Epilogue
The Envelope
It was fourteen months before he saw the lake again.
They let him out on a Tuesday in October, at nine in the morning, through a side gate of the federal facility at Millbrook, in a gray prison-issue jacket and a pair of borrowed shoes. There was a paper bag in his hand. In it were a razor, a toothbrush, a letter from a judge, and a battered Harbor Rats cap that had lain in a locker for a year. There was no one to meet him. That had been arranged. A deputy marshal drove him ninety miles north in a plain white sedan, and said nothing for the whole of the way, and at the end of a gravel lane in the pine woods above Pike's Landing, stopped the car, and looked straight ahead.
"I read the file," said the deputy.
"Yes."
"Fifty-four."
"Yes."
"I thought you'd be bigger."
"So did I," said Damen, and got out.
The cabin stood on a spur of rock above the water. It was a long low log building with a green tin roof, a porch that wrapped round two sides, and a stone chimney from which a thread of blue smoke rose into the clear cold air. A canoe lay on the shingle. A dock ran out into the lake. The lake was gray and still and enormous, rimmed with birch and tamarack burning gold, and beyond it, far off across the water, he saw the faint blue line of the hills where a town called Alder Falls lay out of sight.
He stood at the end of the lane for a long time.
Fourteen months. He had gone in on the nineteenth of August, after the grand jury, with a plea agreement and a lawyer and a pocketful of names. There had been eleven weeks of testimony. There had been a trial, in a gray courtroom, where he had sat in the witness box for nine days and said, one after another, in a dry flat voice, the details of fifty-four deaths. He had not been spared one. Ruiz had led him through every case with a courteous and merciless precision, like a woman peeling an orange. Judge Harlan had been convicted. The Commissioner had been convicted. The Bishop of Port Merrin had been taken from his cathedral in handcuffs, with a hundred cameras flashing, and had wept. In all, the Registry had delivered one hundred and sixty-one indictments, twelve suicides, and a Senate subcommittee. The newspapers called it the largest corruption case in the history of the state. The Table had vanished in a month.
Nobody had ever found the Chair.
He walked down the lane.
The porch door opened before he reached it.
She stood in it with a dish towel over her shoulder, in a gray sweater, and her hair tied up in a scarf. She was thinner. She had gray in her braid that had not been there. She stood quite still with one hand on the frame, and looked at him, and he stopped at the foot of the steps with the paper bag in his hand and did not climb.
"You're early," said Naomi.
"They let me out at nine."
"I said ten."
"I know."
"The pancakes aren't ready."
"That's all right."
"She's been up since four." Her voice cracked. "She's been standing at the window. She wouldn't have breakfast. She said, I'm saving myself."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry." She came down the steps. She did it slowly, one hand on the rail, with her chin raised, and stopped in front of him, so close that he could see the faint lines at the corners of her eyes. She put her hand up. She laid it flat against his cheek, as she had laid it in the dark kitchen, and looked at him, long and steadily, searching, the way she looked at the sick. "Let me see," she said.
"What?"
"If you're still in there."
He did not move.
She studied his face for what seemed a very long time. He felt the cold wind on his neck and the smell of woodsmoke and pine and a faint sweet whiff of butter. He heard the lake lapping. Her eyes went from his mouth to his eyes to the gray at his temples, and something in her own face, tight for fourteen months, let go, very slowly, like a hand that has been holding a rope.
"There you are," said Naomi.
"Here I am."
"Come inside."
She came out of the cabin at a dead run.
He had known she would. He had been braced. He had stood on the porch with his bag at his feet and his back against the post, and heard the thunder of boots in the passage, and the bang of a door, and a shout that rang through the whole house. Dad! Dad! DAD! And then a small furious missile in a yellow raincoat and a pair of yellow boots had struck him in the stomach, and he had picked her up, and swung her, and buried his face in her neck, and she was thirteen years old and a head taller and smelled of pancakes and wood smoke and chalk.
"You're here," said Ivy.
"I'm here."
"You're really here."
"Yes."
"I counted. Four hundred and twelve days." She pulled back. Her face, between his hands, was brown and freckled and solemn and wet. She had lost a front tooth. She had grown out her braids. "Mama said not to count. She said it makes it longer. But I did it anyway, every night, in the notebook, and I got the number, and then I kept going."
