I SLUMPED INTO a chair at the head of the table. The Great Diversion room had the distinct feeling of being closed off from not just the rest of the library but the rest of the world. The little sound and light that made it in from outside were muted and unnoticeable. The air in the room didn’t belong out there; the rest of the world didn’t belong in here. I didn’t belong in here. The table between us was a million miles long, Mara’s voice a million miles away.
“It’s ridiculous, right? He couldn’t be alive, could he? I mean, he would have at least told his family, right? He couldn’t have been faking that whole time . . . could he? You knew him better than that, didn’t you?”
“He’s dead,” I breathed, as if giving the words a place in the room would help me see them better, but it didn’t.
Mara saw straight through them. “Arthur. How well did you really know your grandfather?”
I stared past her, counting books on the bottom shelf across from us, fully aware that she was watching me and waiting for something.
Eventually, out of focus, her dark figure began to bob toward the door, then stopped after a few steps.
“When I asked Jack why he wanted to find this so badly he said, ‘We deserve this.’ And when I asked you, you said, ‘He deserves this.’ That’s what Leila would say. That’s why I came back. For her.”
“That sounds like bullshit,” I said.
“What?”
“That sounds like bullshit.”
She took a few steps closer to me.
“I know what you’re running away from, by the way. I looked you up. You were in court three weeks before I met you.”
I closed my eyes to hide, letting myself be somewhere, anywhere else. Driving. I was driving. I could see the inside windshield of my Camaro, and the road in front of me.
“Hitting your girlfriend? Attacking your best friend in a courtroom? A restraining order?”
I was driving the Portola Valley Dive, taking the curves hard at 120—
“That’s your reason for being all cryptic, not wanting to talk about yourself, wanting to get the fuck away from California?”
—shifting into sixth gear on the straightaway, the speedometer hitting 160. My shoulders were pinned back by inescapable acceleration.
“Let me guess what happened. You did something that you would never do because you felt like you had to do it, and then you regretted it immediately after. Does that sound right?”
I could feel the g-force energy, screaming forward, pulling me toward the center of the Earth, pumping me full of the most addictive substance that exists: adrenaline.
“If Kaitlin Lewis was here right now, is that what you would tell her?”
Kaitlin’s name brought me back. The road, the car, the escape disappeared. I wasn’t driving. I was in the library with Mara.
“I know what that’s like, Arthur. But I think maybe . . . it’s time you start acknowledging the worst parts of yourself, rather than pretending they’re not a part of you. Rather than putting that shit onto everybody else.”
I hadn’t noticed that she’d made her way back to the table and dropped a page in front of me. “There. That’s all they want, and I want you to have it. What does that do for your trust?” I pulled my eyes from the bookshelf and saw my grandfather’s penmanship scrawled inside the fold, with new ink on top of it: a tiny black fist, threatening me. “Sorry about the stamp; Jack put it on all of them.”
She stood still for another moment. “Say something.”
“Giving something back after you failed isn’t noble,” I whispered. “It’s cowardice. It doesn’t earn you trust, it earns you pity.”
She turned up her nose. “Better to live as a coward than to die as a hero.”
“You have that expression backward.”
“I know. And that’s exactly why I came back.” She paused. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Arthur.”
She walked quickly out the door without looking back.
I felt a headache tickling the sides of my brain, everything behind my eyes crashing and colliding. I took three deep breaths. I didn’t know how to do anything else.
The page she’d left behind was the first journal, from the cabin in Truckee.
i’m called to a voice i don’t remember
in a language i invented & have since forgotten
lite, too bright to see its source
“He’s dead,” I told the empty room. “They sent us his . . .”
The room didn’t respond. It swallowed the words and sent them shooting away from me.
For thirteen years, his illness had pushed my family to every conceivable breaking point. For thirteen years, we’d given him every care and comfort, excused every mishap, fought to understand every absurd behavior. For thirteen years, we’d given up our lives for him, only for him to abandon us in the end.
But I hadn’t been without my doubts. He had remembered things I was certain he’d forget. His clues were filled with complex thoughts, more complex than I would have ever thought he was capable of. He had made a clean break, disappearing without questions or a search and never coming back, without telling any of us.
Unless he was telling me now.