The town is silent, every light is off besides the streetlamps that light their usual circles. It is late but Silas is awake, and he is not nervous. He steps across the front porch of Lydia’s apartment building and knocks on the door. Soon, she is in front of him. She is standing behind the glass window in the door, a gray robe folded across her chest, her hair falling around her face and catching the light from the kitchen behind her. She will not unlock this door, she is saying, but he is not bothered. She will call the police, she warns, but he does not budge. He will wait until she trusts him. He will stay as long as he has to this time. And then he will tell her.
Lydia
The truth will set you free. Funny, she thinks as the flight attendant demonstrates how to buckle the seat belts and breathe through the oxygen mask, how it would take a con artist and a kid destroyed by secrets to set her on this path, put her on an airplane for the first time in her life. The truth will set you free, dear Lydia, Winton said in his singsong way on that last phone call. Because it is the only thing that can. He was only trying to engage her in conversation that night, but he nudged to an end what had gone on too long. The truth was something she had hidden or bent all her adult life, and she had suffered and caused others to suffer because of it. Silas, that poor tortured boy, showed her by telling the truth that this was no longer a life she could live. Silas, who she at first wanted to strangle for being so stupid, for making the choice he did to save himself; but as painful and senseless as what he told her might seem to anyone else, she understood. She understood bad choices made from fear, acted on out of a misguided sense of survival. She would never call the police to tell them what he told her. What he did he can never take back, and that will be punishment enough. He’d carried his secret as far as he could and then let it go. It was time she did, too.
She has gathered everything and organized it chronologically in folders wrapped in red rubber bands: report cards, letters to Santa, articles in newspapers about breaking state records, getting the scholarship to Stanford, photographs of shaking hands with the governor, dressed up in a tuxedo for the prom, shirtless on a summer day washing his car. There is, too, the one article in the local paper about Luke’s arrest. Why she cut it out at the time and saved it all these years she does not know. But it is folded neatly with the others, the headline Wells Swim Champ Arrested for Drug Trafficking above a few short sentences reporting how Luke was taken into custody after more than a pound of cocaine was found in his car and in the apartment he shared with his mother. This, too, she will show to George and explain her part. The only picture of Luke with June is one she took in the parking lot of the church the night of Lolly’s wedding rehearsal. She kept the film in her camera until this week, when she walked it to the pharmacy to be developed. Only three pictures were on the rolclass="underline" two of Will and Lolly and one of Luke and June standing in front of his truck — him smiling into the camera, her serious, distracted by something to the left of the frame. Then there are the articles of what came after, which she printed at the library from the computer. These she did not read or look at, but folded quickly as they spooled from the printer and later tucked in with the rest. It is not everything, but she has gathered as much as she can to tell George the story of their son.
The morning after Silas stood on her front porch, Lydia walked to the library and sat down at a computer to see what she could find. She typed into the Google search box the letters that spelled George King, the name on the business card she kept for years and eventually threw away. She kept it through the pregnancy, which she did not expect, but when she found out she was three months along, she knew who the father was. Earl was in a nightly blackout so he had no idea they hadn’t had sex in more than six months. No man ever crowed louder when he found out he was going to be a father. She let him carry on, but she held on to that business card, tucked it deep in her wallet, and waited for the storm that was coming. She knew it was going to be rough, that most likely it would be clear to everyone right away that Earl was not the father, but she knew on the other side there was a strong chance she’d be free and she’d have a child. She held on to that card through the expected divorce and the first lonely years after, with no alimony or support of any kind from Earl, no support from anyone but her mother, and even that was at arm’s length, with conditions, and scornful. Many times she almost called that number. But she didn’t want to complicate a life she knew was already complicated. Not until Luke started swimming was it clear her baby could do something better than anyone else, was going to be all right on his own someday without his mother, and without the help of a father he never knew. This is when she ripped up the card; the only-in-an-extreme-emergency button she never pushed.