“Then we’re done here,” she says, and she starts to put the tape recorder back into her bag.
“Fine,” I tell her.
She finishes packing up. “I won’t be back,” she says.
“Whatever,” I tell her.
She makes it to the door. Then she turns back. “I know it’s hard, Joe, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me.”
“There’s nothing.”
“There’s obviously something.”
“Nope. Nothing,” I tell her.
She knocks on the door. The guard opens it up. She doesn’t look back. She takes one step, then another step, and then I call out to her. “Wait,” I tell her.
She turns back. “What for?”
“Just wait.” I close my eyes and tilt my head back and rub my hand over my face for a second, then put my hand in my lap and look at her. The guard looks more pissed off this time than the last time when Ali moves back to her chair. He closes the door again.
“It happened when I was sixteen,” I say, and I start to tell her my story.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Raphael wakes up feeling like a new man. He feels ten years younger. No, twenty. Hell, he feels like he is twenty, even if his muscles do ache like he’s fifty-five. Which he is. He rubs at his shoulders as he climbs out of bed. He opens the curtains. He went to sleep in rain, but he’s waking in sun. It still looks cold out there, but it’s blue skies and no wind and that makes what they have to do this morning so much better. He showers and stares at himself in the mirror for a minute afterward, wondering what he always wonders these days—which is what happened to his body, his face, to the years that have gone by. He thinks about Stella, Stella who is broken on the inside, Stella who is going to help fix him.
He has time for a good breakfast. These days he doesn’t tend to eat much. It’s pretty obvious when he has his shirt off. Having no appetite combined with being too lazy is the reason. And work—not that he’s really working much these days. But today he’s going to make the effort. Today he’s celebrating. He makes waffles. Mixes up the batter and pours it into the waffle maker, one after the other, more time-consuming than he thought it’d be, but waffles always catch you like that. He eats them with maple syrup and strips of bacon. He drinks a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice. God he feels good. For the first time in over a year he doesn’t feel numb inside, doesn’t feel hollow. For the first time in over a year the anger is stomping around his body looking for an outlet. He even had a name for the anger back then. The Red Rage. The Red Rage would keep him awake at night, trying to figure out a way to get revenge for his daughter, only he never could. He didn’t know who had killed her. He wasn’t a cop. He couldn’t figure it out. And then Joe was caught and the Red Rage had to deal with the fact there would be no revenge here because Joe was in jail, so the Red Rage went into hibernation.
Raphael never thought he’d see it again.
He reverses out of the garage. The morning isn’t quite as cold as he thought it was going to be when looking out his bedroom window. The plan he has with Stella relies on good weather, and the forecast suggests that’s what’s on the menu. The roads are dry, but the lawns and gardens are still wet. It’s forty-five degrees and might climb another one or two, but not much more. Traffic is thin. Raphael has the radio on. It’s talk radio. Raphael is obsessed by it. Has been for the last few months. He keeps thinking he ought to make a call. Others are. They’re sharing their opinion about the death penalty, those who are calling all having an extreme position on it.
His position is extreme too.
He drives to the same coffee shop he went to last night with Stella. It’s an independent store that goes by the name Dregs, and has old movie posters stuck across every spare inch of wall, even one of the windows is blotted out by movie cards. He doesn’t go in this time. Instead Stella is waiting in her car in the parking lot out back that services a dozen stores, including a few hairdressers and a novelty sex shop. He pulls over next to her and pops the trunk. He helps her load the stuff from her car into his car. She isn’t wearing the pregnancy suit.
Then they’re driving together. Talkback radio still on. People still ringing in.
“I honestly don’t know what people are thinking,” Raphael says to her. “How can anybody be against it? How can anybody look at a monster like Joe Middleton, and say he has rights? People are getting confused. They see putting criminals down as murder, but it’s not murder. How can it be, when the people being executed aren’t human?”
“I agree,” she says, and of course she agrees—they wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t see eye to eye on all of this.
They get stuck behind a truck on the motorway, a lorry two trailers long and full of sheep, the ones on the edges staring between the wooden slats of the walls out at the scenery racing by, not knowing their lives are flashing in front of their eyes just as quickly as the view, not knowing that trucks full of sheep tend to head to places where they take the live out of livestock. That would be murder too, according to the people against the death penalty.
But not Stella.
She was a good find. Eager. Angry. Capable. And, truth be told, a little scary. And since he’s admitting things to himself—quite the stunner. Last night he was hollow inside—the trial coming up, his protest starting on Monday. But what was that, really? He and others like him hanging outside the courthouse in the cold, holding up signs, and none of it was going to bring his daughter back. He was doing it because it was something to do—they were motions to go through, motions that were putting off what he really wanted to do to himself while he lounged around inside his house wearing his pajamas for entire days at a time, stains forming on the sleeves where he’d spill tomato sauce or whiskey on them. Last night Stella came into his life. He bought the coffees and she shared the plan. It was a great plan. Good coffees, but a great plan.
The sheep truck turns off. The motorway carries on. For all the conversation they made last night, this morning it’s different. He’s ready to explode with excitement, but he’s too afraid of saying the wrong thing, too afraid that Stella won’t turn out to be as capable as he first thought. At the same time he doesn’t want to disappoint her.
This is going to happen, he keeps telling himself. It’s going to happen and Joe is going to die, and Raphael is going to be the one to pull the trigger. It won’t bring Angela back, but it sure as hell beats protesting. It will bring peace to his life. Perhaps a destiny too. There are others who need his help. Others from the group. This feels like it could really be the beginning of something.
Of course he has to be careful not to get ahead of himself.
“We’re nearly there,” he tells her.
“When was the last time you were out here?” she asks.
Out here is thirty minutes north of the city.
“A long time,” he says, only it wasn’t a long time ago, it was last year. “My parents used to own a getaway nearby,” he tells her, “but it burned down years ago. I used to bring my wife and Angela out here for picnics during the summers, but not in a long time now. Not in almost twenty years.”
He takes a side road from the motorway, through farm country for another five minutes, and then another turnoff—this time onto a shingle road that after two hundred yards becomes compacted dirt as the scenery changes from open fields to forest. The road is bumpy, but the four-wheel drive manages it easily enough. He goes slow. There aren’t many twists and turns, but the back wheels occasionally skid off large tree roots as they round the few corners there are. It’s almost untouched New Zealand scenery. It’s why people come here, film movies here, farm sheep, and raise children. Snowy mountains in the near distance, clear rivers, massive trees.
He pulls into a clearing. It’s just like he told her. Nobody around for miles.