The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly (24 page)

I
n the beginning, I wasn't sure who I was protecting, myself or Waylon. It's still foggy who did the killing that day. But a couple things have parted that fog. One of them is the return of something I lost long ago—not the hands, but what they meant. A kind of power I never knew I had while they were attached to me. The power to do what I know is right. The power to free myself, finally.

An hour before my parole meeting, Dr. Wilson comes in like he always does, unannounced, except this time he doesn't ask me how I am, or what's happening, or what motivates someone to kill. He doesn't say a word. He just looks at my face as if to say,
What else is there to talk about?
And I understand. There's nothing else to say. Nothing but the final thing.

I look down to where the silver hands rest in their box beside me on the bed.

“I wanted to thank you for . . . what you did,” I say.

He nods.

“You could get in big trouble for this, couldn't you?”

He shrugs. “What are you going to do with them?”

“I haven't thought about it.”

“People who get limbs amputated sometimes bury them, have them cremated.”

I shake my head. “The Prophet had them on his mantelpiece. Like a trophy,” I say. “I don't want to hide them away. I want to see them every day, like he did. They're my trophy now.”

He nods wordlessly.

“Are you going to be at my hearing?” I ask to break the silence.

“Remind me of our deal again.”

“I help you find the killer, you recommend my release.”

“That was it.”

“So?” I ask, undeterred. “Are you gonna be there?”

He smiles. And waits. He waits and waits and waits.

In the beginning, I didn't trust him. But he's proven good on his very first promise, to help me. And he's proven something else. They're not all the same. They don't all want to hurt. They don't all want to lie. So maybe he deserves a little trust. A little truth.

I lay the pieces out one by one, the inhalers, the Prophet's lungs straining in the smoke-strewn air, the moonshine bottles and the blue flame they made, the way the hollow houses fell easy, like nothing was really holding them up.

• • •

Waylon stood at the edge of where Jude had lain, and at his feet was a wooden box filled with bottles of moonshine. He stuffed a cloth down the neck of a bottle, lit the cloth with fire, and threw it to the roof of a house where it exploded in a sheet of sharp-tongued flames. From his throat came rusty noises, like a truck engine refusing to start.

“Get out of here,” I shouted. “They'll see you.”

Waylon fell to his knees beside the puddle of blood, taking in the empty space that Jude had occupied before someone had dragged him away. His eyes squeezed shut in a sob. “He's d-dead?” he asked, even though the answer was, even as we spoke, soaking into the knees of his trousers. “He's dead?”

“You need to leave,” I croaked. “They'll kill you, too.”

He stared at me for a long moment, blankly, as though looking at a wall, or the sky.

“Waylon?” I asked.

“Look at what we are,” he said, his voice raw. “We ran away to the wilderness 'cause we thought the outside weren't civilized. But the wild don't change who we really are. It makes it worse.”

In his lap, his hands tore at each other, gripping the rolled sleeves of his shirt.

“Look what it turned us into.
Savages
.” He was yelling over the roar of the flames. Flakes of ash drifted through the air.

“You need to leave. Now!” I shouted.

He shook his head, eyes mad with tears.

The noise of the fire vibrated my eardrums. “If you want to live, Waylon, get out of here! For Jude. Make this worth something.”

Without a word, he started nodding, mouth stretched in a deep frown, then stood and shuffled toward the woods, arms wrapped around his moonshine box.

I ran to the tree line and crouched in the dark of the forest, watching my home smolder. At first I thought everyone would burn in their sleep because none of them had emerged from their houses, until I heard a shout, then screams. Slowly, white shapes streamed from the houses, first only a handful, then a flood of men and women in long nightgowns and little nightcaps, children dragged along like lost white flags in a windstorm.

I braced an arm against a tree and watched my family pour from the front door of our house, littlest children in the arms of their mothers—their real mothers. Constance still hadn't stumbled out with the rest of them, stuck up there in that attic room, the door likely latched. A moment later, my father reeled out of the front door, his face shell-shocked and covered in soot, with Constance behind him. She coughed into the crook of her handless arm.

