Summer had fixed Quentin. Or so she’d convinced herself. She’d been halfway to Brittlebush yesterday when she’d gotten the call. Dean’s voice over the phone, cracking, breaking. “It isn’t like him,” he kept saying, over and over. “None of this is like him.”
She’d turned around, sped back to her apartment to find Dean waiting there for her. She’d taken him inside, the poor guy, so genuinely hurt and confused. She’d made the plane reservation for Dean so he could identify Quentin’s body and bring his ashes home and stayed up with him all night drinking scotch and staring at CNN, and then she’d taken him to the airport at 4:30A.M., her head throbbing. The entire time, the two of them had barely spoken.
Summer had been glad for the silence. What was she supposed to say? There was so much that Dean had never known about his husband. He had no idea that two weeks after his mother’s funeral, Quentin had told Summer he wanted to drive his car off an overpass. He hadn’t known how many times she’d had to cover for Quentin when he didn’t show up at work during that same period, or about the empty bottles of Klonopin she’d found in his desk. When Summer had talked to Dean about convincing Quentin to doClosure, he had no clue how desperate she was to get him fixed again or that she saw the podcast as a lifeline, a last chance. How could she tell Dean about all that now? How could she say that it actuallywaslike Quentin to kill himself?
Shooting the Blooms, though. That wasn’t like him at all.
She thought about that as she got on the on-ramp for the 405, hereyes blurred from crying, her cheeks wet and stinging, her throat feeling as though it had been rubbed with sandpaper. As argumentative as Quentin could be when you backed him into a corner, as self-destructive as he could become if given half a chance, he’d never hurt another person. Not the Quentin she knew. And though he had a tendency to hide things, shooting two people and killing one was simply too big a thing to hide. Wasn’t it? Did she not know her best friend as well as she thought she did?
She recalled all the conversations she’d had with him since Mitchell Bloom’s death. All the updates and exchanges of information and the thinking aloud they’d done on the shooting. Not one of those conversations had made her feel as though there were something Quentin wasn’t telling her.
Except for the last one.
Summer dried her eyes on the bottom of her white T-shirt. She breathed slowly, carefully, as though the end of her crying was something fragile and tentative and the slightest move could start her up again. The thing was, Summer wasn’t a crier, not usually. She probably vomited more frequently than she cried, and she found them both equally unpleasant.
If she didn’t think of that last conversation with Quentin, Summer figured she could make the rest of the ride home without losing it again. But then she turned on the radio. Rihanna. “We Found Love.” Quentin and Dean’s wedding song.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
As she turned off the radio, a phone rang. Not her iPhone, but an old-fashioned beeping like a cell phone from the ’90s. Summer thought it had come from inside her own brain until she realized it was the burner she kept in her purse. TheClosuretipline.Well, that’s ironic.
She hadn’t gotten a call on that phone in at least a month. She glanced at the clock on her dashboard. 5:50A.M.Quentin had called her at that hour when he’d first arrived in New York, apologizing when he remembered the time difference, and for a moment, she allowed herself the fantasy that it was him calling again, that all this was some big misunderstanding on the police’s part that he and Dean would laugh about once he arrived in New York.
She slipped the phone out of her purse and put it to her ear. “This is theClosurepodcast. May I help you?”
“I heard about Quentin.” It was an older man’s voice, ragged and sad. “I heard it on the news.”
Summer switched lanes, her eyes on the rearview, then on the near-empty freeway in front of her, the sky blushing pink from the recent sunrise. “Who is this, please?”
“Kate’s dad. Quentin’s grandpa.” He coughed a few times. Cleared his throat. “My name is Reg Sharkey. My whole family is dead.”
Summer gripped the steering wheel. “I know who you are, Mr. Sharkey.”
“Linda’s dead too. I called her old number. Incredible, isn’t it? Most of the time these days, I can’t remember what year it is. But her phone number’s still in my head, forty years later. Clear as day.”
“Who is Linda?”
No response. Summer wanted to cry again, and she hated Reg Sharkey for that. Hated him for a lot of reasons, actually. “Mr. Sharkey, I’m not sure why you called this number, and I have no idea why I answered. There’s no more podcast, so—”
“What?”
“There’s no moreClosurepodcast.”
“Why?”
“Because it was about Quentin,” she said very slowly, “and Quentin is dead.”
“Please.” His voice cracked. He started to cry. “Please interview me.”
Now it was Summer’s turn not to respond. She listened to the old man’s sniffles, his labored breathing, and thought back to the day Quentin had interviewed him, his voice in her ear. How she’d cringed when he’d played her the interview, the old fuck yelling at him, calling him “fake news” of all things, and how despondent Quentin had sounded when he got back on the line.I’ve learned that my only real family is Dean.Summer clutched the phone tight in her hand, wishing she could squeeze the life out of this entire conversation. She said, “Haven’t you been interviewed enough already?”
Sharkey struggled to catch his breath. “I have a secret,” he said. “An old one. I need to confess.”
Go to church, then.That’s what Summer wanted to say. But she couldn’t make herself do it. She didn’t have it in her today to be that mean.
“I need to confess,” he said quietly. “For the sake of all my children.”
All your dead children.Against her own will, she found herself pitying Reg Sharkey, if only for his age, and for the loneliness and desperation that drove him to call a tipline at dawn. “All right, fine,” she said.
