a feeling of surrender. Cloquet was still asleep. Zoë was still awake. For a long time I sat looking at her in the bassinet. I was scared to touch her.
(The car that had saved Delilah Snow and condemned me belonged, subsequent news reports revealed, to Amber Brouwer, George’s former lover. She’d come by because her dog had died and she’d got a little drunk and weepy and suddenly realised she missed George. A dead dog. Sentimentality. A drive. Headlights swimming over a bedroom ceiling. A life not taken.)
Only when my daughter closed her eyes did I rest my hand lightly on her body, felt the tiny ribs, the solidity and heat, the heartbeat and the sleeping wolf inside her. That, and how unentitled to any of it I was.
I had an imaginary conversation with my mother.
Ma, what do you do if you’re capable of anything?
Just because you’re capable of anything doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It’s not a death sentence, Lulu. It’s a life sentence. Sorry, angel. You’re going to have to either walk away or give it a try.
•
‘This is insane,’ Cloquet said. The rain accelerated for a few seconds, then slowed again.
Without Zoë I might have been able to walk away. Without her I might have been able to swallow the loss, cauterise it, grow a new deformed version of myself to accommodate it: The Unfit Mother. But there she was. Her brother’s insurance policy.
They have your son. Thinking of him as a person made me feel sick. There was a vertigo of the heart. I had to think of him as an object. Like a lost suitcase I had to get back. It was a relief, suddenly, to be reduced to a single purpose. Nothing else matters, we say, when we fall in love. I knew it was hopeless. I knew all I was doing was choosing a route to my own death. It didn’t matter. It was as much of a liberation as walking away would have been.
Zoë’s brother wasn’t ‘he’ or ‘him’ any more. As Cloquet pointed out, we might have to travel far and fast if and when we found him; it wouldn’t do to have to wait on papers again. He was right, but it didn’t lessen the peculiar agony of naming him. It felt like taking something that didn’t belong to me. My mother had a miscarriage two years after I was born. It was a boy. She told me later they were going to call him Lorcan. So I named my son that, with clinical perversity, since it already had death attached to it. I’d phoned Kovatch before we left Anchorage, and the birth certificate (plus aliases to match his sister’s) had arrived this morning. The name in print unhinged me for a moment, as if I hadn’t known until then that the God who wasn’t there took these dares seriously. I put the documents away and told myself I wouldn’t use the name, even in my own head. But of course that was already impossible. It was entailed in the idea of him, and now every time I thought of him I thought of the name, Lorcan , and it was like an invitation to Death to come and claim his property.
I’d made a will, leaving my dad more than he’d know what to do with, enough for Cloquet to keep him for the rest of his days, one of the restaurants to Ambidextrous Alison, a million dollars to Lauren, who’d made a mess of her life, one dollar to Richard – and all the rest to the twins, in a trust to be administered by my dad or his nominees until they were of age. It helped to have done this, to know that materially at least I wasn’t leaving any loose ends. In a small way it made me less afraid of dying.
A black Land Rover sat across the road from us. In it, wearing police uniforms, were Draper and Khan, the two guys supplied by Charlie Proctor at Aegis Private Security. Charlie’s name was on Jake’s list of People I Could Trust. Draper was a fair-haired soft-voiced Scot with a way of moving that never looked hurried and a core of gentleness it seemed his life’s violence hadn’t touched. Khan was a third-generation British Pakistani with liquid black eyes and a thin,
(The car that had saved Delilah Snow and condemned me belonged, subsequent news reports revealed, to Amber Brouwer, George’s former lover. She’d come by because her dog had died and she’d got a little drunk and weepy and suddenly realised she missed George. A dead dog. Sentimentality. A drive. Headlights swimming over a bedroom ceiling. A life not taken.)
Only when my daughter closed her eyes did I rest my hand lightly on her body, felt the tiny ribs, the solidity and heat, the heartbeat and the sleeping wolf inside her. That, and how unentitled to any of it I was.
I had an imaginary conversation with my mother.
Ma, what do you do if you’re capable of anything?
Just because you’re capable of anything doesn’t mean you have to do everything. It’s not a death sentence, Lulu. It’s a life sentence. Sorry, angel. You’re going to have to either walk away or give it a try.
•
‘This is insane,’ Cloquet said. The rain accelerated for a few seconds, then slowed again.
Without Zoë I might have been able to walk away. Without her I might have been able to swallow the loss, cauterise it, grow a new deformed version of myself to accommodate it: The Unfit Mother. But there she was. Her brother’s insurance policy.
They have your son. Thinking of him as a person made me feel sick. There was a vertigo of the heart. I had to think of him as an object. Like a lost suitcase I had to get back. It was a relief, suddenly, to be reduced to a single purpose. Nothing else matters, we say, when we fall in love. I knew it was hopeless. I knew all I was doing was choosing a route to my own death. It didn’t matter. It was as much of a liberation as walking away would have been.
Zoë’s brother wasn’t ‘he’ or ‘him’ any more. As Cloquet pointed out, we might have to travel far and fast if and when we found him; it wouldn’t do to have to wait on papers again. He was right, but it didn’t lessen the peculiar agony of naming him. It felt like taking something that didn’t belong to me. My mother had a miscarriage two years after I was born. It was a boy. She told me later they were going to call him Lorcan. So I named my son that, with clinical perversity, since it already had death attached to it. I’d phoned Kovatch before we left Anchorage, and the birth certificate (plus aliases to match his sister’s) had arrived this morning. The name in print unhinged me for a moment, as if I hadn’t known until then that the God who wasn’t there took these dares seriously. I put the documents away and told myself I wouldn’t use the name, even in my own head. But of course that was already impossible. It was entailed in the idea of him, and now every time I thought of him I thought of the name, Lorcan , and it was like an invitation to Death to come and claim his property.
I’d made a will, leaving my dad more than he’d know what to do with, enough for Cloquet to keep him for the rest of his days, one of the restaurants to Ambidextrous Alison, a million dollars to Lauren, who’d made a mess of her life, one dollar to Richard – and all the rest to the twins, in a trust to be administered by my dad or his nominees until they were of age. It helped to have done this, to know that materially at least I wasn’t leaving any loose ends. In a small way it made me less afraid of dying.
A black Land Rover sat across the road from us. In it, wearing police uniforms, were Draper and Khan, the two guys supplied by Charlie Proctor at Aegis Private Security. Charlie’s name was on Jake’s list of People I Could Trust. Draper was a fair-haired soft-voiced Scot with a way of moving that never looked hurried and a core of gentleness it seemed his life’s violence hadn’t touched. Khan was a third-generation British Pakistani with liquid black eyes and a thin,
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