Chapter 6
Twelve Candles
"Happy birthday to the little one," the voice had said.
That was all, at first. Damen could hear it again on Saturday morning, standing in the shed at six o'clock with a cup of cold coffee in his hand and the first gray light coming through the dusty glass. It had been a mild, pleasant voice, unhurried, a little dry, the voice of an elderly man in a cardigan reading a poem to a child. Behind it, as before, a clock had ticked.
Happy birthday to the little one, it had said, at nine o'clock on Friday night, down a line that smelled of a distance. Twelve is a good age, Damen: a bridge. You were nine, weren't you, when they took you to Mrs. Peller's? I remember the file. A small boy with a very straight back.
He hadn't answered. He had stood in the hall of his own house with the receiver to his ear and sixty-three balloons nodding over his head, and held his breath.
I won't spoil her day, Everett Strand had said. I'm not an animal. I've never been that. You know me. Let her have her cake, and her friends, and her candles. Let her have tomorrow. I'll send someone on Sunday, in the morning, to have a conversation. You'll be home. You'll be civil. The pendulum ticked, a long soft stammer in the third beat. I should hate us to quarrel in front of the children.
Then the line had clicked, and gone dead, and Naomi had asked who it was.
He set down the coffee. On the bench in front of him lay everything he had taken from the dark above the paint locker. The money was in a canvas bag, in the bed of the truck, under the tool chest. The passports, in his shirt. The prepaid phone, charged, in his pocket. And the gun, in its yellow cloth, in the drawer of the old workbench, under a coil of rope, where he could reach it with his right hand in a second and a half.
A conversation.
It was an old word. Between certain people it meant something very particular. It meant two men and a car. It meant a quiet room, an hour long, in which a man was asked what he knew, and to whom he had told it, and who else might wish to be asked. It meant a week afterward in which a family found that its father had gone away on business and did not come back. Strand had never raised his voice in his life. He'd never needed to. When he said conversation, those who understood did not argue. They stopped sleeping.
Sunday morning, thought Damen. He's given me thirty hours.
He should have felt gratitude. He felt only the old cold arithmetic, turning over, like the wheels of a lock. Thirty hours. A birthday party. The old man had always understood the power of mercy as a means of control. He gave a man one more day so that the man would spend it on his knees.
And Strand never did anything without a reason.
He had gone to the motel on Thursday night, with the twelve thousand in an envelope, as he'd said he would.
It was a long low place on the county road, the Lakeview Motor Lodge, with a flickering vacancy sign and a pool that had been empty since the 1990s, and the owner, a gaunt man named Kessel, had looked up from a crossword and said, The big fellow? Room seven. He checked out an hour ago.
Checked out.
Left the TV on. Wasn't even his money; paid in cash. Said a friend might come.
Room seven had been unlocked. The bed was not slept in. A television was playing an old western with the sound off, and on the nightstand was an ashtray with four butts crushed out, a plastic cup of water, and Teddy Calloway's Harbor Rats cap, lying upside down, as though it had been thrown. Damen had stood for a long time in the doorway of the empty room, in the blue light of the screen. Then he had picked up the cap, and turned it over, and found inside the band a folded piece of motel stationery, creased to a hard small square.
Four words, in a hand he knew, in the sprawling capitals of a man who writes with his whole arm.
SORRY. THEY CAME. THE GIRL.
He had read it twice. Then he had burned it in the sink.
The girl. He had been turning the phrase over for two days. It could mean Ivy. It could mean something else. There was a thing in the back of his mind, an old closed door he did not want to open, and every time he came near it the voice said, quite gently, not yet. He had put the cap in the truck. He had driven home. And he had lain in the dark beside his wife with his hands folded on his chest like a man in a coffin, listening to the lake.
By noon the house was full.
It began with Mrs. Okafor, at ten, in a gold head-tie and her best church dress, bearing before her on a silver tray a cake in the shape of a lighthouse. It stood three tiers high. The tower was white, with red stripes of icing winding up it in a spiral; at the top, in a glass lantern made of spun sugar, burned a single electric bulb that she had run, with enormous ingenuity, through a hole in the sponge and out to a battery pack in the base. Ivy stood in the kitchen doorway with both hands over her mouth and made a noise like a kettle.
"It lights," she said. "It really lights."
"Of course it lights," said Mrs. Okafor severely. "What is a lighthouse that doesn't light?"
"It's the best thing I've ever seen in my life."
"Then I forgive you for the balloons." The old woman put down the tray. She turned to Naomi, and looked her slowly up and down, and said in Igbo, with the dry satisfaction of a general who has won a campaign, something that made Naomi laugh and turn red. Then she saw Damen in the doorway and stopped.
"You are not sleeping," she said.
"I'm fine, Mrs. Okafor."
"You are a man of forty-nine years who has not slept since Tuesday."
"Fifty."
