“Chocolate?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me curiously. “You’re trying to bribe me.”
“Oh, I would never do that.”
“You are so trying to bribe me.”
“It’s called an incentive. Parents use them all the time. Don’t they, Brin?”
“Don’t get me in the middle of this.”
“An incentive?” Tessa pressed me.
“That’s right. An incentive not to smoke.”
“Bribery.”
I did my best imitation of a Tessa response: “Whatever.”
Then we were all quiet and watched the sunlight filter through a pile of soft cumulus clouds. Finally, Lien-hua spoke. “How much would you pay to see this? To see the clouds just this way, to see the sunlight fading like that from orange to gray? How much would you pay if you knew this was the last sunset you’d ever see?”
Everything, Tessa thought. Everything I have.
A Latin phrase popped to mind: Crepusculum vorat diem; aurora evincit noctem: Dusk swallows the day; dawn conquers the night.
And when she thought of that, she realized, at last, what she was going to do her graduation speech on.
I heard Tessa whisper to herself, “Yes. That’s perfect.”
“What is?”
“I think I know what I’m going to talk about.”
“Talk about?”
“At graduation.”
“Sunsets?” Tony asked.
“Sort of.” She leaned forward. “Okay, here it is: What would it look like to live in awe of every moment? To really, really see the terrible splendor, the delicate wonder of life? I mean, most people just go through the motions of living: texting, going to the movies, watching TV — it’s tragic how many moments go by unnoticed.”
“That kind of awareness…” Brineesha said thoughtfully, “I think it’s just too terrifying. Most people are barely able to live in awe of just one moment out of a thousand. I can’t imagine what it would be like to thread them all together, one after the other.”
Lien-hua’s voice was barely above a whisper. “It would be life-transforming.”
“Yeah.” Tessa took a small breath. “Listen. In that car last night I really thought I was gonna drown — I guess, officially, I did — anyway, when you really think you’re gonna die it changes the way you think about life, about God and hope and eternity, all that stuff. But nobody ever talks about any of that at graduations — the things that really matter. It’s always the same clichés about pursuing your dreams and following your heart.” She contemplated that. “I was reading Ecclesiastes lately. There’s a lot of stuff in there about how meaningless life is.”
“Well,” Ralph mumbled. “That’s encouraging.”
“But it doesn’t end with everything being meaningless. The king who wrote it ended up saying that finding God brings meaning into every moment — I mean, that’s a paraphrase. Anyway, in my speech I think I’m gonna say that as soon as we put religion out of bounds, we put the search for truth and the quest for meaning out of bounds, and that’s not education, that’s repression. This isn’t 1980s Russia. If we’re not free to speak about what matters most, we’re not free at all.”
“I’m not sure that’ll fly so well at a public school,” I said.
She gave me a small grin. “Neither am I.”
“That’s part of the reason you want to talk about it.”
“You never know. I’ll call it ‘Wisdom from the King.’” She hesitated. “As long as I don’t puke all over the place first.”
“Any more ideas on your plans after that?” Lien-hua asked.
“After throwing up?”
“After graduating. You still thinking English or deep ecology?”
“Hmm, well, I’ve been considering something else, actually, ever since I lit Basque’s hair on fire.”
“What’s that?” I said. “A career in arson?”
“Criminal science.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I like solving stuff. There’s no rule you and Lien-hua get to be the only FBI agents in the family.”
“It’s a long road to getting accepted at the Academy, Raven. It’s not just—”
“I can be a determined girl, Dad.”
Well, there was no arguing with that.
“Look.” Tony pointed. “The sun’s gone.”
He was right, and then that moment that we’d shared, we’d lived together, was gone as well.
But as it passed, a new one arrived.
87
I stood at the front of the church and watched Tessa, Lien-hua’s maid of honor, walk up the aisle toward me. The prom dress hadn’t weathered the Potomac very well and she wore a new dress, red and Oriental, and she looked much older than eighteen.
Her graduation speech last weekend had gone reasonably well. She threw up beforehand and that seemed to calm her nerves enough for her to get through it.
The whole speech lasted less than five minutes, but she said all the stuff she’d told us she wanted to say and I was proud of her for sharing what she believed in most, for challenging people to seek the truth and follow it wherever it takes them, even if that’s away from where their own hearts want to go.
If all we do is follow our hearts, we will live small lives indeed.
Now, she ascended the steps, smiled, and then stood beside me as we waited for the bridal procession to begin.
Apparently, one of Tessa’s teachers had given her a hard time about some assignment, but when the administration found out the circumstances and that she’d actually turned it in, the guy was put on leave for the last three weeks of the school year. Tessa tried to hide her satisfaction about it from me, but I could tell how she really felt.
There hadn’t been any sightings of Basque since I shot him a month and a half ago, and there was no evidence of crimes that he might have committed in the meantime. Some people at the Bureau wanted to consider his case closed, but I wasn’t about to go there. If he was out there I would find him.
The hound does not give up until he has the hare.
I’d heard that Saundra Weathers had a contract to write a true crime book about what happened to her and her daughter. She was going to donate the proceeds to a foundation that helped prospective parents adopt children from Africa. To me, it was welcome news that brought a glint of redemption out of the harrowing experience she and her daughter had been through.
One other bit of national news caught my attention last week.
No one has ever escaped from the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, but we’d gotten word that Giovanni, a brutal killer I’d tracked down in Denver a year ago, was caught at the perimeter fence. He’d been moved to solitary confinement and would probably be there for at least five years for that escape attempt.
Nice to hear.
It seemed like there was more closure than I’d had in my career in a long time.
Closure is good.
But so is the chase.
And after my honeymoon, I knew I’d be ready to look for more hares that might have wandered into my field.
Lien-hua appeared at the back of the church and waited for the music to begin.
My heart beat faster with the renewed realization of what was about to happen — my union with the woman I loved more than life itself. We had already burned the unity candle so much since mid-April that it was only a nub. When we used this one up, we would just get another. As many as we needed.
Considering the rocky past I’d had with my brother, it wasn’t especially easy choosing between him and Ralph for my best man, but in the end I’d gone with Sean — and Ralph had agreed that was the right choice.