She falls silent now and watches the sun falling through the window. I wait, letting her ruminate, sensitive to the otherness she’s feeling. The moment passes, and she turns back to me.
“Which boy died?”
“Avery.”
She closes her eyes tight, and a flash of sorrow rushes across her face, there and gone.
“Avery, the oldest. I had a C-section, and they pulled him out first, and he cried like no one’s business. Dylan was always the quieter boy. Not more thoughtful, just less aggressive. Avery loved music. He’d dance to my CDs, bobbing up and down on the carpet in his diaper.” Her body trembles, her eyes still closed. “Avery Edward Hollister. One day, not too long before I was taken, I had both boys with me. We’d just come home from the store, and I was distracted for a minute. Avery slipped away, and the next thing I knew, I heard the neighbor screaming for help. I dropped the groceries and picked up Dylan and ran over there.” She shakes her head in fond disbelief. “Avery had gone into the yard next door. The dog there was unfriendly and was trying to make a meal of him. The neighbor woman was struggling to hold the dog back, while Avery, completely unaware, was yanking up flowers from her garden by the roots. I ran to get him and he just grinned when he saw me, one of those big, beautiful baby grins. He held up the flowers and said ‘Mama!’” She falls silent. “I guess he’d seen those flowers earlier and had been planning all along to pick them for me when we got home.”
She pitches forward in her chair at the last part of this eulogy, bending at the waist, wailing without words. I come forward and take her in my arms, and we are alone together.
Heather’s grief—at least this incarnation of it—passes. She pulls away from me, and I return to my chair as she returns her gaze to the window and the sun.
I’ve seen this before, I think, feeling a shudder of déjà vu. Another prisoner freed who couldn’t keep her eyes from the light.
“Where’s Dylan?” she asks me, her voice quiet, still sorrowful.
“He’s here. But I need you to listen to me now, Heather. This is really important. If you want Dylan, you need to hear what I’m telling you.”
She frowns, her eyes piercing. “What do you mean, ‘if I want Dylan’?”
Here it is, the telling point, the place where I learn whether Heather’s light has gone out for good or if she’ll find her way back to shore. If ever there was an impetus, this will be it.
“Dylan is being cared for by social services, Heather. They’re concerned about your state of mind. They’re not sure you can take care of him.”
The frown deepens, then smooths out. “I see,” she says. “They’re afraid I’m too crazy to be a good mother right now, is that it?”
Why soften the blow?
“Essentially, yes.”
Rage spasms across her face. “But I’m his mother!” There’s a crazy edge to her voice.
I lean forward, trying to reach her with my words, with my own intensity. “I want you to have this, Heather. Hell, I need you to have it. I think Dylan belongs with you, period, and I think you can pull it together enough to make that happen. But if you can’t, and you don’t—and they’ll be watching—then he’s going to be taken away from you. At least for a little while, and there’s nothing I’ll be able to do about it.”
She glances at the sun, back at me, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Do you?” she asks haltingly.
“Do I what?”
She grabs my hands in hers, surprising me. “Do you think I can take care of him?”
I look right into her eyes and tell her the last of it. “His dad killed his brother. I don’t think anyone else can take care of him, after something like that.”
Her mouth opens, closes. “Douglas did that? He killed my Avery?”
“Yes.”
The rage mutates into something harder and more enduring. Mother anger. “Scum,” she hisses. She drops my hands, stands up, paces around the room, shaking her head. “Jesus!” I watch her pass through the desire to kill, the need for revenge, the despair at what she’s lost. She stops, and she turns to me, and I see the light I was looking for. Bleak but strong. “Help me,” she pleads. “Please, please help me.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Of course I will.”
Something lifts inside me now that I know her hope will survive against her despair, and I look to the window myself, searching for the sun. My four-fingered hand finds my belly and cradles it and the burgeoning life within. For all its horror, life is filled with so much wonder sometimes, such beautiful irony. I am happy I’ve chosen life over death, whatever that means, wherever it takes me, whomever I lose. Life is monstrous, but life is beautiful.
“Let’s go see your son,” I tell her.
She smiles, and for a moment she is the sun.
