On the fourth day, I stir myself and look around. I don’t feel better, but I feel as though I’ve accomplished something. Like I’ve gotten something right. I have not yet confirmed that Atwater is in custody, but considering the way things were set up, I don’t even consider any other possibility. And the world is not necessarily a better place with William Atwater out of circulation and some of his secrets spilled, but at least it is safer. There is some satisfaction for me in knowing I’ve been instrumental in making that happen.
Beyond that, home is soft corners, dull edges. Home reminds me, again, of other homes at different times. Other lives. It makes me think for a time about Vancouver, too. About what had and hadn’t happened there. About desert islands and peeled grapes and different outcomes. And for a single morning, I am choked with a regret so detailed it is like a spider living in my heart.
I ramble the forest. I wander scant trails probably made by deer. Wander also country roads. It passes the time. More than that, it gives me a point from which to begin to process many things. To place them in context. The walking begins to have a meditative quality, letting me see the continuity of life and how the more things are stretched in different directions, the more some aspects of them come to be the same.
I go out to the garage and unearth the television I’d packed away. I dust it off and settle in to watch the twenty-four-hour cycle of news about William Atwater. For once, I have an interest in the outcome. I want to know what the police did with the tidbits they’d been given, and I wonder if they will be able to extract everything from him that they need.
Watching the news is as distressing now as it was before. Talking head after talking head, expert after expert opining in onerous, knowing tones, dredging up endless details, as though they believe that the smallest thing will be relevant to the larger story. It seems to me a form of brainwashing, and yet for what are our brains being washed? What outcome is being shared in which we need to believe?
On the television, psychiatrists opine on Atwater’s mental condition, even though they have not been anywhere near him. On the screen, a well-known news personality talks with Atwater’s aunt about what he was like as a child. The presenter is a celebrity, as well known—or better—than the notorious subject under discussion. It’s hard not to be diverted by his familiar and beautiful profile; the helmet-like smoothness of his hair. We cut to a different news personality; less well known. She talks with the arresting officer. Both are giving us their opinion on Atwater’s state of mind. From what I hear and from what I know, neither are particularly close.
My ears perk up when the officer says Atwater had been found and apprehended in an RV parked in a state park on California’s Central Coast. There is no mention of a phantom woman vigilante who had captured Atwater, then tipped the police off. And I am relieved about that, of course. But a part of me is also disappointed in ways I don’t truly understand. It’s not that I want acknowledgement. Not really. It is potentially disastrous for any sort of finger to be pointed at me. But I would have thought some aspect of the true story would come out. The fact that it has been totally suppressed makes me think there is a reason for that. And I wonder at the nature of that. And I wonder what it means.
After a while there is a press conference. Here the police mention Hoyo Lago. Camera crews are dispatched and the tone of the story changes again.
Finally, action—though now it is of the most horrific kind. The bodies of children, some of them ten years dead, are brought back to the light. Tents are set up over excavations. I can see this from a distance on television, the familiar locale rendered unfamiliar again by all of this activity. It looks like an archaeological dig. I stop myself. Realize. That is, of course, what it is.
Forensics goes in, as well as more traditional branches of the detective arts. After a while, news trickles back to us, the waiting public. Bits and pieces over time and all of it is reported in breathless tones and accompanying still photos.
And so many horrid details. Too many. They had discovered that the decomposed corpse found at the furthest edge of the space wore the outfit little Sally Lund had been wearing when she disappeared. Or still more exacting forensic and detective work: the little boy found near the base of a huge and twisty oak had his femur broken in just the same place as had little Riley Rajagopal, gone missing some eight years before. Dental work. Jewelry. Recovered toys. DNA. Pieces of a gruesome puzzle come together piece by painful piece. It is impossible to watch. Difficult, also, to look away.
The garden theme has been adhered to beyond metaphor. It is horrible to see the story unravel; watch the pieces being put together. A twisted jigsaw that makes my heart weep. Every moment.
A carefully lettered “headstone” was buried just beneath the earth that covered each child. This discovery produces an almost physical reaction. It is beyond horrible. It is unthinkable. And yet it provides the information needed to know how all of these pieces fit and who all of these children were. And with their identities, we also learn Atwater’s impressions of each victim.
We learn, for instance, that little Contessa MacDonald had been a “clinging vine.” So she had needed to be planted in shade and near others of her kind. Exhumation has disclosed wounds less severe than on some of the others, as though Atwater had felt the need to be more gentle with this little vine than some of the others. On the other hand, little Daniel Croft had been “willful and in need of discipline,” and not all of the results of those words are shared with the public. And yet we know.
And all of it is horrifying. All of it is beyond thought. The idea of a garden. Of growth. Combined with the end of so many little lives, and none of them came to a good end. There is such a thing, in case you have wondered. An end that is good. I have seen it myself, on more than one occasion. But none of these is that. It is almost more than I can take.
Then it becomes more than I can take. And just when I think I will break with the saturation of it all, the coverage begins to wane. There has been no further activity, so some other story jumps to the top of the news cycle and it seems as though Atwater’s five minutes have expired. Again.
