X followed Zoe over a snowy rise. The drifts were deep, and their progress was slow. He could hear her just ahead of him, panting and swearing. Occasionally, she would turn back and say, “We’re almost there” or “Okay, I was lying, now we’re almost there.”
He himself did not speak. He couldn’t shake the image of Zoe’s father from his brain. He kept picturing the man’s hand extended toward him, reddened and chapped from the cold and waiting to be shaken. He kept picturing his eyes—Jonah’s eyes.
There was nothing but snow in every direction. He’d had enough of the snow.
Finally, they staggered down the other side of the rise. At the bottom, there was a fence and a hill of rocks, on which stood a small cross and a stone Buddha. X had seen souls arrive in the Lowlands with the same images around their necks—just as he’d seen necklaces with golden stars and crescent moons. New souls never fought so hard as when the guards tried to steal them away.
Without a word, Zoe began scaling the fence. It rattled as she climbed, and X felt a wave of concern. He wondered if he should stop her. But then he remembered that one of the things he loved most about her was that no one could ever stop her.
Zoe dropped down on the other side of the fence and landed with a deep, muffled thud. She turned to X.
“This is Black Teardrop,” she said. “This is my father’s cave. This is where he died.”
X’s heart lurched.
This was the moment to tell her that her father was still alive. This was the moment.
He couldn’t do it. The words wouldn’t come.
He wanted to give Zoe one more minute of happiness, of innocence—of not knowing.
Did he have to tell her the truth? What if he didn’t? He could take her father’s soul to the Lowlands and be free—and Zoe could keep believing that her dad had died in a cave. She didn’t have to know about her father’s sins. She didn’t have to know that he had run from his past as long as he could, or that when it finally caught up with him he’d chosen the most cowardly course: faking his own death and leaving her and Jonah and their mother to cry their hearts out by a tree in the backyard. Zoe could have a whole lifetime of not knowing.
She was staring at him. Her eyes were teary. He had to say something.
“Show me the cave,” he said.
He leaped over the fence and joined Zoe. There were already tracks, half buried in snow. They followed them up to the cave, then climbed to where the statue and the cross sat on the ledge.
“I feel bad for these guys standing out here in the cold,” said Zoe.
X did not reply. His mind and heart were aching.
“But I guess Jesus and Buddha can handle a little snow,” she said.
She sat down on the rocks, surrounded by the light that X had summoned up. She began talking, shyly at first.
She told him about the cave and about her father. X found it hard to concentrate on the exact words—they blew by him like a wind. She said that she’d gone caving the day before. She said that there was a moment during the descent where she suddenly knew what her dad had gone through when he died—not just the mechanics of it, but the terror, too. She said she’d felt the rope wind around his throat, as if it were her own throat. She’d seen the flame on his headlamp singe the rope, then burn through it as he struggled. She’d imagined the fall—the sudden, heart-in-your-mouth naked panic of it—as if the cave were devouring her instead.
She paused.
She apologized for talking so much.
She looked at him, desperate for him to speak. But still X said nothing. And every second that he said nothing felt like a lie. Could he lie to her for the rest of their lives? And would the two of them be able to build anything on top of the lie and still call it love?
Zoe pointed at the statues. She said her mom had left them there. She’d been shocked when she found them. She’d thought that her mother hated her father, but clearly she hadn’t been able to cut him out of her heart. None of them had. Jonah, she said, was a legit basket case.
She picked up the piece of bark from the ledge above the Buddha and the cross.
“See this?” she said. “‘I will come back.’ I carved that for my dad. I wanted him to know we’re not gonna just leave him here.”
X was startled by the words.
“What do you mean?” he said. “What do you mean you’re ‘not gonna just leave him here’?”
“We’re gonna come back and get him,” said Zoe.
He saw the seriousness in her eyes. No one could ever stop Zoe. This time, he thought it not with a pang of fondness, but of dread.
“I’m sorry I’m babbling, but I’m babbling because you aren’t talking,” she said. “Why aren’t you talking? You must have a million things to say.”
“I do,” said X miserably. “And yet no way to say them.”
Zoe climbed down from the rocks. She took off a glove. She laid her palm against the side of his face.
“Try,” she said. “Try just telling me one thing.”
