in through stained glass windows, thinking whatever they’re usually too busy to think.
It makes life so simple, Walker reflects – lovely, in fact. Too bad I’m not that person.
He knows what he is.
Sometimes Walker wonders if the dead stay around, watching even though you don’t know it. He used to wake up screaming, with the old woman roaring around inside his head. Nightmare, he told himself. Vicious, revolting. Done, but now that Lucy’s dead, he has to wonder if these things are ever really done.
He wonders if Lucy’s spirit is out there, if it ever comes near enough to know how he feels, whether she knows all the things he wishes he’d said when he left her run on a loop, filling his head. Whether she understands now why he had to keep his secret, or how hard it was to keep from running back to hug her, so she’d know.
How do you explain to the woman you love that fate or physics or bad chemistry or a great psychic accident transformed you into a toxic avenger, a ticking bomb?
When he fell in love with Lucy Carteret it was forever, but look at the sorrow that brought down. When he left this town he thought it was forever, but even when you are unarmed but dangerous, you never know which things are forever or how much you can lose in a flash. Far as it was from Florida, Cambridge wasn’t far enough; he ran into Chaplin in Harvard Square in his troubled third year at MIT.
By then Walker was living two lives, ambitious and conflicted and in love.
—Bob Chaplin, imagine. Small world.
—Why, Walker, what are you doing in Harvard Square?
Chaplin was friendly; Chaplin had no idea what Walker Pike was hiding, his sweet life with Lucy in that wonderful, tiny room. Swift and intuitive – interested, Chaplin never guessed. They should have talked but Walker was with Lucy, which was intensely private, and they were pledged to keep it that way. He was busy reinventing himself, bent on protecting her, so he muttered politely and backed away from Chaplin and his old life in Fort Jude as if from the far side of a chasm he’d crossed safely.
Protective and cautious Walker, months before it all blew up.
He had no idea what was coming; who would? Nobody in his right mind could divine or even imagine such a thing. Then his life went up in flames and, sobbing, he left Lucy behind – no farewell, no warning, no explanation. A thing like that. How could he explain? He loved her so he left her in the middle of the night.
Love, he thinks, or prays, now that there’s a chance that Lucy’s spirit can hear him, I hope you can forgive me now that you know, but nothing happens, really, except raindrops on his windshield when the hotel sprinkler starts up.
A man like Walker has resources. A man like Walker knows how to disappear in the same big city without running away. The year he got his doctorate in computer science from UMass, Boston, not even Wade came to see them put on the hood and shake his hand. Wade didn’t know. With his life with Lucy destroyed, Walker did what he had to, losing himself in the stream of thousands driving to high tech jobs in the ring of glossy megaliths lining Route 128. Blending in. He reinvented himself as safe, boring, reliable, and up to a point, it worked.
Too bad things went wrong whenever he tried to start over with someone new.
Which he did once too often, because he was alone and grieving and afraid. He left Lucy to save her but he could not stop looking for her in other women’s beds. When they disappointed him: not-Lucy, the anger grew. The last thing he can allow back into his life is anger, so that ended that.
Picture Walker Pike: backing out of life.
He can’t get close to anyone. Not the way he is. For Walker, human contact beyond the simplest transaction is dangerous.
What he does for a living he can do anywhere, so at forty he doubled back on Pierce Point. Kicking off his shoes to walk in the sand where he dug as a kid, Walker considered. It was home. Lucy would never go back to Fort Jude; at the time it felt right. The sand here is, after all, what he came out of. He fit. Using profits from one of his software patents, he bought Pop’s garage