He knelt beside her and realized that she was still naked under the cold wet sheet. He shucked his heavy waxed fireman’s coat and draped it over her shoulders. She stopped speaking then — it was more a noise that had stopped than speech, but a noise filled with feelings he’d never before heard articulated by her, nor by anyone else he’d known. Feelings he had no name for.
“Can you stand?” He held her by the elbows, ready to lift her to her feet.
“Yes, of course,” she said, and without his help moved gracefully to a standing position.
He backed away, surprised, once again unable to distinguish between authenticity and performance, unable to know for certain if she was mad in actual fact or was acting mad, was lost to herself in pain or merely imitating it — and if imitating pain, then what was she really feeling? For she had to be feeling something, didn’t she? No one could be alive and conscious and not feel something.
“Did you set the fire, Vanessa?”
“Yes.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Not really.”
“‘Not really.’ Why did you come up here, Vanessa?”
She pointed at the file folder. “To bury that. I could have let it burn in the fire. Maybe I should have let it burn. Turn it into ashes, like Daddy. I was going to. But then I wanted to bury it with my mother. Put it in the ground with her,” she said. “But I couldn’t.”
“Why? What is it? What’s inside the folder?”
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let them burn up in the fire, and I couldn’t bury them, either. Isn’t that ridiculous, Jordan? Can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em,” she said and abruptly smiled, then was serious again. “Will you do it for me?”
“What’s inside the folder, Vanessa?” he demanded. He reached for the folder, but she shoved his hand away.
“Something that should never have existed! Something that, once it did exist, should have been burned or buried long ago.” Vanessa spoke rapidly now, with more anger than agony. “Something that, if it wasn’t burned long ago, should be buried with my mother. I can’t bury them with him, it’s too late for that now. Besides, she’s the one who allowed them to come into existence in the first place.”
Vanessa was smiling, and Jordan took a step back and tried to see her more clearly, more objectively, as he thought of it, so that he could somehow gain purchase on what she was feeling. He couldn’t know what she was talking about, what she was referring to, unless he had some idea of what she was feeling. Otherwise, she was simply raving. Otherwise, her words had no connection to reality, not even a tangled, mad connection. Unless, of course, she was acting. And if indeed she was only acting, then it was something other than madness, something maybe worse than madness.
“Daddy kept them up here at the Reserve,” she went on. “Hidden in the library, of all places. Can you imagine? Hidden right there in plain sight in the old Beinecke, in the one place he knew she would never look. And neither would I. Until yesterday, when I took you into the library, which had been the nursery when I was little, and I thought, of course, ‘Everything is in the library.’ That’s what Daddy used to say whenever I asked a question he didn’t have the answer for. ‘Everything is in the library.’”
“What the hell are you talking about? Am I supposed to think you’re crazy, Vanessa?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“What’s in the folder, then.”
“What’s in the folder? Why, photographs.”
“Photographs. Of what? Of whom?”
“Photographs of me, Jordan! Me with no clothes on, me when I was a teeny-weeny girl, taken by my daddy, with my mommy acting as his studio assistant. Drunk or doped at the time, no doubt, but my daddy’s faithful assistant all the same. Then and now. Even dead. Do you want to see them?” she said and picked up the folder.
“Yes.”
“Well, you can’t.” She hugged the folder to her chest. “They’re mine. They’re me.”
“Okay, fine. You want me to bury them?”
“Yes. I…I can’t do it myself. I don’t know why. I want to, but I don’t want to let them go. It’s too…hard, somehow. I feel like it’s destroying evidence.”
“I’ll do it,” Jordan said.
“But don’t look at them!”
“I won’t.” He picked up the shovel and proceeded to dig a hole in the soft wet ground that was the width and length of the folder. “Okay, let me have it.”
She handed him the folder very carefully, as if it contained sacred scripture, a gnostic revelation. “You can’t look.”
“I won’t,” he said, and he didn’t. He was absolutely sure that there were no photographs inside the folder. Papers — he could tell that much from the weight and shape of it — but probably nothing more than receipts for materials and work done at the camp, or letters, newspaper clippings, possibly a half-dozen old magazines or a pack of Dr. Cole’s personal Rangeview letterhead stationery. But photographs? No. Jordan lay the folder flat in the hole and filled it in and tamped down the dirt and kicked a layer of pine needles over it. “There, it’s done. Do you want me to place a rock on top, some kind of ceremonial marker?”
“Don’t condescend to me.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “In case you ever change your mind and want to come back and dig them up.”
“‘Them.’ The photographs.”
“Yes. The photographs.”
“No. No need to mark it.” She stood with shoulders slumped, hands lost in the sleeves of the heavy fireman’s coat, strands of soaked hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks — a bedraggled, lost child, Jordan thought.
“Come on, Vanessa. I’ll take you over to my place, get you some dry clothes, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“You can do that? Fly me away from here?”
He was silent for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly, as if a quandary had at last been resolved. “Yes. I can do pretty much whatever I want now.”
“What’s going to happen to me, Jordan?”
“Nothing,” he said. Then added, “But only if you agree to do what your mother originally wanted you to do.”
“Oh! Go into that hospital? That’s what she originally wanted. So they could perform the operation on my brain. The operation they learned from Daddy. The operation that will make me nice.”
Jordan put his arm around her shoulders and gently moved her away from the grave and toward the woods below. “Vanessa, no one’s going to operate on you. Trust me. There’ll be no brain surgery. All that business about your father and lobotomies, it’s not true, Vanessa. You know that. No more than your belief that he took obscene pictures of you when you were a child. You’ll be fine, I promise. If you go into the hospital, nothing bad will happen to you.”
“You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
“I do know that if you don’t go into the hospital, there’s going to be a thorough investigation into the fire, and you’ll likely go to jail for setting it. They already know you set it. That you set it ‘not really’ by accident. And who knows what else will come out in an investigation and trial? Your mother’s death, for example. Which might also be seen as ‘not really’ an accident. And that you kidnapped her. And buried her body here on the Reserve. You’ve still got plenty to hide, you know.”
“Is it like I’m pleading insanity?”
“Yes.”
“Am I insane, Jordan?”
“I don’t know.” Then added, “No, not to me.”
They walked a few more feet, and she stopped and stuck out her lower lip and pouted. “I don’t want to go.”