on the path the keeps looping you back into misery.”
I see that doorway, the bright yellow sunlight, the electric green of the grass, all of it so bright against the darkness it hurts my eyes. I could have walked through that door, and I don’t know where I’d be, but not here, I think. But then—would I have become a doctor? Would I have helped all the young people I think I have helped? Among other things?
Trauma victims spend a lot of time looking back, trying to unstitch the fabric of the past. All the ways the thing might not have happened, everything they could have done differently.
“And suppose I take this other fork,” I ask Tess. “Toward what? Normal life, I guess. I call up Beth, we go to dinner, maybe we fall in love, get married. Have children.”
“Is that so far from the realm of possibility?” she asks. “You’re not getting any younger. Could happen pretty quickly if it’s right. People get married fast at your age. Why wait?”
“And so, I’m at the movies,” I say. “Or on a tropical getaway with my new girlfriend. And what if there’s a boy trapped in a cellar on the isolated property of Tom and Wendy Walters? What if there is more than one?”
“What if there isn’t anyone?” she says. “And what if you don’t have to, can’t, save everyone. And what if you could have the life that you deserve?”
She speaks with uncommon passion.
“What if this is the life I deserve?”
When I glance over at her, she’s not there.
The victims of trauma—they want it back. The time. The person they would have been if the worst thing hadn’t happened. But they don’t get it. The world is fractured; the mirror casts back a different reflection. And we just have to accept it. We are who we are now because of what happened then.
After a while longer, I leave my house, get in the car and drive to the parking garage. There I switch vehicles.
I am about halfway to the Walters property, armed with the new information given by Angel today, when I realize that someone’s following me.
THIRTY-SIX
“Where are you?” Gillian asked, her voice echoing from the speaker. “It sounds like you’re driving.”
Rain didn’t answer. Instead, she told Gillian about her visit to Greta. Told her about the stuffed birds, how they stared, lifeless, frozen. It didn’t sound funny, as she hoped it would.
“That’s creepy,” said Gillian absently, probably on Tinder or whatever the dating app of the moment was. Swipe left, swipe right. That was the low to which the modern world had reduced love, the magic of human connection.
Then Rain went on to what happened in the house with the homeless man, the cat, the kittens.
“Oh, my god. Honey.” Gillian snapped back to attention. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” said Rain. She probably should have gone to the emergency room, gotten herself checked out.
“Why would you go there alone?” she asked. “Rain, you’re smarter than that.”
“I just wanted the pictures,” she said. Gillian made a sound like she understood.
“Two people there that night,” Gillian said after a moment. “That’s new.”
No, it wasn’t new, not to Rain. She hadn’t forgotten as much as she’d pushed it deep, locked in that box her father had taught her about. She’d put that part of herself away.
That box. What her father hadn’t told her, and to be fair maybe he didn’t even realize it himself, is that if you lock something in a box and bury it deep inside you, it stays, rattling around in there, forever.
“Rain?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” It was her friend talking, not her partner. “I mean. Maybe it’s all too hard. Maybe it’s taking you places you don’t need to go.”
“Maybe it’s taking me places I do need to go.”
She was opening the lid now, setting it all free, so that she could watch it fly away, a winged figure across the moon.
That night, she and Hank took the ride mostly in silence. She tried to shift as far away from him as the passenger seat would allow. Greg wasn’t speaking to her, so she hadn’t had to worry about an excuse for where she’d be all night. But she had one at the ready; she was going to visit her father, spend the night in her old room and do some laundry. It was something she did fairly frequently, and it would track.
But Greg hadn’t called or returned her calls. And she was pretty sure