When the state authorities finally turned their attention to Dooling Correctional, the cover story had been spread and codified among the people of the town and the prison. Marauders—a heavily armed Blowtorch Brigade—had laid siege, and Dr. Clinton Norcross and his officers had defended their position heroically, assisted by the police and by volunteers such as Barry Holden, Eric Blass, Jack Albertson, and Nate McGee. Given the overarching, inexplicable fact of Aurora, this story held a little less interest than the floating women who’d washed up in Nova Scotia.
After all, it was only Appalachia.
“His name’s Andy. His mother died,” Lila said.
Andy was crying when she introduced him to Clint. She had retrieved him from Blanche McIntyre. His face was red and he was hungry. “I’m going to say that he was mine, that I gave birth to him. It’ll be simpler that way. My friend Jolie is a doctor. She’s already filed the paperwork.”
“Hon, people are going to know you weren’t pregnant. They won’t believe it.”
“Most will,” she said, “because time was different over there. For the rest… I don’t care.”
Because he saw she meant it, he held out his arms and accepted the wailing child. He rocked Andy back and forth. The baby’s screams became howls. “I think he likes me,” Clint said.
Lila didn’t smile. “He’s constipated.”
Clint didn’t want a child. He wanted a nap. He wanted to forget it all, the blood and death and Evie, especially Evie, who had bent the world, who had bent him. But the videotape was in his head; any time he wanted to do a Warner Wolf and go to it, it ran on a loop.
He remembered Lila, on that awful night when the world was burning down, informing him that she had never wanted the pool.
“Do I get a say in this?” he asked.
“No,” Lila said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” Which was true.
Sometimes—usually at night when she lay wakeful, but sometimes even on the brightest afternoons—names would go through Lila’s head. They were the names of white police officers (like her) who had shot innocent black civilians (like Jeanette Sorley). She thought of Richard Haste, who had shot eighteen-year-old Ramarley Graham in the bathroom of the youth’s Bronx apartment. She thought of Betty Shelby, who killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa. Most of all she thought of Alfred Olango, shot dead by Officer Richard Gonsalves when Olango playfully pointed a vaping device at him.
Janice Coates and other women from Our Place had tried to convince her that she’d had perfectly valid reasons for what she had done. These exhortations might or might not be true; either way, they were of no help. One question recurred like a maddening earworm: Would she have given a white woman more time? She was terribly, dreadfully afraid she knew the answer to that… but knew she would never be sure. The question would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Lila stayed on the job until the situation at the prison was sorted, then handed in her resignation. She brought baby Andy to Tiffany Jones Daycare and stayed to help out.
Clint was commuting to Curly, an extra hour in travel. He was fixated on his patients, especially on those inmates transferred from Dooling who had crossed over, because he was the only person they could talk to about what they’d seen and experienced who wouldn’t label them as crazy.
“Do you regret your choice?” he asked them.
They all said no.
Their selflessness astounded Clint, shrank him, kept him awake, sitting in his armchair in the AM gloom. He had risked his life, yes, but the inmates had handed their new ones over. Had made a gift of them. What group of men would ever have made such a unanimous sacrifice? No group of men was the answer, and if you recognized that, then Christ, hadn’t the women made an awful mistake?
He ate drive-thru food at both ends of his day and the softening he had worried about that spring became a healthy front porch by the following fall. Jared was a melancholy ghost, skimming at the edges of his perception, coming and going, sometimes offering a small salute or a yo, Dad. Erotic dreams of Evie rattled away any real serenity Clint might have found. She captured him in vines and blew wind across his naked body. And her body? It was a bower where he thought he could rest, but never reached before awakening.
When he was in the same room with the baby, it grinned at him, as if it wanted to make friends. Clint grinned back and found himself crying in his car on the way to work.
One night, unable to sleep, he Googled the name of his second patient, Paul Montpelier, he of the “sexual ambition.” An obituary popped up. Paul Montpelier had died five years before, after a long battle with cancer. There was no mention of a wife or children. What had his “sexual ambition” gained him? A very short and sad obituary, it seemed. Clint cried for him, too. He understood this was a well-known psychological phenomenon known as transference, and didn’t care.
One rainy evening not long after reading Montpelier’s obituary, exhausted from a day of group meetings and one-on-one consultations, Clint stopped at a motel in the little town of Eagle, where the heater rattled and everyone on the TV looked green. Three nights later, he was in the same room when Lila called his cell phone to ask if he was coming home. She didn’t sound particularly concerned about his answer.
“I think I’m beat, Lila,” he said.
Lila heard his meaning, the larger encircling defeat it conveyed.
“You’re a good man,” she said. This was a lot to give him right then. The baby didn’t sleep much. She was beat herself. “Better than most.”
He had to laugh. “I believe that’s known as damning with faint praise.”
“I do love you,” she said. “It’s just been a lot. Hasn’t it?”
It had. It had been a hell of a lot.
The warden at Curly told Clint he absolutely didn’t want to see his face over the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Heal thyself, Doc,” said the warden. “Eat some vegetables, anyway. Something besides Big Macs and moon pies.”
He abruptly decided to drive to Coughlin to see Shannon, but ended up parked outside her house, unable to go in. Through the thin drapes of the ranch house he observed the shadows of female figures moving. The warmth of the lights was cheerful and inviting; snow had started to fall in huge flakes. He thought of knocking on her door. He thought of saying, Hey, Shan, you were the milkshake that got away. The thought of a milkshake running away on Shannon’s shapely legs made him laugh, and he was still laughing when he drove off.
He ended up in a tavern called O’Byrne’s with melting slush on the floor, the Dubliners on the jukebox, and a bleary-eyed, white-headed bartender who moved in slow motion between the taps and the glasses, as if he were not pouring beers, but handling radioactive isotopes. This fine fellow addressed Clint. “Guinness, son? Tasty on a night like this.”
“Make it a Bud.”
The current Dubliners tune was “The Auld Triangle.” Clint knew it, and sort of liked it, in spite of himself. There was a romance to the song that was nothing like his experience of prison, but it got you, those voices gathering. Someone, he thought, ought to add another verse, though. The warden, the screw, and the lag all got turns. Where was the shrink?
He was just about to take his beer to a dark corner when a finger tapped him on the shoulder. “Clint?”