A Person of Interest (48 page)

“Garbage. Garbage. Bullshit!” Nora raved. “She knew you didn’t want him, and she was too frightened, she thought if she kept him you’d leave her and then she’d have nothing. She should have known that would be better than marriage to
you
.”

“Goddamn bitch,” Lee hissed, raking his papers together and leaving. Bursting out the cafeteria door, he ran into Esther, with a few of her coterie, on her way in.

“What?” Esther cried when she saw him. “What’s happening?

Daddy! What’s happening?”

It had been easy and instinctive to reject Nora’s words to her face—

no other course of action had entered Lee’s mind. But with the quaran-tine between him and Nora restored, and their lunchtime encounter receding, and Aileen’s death advancing, day by day larger on the horizon but the same unknown distance away, like an optical trick, Lee became exasperated with Aileen that she didn’t sit up from her pillows and resolve what for him had grown into a grating dilemma. Wasn’t it true that the child of her marriage to Gaither had effectively ceased to exist, by their tacit agreement? All the empirical evidence Lee could discern still supported this view. Aileen lay at the threshold of death watching afternoon talk shows with a rapt entourage of teen vandals.

It was dismaying and embarrassing, but it was also a new kind of proof: Aileen never looked up from her circle of waifs and said, Find my son.

Bring him to me before it’s too late. On the other hand, if Lee studied the actual years of their marriage, he was confronted with ambiguity,
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hostile allusion, slantwise assignings of blame—and so he didn’t study these years. As if he’d come late to some well-meaning gospel of family life, he let every morning be new, with no ink on its back from the past; he reinvented his marriage, with the help of a cleansing divorce. He was deluded with regard to most aspects of his life with Aileen, as an innermost self that he brusquely ignored was aware. Years before she’d left, he had known that Aileen hated him, because he’d done nothing to help her keep John. But her hatred for him was obversed with hatred for herself; she had been his accomplice. She’d allowed Lee’s indifference to paralyze her. Like Lee she had put up no fight when her son disappeared. The difference lay in their reactions: for Lee, shared disgrace didn’t cancel but in fact even nourished his love. For Aileen it killed love so completely that once she had finally left, she no longer even felt hate, just the lesser emotions—impatience, trepidation, annoyance. The regular phone calls denoted not passion but passionlessness: another fact that Lee chose to ignore.

Yet one thing remained that even Lee’s inmost self, his harsh ju-rist, affirmed was no product of Lee’s self-delusion and self-justifi cation but fact, and somehow for this reason it unsettled Lee most of all: Aileen’s time remaining continued to shrink, and she still didn’t ask for her son. Lee almost wished that she would. He would say, A little late, don’t you think? You must not really care! Or perhaps he would say, Right away. You only needed to ask. It could have happened a long time ago.

At night, sleepless at the Days Inn, he thought it must be the easiest thing in the world to walk into Aileen’s room the next morning, at the first stroke of visiting hours, and take the chair to her right, and perhaps take her hand, and just ask her, the same way one might ask if she wanted some orange juice,
Don’t you think that we ought to fi nd
Gaither? So that you can see John.
Eight-o-five by the clock. Esther swaddled in sleep for another two hours and Nora her sentry, so that Lee and Aileen were alone.

Morning light beating in through the window. The unending hospital sounds that are so harsh by night somehow hushed by the infl ux of sun.

On several occasions it happened, precisely the way he had worried it over, so industrious in his insomnia, as he sometimes had risen
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and showered and made himself coffee and graded his pile of exams before twitching awake in his knotted pajamas, a few hours or perhaps just a few minutes into long-deferred asleep. Over and over he sat with Aileen, took her hand, and she understood him, and he understood her, and the thing was decided somehow, and he felt such enormous relief that perhaps he did actually sob—and then felt his heart racing, his sweaty, pajama-trussed body again tripping over the threshold, ejected from dreams.

One such morning he got to the hospital and she was dead.

And although he continued to think, at irregular intervals, perhaps for a year afterward, that the conversation was still possible, obviously it wasn’t, and realizing this was just one of the thousands of ways she kept dying for him. Once again at the door to her bright, empty room, the bed stripped, the nurse scissoring toward him as if to deliver a scolding, and the usual grocery-store nosegay as dead in his hands.