For a few days, I am unexpectedly bereft. Watching everything about the story and surfing news channels for mentions of him and his poor lost garden had become my life for a short time. And now it is over. There is suddenly nothing left to do.
I make the trek into town and go to a garden center, buy half a dozen healthy little lavender plants and a few medium-sized rosemary bushes. I’ve done some research. They would survive when nothing else would. They are drought and deer resistant. They should be safe, even from me.
Touching the earth. Planting. Growing towards healing. As I pat the earth around the last plant, I start to weep. What was this now? Soon sitting, hands laced around knees, allowing a torrent to overtake me. Allowing myself to be swept away by it. An overcast day, wisps of sun fighting through clouds, a feeling in my chest of complete and utter despair and surrender.
I can’t imagine anything that is more than this. I can’t imagine, even, a reason to lift my head.
After a while, the crying falls out of me and I lie down next to my plantings and just breathe. I press my cheek to the soil and inhale, trying not to think of Atwater’s garden. Focusing instead on my own newly broken soil. Garden. I want to reclaim the thought of that word from the dark. It is difficult. For now, anyway. The word is tainted. Stolen.
Another part of me wants to join those poor children. For the first time, maybe in my life, the fight has been leached out of me and I think about what it would be to die right here, on my own little patch of earth. Lavender growing on one side. Rosemary taking root on the other. To die and let the sun rise higher in the sky. To warm me after I could no longer be made warm, sun kissing my stiffening limbs and blood cooling in my veins. I can almost feel it.
As time passes, mercifully, the thinking stops. I lie there still. I am listening to the sound of the wind in the trees. The faint “whirr, whirr, w
hirr” of a distant helicopter, nothing to do with me. Infrequently, I hear the sound of a car on the country road that snakes past the house. I feel a bug walking over my arm. I let it walk there, undisturbed. It is likely harmless. And if it is not? What then? Something interesting to take beyond. A closing door to end my time here.
Time passes. The pale sun sinks. Dusk and then darkness come, night falling, like a corpse. I remain with my cheek pressed to the earth, the scent of newly turned soil rich in my nostrils. I am feeling something like ennui, but more. Feeling for a while that there could be nothing beyond this. What more, in any case, is required?
When it starts to rain, I don’t go in right away, though the irony of water falling from the sky, the sheer unlikely ridiculousness of it, does not escape me. Rain when I hadn’t seen any here for weeks. I lie here still, in the darkness, the soil now turning to mud. It isn’t long before I can’t take it anymore—the muddy wet. I laugh as I pick myself up. Not a heartfelt laugh, but still. It is perfectly nice to be dramatic on a fine summer’s evening, that’s what I’m thinking. Quite something else to do it when the rain comes. “Fair weather ennui,” I chide myself as I go inside, step into a hot shower intended to wash off the mud, and perhaps something else. Wash away something unseeable. Unknowable. Wanting to wash things away.
I don’t remember getting into bed. I am only aware of waking and finding myself naked on top of my covers, as though I’d collapsed into bed in a sodden heap after the shower. Drunk on pain and soaked with emotion. And all of it was enough.
More than enough.
Something has ended. I don’t know if that’s good.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ALMOST THE FIRST thing I do when I get out of bed is check my phone. There is a text. I regret the impulse that made looking at it a priority.
“Fuck,” I say out loud as I thumb-type the required reply. The last thing I want is to catch a job right now. Really, all I want is to sleep some more. I don’t feel like crying anymore. That, at least, has stopped. All I want is to be left alone.
Still.
It turns out the job is in New York City. That represents enough of a change of venue that I think it might be solid diversion. I realize that maybe I can use one of those right now. Too many more sodden nights in the dark and I’ll perish; that’s what I’m thinking. I need to get away from possible sodden nights in the dark.
And then my thinking changes as I grapple with what is real.
I toy for a ridiculous moment with the idea of taking in a show while in the City, but discard it in favor of a nice hotel room in midtown where I can recline in posh anonymity while recovering from the trigger I am required to pull, and never mind whatever I’d been putting myself through on the Central Coast and before that in Vancouver.
I can tell from first glance that the job itself will be unremarkable. Routine, if such a thing can be said about an assignment in my particular line of work. But once I get there, the City energizes me, as it always does. So many people, and all so beautifully, stridently, vitally alive. It is all I can do, sometimes, not to smile at people as I walk around. I control the urge though. People sometimes remember people who smile.
I feel those people inside me, though. Waking some nearly dead part of me. Making me feel a part of something instead of separate. Or more a part of it, anyway. Walking around that singular city, I feel alive in ways I haven’t for some time.
I am in this sort of lighthearted, people-loving mood when I get to Times Square. The job has gone well, textbook after the last one, and I have a solid day before my flight is due to leave from La Guardia.
In Times Square, I buy a brightly colored shawl from an old woman, thinking the color will bring out my eyes, plus she looks hungry, as though she needs to sell as many shawls as she can. That seems reason enough to buy.
