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“I mean,” he says. “They’re not bad people. They’re not.”
“You only think that becauseyou’rea bad person. Your perspective is skewed.”
“Mine is?”
He hasn’t pushed back like this before and it’s bad timing. I pin him with my most menacing gaze and he looks away. But then instead of cowing, he moves toward me.
“I’m leaving,” he says. “I’m getting out of here.”
I almost feel sorry for him. He’s not a good man, but he’s not a truly bad one either. He’s made big mistakes, and committed some petty crimes. But his heart, it’s not irredeemable, not like some of the men I have known. Honestly, he’s just bad enough to use for my purposes. Like most, he’s been driven by fear of the things I know about him, and therefore malleable, easy to control.
Another tickle of self-doubt. Maybe he doesn’t deserve this. Maybe no one does.
Is it weakness that motivates me to do nothing as he strides past? Or exhaustion? Or the texts connecting me to my better nature? Idohave one, after all. He stops at the door.
“Come with me,” he says. “Let’s go. Remember what we talked about?”
I ignore him and bend down to pick up Liza’s gun. It’s cool and heavy in my hand.
I turn to face him, but I don’t point it at him. Something passes between us, and then he disappears into the night. A few moments later I hear the rumble of an engine. He’s gone.
24
Henry
2006
Henry sat in his car, watching the house. His back ached, and he was aware of the low hum of anxiety. He shouldn’t be here. This was a mistake.
The street was lined with towering oaks, the leaves swaying in the light summer breeze. Cicadas sang, their song rising and falling. Through the slightly open car window, the whole place smelled fresh. Clean. Wholesome. This was the kind of place people moved to raise families, safe, pretty. Idyllic. At least from the outside looking in.
It was one of those neighborhoods he’d always fantasized about when he was a kid. Basketball hoops in the driveways; bikes left askew on nicely tended lawns. He imagined that people who lived in neighborhoods like this decorated for Halloween with big jack-o’-lanterns and goofy, glittery skeletons hanging on doorways. At Christmastime, there’d be lit and trimmed trees in big bay windows, twinkling lights outside. In summer, kids would play in the street—kickball, and flashlight tag. They’d ride bikes to each other’s houses.
When he was living in this apartment or that with Alice, he would see neighborhoods like that on television or in the movies, wonder what it was like to have that sense of community, of home.
“Can we live someplace like that?” he’d asked one night.
He didn’t remember what they’d been watching—some made-for-television movie where every home was decorated with bright colors, and every woman was pretty and well-coiffed.
“With all the normies?” she’d answered with a scoff. “You want to go to a block party where I make small talk withhousewives?”
She leaned on the word with disdain. But what was so wrong, he wondered, with taking care of a family?
But Alice’s disdain for that type of life was so palpable that he didn’t bring it up again. But it was all he had ever wanted; just one of the many things he didn’t get.
That’s the good news about life, Miss Gail liked to tell him.You get to create yourself when you’re grown. No matter what circumstances you come from, no matter what darkness, you can write a new story for yourself and the family you make.
Maybe he could give a place like this to his own kids. The thought gave him a pang of longing so severe he had to breathe his way through it.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Piper had asked him this morning. “What about always moving forward, never looking back?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “Maybe I can’t move forward without looking back.”
Piper rested a hand on her belly, gave him that look. She hadn’t even started to show yet. “Ready or not, we’re moving forward.”
They were too young to be married, too young to be having a baby. Everyone said so, especially Piper’s parents. Especially Piper’s dad, who never stopped giving Henry the side-eye.
Piper had finished her English degree at NYU, a hugely expensive education which her father complained prepared her to do absolutely nothing, especially with a baby on the way.