My mother stood with some of the small children, her eyes bright and conscious. She hunched over the baby in her arms, her newest, a girl with double streaks of smoke beneath her nostrils.

“Where's the Prophet?” Constance asked. Her voice cut through the churning sound of the flames.

People looked around, aware that nobody had thought of him before that moment, too caught up in pressing their children as close as possible to their bodies. They lifted their heads, taking in the trappings of their Kevinianness burning around them. They couldn't have known that the body of Kevin burned then, too. Their entire religion up in smoke within the span of moments.

“WHERE IS HE?” Constance screamed.

She ran around the crowd, staring into soot-streaked faces, frenzy in her eyes. Surely she was thinking of the sacrifice she'd made for him. If he was dead, it all meant nothing.

Her pink, sockless feet slapped over the frozen ground, running toward the Prophet's house.

“Constance, stop!” my father screamed.

She pushed through the door of his smoldering house.

Everyone loved Constance. This was true up to the moment of her death. When she stepped over the crumbling threshold of the Prophet's house, the fire fell in love with her. So much so that it devoured the delicate blond threads of her hair in screeching, smoking kisses, instantly filled her cheeks with pink and red. It loved her so much that, in an instant, the entire house collapsed around her in a hug.

I think I screamed, though no one heard me because in that moment the entire world screamed, the physical screaming of faithful people, the screaming of fire as it demolished the hard labor of a decade, the screaming of trees as their sap boiled inside them, the screaming of tiny mammals woken from the peace of hibernation to find their bodies aflame.

Hours later, after I'd climbed down the mountain, the sky blushed with sunlight. Snowflakes started falling like white moths, and the stars winked out one by one, without a sound.

“W
e found Constance's remains at the crime scene,” Dr. Wilson says.

I nod.

“Can I say something?” he asks, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“You don't need my permission.”

“I just want you to know, you're allowed to feel badly about this.”

I pick up my head. “What?”

“You've been through something terrible. And maybe I haven't done my duty in assuring you that you have no reason to feel guilty. None of it was your fault. Losing your hands, your childhood, Constance dying—”

“Of course Constance dy—” I swallow a throatful of bile. “Of course her being gone is my fault.”

“I can see why you might feel that way. But it's not logical. It's grief making you see things unclearly. Do you realize that, as long as I've known you, these many months, you've never actually acknowledged that she is dead?”

“Why is that important?”

“So you can accept it. So you can move on.”

“Move on?” I ask, the blood rising in my face, my veins stretching with it. “You don't know what the hell you're talking about. You're so out of touch, you know that? As if you can relate to a single thing I say. You with your expensive clothes. With your tie clip.”

“My tie clip?” he asks laughingly.

“Nobody who wears a tie clip could possibly understand.”

“And why not?” He smiles like the whole thing is a joke, and that makes me angrier.

“You don't get it. If you did, you wouldn't tell me to
move on
. Hey, why don't
you
move on? Get yourself back to DC and live your nice life in your fancy house with shiny things that make you feel good inside. And go out with your wife and eat expensive food, and give your son a car because that's what good fathers do. And give up on me and give up on the Prophet because he's deader than dirt, and so will we all be someday.”

“You're very intuitive, Minnow. You got so very much right in that last statement. All but one thing. I don't have a son anymore.”

I shake my head. “Yes, you do,” I say. “He likes Thomas Hardy. His name's Jonah.”

“I did have a son named Jonah,” he agrees. “And now I don't have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”

The air vibrates numbly, the way it did in the forest the moment before a lightning strike.

“I said that to myself a lot at first, after it happened. Like an affirmation. I had a son named Jonah. And now I don't have a son named Jonah. And that is that.”

“What happened?”

“I bought my son a car for his sixteenth birthday. You even got that part right. How did you guess? Carol—that's my wife—didn't want him to have it. He'd barely passed his driving test and anyone could've seen he wasn't ready. But I bought it for him anyway, because it was his birthday and because I could. And because my father didn't for me. And that night he wrapped the car around the trunk of a tree.”

The room grows perfectly quiet. I look away.

“So how do you deal with it?” I ask.

He shrugs. “God, I can't answer that. You don't. Or, time heals. Or, you get used to it. I don't know.”

