dreamy, well-intentioned mistake on his part. It wasn’t even Iso, suspected of the crime of subtle bullying.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve never said that.”
“I never had a chance to speak to you.”
“I mean—in other, um, venues. You never spoke of it.”
“Other ven—oh, interviews. So you read them?”
“Sometimes.” She had, in fact, avoided them until a month ago, when she had reread everything, trying to figure out how Walter had gotten back into her life.
“I hate to say this, but I was told by my lawyer not to address any of the things where charges weren’t brought. Not even in my own defense.”
“The other girls,” she said, suddenly feeling protective of her little ghosts.
“I’ve never spoken of the other things I was accused of. Not even to you, not even when I wanted to…scare you.”
“No, no you didn’t. But the things I read made it pretty clear—”
“The things you read about yourself—were those true, Elizabeth?”
He had scored a point there, although she thought it unfair. True, Jared Garrett had speculated, with no seeming facts at his disposal, about Walter’s sexual proclivities. He had raised questions of premature ejaculation, necrophilia, pedophilia. It was, after all, impossible to libel a convicted killer.
But the standards for Eliza should have been different. Shouldn’t they?
“I can understand that you don’t want to talk about the crimes with which you were never charged.”
“There was a time,” Walter said, “when they wanted to bury me with every unsolved murder from South Carolina to Pennsylvania. They made my father vouch for my work schedule, went through his files.”
“Yes, but there are still a lot of missing girls…one was from Point of Rocks.”
“That was just a place to cross the river, Elizabeth, nothing more. Elizabeth”—she wished he would stop the repeated use of her name, which made him sound like a salesman, or someone who had just read Dale Carnegie—“I don’t want to go over all of this, I really don’t. I called to tell you that I’m sorry for what I did to you. That’s long overdue.”
And inadequate, Eliza thought. What had she expected? To her, Walter’s attempts to communicate had been a continuation of his long-ago crimes, not a refutation. He held her captive again, violated her again. Despite his letter, she had not really expected an apology, yet he had made one today, clear and unambiguous. What did he expect in return? What did he deserve?
When Iso was small, she had quickly learned to lisp “I sorry,” even as she continued to do the very thing for which she was apologizing. Albie, by contrast, was almost too remorseful, brooding over his misdeeds long after he had been forgiven. A decade or so ago, Peter had written a piece about the nature of modern apologies, stringing together a spate of real and not-so-real ones—the official government acknowledgment of the Tuskegee experiment, a baseball player’s belabored rationale for spitting at an umpire, the ongoing discussion about reparations for slavery. This would have been, in fact, about the same time that Iso was careering through their little bungalow in Houston, throwing out “I sorry” as if it were confetti, her private little parade of destruction rolling past, leaving Eliza to clean up all of the mess. They had tried hard to teach their children the importance of genuine remorse, what it was to say and mean “I’m sorry.”
They had spent less time, Eliza realized now, on the nature of forgiveness. She told her children that when someone was sincerely sorry for a misdeed, he or she must be forgiven. And in the context of a family, that was true. Family members must forgive one another. (Although—another stellar example from children’s literature—Jo did not need to forgive Amy for burning up her manuscript, and Eliza always thought Amy’s near-death experience was a bit heavy-handed on Louisa May Alcott’s part.) But then again—if one doesn’t forgive someone, doesn’t one, in a sense, lose that person forever? And what could be better than to lose Walter in that sense? She was under no obligation to forgive him. Was she?
“I appreciate that. I appreciate that you said it straight out, without any of those weasel words that politicians use.”
“Weasel words. I love that. You always did have a great way of talking.”
She did? No, Eliza wanted to say, that was Vonnie, the writer and star debater. She had been proficient with words, even tidy with them. But creative? She was not one to fish for compliments, and she would never, under any circumstances, invite