much blood …
“I ran back inside and upstairs to my parents’ room. Part of me thought she would be there. I wanted her to comfort me, tell me it was all going to be okay. She wasn’t there. It was just my dad, who woke up when I came in. I pointed to the window and he went to look outside. When he turned back to me, his face had gone white. Then he said, ‘What’s on your shirt?’
“I looked down. My shirt was red and brown down the middle. He came over to me and I thought he was going to hug me but he didn’t. He just stared at my shirt, and at me, and then he said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’
“I was so shocked. I did what he told me. He made me go back out to her and wipe down the gun with my shirt. He stood by the door … watching me do it … I tried not to look at her, but I couldn’t help it. I saw it again. Then we went to the bathroom and he washed the blood off my face and my hands. Then he washed his own. The soap smelled like roses. That smell still makes me sick, too. He made me take off my clothes and take them upstairs to her darkroom and put them down inside one of the big jugs of fixer so he could deal with them later. Then he told me to come downstairs and shower, and put on new clothes, and then I was supposed to call 911 and say I had just found my mother dead.
“I told him, ‘But when I saw her she wasn’t dead.’ And he said, ‘I know, but it’s important to pretend. You have to pretend, Theo.’ Because he thought I had done it. He thought he was helping me cover it up.”
At last, Theo turned around. His face was wet. The way the red light reflected off his tears made it look like his cheeks were striped with fire.
“It ruined me, what he did that day,” he said. “He never let me talk about it. He never brought it up again. So I’ve just carried it with me, my whole life. The thing I saw. The things I did. I never told anyone.”
Kate’s mind was rushing and rushing, unable to compute, unspooling and respooling like a fishing reel, all her conclusions collapsing around her.
“You must have told Rachel,” she said, her voice rusty.
“No. Just you.”
His gaze was bleak. Kate pressed her lips together so they wouldn’t wobble. It should have been a gift, him telling her all this, and even through the haze of her fixation, she saw that she had dirtied the exchange.
“Maybe I should have called the police,” Theo said. “But I didn’t know how. My dad was an awful person. You don’t even know the half of it. I haven’t told you. He was terrible to me. He was terrible to my mother. He hit her, he undermined her, he yelled at me. He made us think we were crazy. He broke us down. Him lying that day was the one thing he ever did for me out of love. I couldn’t … even when I hated him, I couldn’t dishonor that. I couldn’t refuse the only thing he had ever given me.
“And now … now that I have the kids…” He shook his head. “I just keep hoping everyone will forget about it. If I came forward, the journalists would pump it all up again. I would have to explain to the kids about all this stuff they’re too young to get. I want to protect them. I want them to have all the things I never had. All the innocence. Why should I expose them to all that ugliness, if the end result just confirms what most people already assume? So I’ve kept quiet.”
Kate made a quiet, involuntary noise.
“So I understand why I never told anyone,” he went on. “What I don’t understand is why did I do it? Clean up the way he wanted me to? Why didn’t I just call the police right away?”
It took her a moment to realize that Theo’s question wasn’t rhetorical. He had been asking himself this question all his life and had never found an explanation that satisfied him. And she knew then, from the lost expression on his face, that Miranda had taken a part of him away with her that