“Time doesn't heal,” I say.

“You're damn right it doesn't.” He rubs his forehead. “You know, I studied in Paris when I was about your age.”

I glance at him. “Yeah?”

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. “I've been carrying this picture in my wallet since my son died. It's my identification photo my school in Paris took on the first day.”

He holds out the photo between two fingers. The doctor in the photo is much younger than the one in front of me, with a head of bushy, overgrown hair and a collared, striped shirt. He's standing on a sidewalk with a curve-sided yellow stone building behind him. I flip the photo over. On the back, written in the doctor's careful cursive, are the words, “Darwin Neil Wilson.”

“Your name's Darwin?”

He shrugs. “I go by my middle name now.”

I pass the photo back to him. “So what's Paris got to do with anything?”

“What do you know about Parisians?”

I pause. “They smoke a lot.”

“Yeah, they do. Back then, they allowed smoking in bars. When you walked in, you'd see everything through a blanket of blue smoke. I'd be at a bar stool, alone, and I'd look around and hear all these foreign voices layered over one another and see these people moving around in foreign clothes with foreign faces. And then I'd realize that, actually, I was the foreign one. I was the one who didn't belong. There's something about grief that makes you feel like that, like a foreigner. When I lost my son, I became a citizen of a country I never knew existed. And all of the people I ran into on a daily basis were speaking a different language, only they didn't know it. Because I was the one who'd changed. I'd sit around the office and soak in the sounds and realize that I would never be like them again. And you know the strangest part?”

“What?”

“That idea made me happy. I started carrying this picture around, just to remember the feeling. It felt good to be different. It made me feel closer to my son. Closer to my guilt. The trouble is, though, when you lift your head back up and look around, everything's different. Things have been moved, people have walked out.”

He flicks the photograph back and forth between his fingers.

“The grief world isn't closer to where the dead live,” the doctor says. “You only trick yourself into believing that. If you stand up and move around and look at the living world, and start participating again, you're closer to them anyway.”

He lets the picture fall into the water-filled bowl of the stainless steel toilet beside him. The young Darwin looks up from the shadows of the trough of water. Wilson curls his fingers around the handle and flushes.

I watch the photo spin around and around until it disappears down the drain. I rest my chin on my breastbone. “Constance is dead.”

“And that is that.”

“W
hat will happen to Waylon?” I ask.

Dr. Wilson shrugs. “We've been looking for him for months. He's been a suspect since the beginning.”

I straighten up. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“Will you promise me something?” I ask. “If the police ever find Jude, promise you'll help him.”

“Help him return to the wild?”

“It's the life he wants,” I say. “He ought to have the choice. Everybody should.”

“So will you be joining him?” he asks. “If you get parole.”

“I'm still deciding.”

He moves his jaw back and forth. “I hear you got into the Bridge Program.”

“How'd you know about that?”

He smiles. “You're not the only one who talks to Angel.”

I nod, chewing my lip. “Will Waylon go to jail?”

“Who knows if we'll ever even catch him,” he says. “He hid for twenty years without detection.”

And it seems as though he's saying it'd be okay if Waylon never was found. It'd be okay if the case got cold and went to bed.

He looks up suddenly and casts his eyes around the ceiling. “Do you hear that?” he asks.

“What?”

“Thunder. I think it's raining.”

I can hear it now, plinking on the metal roof.

“Storms are so quiet here,” I say. “Thunder was deafening in the Community. Loud as cannon blasts. Sometimes, I'd wake in the night and think the war must've started.”

“What war?”

“Between us and the unbelievers. That's what the Prophet said. A war was coming. The Gentiles were out there with their nuclear weapons and automatic rifles, but we had the greatest weapon of all, God. The war never came, though. Good thing, too.”

“Why?”

“God doesn't stand up well in the face of a gunshot. Or a hatchet. God can't protect you against very much at all.”

“Is that how God works?”

“That's what the Prophet told us.”

“But what do you think?” he asks. And he looks at me with an expression that tells me the question means something. And so does the answer.

“I don't know,” I say finally. “I don't know, but I'm gonna find out.”