"It makes no difference." She put out a dry brown hand and patted his cheek, firmly, twice. "Whatever it is, you will tell Emeka. He will not say anything. But he will know what to do."
"There's nothing wrong."
"Hm," said Mrs. Okafor, with the whole weight of seventy years of listening to men say that.
Then the doorbell rang, and rang again, and the house filled up.
They came in waves. The Hendersons, with a hamper. The Pruitts, with a box of homemade fudge and a set of stickers. Emma from the camp, and Emma's mother, and Emma's three brothers, who had to be separated twice. Mrs. Dolan from the library, in a sunhat, with a pirate flag. The pastor and his wife. Cody Bell, shy and enormous in a clean shirt, carrying a lopsided present wrapped in the Sunday comics. Josie from the Blue Moose, still in her apron, who had closed the diner for ninety minutes and told anyone who asked that the pie could wait. The children took over the back lawn at once. They ran in a screaming pack from the sprinkler to the swing set to the sandbox and back, and the adults retreated to the porch with lemonade, and the radio played, and the sun beat down, hot and white and perfectly ordinary, on the roof of the house.
Damen moved through it.
He did it well. He'd had practice. He carried trays, and poured drinks, and listened to a long story about a snow blower, and laughed in the right places. But under the easy movement of his body, behind the open face, he was working. He was very busy. Every minute or two, without turning his head, without changing his pace, he found some reason to cross to a window, or step to the end of the porch, or lean on the gate with a drink in his hand. Each time he took in the street, from end to end, as one reads a line.
The white truck with the ladder rack, at the bottom, with Pruitt's wife beside it, laughing. The Hendersons' maple. Three parked cars he knew by name. A moving van two doors up that had been there since Thursday, a tenant's. A boy on a bicycle. A man walking a dog.
No gray van. No pale blue polo shirt. No long black coat.
They're not here, he told himself. They're not coming. He gave his word.
He gave his word, said the other voice, to a man he's about to bury.
At two o'clock Deputy Ray Tobin arrived, in plain clothes, with a present under his arm.
Damen saw him first. He was on the porch, with his back to the wall. He saw the sandy head come through the crowd, cheerful and boyish in a checked shirt, saying hello to everyone, accepting a hug from Mrs. Okafor, ruffling the hair of a small boy. He saw him pause at the foot of the steps and look up, with his usual wide smile, directly at Damen. The smile held. It held a half second too long. Then he came up the steps, and held out the present, a baseball glove wrapped in blue paper, and said, "Happy birthday to the champ."
"That's very kind," said Damen. "She'll be out of her mind."
"It's nothing. She's got an arm." The deputy's eyes slid, for one instant, to the door, to the hall, to the cream-colored telephone on the table. "Great place you've got here, Dean. I don't think I've said. Always loved this house."
"Thank you."
"Nice and quiet. Out of the way."
"That's the idea."
"Mm." Tobin cleared his throat. A drop of sweat ran down from his temple. "Listen. I wanted to say. If there's ever anything. If you ever feel like you need..." He stopped. He seemed to hear himself. His round, decent face went slowly red. "If you need anything fixed. I've a nephew who does roofs."
Damen looked at him. He looked at him for a long time, quietly, without moving, and saw as clearly as if the words were written on his forehead that the man had come not to spy but to apologize; that he had been told to bring a present, to stay an hour, to see who was in the house and where they stood; and that every second of it was making him sick.
"Ray," he said gently.
"Yeah."
"Go and have some cake."
The deputy swallowed. He nodded. He went in. And Damen stood on the porch, among the voices and the sun, and understood with perfect, final clarity that whatever Strand had promised him, the sheriff's department of Alder County had already been told where to stand on Sunday.
The candles were lit at six.
The sun was going. The long light lay across the lawn in gold bars, and the shadows of the maples reached out toward the house; the radio had been turned down; the children, tired and sticky and hoarse, had been herded into a circle on the grass. In the middle of it, on the picnic table, stood the lighthouse, with its tiny bulb glowing in its sugar lantern, and around its base, in a ring, twelve slender candles in a spiral of blue wax.
Naomi lit them. She did it with a long match, one by one, and the little flames bent and stood. She was wearing the yellow dress. Her braid lay over one shoulder. She looked up once, across the table, over the heads of the children, and her eyes found his, and for a moment he saw in them everything he had seen on the day she had asked, on a porch in the rain, is it going to come to my door?
And then she smiled. And it was a real smile. It went all the way down.
Oh, he thought. Oh, you stupid man.
"Make a wish!" shouted somebody.
"It has to be a secret!" shouted somebody else.
"If you tell, it doesn't come true!"
