“YOU REMEMBER when I got home?” Ingrid asked David nine months later, and he didn’t reply; his embarrassed expression was enough. To Rachel, she said, “He saw blood on me, and when he found out where it was from he lost his shit. It was all about Clare. I was out there risking our baby for some people I didn’t even know.”
“I didn’t use those words.”
“Don’t lie, okay?” She turned to Rachel. “I’m telling you all this because by the time I got to Bill and Gina’s party, I was ready for a change.”
Rachel looked over to Kevin, but he was standing by the window again, eyes closed, listening to a story he’d probably heard many times already. She said, “You don’t need to make excuses.”
“No,” Ingrid snapped, shaking her head. “These aren’t excuses. They’re explanations. Don’t think at any point that I’m apologizing for my decisions. I might be stuck in this house worried about my baby’s safety, but this isn’t the result of bad decisions. It’s the result of the hypocrisy that feeds this selfish country.”
Rachel leaned back, feeling an instant revulsion but trying to hide it. Hypocrisy was just another word for reality, but not to someone like Ingrid. She lived in a world of absolutes that, history taught, led to blood in the streets.
“Seventeen people were injured at that demonstration. A couple of days later, an old man died from injuries there. Why? Because the police were paid to get rid of what the ruling class fears most: angry people who are ready to smash banks and businesses in the face of injustice.”
“Enough, Ingrid,” Kevin said, sounding annoyed.
She looked at him. “What?”
“There’s no soapbox here. The only thing that’s going to help is if you tell her what happened.”
Ingrid locked eyes with him, and Rachel felt there was a lot unsaid going on between them. But of course there would be—Kevin had saved her from arrest and, more likely, death in Watertown, and she had repaid him by turning him in, guessing that Ben Mittag would kill him before the Bureau’s team arrived. Yet here Kevin was, protecting her from everyone, even Rachel. She’d seen no sign of affection between them; this wasn’t a love affair. So why was he risking himself for the sake of an ungrateful revolutionary? She was beginning to finally understand Fordham’s critiques of Kevin.
“Fair enough,” Ingrid eventually said, then turned to Rachel. “Look, I get carried away. And I’m not saying anything original; I know that. I just want you to understand me. And you should know that when I met Martin at the party here, I knew him—I knew his type. My father was a Communist, and that was both good and bad.”
She paused, looking down at Clare, who was dozing, little bubbles forming on her pursed lips. Rachel remembered the details David had shared about Ingrid’s father, the ones Ingrid was choosing to keep locked away: the abuse, going after him with a shovel, him drinking himself to death beside the Kearsley Reservoir. As Kevin had told her, anyone who tells you there’s one reason for what they do is a liar.
Ingrid said, “I fell in with the radicals at U Mich. This was pre-Twitter, but we spray-painted Twitter-length manifestos all over the buildings. I got into the language of the left, and soon I was an expert on the Red Army Faction and Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Action Directe—all those guys. So when I met Martin, I was back on familiar ground. And after the police attacked our protest in Newark, I needed to get involved again.”
“Did you start the conversation?” Rachel asked.
She shook her head. “I’d wandered around the party, looking for someone, anyone, who wanted to talk about Jerome Brown. No one did. Like the subject embarrassed them. Then this guy sits next to me on the sofa and says, ‘So what do you think about what went down in Newark?’ He had me from his opening line.”