“Actually, no. But before you leave town, you should see about getting something to the kid, don’t you think?”
“Yes. Christ. What did we get her last year?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Call Natalie tonight, make your excuses, and get a gift suggestion at the same time.”
“Good thinking.”
Neither of us said anything for a while. We seemed to have taken a turn down some baffling side street, and I didn’t know how to get back to where we’d been. So I simply picked up the car and put it back on the other road.
“Amy, if you’re just going to stonewall, then—”
“There’s nothing that needs to be talked about.”
“So how come you’re suddenly listening to Bix Beiderbecke?” I asked, feeling absurd.
“Christ—you’re really pushing on this, aren’t you? I caught a couple tracks on the radio, thought it sounded okay, didn’t bother to change the station. And anyway—how do you know that’s who—”
“Your phone is full of it.”
“You looked through my phone? For God’s sake. When?”
“The day in Seattle. As far as I could tell, you’d vanished off the face of the earth.”
“What’s on my phone is private.”
“From me? Since when did we have secrets?”
“People always have secrets, Jack—don’t be a moron. It’s how you know you’re a different person from somebody else.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Is that why you tell people you left the police because you’d finally had enough? Why you don’t volunteer the information that one night you just got up and fucking—”
“Secrets from you, I meant. And what would you prefer me to say? That I nearly wound up on a—”
“Of course not. But…”
She breathed out heavily. The air was beginning to turn, to lose its warmth. We looked at each other, and for a moment it was only the two of us, as if a bubble had burst and any disagreement between us was absurd.
“You want some coffee?”
She nodded.
“Or is it tea these days?”
She smiled a little, against her will. “Coffee will be fine.”
We got drinks from a stall thirty yards back up the pier. Started walking together toward the shore but wound up back at the end without discussing it. Whenever we’d come onto the pier together, that’s where we always went, where our feet took us when they were together.
I found myself saying something from nowhere, something that sounded odd and clumsy in my mouth. “Do you think there’s any of him still here?”
“Any of who?”
She knew who I meant. “Don’t you remember the wind? How some of…some got blown back at us, back onto the pier?”
She looked away. “There’s nothing left. Nothing here, nothing anywhere. It was two years ago. It’s dealt with.”
“No,” I said. “We haven’t dealt with it.”
“I have,” she said. “It’s history. Leave it there.”
It was only for an instant, but I saw her chin tremble, two tiny little twitches. I realized that it had been a long time since I’d seen her cry. Too long, for what had happened.
“We don’t talk about it,” I said. “Ever.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“There must be.”
She shook her head, and now her face was firm. “I was pregnant. It died at five months, and I had a dead thing inside me for a while. It came out. It was cremated. We spread the ashes over the sea. My womb is broken, and I’m never going to have a child. There’s nothing else to say, Jack. It happened, and I’m done with it now.”
“So how come you changed the picture background on your phone?”
“You know why. Because I was pregnant in the photograph. I’m moving on. You should be, too. Not thinking about it. Not letting that or things that happened fifteen years ago rule my life. Sometimes people die. Children, fathers. You have to move on. Your dumb God of Bad Things is only in your head, Jack. There’s no one to catch, no perp. Nothing to be done.”
“You can’t pretend things never happened.”
“I’m not. I’m just not wallowing in it. I don’t want that crap anymore. I want to be someone else.”
“Congratulations, it’s already happened.”
“That’s an asshole thing to say.”
“Well, you’re being an asshole.”
And then we were at each other like vicious children, two people shouting at the end of a pier, and passersby watched us curiously and either changed their course to avoid the embarrassing couple or slowed a little to catch a sentence or two, neither knowing nor caring that they were witnessing a universe as it split in half.
For this to be happening, and happening here, made me so sad that my words started to catch in my throat. I could barely hear what Amy was saying.
“Amy, just look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t about some other guy.”
Asking the question out loud made me furious, and sad, and exposed: There’s little difference between it and saying, “Mommy, why don’t you love me anymore?” It made me feel fourteen years old. This only worsened when she didn’t answer me.
“Jack, this is stupid.”
“Is it Todd Crane?”
“Jesus.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Amy. I’m asking you an adult question. Are you having an affair with Crane?”
“I…Look, a long, long time ago, years before you and I even met, Crane and I were an item. Briefly. Not since. There’s nothing inside that guy’s head, Jack.”
“So who is it? This guy Shepherd?”
She stared at me. I hadn’t scored a hit—at least, not of the right kind—but I’d clearly unbalanced her in some way I didn’t understand.
“What…how do you know about him?”
“Yes or no, Amy?”
She looked away, eyes clouded. “Of course not.”
“This relationship with Crane—would that have been around the time the company bought the building in Belltown?” Amy had started to look very unsettled now, and I realized that Gary Fisher had been right about at least one thing: The building was important after all.
“Jack, you really…you shouldn’t be getting into this. It’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s not something you’re going to understand. Believe me.”
I was unable to stop pushing now that I’d started, and I tried the remaining name I’d heard in the last few days, the name that appeared on the building’s papers, along with Amy’s and Crane’s.
“What about Marcus Fox?”
Amy’s face dropped. She actually looked pale. I nodded, suddenly disbelieving anything she had to say. Disbelieving Amy, period. All that had happened to us in the last few years no longer seemed like events we’d weathered together. Instead, the time had coalesced between us, like ice: transparent at first, stealthily growing harder and more opaque with every day that passed.
“Last chance to do this right,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, her hands shaking a little. She took the last one, lit it, and threw the empty pack over the rail. A woman who, when I first met her, took part in volunteer walks to pick litter off the beach.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” she said.
Her gaze was level and flat and cool. The fingers curled around the cigarette ended in splashes of pink. I realized I did not know this woman. Someone, some person who for now existed only in the shadows, had pushed his way into my life. He’d found his way in and was destroying the things that mattered most to me, either stealing or changing them so they were no longer mine. I’d thought I kept my house empty, protecting myself from the outside. But I had not. Amy had been inside all along, and it was she that he had come in to find.
And somehow he was taking her away from me.