“Yeah, because they were making everyone pitch from, like, fifty feet back.”
“I’m about to walk away, all warm and dry, when up steps your dad. He makes a couple weak-ass throws, and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we’re all good.’ Then suddenly, he winds up like he’s pitching the fucking World Series, and the next thing I know, I’m paddling around in water that tastes like dysentery.”
“He took his team all the way to States in high school.”
“I can believe it. I think that sonuvabitch nearly drowned me.” I reach over and shove her shoulder; she floats away but quickly paddles back to me. “How’s he doing, your dad?”
With anyone else, that question might come across as cruel, a reminder that he’s getting what he deserves in prison. I know she’s only asking, though, because she’s concerned. “I’m not sure. I haven’t spoken to him since he was arrested.”
“Most of our club members aren’t in contact with their parents anymore. It’s completely normal if you hate him—”
“I don’t hate him.”
“I’m just saying, after what he did, no one would blame you.”
Claire. I swallow down the lump that’s lodged itself in my throat. “I don’t hate him,” I repeat. “I know I should. I know it’d be the right thing to do, but I can’t.”
A wave blows across the surface of the lake; the two of us rise and dip, water slapping against our skin.
“Have you ever been to Niagara Falls?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“I went for the first time while we were filming. Took a day trip with the PAs. They asked me to take a photo of them, and through the lens, it looked like they were right on top of the water, like if they leaned backward over the safety rail, they would’ve tumbled right in. But you know what was missing from that photo?”
“What?”
“The fucking grass. If they’d fallen backward, they would’ve landed on a little strip of lawn. They might’ve walked away with bumps on the backs of their heads, but apart from that, they would’ve been fine. You couldn’t see it in the photos, but it was there.”
“So, you think Ros was lying?”
“No, she believes everything she says. But it’s easy to look at an old photo and fill in any missing details with whatever you think makes the most sense. She probably doesn’t remember a family vacation from almost forty years ago, but she knows her father was a dangerous man. So the ground disappears, and in its place, rapids threaten to rip her away. She’s rewritten her past, dropped in clues so she can tell herself, ‘Of course he was a serial killer. No normal father would dangle his child over the Falls.’ I’ve never needed to do that. I can accept that my father was a murderer and, at the same time, loved me more than anything in the world.”
“It’s possible to do bad deeds and still be a good person?”
“Exactly. We contain motherfucking multitudes.”
I turn my head to look at her. We’re so close, our fingers are only a ripple away from touching.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She hums her consent, her gaze never drifting from the clouds meandering across the sky.
“Did you really filmTo Catch a Killerbecause you wanted to get justice for the victims—or was it to help your father?”
Greer hesitates, then asks, “Can’t it be both?” She waits for myanswer, but I don’t have one. “You know, my dad used to take me to the lake when I was a kid.”
I try to imagine Tom Woods splashing around in the waves. It was just the two of them growing up; her mother died when she was little, same as mine. Looking at Greer, it’s hard to frame a mother in the picture—she’s so completely Tom Woods’s daughter. She’s beautiful, like him: same angular cheeks, same snubbed, upturned nose.
“One day,” she continues, “we swam out as far as we could—so far out the sunbathers on the shore looked like specks. All we could hear was the sloshing around our ears, and our gasps of breath as we treaded water. Then he said, ‘It’s just you and me, Greer, until the end.’ He took my hands in his and tugged me underwater. And we stayed down there, watching each other through the swirl of bubbles, until we couldn’t anymore.”
Water shimmers on her skin. The freckles on her nose are darkest, but others ghost across her cheeks—the memory of summers past. My eyes covertly slide down her body to nipples poking out from under fabric. They don’t look anything like mine.
They don’t look anything like Claire’s, either.
Still, I can’t help thinking about Claire whenever I look at her. There’s something wild about both of them, untamed, ferocious even. Like whatever’s inside them is too big to be contained, and at any moment, it might break itself free and go hurtling across the countryside, wind rushing past as its claws dig ruts into the soft earth.
The first time I saw that wildness in Claire, we were sprinting back to campus during a thunderstorm. Our clothes stuck to our limbs, and our socks squished, rubbing blisters onto our heels, but we were laughing loud enough to wake Cooper Square. We were gasping with laughter, choking with laughter, until she pulled me into the covered passageway connecting our residence hall to the street. She slammed me back against the wall, my shoulders scratching againstrough brick, and before I could ask what she was doing, her lips were on mine.
