Page 73 of The Immortalists

The footsteps are becoming closer now, faster, and his pulse begins to speed.

“Daniel?” calls a voice.

The map to West Milton on his computer screen. The business card by the mouse pad. Mira must have found them. She must have called Eddie.

“Daniel!” Eddie shouts.

Daniel moans.

“I told you get out,” Bruna says.

But Eddie is too close. Daniel sees a figure scrambling up over the edge of the gorge and into the clearing. His stomach rises and turns. He slams Bruna’s folding table up toward the wall so that the boxes fall to the floor. The metal folding chairs collapse on top of them.

“All right,” snaps Bruna. “That’s enough.”

But Daniel can’t stop. He is alarmed by his own fear, by the deep unstoppable rush of it. It is not him, it is not his: he must cut it out at the root. He walks to the counter beside the sink and uses the barrel of his gun to knock the religious icons to the floor. He empties the boxes in the front seats, dumping their contents—newspapers and canned food, playing cards and tarot cards, old papers and photographs—on the ground. Bruna is shouting now, rising heavily from the couch, but he moves past her to the bedroom door. He rips the wooden cross from its peg and slams it into the wall of the trailer.

“You got no right to do that,” Bruna cries, unsteady on her feet. “This is my home.” The whites of her eyes are threaded red, and the bags beneath them gleam. “I been here for years, and I’m not going nowhere. You got no right. I’m an American, same as you.”

Daniel grabs her wrist. It feels like a chicken bone.

“You are not,” he says, “the same as me.”

The door of the Regatta swings open, and Eddie appears in the frame. He’s off duty, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, but his badge is out and his gun drawn.

“Daniel,” he says. “Drop your weapon.”

Daniel shakes his head. He has so rarely acted with courage. So now he will—for Simon, his sexuality hidden in life, understood only in death. For Klara, wild-eyed, tied to a light on the ceiling. For Saul, who worked twelve-hour days so that his children might not, and for Gertie, who lost them all.

It is, for him, an act of faith. Faith not in God, but in his own agency. Faith not in fate, but in choice. He would live. He will live. Faith in life.

He still holds Bruna’s delicate wrist. He raises the gun to her temple, and she cringes.

“Daniel,” roars Eddie. “I’ll shoot.”

But Daniel barely hears him. The freedom, the expansiveness, of thinking he is innocent: it fills and lifts him like helium. He looks down at Bruna Costello. Once he believed that responsibility flowed between them like air. Now he can’t remember what he thought they had in common.

“Akana mukav tut le Devlesa.” Bruna speaks under her breath, a strained mutter. “Akana mukav tut le Devlesa. I now leave you to God.”

“Listen to me, Daniel,” Eddie says. “After this, I can’t help you.”

Daniel’s hands are damp. He cocks the gun.

“Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,” says Bruna. “I now leave you to—”

PART FOUR

Place of Life

2006–2010

Varya

28.

Frida is hungry.

Varya enters the vivarium at seven thirty and already the monkey is standing up in her cage, holding on to the bars. Most of the animals warble and chirp, knowing that Varya’s arrival portends breakfast, but Frida releases the same rapid bark she has for weeks. “Shh-shh,” says Varya. “Shh-shh.” Each monkey receives a puzzle feeder that forces them to work for their food as they would in the wild: they use their fingers to guide a pellet from the top of a yellow plastic maze to a hole at the bottom. Frida’s neighbors scrabble at the feeders, but Frida leaves hers on the cage floor. The puzzle is easy for her; she could have the pellet in seconds. Instead she stares at Varya and calls in alarm, her mouth wide enough to hold an orange.