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CHAPTER 8

August 12 th

8:22 AM

T HE NE XT MORNING, I have just enough time to visit Gil before the search begins. The longer I loiter without visiting him, the more cowardly I am. It’s not until I’m following the nurse down the hallway that I realize I’m dressed completely in black, come to pay my respects to the enervated remnants of the man I once loved like a father.

“You picked the perfect time to come in.” The nurse has a peculiar smile, one side of her mouth lifting as the other droops ever so slightly, like a stroke patient. It’s the same cute, pocket-sized girl who brought me to Gil’s room the other day. She still looks familiar. She smells familiar too, like freshly baked pastries, sugary and buttery. “He’s just finished his morning coffee.”

“He’s like me,” I say. “Neither of us are human until we have our coffee.”

She walks one pace in front of me. Her cocoa-brown ponytail is fastened impossibly high on her head and swishes with every step she takes. “He talks about you sometimes. He likes to tell us about how he taught you to drive.”

“How do you—?”

The nurse flattens herself against the wall so a wheelchair can pass. “Softball. You were shortstop; I was first base.”

“Jesus Christ, Penny Eastman?”

Now the other side of her mouth lifts too, imbued with enough joy to complete her smile. She is happier to see me than she should be: her father, after all, is the sheriff. I was never able to disassociate the softhearted, bubbly girl I knew Penny to be from the man I hated almost as much as I did my father.

“I wasn’t sure if it was my place to go hey, remember me? when you brought Gil in a couple days ago,” she says. “But … it’s so good you’re here, looking for your mom. I know you were … troubled, growing up. It seems like you’re in a better place.”

“I live in Missouri and my apartment has mice. I think you’re being generous.”

Despite her deer in the headlights look, Penny musters up a laugh. She waits for me to remedy her discomfort by brushing off the remark as a joke— ha-ha, no, I’m happily married with two kids and working at a Fortune 500 company —but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s unfair of me to punish her for Josiah’s misdeeds, but I cannot unlink them in my mind. Any act of kindness I show to her becomes an act of kindness toward him, and that requires a level of magnanimity of which I am incapable. I nurture that ancient grudge like the precious first spark of a fire.

“While you’re in town, I’d love to have a drink together.” We arrive at Gil’s room. He is hunched over a small table, laboring over a puzzle designed for children. The pieces are comically large. “It’s been too long since we’ve talked,” Penny says. “I’d really love to chat while you’re here.”

“Sure,” I say. I don’t mean it, and I’m puzzled as to why she’s keen on catching up with me like a long-lost best friend. I chalk it up to a morbid fascination—with me, with my family. People used to say we were cursed. One of our forebearers was a graverobber.

Penny insists on exchanging phone numbers, then scuttles down the hallway with her ponytail bobbing along behind her, back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. I knock for Gil’s attention even though the door is open. “Hi, Mr. Crawford. Is it okay if I come in?”

He grins at me. “Sure, Elissa. Come on in.”

All my muscles constrict, my body attempting to collapse in on itself. Elissa. He thinks I’m my mother. Every time I think the universe has exhausted its supply of cruel jokes to play on me, it cooks up another.

“Mr. Crawford, I—”

Gil waves his hand as if swatting away a gnat. “Call me Gil. You’ve known me nigh on twenty years now. Help me with this puzzle, will you? Got to get that last corner. Wish I could find my damn chessboard instead.”

Considering his declining mental faculties, the puzzle has been pieced together with skill, its border complete but for the pesky final corner. He was always good at puzzles. It was his hobby of choice, that and chess. I set my purse on the floor and take the seat across from him. We sift through the box. Gil holds each piece up to the light for scrutiny like a surgeon checking to see if his scalpel is still sharp before making the next cut.

“These corners.” He discards an examined piece back into the same box he plucked it from. No wonder he can’t complete the last corner: he has made assembling the puzzle a Sisyphean effort. “Useless until we find all the corners.”

“Why don’t we make another pile for the pieces we’ve already checked?”

