She opened to a favorite section, the part told from Miranda’s point of view and was immediately in the world of the story before Dad asked if she wanted anything to eat.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Apple?” He lifted one out of his bag.
She shook her head and dove back into the book. The students in one of her courses had gone on the war path when Mercy dared to suggest that Miranda felt sorry for her abductor and that perhaps she even enjoyed his lavish attention. The girls in the room wanted to rip out Mercy’s throat or, better yet, remove her sex so she could no longer be counted as female. The professor had encouraged Mercy’s views in the face of student opposition and Mercy wrote her term paper on the topic. She’d earned an A. That paper was part of the reason she came back to this book at least once a year.
What would it be like to be the subject of a man’s undivided attention? Obviously, the man in The Collector was psychotic, but if she were Miranda, Mercy thought she’d enjoy the man’s attention, at least for a little while. She wouldn’t be stuck-up like Miranda.
She could never tell anybody that, not even Dad because he barely understood women any way and the couple friends she still kept in touch with via Facebook would say she just needed to get laid. And there was that, too, she supposed, for why she enjoyed this book so much. If she were Miranda, she would have given it up without protest.
She always reread the part where Clegg takes pictures of Miranda in her underwear while she’s unconscious and then later when he demands to take pornographic photos of her. She wasn’t even bothered that the man preferred the pictures with Miranda’s head excluded. That pure physicality of the man’s urges (even though he’s never able to perform) tingled every part of her with a warm gush.
At some point, Mercy was dimly aware of Dad glancing through the bonding book and then closing it and staring at her the way customers at the store did when she was reading at the checkout and they wanted to purchase something.
She pulled herself out of Miranda’s doomed world. “Yes, Dad?”
“No, no,” he said. “Keep reading. I’m just watching you.”
“I saw you reading that book. What do you want to say?”
He glanced at the book closed in his hands. “It’s embarrassing to admit that there’s so much about you I don’t know. I’ve been a lame father. The book calls me a ‘Non-active Daddy.’ I love you. I care about you. But I don’t know who you are.”
“Maybe you should stop reading that book.”
“What are your dreams?”
“Dreams?”
“When you were seven, you wanted to be a Rockette. We went to that Christmas show and then you went around the house kicking your legs. Then you took ballet.”
“And quit after three sessions.”
“You loved it, though. You’d twirl around and put on little performances for Mom and me.”
“I’m not that little girl anymore, Dad.”
He looked down. “I know, I know.”
“You’re a great dad.”
She expected him to get teary and ask if she really meant it and then she’d get teary and they’d share a hug. Instead he said he wasn’t a good father.
“But I’m trying. I hope it’s not too late.”
“Why would it be too late?” she asked.
He stumbled over words before finding his voice. “You’re a young woman now. Soon you’ll be out on your own and then I’ll just be some guy.”
She sighed. “Dad, you’re never going to be just some guy. You’re my father and you’ve been a great one.”
“I’m sorry to keep putting you on the spot. I’m so lost without your mother.”
“It’s okay. I know.”
“I know you’re not a child anymore but whenever I look at you, I see that little girl kicking her legs all over the house. You’re my little angel.”
“I always will be.” She should get up, go to him, hug him, but her legs refused to move. Maybe stopping had been a bad idea.
He was on the verge of crying and Mercy’s eyes began to water too.
“There’s something else,” he said.
She waited.
“I have cancer.”
SEVENTEEN
Victor stopped at the place where he had once thrown his knife at a deer. He ate sardines from a can and then tossed the empty can away. He loved how the sardines coated his mouth and liked to imagine that the little fish came back to life in his stomach only to die a painful death in the pool of acid. It was childish but no less amusing.
He continued on his way.
There was no path here but the faded marks on the trees guided him in the steps he had taken several times over the years. As usual, he hoped he would find his knife but did not hold out much hope. If he was meant to get it back, the universe would give it to him. Perhaps someone else had found it. Maybe that person was now a cleanser too. Sometimes that’s how it worked.
There weren’t meetings or secret websites only accessed with some special, constantly changing password. There wasn’t a monthly magazine or any public figures to represent the cause. If anyone ever tried something like that, they would be brushed aside as a freak. But that was beside the point. If someone dared to expose the Great Plan, at least as he understood it, that person’s place in that plan would vanish and he would be revealed as a fake. True cleansers didn’t need unity or reassurance or followers. They had each been chosen in a unique way and the universe would manipulate events to get them where they needed to be. But that didn’t mean cleansers couldn’t work together. In fact, the universe might unite several of them for one purpose.
When looked at the right way, Victor could almost see the inner workings of the world. That didn’t make Victor special, just specially attuned. And through that understanding, he knew peace. He knew purpose.
He moved through the woods slowly. He enjoyed deep inhalations of the air sweet with the dry remnants of decay. When the trees bloomed, the smell would become fresh like renewed hope but he loved being in the forest just before that. It was a walk through a barren land on the cusp of a great reawakening. The world had known cleansers before and it would know them again.
He picked up a pine cone from a pile of dead leaves. Something scurried across the ground up ahead. Another squirrel. Victor turned the cone over in his hand slowly like it was a bomb that might explode at the slightest disturbance.
He kept the cone in hand as he continued through the woods. He tried juggling it a few times and had to pick it back up, once out of a small puddle of sap. The thick blood-tinged stuff got on his hands and he grew interested it its sticky texture. He tossed the cone aside for good.
Blood was smooth like silk. This sap that looked like blood as it seeped from trees and coagulated on the ground was also smooth but much thicker than blood. It slipped between his fingers and he made a fist. He opened his hand wide, spreading the fingers to form a webbed hand made from glutinous sap. He turned his hand slowly back and forth like he had done with the pine cone.
Sometimes Victor felt like he was seeing the world for the first time. Often, those epiphanies happened here, engulfed by trees and miles from civilization. This was a place of a billion revelations. Out here, the world was born afresh repeatedly before Victor’s eyes.
EIGHTEEN
Mercy did get up now and go to her father. She stepped around the abandoned fire pit and noticed a small pile of snow a few feet deep in the woods. That was so odd. The last snowfall had been at least three weeks ago and yet some still survived on this mountain. Perhaps there was lots more, up higher near the peak.
Then she was in her father’s arms.