“This is great,” Quentin said. “You’re great.”
“Aw shucks.” He could hear the smile in her voice.
“How did you do it?” His eyes stayed on the mother and her son. They’d reached their car now, and they were involved in conversation, the woman crouched down so she could look him in the eye. He figured she was giving him a good talking-to... until he saw that it was the boy doing the talking. Quentin wasn’t sure he’d ever experienced that as a child—a grown-up crouching down to listen to him.
Summer was saying, “... so now I’m stuck going to knitting group with George’s executive secretary.”
“You don’t know how to knit.”
“I’ve been watching how-to videos on YouTube. I think I can fake it. Oh... and I also overnighted you some reading material. The hotel should have it when you get back.”
“Summer?”
“Yeah?”
“Do I seem angry to you?”
“Well... are you?”
“No, I mean, do I seem like an angry person? Like... all the time?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Why would you ask me that?”
He drew a shaky breath. “No reason.”
She started to say something more, but he didn’t let her. “I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “Let me know how everything goes.”
Once he hung up, he turned on the voice recorder and played back the rest of his conversation with Nicola. Listened to his entire, three-minute-long I-hate-Mommy harangue. Then he erased it. Nicola was right. It had been very, very harsh.
He was staying at an airport hotel in Newark, a big block of a building as generic as his rental car. He tapped its address into the GPS app on his phone and started up the car without turning on the radio. He watched the mother and son leave the lot in their SUV, listening to the rasp of his rental car’s engine and Siri’s barking directions and recalling, without wanting to, the one thing he hadn’t mentioned in his harangue: his mother’s death; his part in it.
As he pulled out of the parking lot and turned left on the busy road, following the directions leading up to the highway, he allowed himself to remember that afternoon six months ago: the acrid smell of Kate’s room in the so-called sober living house and the way he’d brushed her hair from her forehead, a tender gesture she’d never feel. He recalled how cold her skin had been and the glassiness of her eyes, like a light had gone off behind them. He recalled how he’d cried out and the helper had rushed in (What did she like to be called? The resident associate?), how she’d checked Kate’s pulse at her wrist and neck and said, without seeming to bear any responsibility, that it had been their third overdose that year. He remembered how he’d cried for his mother—not because he’d known and loved her and now she was gone, but because he hadn’t known her, and now he never would.
It had been Dean who had suggested Quentin do a podcast onthe murders. He’d told Summer about the idea first, the two of them conspiring behind Quentin’s back as though they were planning a surprise party, then cornering him one night at the bungalow, when Summer had been over for dinner. “It will help you get closure.” One of them had said it, Dean or Summer. At this point, he wasn’t sure which.
It had made some sense at the time, Quentin supposed. He never would have agreed to it if it hadn’t. But now that dinner at the bungalow felt to him like the opening scene in an endless nightmare—the murders, the fallout from them now occupying his every thought, every dream. Closure. What a joke. Mitchell Bloom’s line of shrink-interrogation couldn’t have been more on the nose.
Battling traffic on the Cross County Parkway, Quentin thought about April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy—how they’d ruined not only his grandfather and his mother, but ruined him too, turning him into the kind of person who doesn’t let an old man know that his only daughter is dead.Your mother put you up to this, Reg Sharkey had yelled at him. And Quentin hadn’t corrected him. He’d been so full of hate, he hadn’t said a word.
By the time Quentin reached his hotel, he was back to his mother’s overdose—the part that he never allowed himself to think about, the one part of it that he hadn’t told anyone, not even Dean. She’d still been alive when he showed up at the sober house. He had seen her sitting up in bed, her eyelids fluttering—and immediately, he’d known what was going on. It had happened before, twice. He had been angry at the people at the sober house for allowing her access to sleeping pills to the point where she’d been able to hoard them again, angrier still at Kate for planning it this way, right before his weekly visit, as though she were forcing him to save her. Forcing a man to save her, because no man had ever done it voluntarily.
He’d pulled out his phone to call 911, just as he had the other twotimes, and she’d whispered to him, just as she had then.You’re better off without me. Let me go.
And this time, he had. He never pressed send on the 911 call, didn’t attempt CPR the way he had two other times before. He just stood over Kate, watching the life spill out of her, the way April Cooper had watched Kimmy Sharkey fall to the ground.
Relieved. That’s how Quentin had felt. He may have even smiled.
He had felt that way until she was gone, until he brushed the hair from her forehead and gazed into her glassy, wide-open eyes and thought,What have I done? What kind of person am I?
Quentin got out of the car and walked through the hotel parking lot, his vision thick with tears, not for himself but for Dean, for Summer, for anyone else who was deluded enough to believe in him.
“Mr. Garrison,” the front desk clerk called after Quentin, as he made his way through the antiseptic-smelling lobby to the elevator. Quentin’s cheeks were wet. He was a mess. Whatever the guy had to say to him could wait for later. “Mr. Garrison! Mr. Garrison!Mr. Garrison!”
“What?” Quentin shouted it so loud, his voice went hoarse.