"How many notebooks?"
"Seven."
"Show me."
"Later." She gripped his collar. "First, I have to tell you. It's the most important."
"Tell me."
She put her mouth against his ear.
"Wren's here," she whispered. "She came this morning. In her van. She's by the dock. She's been sitting there for an hour with a letter. She wouldn't come in. She said she wanted to wait for you." A breath. "She looks funny."
"Funny how?"
"Like Mama does," said Ivy, "when she has to tell someone a thing."
She sat on the end of the dock with her feet over the water.
It was a gray, cold, sparkling morning, and the sun was low, and the lake lay before her like a sheet of pewter. She was wearing a navy peacoat and jeans, and boots; her hair had grown out into a soft dark cap; she had a nurse's badge pinned to her collar that said W. CALDER, R.N. (STUDENT). Beside her on the planks, held down against the wind by a stone, lay a plain white envelope. It had been opened. A thin cream sheet was folded back from the flap.
He walked down the dock.
She did not turn. She sat very straight. As he came up beside her she moved the stone aside, and slid the paper toward him, and said, without looking round, in a voice carefully empty:
"Sit."
He sat.
The lake lapped. A loon called, far out, a long wild quavering note, and was answered from the farther shore. He sat beside her on the cold boards with his hands between his knees and waited, as he had waited on a quay, at dawn, in a blanket, for fourteen months of silence.
"I opened it in June," said Wren.
"Yes."
"I wanted to be sure. I wanted to have finished my first year. I wanted to be a person who'd done something." She stared at the water. "I took it out of the bank on the day of my last exam. I took it to Marta's. We had dinner. And after, I went upstairs to my old room, and sat on the bed, and broke the seal."
"You don't have to tell me."
"I do." Her voice shook. "I do, because it's yours as much as mine. It's your name on the cover of the thing. It's your fault, a little." A faint twist of the mouth. "That's a joke."
"I know."
"It isn't very funny."
"No."
She drew a long breath. She reached down, and picked up the cream sheet, and held it for a moment against her knee, without looking at it, as one holds a thing too hot to hold. Then, quite gently, she laid it in his hand.
It was a single page. It was thick and heavy, with a deckled edge, of the kind one gets from a stationer's who has been in business for a century. It was typed. The type was small, black, perfect, and above it, embossed in the corner in faded gold, was a coat of arms he did not recognize.
MEMORANDUM, it said.
Re: the retention of E. Strand. Standing instruction, 1996.
1. All payments to E.S. to be drawn from the Delgado Family Trust, Fenwick Savings & Trust, Hallam Street, under the authority of the undersigned.
2. All instructions to E.S. to be given in writing, Thursdays, in the usual form.
3. The seat of the Chair to be held, in perpetuity, by the undersigned, and thereafter by the undersigned's heirs.
4. Contract on D. Knox: suspended. Not cancelled.
5. Contract on W. Calder: suspended. Not cancelled.
6. In the event of the death of E.S., the undersigned will assume direct authority.
And beneath them, a signature. It was small, round, careful, a woman's, in blue ink. It was a hand he knew. He had watched it, for years, sign Christmas cards, and the backs of recipes, and the lids of foil-wrapped dishes on his kitchen counter, with a flourish and a smile.
R. M. Delgado.
He did not move.
It was a curious thing. He sat on the end of the dock with the paper in his hand and the wind in his face, and everything in him, all the old machinery, the quick cold silent calculating engine that had saved his life a hundred times, simply stopped. It did not rage. It did not run. It sat, for perhaps ten seconds, quite blank, like a clock whose spring has gone, and he heard in the sudden hush the plash of the water, and the loon, and the faint far-off sound of a woman's laugh from the kitchen of a log cabin.
It's a common name, said the voice, rather faintly.
It is not.
She makes tamales.
Yes.
"I checked," said Wren. "I took it to Ruiz. I didn't say what it was. I asked if she could run a signature. She did." The girl's face was white and drawn. "It's her. It's the same hand that signed Naomi's wedding license. It's the same as the card on the Christmas present. I stood in a government laboratory with a magnifying glass and looked at the way she makes her D."
