She nods. “I know you can’t go, but I figured you might want it as a keepsake.”
“Yes, I’ll treasure it,” I tell her, but in truth, all the invitation has really done is cause me to feel a steady, glowing anger. Not at her—she’s being kind, and I know it—but at the fact that I can’t possibly go. It makes me think unpleasantly of the long-ago possibilities. Chris was knifed to death by his cellmate more than a decade ago; Liz was killed during the standoff. If only Ricky had handed either one of them the gun at the rectory. If only.
“I have some questions for you,” she says.
Here it comes, I think. My nerves have been on edge ever since our last meeting, and the discovery that she sought out Forrest hasn’t soothed them one bit. All this time, all this thinking, and I still haven’t decided what I’m going to tell her. No more misleading her, I decided. But the thought of telling her the truth fills me with absolute dread. Ricky has family out there in the world—cousins like Dan, who cared enough to visit him in prison and cried when he came to read the suicide note to me. Ricky had disdained him as buttoned-up and painfully religious, but he was the type to be good to family on principle of the fact that they were family. I haven’t had enough time yet with Annemarie to believe we could push our bond out of the nest and expect it to fly. I certainly can’t compete with the fulfillment that a free, innocent extended family might offer her.
She leans back carefully against the stucco wall. “I was looking over some of the dates. You gave me up before the trial took place. Why didn’t you wait and see if you’d be convicted?”
“Because I knew I would be. I did it. I confessed to it as soon as I was arrested.”
“You pleaded not guilty.”
“Of course I did. Lawyers don’t want you to plead guilty, especially if you have extenuating circumstances, as I did. The prosecutors wouldn’t let me plea bargain, but it was possible that the confession would be thrown out or that I’d be convicted only of the lesser charges.”
“So why didn’t you put me in foster care while you waited to see?” At the sight of my perturbed expression, she adds, “I’m just trying to understand the circumstances around my birth, exactly. I know you have a stepbrother who—”
“I wasn’t about to place you with him,” I interrupt her. “He’s a very bad person. You would have been better off in a basket sent down the river.”
“But he spoke up for you during the trial.”
“He’s evil.” She shrinks back at the conviction in my voice. I want to tell her the truth about him, but I know that could make all of this ever so much worse. She’s already reached out to Forrest in a wild guess that he might be her father. If she learns what Clinton did to me, she might take one look at his photograph and draw easy parallels—his Norse-blond hair, his lanky stature—and go to him with the same question. “Don’t be fooled by what he said. He had his own reasons, and it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart.”
“What about my father’s family?” She holds my gaze, steadily, but I can see the trembling small animal she is inside, and it’s breaking my heart in a slow and ragged way. “Why couldn’t they take me? Why didn’t you tell them about me so they could?”
“Because they’d done a poor enough job with their own child.”
“You said he was a good man. Generous and kind. Those were the words you used.” When I don’t reply, she bites down on her bottom lip. Though her hands are behind her back, I can see her shoulders shaking. “Chris Brooks wasn’t an artist, and it wasn’t Forrest Hayes or Jeff Owen. I know those things for sure.”
I can’t help my curiosity. “How?”
“Because neither of them had a sister. Only Ricky Rowan did. She died when she was ten.” She levels her amber-flecked gaze on me, but I can’t meet her eyes. “It was Ricky, wasn’t it? I know it was.”
“Of course it was Ricky.” I spit out the words like bitter husks, like coffee grounds. “Who else would it have been. I’d been with him for years.”
“You specifically told me it wasn’t.”
“I wanted to spare you from knowing. There. Yes. You came out of all of this. If I had one hope for you, it’s that you would never find that out.”
“Did he know about me?”
“No.”
“Do you think he would have—”
I cut her off before she can wander any further down that path. “Don’t ask me to put myself inside Ricky’s mind. If I could predict his thoughts, I never would have gone out with him that night. And you wouldn’t be here, either. So let’s just leave it there.”
Her delicate brows knit together. “What do you mean, I wouldn’t be here?”
Now I realize that, inevitably, I have said too much. I try to deflect. “Do you really want the nitty-gritty of your conception story?” I ask in a wry tone. “I don’t think you do.”
She shakes her head, slowly at first, then with a quick certainty. “Not if it was a rape or something like that, no.”
“No, no.” The mere suggestion jars me. Though I’ve long known I don’t owe Ricky a damn thing, a fierce and unexpected loyalty rises up in me at this prompting. This I do owe Ricky. I will not let his daughter believe, even for a moment, that she was conceived in violence. I try to back down to a more even tone of voice. “It was a domino effect—that’s all I meant. The crime, and then I got stuck in the Cathouse, and I’d left my birth control pills behind. Events spiraled out of control, and I didn’t see it coming. But Ricky wasn’t a rapist. Ricky was the opposite of a rapist.”
She looks away, toward the yellowed grass of the yard. “So I was conceived in the Cathouse? During the standoff?”
“No. It was just before all that happened, and—not in the Cathouse.” I’m not about to tell her about the bathroom at Champion’s—that detail, at least, she’s not likely to dredge up. “We loved each other, Annemarie. In so many ways, he was a good man. He was generous, sometimes to a fault, and mostly kind. He was imaginative and playful and protective. For so many years I demonized him in my mind, because if I say, look, Ricky Rowan was a sweet and compassionate man—well, either I sound delusional, or else you’d presume I’m even worse than he was, if I have the gall to think well of him.”
Her eyes narrow with suspicion. “A minute ago you said his parents did a poor job with him.”
I throw one hand in the air helplessly. “Well, the results speak for themselves. Those last few days were so horrible, and they overshadowed everything else. But if you force me back to what it was like before that, before everything went awry.” I sigh, so heavily that it feels like setting down a stone. “He had his flaws, many of them, and in retrospect there was always a seed of something ruthless in him. Yet the Ricky I knew—I loved him. And he was worth loving, then.”
She nods, but it’s only the slightest bob of her head. “So if the two of you hadn’t killed those people, I would never have been conceived.”
“Probably not, no.” She’s very quiet. “I know how that sounds. I like to believe that your birth was an act of grace. On God’s part, I mean. That there’s nothing so dark that a bit of light can’t break through it.”
“I don’t believe you thought that at the time.”