“Okay,” you say now. “Okay.”
For a moment, you feel unmoored, your mind afloat in a littered sea clogged with strangely recognizable debris. You bobble in the gray water; curiously buoyant, watching things drift by, a red rubber ball, a green pillow, a slip of yellow paper, a fallen branch.
“From then on the die was cast,” you add softly.
Petrie’s flesh seems moist, soft, and for the first time, you notice a battered tenderness in his face.
“The design was in place,” you tell him.
You think of this design as a badge in the form of a five-pointed star, each point represented by a name, the Old Man, Diana, Jason, Patty, you. The dots are aligned, waiting only to be connected.
“What design?” Petrie asks quietly.
“Like in that poem by Hardy,” you tell him, no longer surprised that you remember it. So much has surfaced, after all. “The iceberg grows while the ship is built. A piece of the iceberg breaks away as the ship sets sail. Each floats toward the other until …”
“Life is not a poem,” Petrie says softly. “No, it isn’t.”
“What happened is not a poem.”
“No,” you confess. “Poems don’t bleed. Poems don’t die.” The fingers of your right hand curl into a fist. “Or kill.”
“Or kill,” Petrie repeats.
You see how wearisome it is to live as he does, always in the aftermath of some act he couldn’t stop. You know that he will live that way forever. And that you will, too.
Petrie lowers his head and rubs his eyes.
You want to speed up the process, send him home to his family, let him regain whatever has been drained from him, replenish the store of his illusion.
“Stewart Grace,” you say. “He called me about two days later.”
Petrie takes the cue and immediately returns to the story. “Did it scare you?” he asks. “Because you must have thought he was calling about Diana.”
“No, it didn’t scare me.” What you say next is a sheet you draw back to reveal a still bleeding wound. “I felt … important. Because he was a big lawyer. Rich. Famous.” You pull the sheet back farther, reveal the depth of the damage. “And I was nothing.”