, dead island.
He raised her hand to his cheek and held it there. And she knew with clarity in that moment that the past was
