An ah-ha look of understanding came into Danzig’s eyes.
“‘Now the lie has come to haunt me,’ she said. I said, so tell your mother quietly. No one else has to know. She said if she did it would change Anna’s attitude toward me and everyone would figure it out. I said so let them. Anna didn’t let your birth shame her and she’ll ignore any talk about you.” When I dropped her back at the high school she said she was going to tell her mother. But maybe she lost her nerve.”
“And took off? Without clothes, and without her rental car?”
Oh, god…that needed explanation. But not by him…not tonight. His brain felt like sludge. Maybe just as well. Pat explanations always sounded suspicious to him. He imagined they did to Danzig, too. So Garreth confined himself to a shrug. It hurt like hell. “She’s always kept in contact with Anna. Hopefully she’ll call or something and explain.”
Lying in bed watching the blood bag deflate and tuning out Duncan’s rambling speculation on the identity of their psycho, Garreth wondered how to have Mada make contact and establish herself as alive elsewhere, definitely separating her disappearance from John Doe’s appearance. When his brain still produced no bright idea, he turned to considering the real irony of the evening. Not long after Garreth arrived in the room, City Councilman Al Dreiling had come up the hall from his son’s room, the son Garreth might have killed while destroying Lane, to thank Garreth for saving Scott’s life. “I know he’s been a pain in the butt for you guys. Maybe this will make him finally listen to me and grow up.”
Eventually Duncan shut up. Garreth closed his eyes, savoring the silence and the feel of life dribbling into him.
“Garreth!”
Maggie! His eyes flew open.
She hurtled across the room to his bed and crushed the nearest hand with hers. “What happened? How bad are you hurt? Doris called Helen, thinking you might need some things here in the hospital and she called me, of course. I — ” She broke off to frown across at Duncan, who eyed the two of them with raised brows and the start of a sly smile. “Okay, Ed, say it!”
He blinked. “Say what?”
“Whatever smartass remarks about me or us you’re cooking up in your skull.” She straightened, hands on hips. “Now’s the time. Get it all out. Because if I hear anything from you later, or you start pulling your un-funny practical jokes, I will yank your nuts out through your throat!”
Duncan’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut.
“Fine!” Maggie said, and stepped around the bed to jerk the curtain between the two closed. Then she pulled up a chair beside the bed and reached through the bed rail to take Garreth’s hand again. “You don’t have to tell me anything right now. There’s all the time in the world later. Go to sleep. I’ll just sit here until they kick me out.”
At a guess, looking at her jaw, no one better try. Garreth squeezed her hand back, smiling at her…and discovered he had no regrets about surviving the crash. His life — unlife — might be tangled in lies, but Maggie, like Baumen, gave him reasons to continue it, and learn how to enjoy it.
3
Where do they end, the roads that lead a man through hell?
Maybe with the realization that hell is only what people make for themselves, Garreth thought, lying in his own bed four nights later with his arms around Maggie, breathing in the sweet scents of her blood and skin and the musky one of sex.
Maybe it ended with atonement. He needed to make amends for killing Lane and using Scott to destroy her. As much as he disliked the boy, he felt sorry for him at the hearing today, no longer cocky but white-faced at the consequences of his recklessness. In the courtroom, Garreth silently committed himself to making friends with the boy.
He committed himself, too, to giving Anna Bieber friendship and support, to acting as the great-grandson she would soon believe him to be.
Lien gave him an explanation for Mada’s disappearance when he called her two days ago and told her everything…almost. Odd how he could confide so much in her…could confess to killing Lane, expecting understanding — which she gave him — ask her to abet a cover-up — which she agreed to — but still not be able to admit what he had become.
He thought maybe Lien could send a typed note to Anna, purporting to be from Mada, “confessing” to being Garreth’s grandmother and apologizing for running off because she felt so ashamed of having lied. Then the next time Lien read of an apartment house fire or other disaster with multiple casualties and some unidentified bodies, Lien would send another letter claiming to be a friend of Mada’s, regretting to inform Anna that Mada was believed to be one of the casualties.
“It won’t work,” Lien said. “If she were alive, even if she confessed by letter, she would resume calling her mother. No, there must be nothing from her until we’re ready to have her die. I read about fugue states not long ago. I think she left the gym for a breath of air and met the man in this horror movie costume stealing the bow and arrows — you did say they found that’s where the weapon came from — and he attacked her. He slammed her head into the wall and that concussion caused her to enter a fugue state in which she thought she was one of her old professional personalities.”
“Mala Babra,” Garreth said.
“Good. As Mala, she didn’t know what she was doing in this strange town when she should be in San Francisco singing so she walked away and along the highway thumbed a ride with a trucker. She made her way back here by stages, stopping here and there to make money singing in bars and such. Once she reached here she began recovering her memory and contacted a friend, me, Lucy Lee. I will call your Anna, give her the story and say I’ve given Mada a sleeping pill because she was so bewildered, but Mada herself will call in the morning. Only I’ll call again to say with great regret that while I was out for the evening, because I’m a singer, too, my apartment house burned and Mada died in it. Or I assume so because she wasn’t among the survivors and there are unidentified bodies. I’ll even offer to send Mrs. Bieber the newspaper article.”
Which he hoped would put Mada to rest far from the John Doe — fortunately not autopsied — buried here. Buried but never to be forgotten. He planned to tend the grave as Anna would if she knew, and as a blood debt, a reminder of responsibility and accountability.
Maggie stirred in his arms. “Why don’t we move more to my side of the bed. Your side is so lumpy, like you have rocks in the mattress.”
“Nothing’s wrong with that,” he answered, though he shifted her off the pallet. There must be a better way to have his sleeping earth. Maybe take fabric to someone and ask for a custom mattress pad with packets of earth sewn into the quilting, calling it an “holistic” aid to health. Further evidence that Californians were nutty, of course…which he hoped made his differences seem quirky rather than suspicious. “Contact with earth sets up positive resonance in the human body. My veins carry the blood of an ancient lineage who always keep close contact with the earth and barring accident or murder, live very long lives.”
She sighed. “You’re crazy, Garreth.”
“Ah, yes, but it’s part o’ me charm, Maggie darlin’.”
She giggled and snuggled against his bandaged shoulder and side.
He smiled down at her. Maggie was not like Marti but even without being able to bare his soul to her, she filled some of his needs, as he did some of hers. The gulf between him and normal humans might be narrower than Lane thought, and bridgeable with care.
“What did you talk about with your ex-wife today?” Maggie murmured.