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I sit in the chair in Leo’s room, watching his chest rise and fall. It is evening, the door is closed, and we are alone.
Another week has passed. Much has happened. Law enforcement raided the other locations. Another five women were freed. Some were thankful, but many will never recover. Mercy Lane stole something fundamental from them, some certainty about the worth of the way the world turns. Too many years in the dark.
Heather Hollister is making a comeback. She held her son and she has no intention of ever letting him go again. Social services seems as happy about this as I am. Her light grows stronger day by day.
I run a four-fingered hand over my head. I trail it down my face, feeling the scars left by others.
Who am I? Am I a result of what I decide or what’s been done to me?
I think both, perhaps.
Life rolls on. Sometimes I dream that I did shoot Mercy. I see the play of headlights on the sand, hear the chunk chunk sound of shovels against the dirt. Bonnie knows something happened but seems content to let it go, as though she can sense when she shouldn’t ask some questions. Baby is just a baby again, not a fetal Buddha dispensing wisdom from a mind-lit meadow behind my eyes.
Life rolls on. I return to work tomorrow. Alan has remained mute, and I don’t know if he’s really serious about retiring or not. I’ll have to wait and see. The promised press conference is scheduled, and I find myself ambivalent about it.
Life rolls on. Months from now a child will be born to a nine-and-a-half-fingered mother. He’ll have killers for parents, an ancient thirteen-year-old for a sister, and a collection of mildly crippled aunts and uncles going blind from peering into the darkness. What does that bode for the child? Good or ill? I have no answer to this question.
I’ve thought about Mercy a lot in relation to my wondering about the soul. Mercy Lane was taught that she was just meat, but it takes more than cutting off her breasts to make a woman a man. What drives a runner, puking, to the finish line? What makes you love a child you haven’t laid eyes on yet? What makes you saw the breasts off your own daughter?
When I close my eyes and remember Matt and Alexa and Mom and Dad, when that overwhelming surge of sadness and love and joy and grief runs through me, is that just a chemical reaction? Do cells feel love? Or is something far, far more beautiful involved?
I don’t have all the answers, but I do know this: I have looked into the eyes of Mercy Lane, and I have looked into the eyes of my husband, and I found something very different behind them both.
It’s this certainty that’s brought me here now. If we’re all just meat, if I really believed that, I’d feel no onus to keep my promise to Leo.
The machines hum and whisper. His chest rises and falls.
I’ve agonized about Leo and the choice I made. I’ve asked myself the hard questions, and I’ve wept and doubted. I’ve examined myself without filters, in the brightest internal light. It’s a process that’s humbled me, that’s given me answers but little peace.
I know now that if I hadn’t been pregnant, I would have chosen to give myself over to Mercy. I would have been willing to let my mind die so that
Leo could stay Leo. I became a hunter of monsters because I want others to live. I’m driven by a duty to protect them, and I’ve been compelled by that instinct since I was very young. I don’t know where it came from—God, the soul, genetics—but I am certain of its existence. Mercy’s puzzle asked me to choose between Leo and myself, but in reality I only ever chose between him and my child.
Knowing this has calmed me, but it doesn’t help with the guilt. Neither does the truth that it would have been Leo, whatever I decided. I am here, and he is there; it’s a scale that will never be balanced.
I stand up and walk over to Leo’s bedside. I reach out a hand to touch his forehead. It’s dry and warm. The body lives.
“I’m so sorry, Leo,” I whisper.
It doesn’t matter that I would have taken his place under different circumstances. It doesn’t matter that Mercy was just playing a game. I chose, thinking a choice was needed. There is a world where he died so my child could live. I lean forward and I kiss his cheek. The machines hum lowly. One tear falls. “Thank you.”
Then I keep my promise and I send him gently into the darkness, hoping the stories are all true, that, for the good souls, the dark turns into light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CODY MCFADYEN is the internationally bestselling author of Shadow Man, The Face of Death, and The Darker Side. The Face of Death was #5 on Amazon.com’s Best Mystery/Thriller Books of 2007 list. McFadyen lives in Colorado.
www.codymcfadyen.com
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