Joseph’s heart slammed into his chest. He could feel it knocking against the dried-sweat crispness of his shirt. He stood. “I’m here,” he said.
The man’s head turned, then his body pivoted toward Joseph. Joseph sensed threat, but he moved onto the path anyway. One step at a time, he drew nearer: twenty feet, then ten, enough, close enough to see the breeze lifting the man’s dark brown hair, close enough to see the lined shadows around his mouth. A thousand voices inside Joseph were screaming a thousand different things. Beneath the roar, he heard himself speak.
“I’m Joseph Goins.”
“Hello, Joseph.”
“All of the things I said in my letter were true. The papers I copied from the lawyers are genuine. They never knew I was there.”
“I want to believe you. Come closer.”
His voice sounded so honest. Joseph moved into the dull moonlight. He watched the man’s eyes prying into him. It was one of the hardest looks he had ever felt. It was more penetrating than any doctor’s, but more curious and forgiving than any cop’s. “I’m not sure what I want,” said Joseph.
“I think I understand what you want. Some of what you want.”
“I didn’t kill Ann. I would never kill Ann.”
The man said nothing. Could he blame him?
“I followed her for nine weeks, and took pictures of her. I wasn’t sure... what to do. I saw her, up close, only once.”
The man looked down at the grave for a long moment. “I might understand what you felt.”
“I’m afraid. The police are everywhere. Did you bring them with you?”
The man shook his head. “No. There are things about you, Joseph, I don’t want the police to know.”
“And things about Ann.”
“Yes. Things about Ann.”
“Do you want me to go away?”
The man hesitated. “I wish you hadn’t come. But now, you’re here.”
“Do you wish I hadn’t come enough to kill me?”
A long silence. “No. Of course not.”
The breeze blew against Joseph’s face, swaying the eucalyptus beyond the graves. The man’s hard look came back: It seemed to dismantle him. “I don’t know what to say now.”
“Do you have a place that’s safe?”
“No.”
“I can give you one, if you want it.”
Joseph’s heart jumped. It was beyond the very wildest hope he ever had allowed himself to have. Was it a lie? “I need a place.”
“Will you be quiet, until we figure out what to do?”
“I’ll be silent.”
“You can come closer.”
“I’m afraid of your hands.”
The man pulled them slowly from his pockets, then let them fall to his sides. His face was handsome, lined, sad. It reminded him of his own. He offered his hand. It was strong and moist and confident. “Did you see me that night?”
“Yes, sir. I saw a lot that night.”
“You must be afraid.”
“I don’t believe I killed her. I wouldn’t do that.”
“No. We should go, Joseph,” he said.
“Let me get my things.”
As Joseph gathered up his pack from beside the bicycle, he looked down the pathway to see Mr. Cantrell standing at the grave of Ann — his mother — head bowed in silence.
In a way that he could not comprehend, Joseph Goins had more peace in this instant than in all of the twenty-four anguished, bewildering years that had led him here.
Chapter 26
Thought: the first temptation. Small thoughts at first, always pleasant, always manageable. But betrayal and love both happen by degrees. They’re like two snakes, patiently swallowing the mouse of marriage from different ends. To be honest — honest to myself — I have to say that I think about David incessantly. Mostly, I wonder about who he really is, how he’s managed to affect me so strongly after not seeing him for twenty-five years. I want to expose the change in him, see for myself exactly what his success and power had cost him. I want to know what he was hiding. Aren’t we all hiding something? Sometimes, though, all I can think about is what if. What if we’d run away like we said we would, what if we’d had that girl and she’d been born alive, what if we’d married each other like we promised we would when we were young, dumb, gloriously in-love kids? I want to see him. Not to be close, really, but just to see. Who is this man? Who am I, to be drawn to him, still, again?
Over the past three weeks, I’ve seen him seven times, always at night after work. Twice, he’s come in for a late dinner, where, of course, we are polite and formal. We write every day, almost. He signs his letters Mr. Night because we joked about not existing in daylight. The first three times I saw him, we took the limo, but I made a crack about preferring something on a more human scale. So there I am, walking through the alley at 11:30 on a cold, windy night, and there’s no limo in sight. There’s just a busted-up old Volkswagen bug, and David’s at the wheel, all wrapped up in a thick coat. No Egyptian cotton and Italian linen, just a pair of jeans and a faded rugby shirt and the jacket. But the windows of the bug are darkened so no one can see in. Pure David. We roared down Balboa to PCH, then headed south into the Back Bay. He had a bottle of brandy wrapped in a brown bag, which we passed back and forth. Cut the chill, and went straight to my head. We drove through a chain-link gate and into a dock that said PRIVATE.
I gave the bottle to him and he took a swig. The sight of C. David Cantrell drinking brandy from a paper bag was something just too wonderful for words.
So we walked the Back Bay with the wind to our backs and the brandy going back and forth between us. When we were way out in the middle of nowhere, he turned to me, offered his arm, and I took it. Ann, he said, I can’t get you out of my mind. I saw you on the Lady of the Bay and something jumped up inside me I didn’t know was there. I get up in the morning, and there you are. I go through my day, and every second I’m not completely focused on something, there you are again. I go to sleep, my head a few inches from Christy’s — and all I’m thinking about is you. I’m afraid she can hear it, sometimes.
You might be surprised, I said.
He looked at me sharply and we walked farther. The moon was low over the hills, a perfect half, like it was cut with a knife and the other part had fallen out of the sky.
Can I ask you something? he said.
He brooded for a minute. What is there about a brooding man? Please ask me something, I said.
What... what are you doing here?
I was surprised at how little I wanted to be asked that question. I’d managed to avoid it. Not so much to avoid it, but to glide over it, consider it a mystery unfolding, a flower not to be picked. But the moment he asked, I knew the answer. I asked him if he remembered the Seabreeze.
He looked at me, his face a pale oval in the darkness. I knew he remembered it, our place, just a dumpy motel down the peninsula — no view, no pool, no TV. That was where he took me when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one and still in college, our little love nest, our world of damp sheets and sweat and smells. It sounds now like nothing more than an almost-grown man taking advantage of a girl, and maybe in a court of law you could prove that’s what it was. But that wasn’t it at all. It was the place and time I first felt love for a man, and it was a love so pure and uncomplicated, I never forgot it. One night we had spent hours in each other’s arms — like the other nights there — and we just knew it was time. I wasn’t terrified — I was famished. I wasn’t after pleasure — I was after completion. I told him I was ready for him, and he unfolded my arms from around him and my legs from over his, and he touched me from top to bottom with his warm, patient hands, and a hundred years later he kissed me and I guided that hard, wet knot into myself and I felt totally, absolutely invaded, punctured, possessed. I could feel myself hurtling through dark space. I could feel Ann the girl falling away from me. And it wasn’t an anguished fall, but a contented one, and in her place I felt for the first time Ann the woman stepping forth into being. I felt trembling, given, and, strangely, empowered. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it might. What I remember most about that night is lying there with him afterward, my head against his chest while he stroked my back, feeling, knowing, that I now occupied the world as a woman, that my world was small and simple and bursting with love, and that this world would never be so secure again, never be so complete, never be so welcoming. These were moments to be honored. Nine months later, lying knees-wide in that hospital in upstate New York, came the coda I somehow knew would end this lovely little beach-town symphony. Life and love, truth and consequence, birth and death, all neatly arranged in a bacteriostatic room of gleaming metal and hovering, masked forms — the employees of fate itself. And not once, not even when the pain finally took me out — or was it the drugs — would I have done it any differently, as if that mattered at all.