X took her hand from his cheek. The softness of her hand—the kindness of the gesture—only hurt him.
“You cannot go into this cave,” he said.
“I’m not going to,” she said. “The police are.”
“They cannot go either,” he said, growing heated. “You must trust me. You must stop them. No one must enter this cave. Let them seal it forever.”
Zoe pulled away from him.
“Why?” she said.
His mind spun in search of an answer.
“Why should I stop them?” she said.
“Because I am asking you to, Zoe,” he said. “Because I am begging you to. Because everything depends upon it.” He was going too far. He was saying too much. “Because I will destroy the cave with my own hands before I let anyone venture into it.”
Zoe recoiled from him.
“What is wrong with you?” she said. “Why should I stop them? I’m going to keep asking until you answer me. And you know me—I can go all night.”
This time, he interrupted her before she could get the question out.
“Nothing but the most desperate pain can be found in that cave,” he said. “You might recover from it, but I am not so strong as you, Zoe. I could not bear to watch rags made of your heart.”
His tenderness had no effect.
“You’re not answering me,” Zoe said angrily. “Why should I leave my father’s body in a hole? He would never have left me. Why shouldn’t we go into the cave? Tell. Me. Why.”
X felt the answer fly up his throat, like a sickness.
“Because your father is not there,” he said. “And because you are wrong—he did leave you. He left all of you.”
Zoe staggered back a step, her face suddenly unrecognizable.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
He stepped toward her. She drew back, as if in fear.
“What are you talking about?”
“The lords gave me one last commission—one last soul I must take if I am to be free,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Banger told me.”
“The soul they sent me for, Zoe—it was your father,” said X. “He is alive. I have seen him.”
The color was gone from Zoe’s face now. He reached for her again. She wouldn’t let him touch her.
“You’ve—you’ve seen my father?”
“In Canada,” he said. “On a barren coast. Not so many hours ago.”
Zoe shook her head.
“It couldn’t have been my father,” she said. “Tell me how you knew. Tell me exactly what he said.”
“We spoke but little,” said X. “He gave off a strong scent of fish. He begged my pardon for it—he said he had been fishing through the ice.”
Zoe’s eyes suddenly flared with hope.
“My father didn’t fish,” she said. “He didn’t know how. If he knew how, I would know how. He would have taught me.”
“It may be that he has learned,” X said gently. “This is a man who fled his life—who shed even his name. I suspect he lives on the margins and in the shadows now. He calls himself Leo Wrigley.”
This last detail seemed to wound Zoe more than anything that had come before.
“We used to have a cat named Wrigley,” she said, her voice breaking. “And Leo is—it’s Jonah’s middle name.” She was quiet a moment. “What else did he say? This is insane.”
X searched his mind. He had spent so few moments with the man—and he had been in such a tortured state.
“He praised the rock we were sheltered under,” he said. “He said it was sandstone, and remarked on how ‘freakin’ awesome’ it was. I grieve to tell you, Zoe. But it was your father.”
Zoe burst into sobs.
He reached out to her again, and yet again she shrank away. Not being able to touch her was excruciating. X clenched his hands so tightly that his nails drew blood.
“Did you—did you take him?” said Zoe. “Did you take my father to the Lowlands?”
“No, Zoe,” said X. “How could I? He sits on that beach still, for all I know.”
“What did my father do?” she said. “What were his crimes?”
“Do not ask me,” said X. “Spare yourself something.”
Zoe rubbed frenziedly at her eyes, but the tears kept coming.
“I need to know at least a little,” she said. “I mean, it was bad, what he did? Bad, like … bad, like you’re used to?”
X shivered. Every word she spoke pierced him, but the words he was forced to speak in return were worse somehow—because they pierced her.
“Much of it occurred in his youth,” he said. “Yet—”
Zoe could not wait for him to complete the thought.
“Yet what?” she said.
“Yet I have taken souls for less,” he said. “There was blood on his hands when he was still a young man. And there is fresh blood on them today.”
He watched as the last remnants of hope drained out of Zoe.
“What happens now?” she said.
He reached out to her a final time, and this time she let him hold her.
“I regret this answer above all the others,” he said. “What happens now is for you to decide. Either your father goes free—or I do.”
X waited for what felt like years for Zoe to speak.
