Alexandra showed Jeremy the Cathected things and a newspaper article in the window of her phone screen. He was just home from work, and he slung a jacket over the back of a chair so that it drooped like a diminished man. He was saying an alternative to her. He urged her to believe that Lyle Michaels had killed himself.
“And yet,” she said.
“Even if he didn’t,” Jeremy said.
“He didn’t.”
Han was rolling trains. He smashed them. He made noises like apocalypse. And maybe it was. Lyle Michaels was the new evidence. She’d assimilated him. She could see his death as a point in a line, a surface straight enough to hold the wrong she knew. It fit. His death fit. It was them again who killed.
“If it were true that he didn’t,” Jeremy continued, “you can’t go to the press. There is danger. You must think of that. You must think of yourself, and Han.”
“He didn’t,” she said, because she could not unlatch from the idea simple as opening the clasp of a necklace and because though it was not quite hope in her, she wanted him to believe what she did, to reflect her suspicions, turn them back, so that his seeing what she saw would make it weighted and true. A real origin to pain.
“You’re a mother now.”
“I know who I am responsible to,” she said. “He had people who cared about him.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Jeremy said. “People give up.”
It was possible, she thought, to turn a death inside out so that its victim appeared to be the instigator. It was not possible Lyle Michaels had killed himself. He had a daughter.
“You are finding the evidence to match the theory,” Jeremy said.
“I’m telling you there are connections. Shel was trying to warn me.”
“By disappearing from you.”
Her hand dropped a glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said.