"Did you tell Ruiz?"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't know what it meant." Her voice cracked. "I still don't. She's Ivy's grandmother. She's Naomi's mother. She held me, Damen. At the funeral. She put her arms round me, and she said, you are a brave girl." She wiped her face. "She sat with Teddy's body for a night. She brought casseroles to the prison. She came to every visiting day."
"Yes."
"I don't know if she's a monster."
"No."
"Or if she's the only one of them who ever did anything for love." The words came out in a whisper. "It says suspended. It doesn't say cancelled. It says she's been holding the knife for fourteen months and hasn't used it." A shaky breath. "Why?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think Naomi knows?"
He thought of a woman on a stair. A woman in a taxi, with a covered dish. A woman who had said, it was a long time ago; we knew each other once. He thought of his wife's face, in the kitchen, with the crease between her brows: Tell Rosa. I don't know why. He thought of a man in a tower who had said, with his dying breath, she'll know what I mean.
"No," he said. "I don't think she does."
"Will you tell her?"
"I promised," said Damen slowly. "No more rooms."
"Then you have to."
"Yes."
"And Ivy's there. With her. At the cabin. Right now, I think." Her hand closed on his sleeve. "Damen. She's in the kitchen with Ivy."
He was already on his feet.
The taxi was coming up the lane.
He saw it from the dock, small and yellow in the pines, bumping over the ruts, with a plume of dust behind it. It came on slowly. It stopped at the foot of the porch steps. A door opened, and a small, round, gray-braided figure got down with great care, in a flowered dress and a black cardigan, with a covered dish in both hands. She stood in the sunlight, blinking, and then, with a rich warm delighted cry that carried clear across the water, held out her arms.
On the porch, a girl of ten in a yellow raincoat was already leaping down the steps.
Abuela!
Naomi stood at the top, with the dish towel on her shoulder, laughing. A tall pale boy with a swallow on his hand stood at her elbow, grinning; Eli had been working on the cabin roof since August. Behind them, in the open door, an old woman in a gray uniform, who had given testimony for eleven days and been granted immunity for all of it, stood with her hands folded, smiling a little, for the first time in twenty-seven years. A lanky young man in a Harbor Rats cap lifted a hammer from the shed. Smoke rose from the chimney. A pot lid rattled. The whole bright cold autumn world was full of the sound of voices, and the smell of butter, and a dog barking somewhere, and Damen stood motionless at the end of the dock with a sheet of cream paper in his hand and every nerve in his body singing.
Seven doors, he thought.
Front. Back. The cellar. The porch. The lake.
She's on the porch.
My daughter's in her arms.
"Dad!" called Ivy.
She was looking back over the old woman's shoulder, across the sunlit yard, down the long gray planks of the dock to where he stood. Her face was flushed. She was grinning from ear to ear. Her gray eyes, his own, were bright and clear and perfectly steady, and she lifted one small hand and held it up, with the fingers spread.
"Five things!" she shouted. "It's time!"
He looked at the paper.
He looked at the water, and the pines, and the long pale ribbon of the lane, and at the small kind figure with its arms round his child. He looked at his wife. She had stopped laughing. She had turned her head. She was looking at him down the length of the dock, across forty yards of cold bright air, and for the first time in his life he saw her look at him and not know what he was about to say.
He folded the paper.
He put it in his pocket.
He walked down the dock.
"One," he called. His voice was quite steady. It carried across the water, calm and low and even. "A yellow taxi."
"Two!" shouted Ivy.
"A covered dish."
"Three!"
"A woman I've known for nine years," said the Metronome, "whom I do not know at all."
He reached the end of the planks. He stepped onto the grass. And Rosa Delgado, with her granddaughter's arms about her waist, looked up at him across the yard, with her kind brown face and her gray braid and her black-bright eyes, and smiled, and lifted her free hand in a small, friendly, unhurried wave.
"Dean," she called. "You are home."
"Yes, Rosa."
"You look well."
"Thank you."
"I made your favorite."
"I know you did," said Damen Knox. "I've been counting on it."
And behind him, on the lake, the loon cried once more, long and lonely and sweet, and in the pocket of his borrowed jacket, against his heart, the paper lay folded, light as a feather, heavy as a stone.
Suspended, it said.
Not cancelled.