“Take me to him,” she said finally. “Take me to my father.”
Her voice sounded so hard now. X turned from her. He stared down at the feeble metal fence, which shook and rattled in the wind.
“Please,” she added. “Or I’ll go myself. I’ll find a way. You know I will.”
“Yet what will you say to him, Zoe?” X said. He did not look back at her. He couldn’t. “And what will you have me do? Will you ask me to stop your own father’s breath? Will you watch as I circle his neck with my fingers? And, once I am done, will you ever be able to look at me again?”
Zoe was silent a long time.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I want to see him with my own eyes. I want him to know … I want him to know that I know what he’s done. I don’t want him thinking he got away with this—not for one more second.” She put a hand on X’s shoulder. “Will you take me?” she said. “Even if I don’t have all the answers yet?”
He turned back to her. Her eyes, even in distress, were so familiar. They never failed to unravel him.
“You know that I will,” he said.
Zoe texted her mother: I’m not going to be home tonight. I’m OK, I promise. Please trust me ONE more time.
She turned off her phone so she wouldn’t hear it explode. She nodded to X. She was ready.
He picked her up and pulled her to his chest. He did not bother leaping over the fence—he just let out a howl and kicked it down with his boot.
He carried her up and over the powdery banks and then down the icy road that wandered through the mountains. The moon had broken through the clouds. The snow gave off a faint blue light. Zoe was silent now—overwhelmed by the shock of it all, he imagined. Her eyes were open, but she appeared to see nothing.
He tried to think of a story to tell Zoe as he carried her. He thought that hearing his voice might console her somehow. Talking would never come naturally to him (how many words had he even spoken in his lifetime?), and he realized now that he didn’t know very many stories—and certainly no pleasant ones.
So he told her their story.
He began with her knocking him down on the ice.
He told her that she’d smelled like the dogs, adding nervously that he meant it as a compliment, that he’d liked it. He told her that he was changed the minute she smashed into him, that by stopping him from taking Stan, she’d woken him up—challenged him not to hate himself and to think of himself as something more than a killer. Because that’s all he was when they met, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if you killed only bad men. You were still a killer. Even if Zoe and X had never spoken (never touched, never kissed) he wouldn’t have forgotten her. Couldn’t have. He’d have guarded the memory of her with two cupped hands, like it was a flame in a draft.
Was Zoe listening? He wasn’t sure. But he liked telling the story. It soothed him.
He told her about how they’d argued when her family found him in agony in the garage—how he’d begged her to abandon him, even though he was praying that she wouldn’t. He described riding to the house in Jonah’s sled and sleeping in a bed shaped like a fat insect. Why was it shaped like an insect? He’d worried it was a stupid question, so he had never asked.
X told her how he used to lie waiting for her to fall asleep. He told her that she snored just the tiniest bit—but maybe he shouldn’t have said that? He changed the subject. He talked about Jonah. He said he could feel his hard little hugs even now. He confessed that when he was tiptoeing out of the room one night he’d stepped on one of Jonah’s toy animals and broken its horns. How ashamed he’d been! He’d meant to apologize, but never did. He didn’t know what kind of animal it was. It had horns, so maybe it was a monkey?
Zoe’s lips twitched at this last detail—she nearly smiled.
She was listening. And she looked warm in his arms.
X talked for another hour. They were out of the mountains now. They were on a road lined with evergreens. X saw poles strung with wires. He felt civilization rising up to greet them. Still, it would take them ages to reach her father.
As if she’d read his thoughts, Zoe stirred in his arms and spoke.
“Why are you walking?” she said.
Her voice was flat and tuneless, but he was grateful to hear it.
“Why aren’t we zooming—or whatever you call it?” she added.
“I have seen the effect that zooming produces in you,” said X, “so zooming must be our last resort. In truth, I am happy to walk—for the more slowly we go, the longer I can hold you.”
Zoe was quiet a moment.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “But it’s okay to zoom.” After another silence, she added, “Do you really call it zooming? I was just guessing.”
“No, we don’t call it that,” said X. Fearing that he’d been unkind, he quickly added, “But we certainly can.”
Satisfied, Zoe withdrew into her thoughts again. The moon, appearing to follow her cue, ducked behind the clouds once more. Even to X, the darkness was alarming.