Samantha tried not to react.
“What about senior year?”
Her daughter, maddeningly, shrugged. “Senior year is bullshit. I applied early. I’m going to Ohio State. I got a scholarship for out-of-state students.”
“Oh? When were you going to mention all this?”
Again, that shrug. “Now, I guess. I thought maybe I could drive my stuff out there, then I’ll bring the car back. Then I’ll take a bus or something.”
“Wow. Great plan. I guess you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Well, it’s not as if you’re going to take me to college.”
“No?” Samantha said. “Well, how can I if you haven’t even told me it’s happening?”
She turned, and Samantha could hear her stalking back along the corridor to her room. She got up and followed.
“Why is that, by the way? Why did I have to hear from my high school math teacher that my daughter is graduating early? Why do I have to look through your desk to find out my daughter’s going to college out of state?”
“I thought so,” Maria said, her voice maddeningly calm. “Couldn’t keep your paws off my stuff, could you?”
“No, I guess not. Same as if I’d thought you were doing drugs. Proper parental oversight.”
“Oh, that’s hilarious. Now you’re suddenly interested in proper parental oversight?”
“I’ve always—”
“Right. Cared. Please, Mom, we’ve got, like, a couple more days to get through together. Let’s not blow it now.”
She got up from the bed and stepped in front of her mother, on her way, perhaps, along the hall to the bathroom, where Samantha had once confirmed her predicament with a pregnancy test from the Hamilton ThriftDrug, or down to the kitchen where Samantha had once tried to persuade her own mother that it made no sense—no sense!—to have or at any rate to keep this baby she had never wanted, never for one moment wanted, not then, not since, not now, and as that body passed before her she saw, shockingly, herself: slender and straight, with thin brown hair and that family way of slouching, both as she was now and as she had been in that long-ago moment, only wanting, hoping, and waiting for the day she could leave like Maria was about to leave. And without understanding what she was doing or knowing she was going to do it she reached out for her daughter’s wrist and yanked it hard, swinging the body attached to it powerfully back along an invisible arc, and as she did she had an idea of herself, swinging a little girl up into the air and smiling into her smile as the two of them spun around and around. It was something a mother might have done with her daughter, and a daughter with her mother, in a film or a television commercial for dresses or Florida beaches or weed killer to make the backyard pretty for an innocent child to play in, only Samantha couldn’t remember ever having done this herself, whether she’d been the spinning mother or the spun little girl, around and around in a perfect arc.
Maria’s head swung into one of that old bed’s wooden cannonballs, and the crack was so deep and so loud it silenced the world.
She fell like something light, barely making a sound, only there she was: half on and half off an old braided rug that had once, when Samantha herself was young, been in the hallway outside her parents’ bedroom door. She waited for her daughter to get up, but the waiting ran along a parallel track to something else, which was the absolute and weirdly calm understanding that she was already gone.
Off. Fled. Escaped, after all.
Samantha must have sat there for a minute or an hour, or the better part of that night, watching the crumpled thing that had once, long ago, been Maria, her daughter. And what a waste that had been. What an exercise in pointlessness, bringing a human being into the world, only to find oneself more alone than before, more thwarted, more disappointed, more perplexed about what anything meant. This child who had never once reached for her or expressed love, who had never shown the smallest appreciation for what her mother had done, what she’d given up—not willingly, sure, but resignedly, responsibly—and now it had come to this. What for?
She thought, at one point in the deepest part of the night, I could be in shock. But it didn’t stick. That thought dropped behind her, and also lay still.
Samantha was, as it happened, wearing Maria’s discarded green T-shirt that night. It was soft, and it hung on her pretty much exactly as it had on her daughter: same narrow shoulders, same flat chest. She rubbed the cotton between her fingers until they hurt. There was another shirt of her daughter’s she had always liked, a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that looked slouchy and comfortable and had a hood. She thought of herself wearing it and wondered if anyone would see her and ask: Isn’t that Maria’s shirt? What would she say? Oh, Maria gave it to me when she left for college. But Maria wasn’t going to college now. Surely everyone would know that. But who would tell them?
I’m not telling them, Samantha realized. She wasn’t telling anybody.
It was all so obvious after that. She finished packing up her daughter’s belongings, and some of her own. She closed up the house and put everything into the car and drove west, as far west as she had ever traveled before, and then farther. At Jamestown she turned south and at last left New York state, and by late that afternoon she was deep in the Allegheny National Forest, taking at each turn the road that looked less traveled. In a town called Cherry Grove she saw a sign for a rental cabin, so remote the owner told her not to bother if she didn’t have a four-wheel drive.
“I have a Subaru,” she told him. She paid cash for a week.
The following day was spent looking for the best place, and that night she dug the hole with a shovel she’d brought from Earlville. The next night she brought her daughter’s body and left it there, deep in the soil and covered with rocks and brush, after which she took a shower and tidied the cabin and left the key on the front porch, as she’d been instructed. Then she got back in her old car and put that, too, behind her.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Athens, Georgia
“I need to go to Georgia,” he told Anna, a day after his return from Rutland. They were walking from their apartment up to Chelsea Market, and immediately they began to argue.
“Jake, this is crazy. Going around talking to people in bars and sneaking into people’s houses and offices!”
“I didn’t sneak.”
“You didn’t tell the truth.”
No. But it had been worth it. He had learned, inside of twenty-four hours, more than he’d been able to figure out in months. Now he understood what he’d actually been dealing with, or at least what he’d been avoiding dealing with, all that time.
“There has to be another way,” she said.
“Sure. I could go back on Oprah like my spirit animal, James Frey, and hang my head and whine about my ‘process,’ and everyone will totally understand, and it won’t destroy everything I’ve accomplished or get the movie canceled, not to mention the new book, or make me a pariah for the rest of my life. Or I could ask Matilda or Wendy to set up some kind of public breast beating, and make Evan Parker into a tragically lost Great American Novelist, and give him credit for a book he didn’t write. Or maybe just let this bitch have complete control over my life, and the power to blow up my career and my reputation and my livelihood.”
“I’m not suggesting any of that,” Anna said.
“I can see how to find her now, or at least where to start looking. It’s the wrong moment to ask me to stop.”