“It wasn’t even in your top-ten craziest days, was it?” she said quickly, as if that was what she’d been pondering.
He screwed up his face, long crow’s feet imprinting around his eyes.
“Top twenty?” she tried.
“Securely in the top fifty. Top sixty, definitely.”
“Huh.”
Maybe if she’d spent more of her life outside the town she’d grown up in, she wouldn’t stress so much when unexpected things happened.Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuffhad to take on added meaning when everything seemed small in comparison with the kind ofstuffhe’d experienced, withthe military and then the CIA. For her, the small stuffwasthe big stuff. Even among all the big stuff of death and mourning, she obsessed about the details. The wording of the obituary. The colors of the flowers. Who to call in what order. It was about exercising control over something that made her feel powerless, Kimberly said. And like with a lot of behaviors and thought patterns that Kimberly pointed out, knowing the reasons she did dumb shit rarely stopped her doing dumb shit.
Carter shifted to face her, which left her stuck eyeballing him. “You don’t seem all that freaked out now. Or is that the neutral-expression teacher thing?”
“Chill on the outside, losing my shit on the inside. Even out of school, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to keep my emotions from showing on my face.”
“And covering with humor, I’m guessing.”
“A family thing. We try to keep things light, but not be in denial, either.”
“Hard to find that balance, I imagine.”
“Can be. But when someone around you is dying, you don’t want to make it all aboutyourgrief andyourfears. Plus, at work, it’s a bad idea to let students know how you really feel.” She shrugged. “You wear a mask for long enough, and at some point it gets fused on. Like a method actor.”
He grunted.
“I guess you’d know about that.”
Another grunt.
“Do you still wear the mask, now you’re out of the CIA?”
He brushed crumbs off his sweater. “Mine fused on a long time ago. And not just because of working in the I.C. You wear one in the military too, especially doing the shit I did.”
“But you must feel that stress on the inside, right? Like when the doors opened at the transfer station, and the van was there. God, look at me—I’m shuddering just thinking about it.”
He lifted an arm, as if he was about to put it around her shoulders, and then lowered it, linking his fingers together and looking down at them. He shifted away a little. “Nah. Adrenaline makes me go super calm and clearheaded. Like all the other shit drops away. Even when I was at school, playing quarterback, even in big games, I got that feeling. Like time actually slowed down in those moments, and I had all this headspace to calculate the best moves. I like those moments.”
“Of courseyou played quarterback. That would have been a perfect detail for the novel. Exactly how much of Anderson Holt’s backstory was true—I mean true of you, not your alias? Coz there are like three versions of you in my head right now.”
“The broad brushstrokes are true. I told Nika from the beginning that my wife was missing, presumed dead. And then when we got to America, when we could finally take off the masks, we spent a night at a hotel—which you knowallabout—and I told her a few things about the real me, which she obviously remembered. But we didn’t have time to cover a whole lot of ground. I realized after we parted that I hadn’t even told her my real name—she married my alias. So even if she had gone looking for me… Some of the details in the book were fused with my cover story, some were wildly incorrect.”
“Yeah, I went through and layered in some details later.”
“I didn’t kill Vanessa, my wife. In case you’re wondering.”
“I’mreallysorry about that.” It had only been a suggestion, a question she’d left with the reader at the end of the book, after Holt turned out not to be the hero he seemed.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, with sarcastic brightness. “Ah well, better get started on this tape.” He stood and walked inside, as if to turn a new page, like Alice had with the ruse of getting food. She felt the sting of a mosquito biting her ankle and slapped at it.
Vanessa. In the book, Holt’s wife was Felicity. Apart from the hint that he was involved in her death, Alice hadn’t changed anything about her. Nika had painted them as soulmates who couldn’t have been better suited if they’d been created for each other—gutsy and adventurous with strong personalities. She must have known she could never hope to fill that gulf, and she’d been twice the woman Alice was. Not that Alice was interested in going there. Well, she wasinterested, sure, but she’d never actually do anything about it.
Alice had spent ages trying to pin down on the page how Holt might feel about losing his wife, drawing heavily on her own experience to the point it became cathartic:At first the grief came in waves, so huge, so violent, so close together you could barely catch your breath. Then the waves settled into a pattern, coming in the wake of triggers—anniversaries, smells, belongings, memories—smaller and further apart, but for the occasional breaker that threw you under when your back was turned. It could be a ripple, a swell, or a tsunami, but the only certainty was that the water would never again be still. And Holt wasn’t the type to go with the current. He stood his ground as the tide sucked the sand from under his feet and the waves broke over his head.
By the time Alice had finished that scene, she’d felt a yearning in her own belly, though it was less a longing for an absent loved one—that was nothing new—and more a hunger to love that way in the first place. To be loved like that. These days Alice could hardly bring herself to go on a second date. Though to be fair, when did she last have a first date?
When the mosquitoes got too fierce, Alice relented and went inside. Carter had settled himself onto a jute rug on the wooden floor, leaning back against the low bed. He’d pushed the chairs under the table to accommodate the length of his legs, leaving her with little choice but to step over them and sit cross-legged atthe head of the bed. The heavy silence of the room made it seem even smaller.
“What are you hoping to find on the tape?” she said as he pulled earbuds from his backpack.
