At long last, she left. “Mom,” Robin said.
“What?”
“The gun you both were shot with. It was registered to you.”
Renee exhaled heavily, twisted a piece of Kleenex between her fingers. Robin watched her, twisting it tighter and tighter. It was like watching a jack-in-the-box, waiting for it to pop open. “It was your father’s idea,” her mom finally said. “He bought it for me. He was going to a lot of conferences at the time, and he was worried about me being at home alone.”
Robin opened her mouth, but she couldn’t find the words. Mitchell Bloom had always despised guns, to the point of where he’d complained to Robin’s high school about the use of prop guns in a production ofHedda Gabler. He’d always said it was the thing that had bothered him most about Wards Island—not the murderers, but the armed guards, the ever-present firearms. The idea of her father buying a gun made even less sense than her mother buying one. But what could Robin say? Renee knew it as well as she did.
“I know it sounds strange,” Renee said. “That’s one reason why we never mentioned it to you.”
“It was Dad’s gun.”
“Yes.”
“He registered it to you.”
Renee met her gaze, her blue eyes steely. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Robin said. “Thank you for being honest.”
Renee’s eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?” She practically hissed it, her face hard and angry and unfamiliar, Robin feeling the way she’d felt as a kid when her mother had railed at her for watching a movie on TV. As though she’d suddenly droppedcharacter, turning into someone Robin didn’t know, someone she couldn’t trust. Someone who scared her.
“Nothing,” Robin said. “I swear.”
Renee’s face relaxed. She ran a hand across her eyes and gave her daughter a kind smile and settled back into herself again, as though a mask had slipped off and she’d snapped it back in place. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Twenty-Three
June 17, 1976
9:00P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
He’s dead. The cop who pulled us over. His name was Officer Nelligan. He was probably just a few years older than Gabriel. I killed him.
He’s lying in the middle of some road we never learned the name of. He is a skinny guy with freckles, a gap between his front teeth, a Timex watch. A wedding ring. A name tag that says Officer Nelligan. I learned all those details about him after he was dead, and those details made him alive. When he actually was alive, he didn’t even have a name. He was just a shadow that yelled.
“What do you think you were doing back there?” Officer Nelligan yelled into our car. “Do you realize you were going eighty in a forty-mile-per-hour zone? What is wrong with you? Are you on drugs?”
I’d never known cops could be so loud, so terrifying. Before now, the only ones I’d seen up close had been the ones who came to school every year for the first assembly. When we were little, they told us to look both ways before crossing thestreet and not to talk to strangers, and once we got into junior high they added “don’t do drugs” to the mix. There were different cops every year—usually a young one who tried to act “cool” and an older one who was a little more serious. But no matter what kind of thing they were telling us to do, those cops’ voices had always been calm and kind. This one, Officer Nelligan, was as loud and mean and scary as the siren that blared from his black-and-white car. It was dark out. The sun had just set. His face was hidden by the brim of his hat. Maybe it’s just the way I remember it, but I swear to you that when he was talking to us, all I could see were his eyes, glowing like a rat’s eyes in the dark.
He had a flashlight in his hand. He aimed it through Gabriel’s opened window. He pushed the beam of it around the inside of our stolen car, over our bodies, into my dyed orange hair so that I could feel its burn. He aimed the beam into my eyes until the pupils squished up. Held it there good and long, so that when he finally moved it away, my eyes didn’t work for at least a minute, and all I could see was this hovering cloud of white.
Gabriel apologized to Officer Nelligan. He said he hadn’t realized he’d been speeding, and that he was a new driver. “Please forgive me, sir.” He said it so calmly, I was proud of him. I thought to myself,Everything is going to be all right. We will escape with a warning and we will drive far away and he’ll never even know who we are.
But then the cop asked Gabriel for license and registration. I knew we’d never escape this. Remember, Aurora Grace, we are wanted. Fugitives. And as soon as he got one look at Gabriel’s driver’s license and called in the name or whatever it is that cops do when they take people’s licensesto their cars, Officer Nelligan would know that about us. We were doomed.
Gabriel stalled a little, pretending like he couldn’t find his license. I sat there, sweat pouring out of my underarms, slipping down my rib cage and into the belt of my too-baggy jeans, the vinyl seat of this cheap stolen car sticking to the backs of my arms and my neck. It felt like the whole car was trying to hold me down, to punish me for stealing it. Without moving my lips, I prayed for something. A miracle to save us. I wasn’t sure what that miracle would be, but I wasn’t picky. I told God,You decide.
And then I saw it happen: Officer Nelligan recognized us. I knew it before he said anything, just in the way he stopped talking, the way his back straightened, and he seemed to change shape, growing bigger and taller and meaner than he’d been just two seconds earlier. I pictured buttons popping on his uniform, his rage turning him into a giant, a monster that could, would kill Gabriel and me.
“Get out,” he said. “Get out of the car now. Both of you. Out.” I could hear the crackling of the radio at his belt. I saw the handcuffs in his holster, the gun. He told us to get out of the car again, and then everything seemed to slow down like gears grinding, each movement a freeze-frame, so I could see it super clear. Gabriel opening the door. My hand finding the gun on the seat between us—the gun that had killed Ed Hart. The gun I’d been forced to shoot Papa Pete with after his death, so that it now felt familiar in my hands and I knew what to do. It was a sign. At least that’s how I felt in that moment. Like God was showing me what needed to be done.
I told Gabriel to move out of the way. I think I must have screamed for him to do it. My throat still feels raw.
The cop reached for something—his radio or his gun, I wasn’t sure which. I had the gun in both hands. I released the safety the way Gabriel showed me. Time froze into a still photograph. I was standing at one end of a tunnel and Officer Nelligan was at the other and there was no one else in the world but the two of us. I pulled the trigger and we both fell back. It was like a weird dance, only he kept falling. My shoulders jammed into their sockets, same as with Papa Pete. And again, my arms went all weak and tingly and my head got light and I felt like I might pass out. It was only then, when I saw him fall to the ground, the blood spreading across his chest and pooling beneath him, his mouth opening and closing and then stopping—all of him stopping—that time started moving normally again.