24.

ALL ACROSS THE STATE OF COLORADO, HE IMAGINED HE

might find Esther, sitting on the bright swell of grass that rose away from the interstate’s shoulder, her feet in a carpet of wildfl owers, a heavy pair of binoculars held to her face. The warm sun still reminded him of holding the back of her smooth newborn’s head in his palm.

Now he was surprised to find that even amid the demands of driving, of keeping his eyes on the road, of maintaining at all costs the speed limit, of checking the rear mirrors regularly, he often noticed magnifi -

cent birds, with their great wings outstretched, hanging motionlessly in the air. Could these be Esther’s eagles? They conveyed that nobility to him, with the fans of their tails and their planar perfection of wing, through which he could see the sunlight when they passed just above him. He saw one surveying the road from its perch on a post like a conquering Caesar, big as a fireplug with darkly caped shoulders and a weaponlike hook for a nose. They weren’t brown with white heads like the eagles he’d seen on TV. In truth they were probably not all the
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same. But they were equally awesome to him—glimpsing Caesar, he’d heard himself gasp. Some were dark brown all over, but with an incan-descence, a gold gleam in the brown, that reminded him of Esther’s hair. As he pushed west through grassland, the ground near the highway was often churned into furrows and holes, as if drunks had been trying to put up a fence, and amid the fresh dirt Lee saw comical rodents, sitting up on their haunches with their little paws clasped, as if the road offered great entertainment. The eagle’s stark shadow would be rippling closer and closer. Lee was almost convinced all these eagles had been raised by Esther from chicks. In their brief helplessness they’d looked up from their nest and seen her, watchful, looking back down.

Since crossing the Mississippi, he’d also harbored the imprudent belief that he’d eluded the last of the FBI’s agents: he’d found a hole in their net. Nothing like elation or triumph accompanied the idea, but beneath the titan sky of Colorado—Esther’s sky, with her sentinels in it—he could dare to believe that he’d vanished. He left Colorado driving to the north, the mountains keeping their distance to the left and west of him. When Lee looked away from them out the passenger window, he seemed to see all the way back down the featureless plain past the anticlimactic elbow of the brown Mississippi to his house on its own dingy elbow of Fearrington Way. But this brief union of the old and discredited world with the uncertain present disturbed him, and he turned his eyes back to the road.

At Cheyenne, Wyoming, he joined Interstate 80 and turned west again, driving into the sun until he so needed to rest his seared eyes that he parked on the shoulder—just for a moment, and to look at the map—and woke up again hours later, with a distended orange sun in his face, the few other cars on the road dragging shadows like capes.

He’d collapsed against his door, his cheek pressed to the glass, which was cold against his face, though it had been a sultry afternoon. He had a crick in his neck and deep aches at the base of his spine and in the hidden sockets where his legs met his trunk, and his bladder was pained. He clumsily righted himself, flipping down the sun shade, which revealed a small mirror, and his own shocking image: an old, shriveled apple, strangely shiny skin carved by creases and sunk with deep hollows, eyes beady and vague from the depths of a fringe of
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gray hair. No one had bothered him, perhaps even noticed him, while he’d been sleeping.

Utah was a mud flat, a few poorly organized piles of stone standing off in the distance like islands of a long-vanished sea. As he crossed from that state into Idaho, his brief oasis of calm burned away. A swarming sensation tormented his skin, anticipation and dread as a dermal outbreak. In his motel that night, he barely slept, leaving the lamps on so that he could move his miserable, tension-coiled body between every station the furniture offered, very possibly talking out loud to himself, as he thought about Gaither. He remembered the chill sanctimoniousness, the gigantic deft hands, the insufferable air of the patriarch meting out justice. He recalled his own shameful sensation of being the victor, because Lewis and John had retreated—when in fact this retreat might as well have been Gaither’s first bomb. To destroy from a distance, without fouling his oversize hands—that was Gaither’s brilliance. Whitehead had Dieckmann, and Gaither had death, and Lee felt once again he had nothing.