Ivy stood in front of the cake with her hands clasped behind her back, in a new blue dress and her yellow boots, with her hair brushed flat and her chin lifted and her eyes fixed on the glow. She looked, he thought, like a very small judge. She stood there for a long breath, and the whole lawn was quiet. A bird sang in the maple. And in the stillness, with no one but her father near enough to hear, she turned her head and looked up at him and whispered, so low that it was hardly a voice:
"I'm going to wish the same one as last year."
"What was that?"
"You're not supposed to ask."
"I know," said Damen. "I'm only wondering if it came true."
She considered this, solemnly, with her head on one side. Then she said, "Not yet. But it's getting closer."
"How do you know?"
"I notice," said Ivy.
She turned back. She took a breath, a huge one, and shut her eyes tight, and blew. The flames bowed. They flickered, leaned, went out in a line, twelve little threads of smoke rising into the golden air; and the lawn erupted, children shrieking and parents clapping, Mrs. Okafor's voice rising above them all in a long ululating cry, and somebody started the song. The cake light swung. A balloon broke free and sailed up over the hedge.
He stood with his glass in his hand and did not hear any of it.
He was looking at the smoke.
He had seen smoke go up like that once before. A bad night, a long time ago, a house at the end of a road, and a small flame, and a thread of gray rising straight into a windless sky. It had meant the end of something. He had known it for a moment, as one knows a grave. And he thought, with his daughter's face turned up to the dusk, shining and delighted: I don't want to know what she wished.
I'd have to try to make it come true.
The guests left by eight.
It took a long time. There was a lot of kissing. There was a lost shoe, a quarrel over a balloon, a long and affectionate speech from Emeka Okafor about the future of the town. Ivy ran from face to face, thanking everyone. She was hoarse. She'd been given nineteen gifts, among them a baseball glove, a kite, a chemistry set, a ship in a bottle, two stuffed owls, a telescope with a broken cap, and a battered brass compass from Cody Bell, who stood in the doorway scarlet with embarrassment and said it had been his grandfather's and he'd just thought she'd like it. She had put it round her neck at once. She would not take it off.
When the last car pulled out, the street fell silent.
He stood on the porch with his arm round his wife and watched the taillights go down the hill. The evening was warm. The lawn was strewn with paper plates, and plastic cups, and trampled streamers, and a single yellow balloon was bumping gently against the gutter. It was the particular peace of a house after a party: a sweetness, a tiredness, a feeling that something good had happened and been survived.
"That was the best one," said Naomi.
"Yes."
"I saw you."
"Saw me what?"
"Laughing. Properly. By the cake." Her head was on his shoulder. "You looked, I don't know. You looked like a man in a film who's forgotten there's a plot."
"There's always a plot."
"Not tonight."
"No," said Damen. "Not tonight."
Sofi had gone already, at twenty past eight, in her mother's green Civic, to a bonfire at the old ramp: a last Saturday before the summer scattered. She had kissed her sister, rolled her eyes at him, and promised to text. He had stood on the porch and watched the taillights go down the hill, and told himself that she was eighteen, and that the ramp was two miles away, and that the men he feared did not know her face.
Ivy went up at half past eight, of her own accord, with the glazed stagger of a girl who has eaten cake since noon, and was asleep before the second page of her book. They stood in the doorway for a time, the two of them, looking at her, in the blue circle of the moon lamp, with the compass on its string lying open on her chest, and the notebook under her hand, and the yellow boots standing sentry by the wardrobe. She breathed slowly. A faint smile touched her mouth.
"Sunday," said Naomi, in a whisper.
"Sunday."
"Where?"
"North. The cabin first. Then somewhere I haven't told you yet."
"Why haven't you told me?"
"Because I haven't decided," said Damen. "And because the fewer people who know, the better."
"That includes me."
"It includes me," he said. "I'd like to wake up and not know where I'm going. It's a trick. It's a thing I used to do." He kissed the top of her head. "Let me have one more night where nothing's decided."
They went down. They cleared the plates. They washed the glasses, standing side by side at the sink in the yellow light, not speaking, with the radio playing something low and sweet. She hummed. He dried. He thought, this is what it is, once again; the thing he had said to himself on the lawn. This is what they mean. And he found, to his surprise, that his hands were not quite steady, and that they had not been for some time.
He looked at the phone on the windowsill. There was no message from Sofi.
At nine thirty-eight, he put the last glass on the shelf and turned out the kitchen light.
At nine thirty-nine, he took his wife's hand, and led her to the foot of the stairs.
At nine forty, in the middle of the third stair, with Naomi's palm warm in his and the moon lamp glowing at the top of the house, every light in the building went out.
It did not flicker. It did not hum. It went out cleanly, all at once, with a small, soft, final click, as a breath goes out of a body; the refrigerator died, the radio, the fan, the electric lantern on the cake; and in the dense black silence that fell on Birchwood Lane, Damen Knox felt his daughter's compass swing, somewhere above him, on its string.
He did not say a word.
He put his hand over his wife's mouth.