He heard the door. She was home with a loaf of bread and an apology not to have been here on his return, and when he hugged her she hugged him back, and the relief he hadn’t realized he was so in need of came sweeping through him.
“Look what I brought,” he said, handing her the bourbon.
“Nice. I’d better not have any myself, though. You know I need to head to LaGuardia in a couple of hours.”
He looked at her. “I thought it was tomorrow.”
“Nope. Red-eye.”
“How long will you be gone?”
She wasn’t sure, but she wanted to keep it as brief as possible. “That’s why I’m flying at night. I’ll sleep on the plane and go right to the storage unit from the airport. I think I can get it all sorted out inside of three days, and the work stuff, too. If I have to stay another day, I will.”
“I hope you won’t,” Jake said. “I’ve missed you.”
“You missed me because you knew I was pissed at you for going.”
He frowned. “Maybe. But I’d have missed you anyway.”
She went to get the soup and brought back a single bowl.
“Aren’t you having any?” Jake said.
“In a bit. I want to hear about what happened.”
She put the bread she’d just gone out to buy on a cutting board, and poured wine for both of them, and he began to tell her everything he’d learned since leaving Athens: the drive north into the mountains, the chance meeting at the general store, the campsite far enough back in the woods that you could barely hear the creek. When he held out the photograph he’d taken on his phone, she stared at it.
“It doesn’t look like a place where somebody burned to death.”
“Well, it’s been seven years.”
“You said, the man who took you out there, he’d been at the scene that morning?”
“Yeah. Volunteer fireman.”
“That’s quite the lucky coincidence.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Small town. Something like that would involve a lot of people—EMTs, cops, firemen. People at the hospital. The coroner turned out to be this guy’s neighbor.”
“And the two of them just sat down with a total stranger and told you everything? It seems kind of wrong, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? I guess I ought to be grateful. At the very least they kept me from poking around all the cemeteries in Rabun Gap with a flashlight.”
“What does that mean?” said Anna. She refilled Jake’s wineglass.
“Well, they told me where the plot was.”
“The plot you sent me the photo of?”
He nodded.
“Look, I’m going to have to ask you to be more specific. I want to be exactly sure I understand everything you’re saying here.”
“I’m saying,” said Jake, “that Rose Parker is buried in a place called Pickett Hill, just outside of Clayton, Georgia. The headstone says Dianna Parker, but it’s Rose.”
Anna seemed to require time to think this through. When that had been accomplished, she asked how he was enjoying the soup.
“It’s delicious.”
“Good. It’s the other half of that batch we had before,” she said. “When you got back from Vermont. The night you told me about Evan Parker.”
“Soup for the raveled sleeve of care,” he recalled.
“That’s right.” She smiled.
“I wish I hadn’t waited so long to tell you about this,” Jake said, bringing the heavy spoon to his lips.
“Never mind,” she said. “Drink up.”
He did.
“So, just because we’re talking this through, what is it you think happened here, exactly?”
“What happened is that Dianna Parker, like hundreds of thousands of other parents, was delivering her kid to college in August of 2012. And maybe, like probably most of them, she had mixed feelings about that kid’s departure. Rose was smart, obviously. She rammed her way through high school and into college in only three years, didn’t she?”
“Did she?”
“With a scholarship, apparently.”
“Genius girl,” said Anna. But she didn’t sound that impressed.
“Must have been pretty desperate to escape her mother.”
“Her terrible mother.” She rolled her eyes.
“Right,” Jake said. “And probably she was very ambitious, just like her mother might have been, once, but Dianna never made it out of West Rutland. There was the pregnancy, the punitive parents, the uninvolved brother.”
“Don’t forget the dude who got her pregnant and then was like: leave me out of it.”
“Sure. So there she is, driving her daughter farther away than either of them have ever been, from the only place they’ve ever lived, and she knows her daughter’s never coming home. Sixteen years of putting her own life aside and taking care of this person, and now boom: it’s over and she’s gone.”
“Without a thank-you, even.”
“Okay.” Jake nodded. “And maybe she’s thinking: Why wasn’t this me? Why didn’t I get to have this life? So when the accident happens—”
“Define accident.”
“Well, she told the coroner she might have knocked over a propane heater while she was leaving the tent in the middle of the night. By the time she got back from the bathroom the whole tent had gone up.”
Anna nodded. “Okay. That would be an accident.”
“The coroner also said she was hysterical. His word.”
“Right. And hysteria can’t be faked.”
He frowned.
“Go on.”
“So after the accident happens, she thinks: This is terrible, but I can’t bring her back. And there’s a scholarship waiting and nothing to go back to. And she thinks, No one knows me in Georgia. I’ll live off campus, take classes, figure out what I want to do with my life. She knows she doesn’t look young enough to say she’s the daughter of a thirty-two-year-old woman, so maybe she says she’s the victim’s sister, not her daughter. But from the moment she drives out of Clayton, Georgia, she’s Rose Parker, whose mother died in a tragic fire.” Burned up.
“The way you put it, it sounds almost reasonable.”
“Well, it’s horrible, but it’s not unreasonable. It’s criminal, obviously, because at the very least we’re talking about theft. Theft of identity. Theft of her daughter’s place at a university. Theft of an actual monetary scholarship. But it’s also an unanticipated opportunity for a woman who’s never managed to live her own dreams, and by the way who’s still young. Thirty-two is much younger than we are. Doesn’t it still seem possible to make an enormous change in your life when you’re thirty-two? Look at yourself! You were older than that, and you left everyone you knew and moved to the other end of the country and got married, all inside of … what, eight months?”
“Fine,” Anna agreed. She was filling Jake’s glass with the last of the Merlot. “But I have to point out that you seem to be making every excuse for her. Are you really this understanding?”
“Well, in the novel—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“Whose?” Anna said quietly. “Yours? Or Evan’s?”
He was trying to remember if Evan’s Ripley submission had covered this. Of course it hadn’t. Evan Parker had been an amateur. How far beneath the surface could he really have gone into the inner lives of these women? Unfurling his extraordinary plot that night in Richard Peng Hall, Parker hadn’t troubled himself to describe or acknowledge the complexities of Diandra (as he’d called the mother) or Ruby (as he’d called the daughter); how much better would he have done over the course of an entire novel, even assuming he’d been capable of completing one?