“Hmm?”

I place the puzzle box lid on the windowsill. Just outside, two hummingbirds hover beside a feeder filled with red nectar. Gil’s room overlooks a small courtyard with overgrown shrubbery and a water fountain tinged green with algae. “After you look at a piece,” I say, “drop it into the new box here, like this.”

“Good idea.” He proceeds to drop the next piece in the wrong box. “How’s Marjorie? She’s been so busy, haven’t seen her lately.”

I feel like I’m hurtling through whitewater rapids, flailing my arms to catch hold of a rock or a tree root, anything to keep from drowning. I resent Penny for leaving me here without instructions. What do you do when a person you love thinks you’re someone else? What do you do when they ask about their dead wife? Gil’s eyes are eager and hopeful. I have to lie, like I did about Coach Romanoff. I have to crawl inside his world.

“We’re getting to the end of the month,” I say. “That’s when they get busy in her office. She’ll come around soon, I promise.”

“Next time you’re in Carey Gap, you should go to lunch together. Marjorie’s always been fond of you.”

“I’ve always been fond of her too.” This much, at least, is true. His late wife was a sweet woman.

“Remember the song she likes to play on the piano? The old Civil War ballad?”

“ ‘Lorena.’ It was a beautiful piece of music,” I say. “I like when she sings it too.”

We lapse into an uncomfortable rhythm. Gil drops pieces into the wrong box and I fish them out. The corner continues to elude us. Across the hallway, another resident watches Wheel of Fortune at sonar blast volume. We can hear contestants buying vowels and going bankrupt.

“You shouldn’t be hanging around Mitch Perkins.”

Mitch Perkins? Who the hell is that?

“I don’t know what the two of you get up to—and frankly, it isn’t my business—but Tom is … well, Tom is Tom.” Gil crinkles his nose. “Not exactly slow to anger, is he?”

“That’s from Proverbs, isn’t it?”

“James,” he says. “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.”

It’s my turn to be slow to speak as I turn the name over in my head. Mitch Perkins . Most last names around here ring a bell to me, a person I went to school with or a family with a reputation for handing out princely portions of Halloween candy, but Perkins comes up empty. I file the name away to give Daniel later. It’s that or poking around the Tyre pool hall and asking too many questions, drawing too much attention.

“You should go to church more,” I say after a moment. It strikes me as something my mother would say. “It’d encourage Providence to go, I bet.”

An emotion I can’t quite recognize flickers on his face, like my name unlocked a vault of memories previously inaccessible. He balances a puzzle piece between his thumb and index finger, the tip of his tongue peeking out between his lips in concentration. “Go easy on her. She’s a good kid.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say.

“I think she’ll surprise you.”

“How so?”

This gives him pause. “She could be an astronaut.”

“I don’t think she wants—”

“Not a real astronaut, no.” His laugh is still hearty and warm. It’s the laugh of a man who gives each character a unique voice when he reads storybooks to his son, a man who dresses up as Santa every Christmas. “But she’ll leave Annesville and go to college, and that’s even more impressive than going to the moon in my book. You should be proud of her, Elissa.”

I am not an astronaut, nothing even close, but in the distorted slice of reality Gil and I currently share, I can be. No one dreams of somebody they love tattooing for a living, even if it’s good, honest work that pays for the silicone in my chest and the veneers in my mouth. They want doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs, firefighters, teachers, lawyers. Astronauts. In another life, under a different set of circumstances, I like to think I could have been one of those things. I wish someone else cared about me enough to rue my lost potential.

“Of course I am.” I clasp my fingers together in my lap. “But I worry one day she’ll do something horrible and … she’ll ruin her life, and maybe the life of someone close to her.”

“Parents have had that worry for eons. Somehow the kids survive their own stupidity and somehow we still love them in spite of it.”

“Blood is thicker than water.”

Triumph at last. Gil holds up the corner piece. “That’s not how the saying goes. The real expression is the opposite. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb .”