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?”
She nods. “My father said that war is a bloody crucible. You go in human. You come out with death in your veins. You become stronger. He’d learned the necessity for strength.”
“Stronger why? Because you’ve lost your humanity?”
She looks into my eyes and I look behind hers. I try to see into the emptiness, but there’s nothing to see.
“Are you familiar with Buddhism?” she asks me. It’s a strange, abrupt question.
“Not very.”
“At its essence, Buddhism is based on the idea that the spirit is the only thing that’s true. Everything else that we see or feel”—she slaps her chest with her hands, indicates the hushed concrete walls that surround us—“all these material things are just illusion. Mara. According to Buddhism, as long as man believes that Mara, is what’s real, rather than the soul, he’s trapped. Doomed to the cycle of rebirth, life, and death, what they refer to as Samsara. Reincarnation.”
I say nothing, fascinated at this story of the soul from a monster’s mouth.
“But Buddha had it backward,” she continues. “Don’t you see? It’s not Mara that’s the illusion. It’s the soul.” She slams a fist down on the table. “This table is real. The pain I feel when I hit it too hard, that’s real. The soul?” She shakes her head. “Just a dream. Buddhism, Christianity, they all put you to sleep.” She leans forward, excited and grim. “War wakes you up.”
I stare at her, speechless. I can’t help it. She looks off, seeing something invisible to me.
“He loved it there, you know. In Korea. He told me a story one time about strangling a man in a rice paddy while the sun rose and the rain fell. That man died with water in his eyes and rice in his ears, hearing thunder. That’s what my father said.” She pauses. “All the lies are stripped away in war. All those illusions about beauty and ugliness, or goodness and badness, about any of them being important. In war, it’s meat against meat, to the death. The naked truth.” She sounds almost wistful. My stomach turns a little.
I gather myself and continue.
“What happened to your father?”
“He died of cancer.”
“Were you sad when he died?”
“I was regretful. He was my teacher. If he’d lived longer, I would have learned more.”
Nothing rises in her eyes at this. No hint of grief, no longing for the man who raised her. I try to picture him in my mind, but he is faceless, a burning man, branding his child as he’d been branded, scarring her deepest where it would never show.