Gabriel’s face changed into something I’d never seen before. It was as though he was a jar and sadness was water, and someone kept filling and filling him until it spilled over the edges. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I can’t say the words.”
It turns out Ed Hart wasn’t a second father to Gabriel. He wasn’t a mentor or a teacher or even a human being to him. Ed did things to Gabriel when he was little that he still can’t talk about for the shame of those things, not even to me. “Especially to you, April,” was exactly what he said.
Gabriel figured Ed would remember those things he’d done to him and feel guilty enough to give us a bunch of money and some names of people in Hollywood. But when Gabriel saw Ed’s face—the blankness and confusion—that small, weird hope of his turned to something else. Something he couldn’t control.
Gabriel didn’t tell me any of that until we were sitting at a diner off the 10, forty miles away. He bought me a slice of lemon meringue pie and a strawberry milkshake with money from Ed’s wallet, and he explained it all to me in a voice so quiet, I had to strain to hear him.
Listening, I understood why he’d wanted to burn Ed’s body, to bury it in the ground, to mash it to a pulp. It wasn’t enough to kill him. He wanted to make Ed Hart into something that had never happened.
It scares me, how well I understand Gabriel. How perfectly I can read his thoughts. It makes me think he may be right when he says that we were meant to be together, and that we always have been, from the dawn of the world and through many lifetimes up until now. There’s no controlling that, is there? Is there a way to stop something that’s meant to be, even if it’s something you don’t want?
There’s something else I need to tell you, Aurora Grace. I am the one who tied up Ed Hart. I got the socks out of the drawer in his bedroom. They were thin, stretchy knee socks, long enough that I was able to do the knots Papa Pete taught me from his days in the navy during the Korean War. I made the knots tight and perfect, leaving him no chance of escape. Yes, Gabriel told me to do it. Yes, he had a gun aimed at Ed and me both, and yes, I do believe that Jenny’s life still depends on my obeying Gabriel at all costs. But I could have tied looser knots.
When we were in the diner, after Gabriel finished telling me why he killed Ed Hart, he pulled something out of the duffel bag he’d filled with all the things he’d taken from the house before we left. It was a coffee mug, with a picture of Starsky and Hutch on it. “For you,” he said.
A better girl might have thrown the mug in his face. A better girl might have said that she could never accept a gift that had belonged to a murdered man, even if that man had done horrible things to a child. Even if that man deserved to die. But I took the mug, Aurora Grace. I took it, and I thanked him and told him I will keep it with me, always.
Thirteen
Robin
“LET US PRAY,”the rabbi said. He began reciting the Twenty-third Psalm, and Robin mouthed the words, her father’s body in a coffin just a few feet away, the coffin she’d chosen based on some musing of Dad’s that she vaguely recalled. Something about being buried in a “plain pine box.” Though it could have been her mother who had said that. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Getting ready for the funeral, Robin had downed a glass of wine to steady her nerves, and now her head felt light and woozy, her peripheral vision pierced by tiny, bright sparks. She hadn’t eaten today, and that, combined with the wine and the Xanax she’d taken earlier and forgotten about, was affecting her, that plus her own cartwheeling emotions—confusion and grief and anger and fear, so much fear for her mother.Please, please, Mom, please wake up...
Wake up and explain to me who you are.
“Are you all right?” Eric put an arm around her and she leaned into his shoulder and closed her eyes for a few moments, waiting for the feeling to pass, trying not to think of Eric texting furiously on a day off from work or the way he’d dropped his phone into his pocket when he realized she was behind him.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” So many things Robin couldn’t let herself look at, not if she was going to get through the rest of this day.
Robin opened her eyes. She turned her attention to the group surrounding her father’s grave, work colleagues of Dad’s whose faces looked vaguely familiar, a contingent from her office headed by Eileen, a few shell-shocked men and women she figured for Dad’s patients. Morasco was there too, standing in the back of the group with a tall, curly-haired woman Robin assumed was Brenna, his wife. There were a few people from Eric’s job whom Robin barely knew, a voluptuous young woman she recognized as Shawn Labatoir’s latest personal assistant. Some of her mother’s fellow hospital volunteers, her parents’ neighbor, Mr. Dougherty. And Nikki. Nikki was a sturdy-looking woman in a black T-shirt dress with sensibly cut silver hair; a weathered, makeup-free face; and blue eyes so bright they were difficult to look directly at. Before the ceremony started, she’d gone straight for Robin, hugged her tight enough to knock the wind out of her. “My God, Robbie,” she had said. “Little Robbie.”
“Umm... I’m not sure I—”
“Of course you don’t. It was so long ago. I’ve been keeping up with you, though. Your school and your career. Your mom... She is so proud of you.” Her face was wet against Robin’s shoulder, her arms warm and strong. At last, Nikki had pulled away, those otherworldly eyes sparkling with tears, and Robin had hung on to her hands, not wanting to let go of the only person here who seemed as hurt and as lost as she was.
“Sheisproud of you,” she had said, leaning on the present tense. “Sheis.”
“I wish I remembered you, Nikki,” Robin had said.
“We’ll catch up. When your mother gets better, we’ll catch up, and we’ll reminisce.”
Nikki was standing by herself now. She was holding a Bible and mouthing the prayer and Robin watched her, the memory of herlike the pinpoints of light at the corners of her eyes, so close. Yet she couldn’t hang on to it long enough to see it clearly...
The rabbi finished the psalm. Workers lowered the coffin into the grave. “Al mekomo yavo veshalom,” the rabbi said. “May Mitchell go to his place in peace.”
The rabbi was a young man, rosy-cheeked and earnest. Robin’s parents never went to temple that much to begin with, but when Rabbi Isaac left last year and this one took over, they stopped going altogether.Nothing against him,Dad would say.He’s just too young to lead a flock.The new rabbi’s last name was Klein, which means “Little” in German—something Robin’s father had found hilarious. Mom and Dad had referred to him as the Bar Mitzvah Boy. And yet here he was, the Little Bar Mitzvah Boy, laying her father to rest. Life had a sick sense of humor.
Rabbi Klein beckoned Robin to the grave as the workers lowered the coffin. Eric put one hand on her waist and took her hand with the other, as though she were too frail to walk. He started to lead her to the grave but she shook her head. “I can do it,” she said, a little too sharply. “I can stand on my own.”
At the edge of the grave, the rabbi handed Robin the shovel. “As is tradition,” he said, “Mitchell will be buried by the hands of those who love him.”
Just as he was shot by the gun of his wife, who loved him.
Robin shoved the thought away. She pushed the shovel into the dirt, feeling as though she were moving through water, the lack of her father all around her, the gasp of her mother’s ventilator running through her head. The shovel was heavy as she lifted it, and the clump of dirt hit the coffin with a soft, crumbling sound. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, not with all these eyes on her. Not standing next to the Bar Mitzvah Boy. It was easier to keep her head down, her breath even, to focus not on feelings but on what she hadto do: hand the shovel to the rabbi, turn around and walk back to her husband, one foot in front of the other, eyes aimed at the ground, at her open-toed shoes. Her chipped pedicure.Don’t think. Just do.
As she walked, though, Robin found herself remembering again the last phone conversation she’d ever had with Dad—the strange, sad sound of his voice. Yes, he frequently got sad over the Yankees losing. But this had been different and Robin had known it, deep down.Have we been good parents to you?Over forty-one years of her life and hundreds of poorly played games, he’d never asked her that question before.