She is set up next to a newsbox, and I let my eyes run over a headline, then feel my heart move down.
“William Atwater Escapes Custody,” reads the headline. “Serial Killer Loose Again,” reads the subheadline.
I buy a paper. Find a bench, the shawl forgotten in my hand. I sit down and start to read. As bad as the headline had seemed, things are worse, even, than that.
The paper reports that he had disguised himself as another prisoner, then faked his way out on a work detail. No one had realized the switch until they found the corpse of the prisoner he had impersonated. This sounds simplistic to me. I suspect the truth is somewhat more complicated than what the news is reporting, but I also know that the details won’t change the outcome. Alarms had been sounded, but it was too late: Atwater was nowhere to be found.
I sit there for several minutes, just letting the information penetrate and thinking about what, if anything, I can do. What, if anything, I even want to do.
I am aware of the blood forcing its way through my veins, making an echo through my mind. For a short time, I am aware of a sort of absolute stillness in my brain where all of the shouting should be. I hold things together in this way—careful of thought, of sound—while it all sinks in. After that, I don’t know quite how I feel. I only know it is terrible.
Somehow, I find my way back to my posh hotel room. Once there, I forget about the relaxing I’d intended to do and turn on the television. The media circus has returned. Though now I wonder: Were they ever really far away? Whatever the case, once again it is all Atwater, all the time. It hasn’t taken long at all and there is a sort of dull satisfaction in my gut at its return. This time, the networks already have a pile of file footage in the can. I’d seen it in the newspaper, after all. It is no surprise that it is already streaming on every station.
Through the magical lens of television, I see again the charming town of San Pasado. It feels like a homecoming. And then the most endearing photos of past victims, the most heartbreaking stories from parents, the most hair-raising stories from people who had experienced near misses with Atwater or thought they had. It’s the same material that was aired a few weeks ago, but this time dramatic twists have been added. It’s like in the time between, teams of artists have been working on all this material, just in case. And now here it all is: ready to make us feel more frightened and afraid and apprehensive, if any of that was even possible. And it seems that it was.
And now again there are the talking heads. Those with opinions on Atwater himself. Those with opinions on what his condition might be and what can be done about it. A psychiatrist who looks as though he has been summoned from Central Casting grabs my attention. He is slender to the point of thinness—his hair, his face, his hands. Even his voice is thin. His words stick with me despite that.
“What we are discussing here is the very nature of good and evil.”
“Are we?” The host has flat blue eyes and a helmet of close blond hair. This is already not going as she’d thought it would.
“Well, of course. It’s not as though we’re talking about someone who can be captured and neutralized and then remediated. We are not discussing here the aberrations of a petty thief or a crooked stockbroker. Nor are we discussing someone who has fallen off the rails of civilization because he is having trouble making his mortgage payments and so has poked his hand into the till. No!” The thin glass table in front of him is slammed so severely, even on television we can see it shimmer and shake as though in fear for its life. “What we are discussing here is something else entirely.”
“Well, these are different issues, certainly.” Helmet Head is trying hard here. I can see it on the glisten of sweat on her brow. And she’s not even treading water while her makeup assistant sweats it out offstage. Helmet Head’s goal is to keep her interview in check and under her control. I can see she doesn’t really care that much about what her guest is saying, one way or the other. She’s just concerned that he doesn’t come across as a loon or, worse, that she herself comes over as an asshole. It’s image to her, nothing more. Another day at the office. The doctor, meanwhile, is just warming to his topic.
“Different issues!” The five syllables come out on a snort. “These are like different planets.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say …” but Helmet Head doesn’t get to finish. The doctor is a horse galloping downhill. The thin reins she is holding will not stop him.
“But yes, they are! Don’t you see? Even Sigmund Freud understood—at the very infancy of psychoanalysis—that we are not all created equal. The reparation of a brain such as William Atwater’s is beyond the capabilities of psychiatry.”
“You are suggesting then that he can’t be rehabilitated? That he can’t be cured?”
“That’s right!” The response is an explosion. “As Freud maintained, for psychoanalysis to have a hope of working, it is essential for the subject to be of good character. We are talking about the true nature of Evil.” I hear the capital on “Evil.” It’s in the way he pronounces the word. And then a further and even more dire pronouncement. “For what is wrong with William Atwater, there is no cure.”
There is more, including a sort of mildly horrified backpedaling from the interviewer. What the doctor had said was so outside of Western thought and also how we think about doctors answering. Weren’t they meant to help everyone? That was part of what she said and also part of what I thought. And yet he had said that he felt that, for someone like William Atwater, there was no hope.
That he is beyond hope.
Though the faces on the screen have changed, I am still thinking about what the doctor said—and about the nature of evil—when a familiar face startles me. I sit up and pay attention even though the crawl has told me the story at a glance. “Atwater accomplice stole RV at knifepoint.”
At knifepoint? That was quite the innovation. And the frightened face of the sales guy I’d dealt with fills the screen. It is horrible in HD.
Endings Page 15