He was even farther from Sippston than he’d realized. The next day he had to continue north, across the east end of the state, leave it and spend tedious hours tacking north by northwest through Mon-tana before he turned west to reexperience the horror of crossing the fateful state’s line, as he entered the handle. By now it was late afternoon. The landscape no longer seemed neutral, but hostile. The highway just narrowly threaded through plunging pine walls; it wound gingerly, held aloft by immense concrete stilts, sometimes briefl y revealing a glimpse far below of the steel-colored river it followed. Rarely a precipitous slope touched the road, or vice versa, and at these points of contact, Lee twice saw huge corpses of deer stretched out dead on the shoulder. Since crossing into Idaho the second time, through the shadowy pass of the Bitterroot Range, Lee found he drove more and more slowly, as if the car had gained weight or was dragging its fender.

Whenever the grade ran downhill, the huge trucks thundered past with their horns screaming warnings, like freight trains. It was cold, as if he’d ascended past summer to autumn, and with the car’s windows tightly rolled up he felt bathed in a pocket of palpable dread.

Whatever pithy or courageous declamations to Gaither he might have rehearsed had escaped him. His mind was a blank.

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Abruptly he saw the sign he had been looking for and scarcely made the turn, pumping his brake in a panic as he slid down the off-ramp. He had to turn again on the road that he found at its foot, two wet-looking lanes of asphalt. The highway closed its curtains, as if it had never existed.

Sippston was only a few miles north by the map, but it was more than forty minutes of slippery driving before the pines fell away and he had entered the unwelcoming utilitarian town, larger than he had expected and at the same time extremely alone in its long, narrow val-ley. There were snowmobile dealerships and gas stations and a Woodsman and generic motels, a stingy assortment of orange lights beneath a gray sky. The library was unavoidable, a squat brick building on his right just before the first stoplight, so that he was almost forced to turn in and take one of its four parking spaces. Then he sat for a moment in the harrowing silence left behind by the engine.

The town felt wrong to him. Never having spent time in the West, he had envisioned Gaither’s hideaway in northeastern terms, a sort of Smith College amid soaring alps, with cottages and cow pastures and most particularly lots of churches, a veritable arsenal of spires. Gaither himself in this vision was a pseudonymous priest, beloved by a duped congregation, leading a satanic double life. But if there were any churches in Sippston, they were unsentimentally located in brick boxes like the library building; Lee saw no spires or crosses straining for the sky. It was a town of chain saws and snowplows, and the fact that there was a library at all was surprising, if not the emptiness of the small parking lot. There was only one other vehicle, a truck with an occupied gun rack.

“My God,” Lee murmured. He was frightened again, by the unfamiliar Gaither who was adequate to live in such a place.

The only welcome detail was a sign on the door indicating that the library would close at fi ve p.m. The Seiko and the clock in the dashboard agreed that it was only ten or twelve minutes to five. Ten or twelve minutes was certainly not enough time, Lee realized with relief, to conduct his inquiry of Marjorie, or even to determine who Marjorie was. He would find a motel, as he’d done every day for five days, pay in cash, find a drive-through McDonald’s—nowhere lacked one—eat his rubbery hamburger hunched in his car, and then, back in his room,
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curl his limbs painfully between chemically sterilized sheets—except that tonight would be different, because he was in Gaither’s town.

A person emerged from the library, a woman, perhaps close to Lee’s age, less petite than severely pared down, with extremely straight carriage. If not for the style of her clothes, she might have been mistaken for a slightly built man. She was wearing white running shoes and a fuchsia windbreaker zipped to the neck. Her white hair stood coarsely off her head like a ruff, and she apparently owned the shot-gun. She unlocked the truck before glancing in Lee’s direction. Lee had been paralyzed by the possibility that in starting his engine he might make her notice him, and so he hadn’t, but now she had noticed him anyway.

“Already closed,” she called. “Sorry. Eight-thirty tomorrow.” Lee gave a wave through his closed window to indicate that he had no objection and started his engine, but now she had jutted her head slightly forward, as if she had not understood. Emboldened by the running engine, Lee rolled his window partway down, and cold damp-ness poured into the car. “That’s okay!” he called. “I’ll come back in the morning!” He was trying to get into reverse when she came swiftly toward him. She bent slightly, squinting into his open window.