He hauls the skeleton up the driveway like a buddy who's drunk too much, phalanges dragging on the gravel, and he uses one long bony finger to push in the doorbell. A few moments later, Tanya answers the door.
She's still wearing her scrubs, and her braids are pulled back into a ponytail. "Okay," she says, looking at Quentin and the skeleton. "I've got to hear this."
He shifts position, so that he can hold the skull and let the rest dangle, freeing up one hand. Quentin points to the shoulder. "Scapula," he recites. "Ischium, ilium. Maxilla, mandible, fibula, cuboid." He has labeled each of these on the appropriate bone, with a black permanent marker.
Tanya starts to close the door. "You've lost it, Quentin."
"No!" He wedges the wrist of the skeleton inside. "Don't." Taking a deep breath, Quentin says, "I bought this for you. I wanted to show you . . . that I didn't forget what you taught me."
She tilts her head. God, he used to love the way she did that. And how she'd massage her own neck when the muscles got sore. He looks at this woman, who he does not know at all any longer, and thinks she looks just the way home should.
Tanya's fingers slip over the bones he could not recall, wide white ribs and parts of the knee and ankle.
Then she reaches for Quentin's arm, and smiles. "You got a lot left to learn," she replies, and she tugs him inside.
That night I dream that I am in court, sitting next to Fisher, when the hair stands up on the back of my neck. The air gets heavier, harder to breathe, and behind me whispers run like mice on the hardscrabble floor. "All rise," the clerk says, and I'm about to, but then there is the cold click of a gun against my scalp, the surge and stream of a bullet in my brain, and I am falling; I am falling.
The sound wakes me. Unmistakable, a celebration of clangs and clatter in ringing tin. Raccoons, but in January?
In my flannel pajamas I tiptoe downstairs. Stuff my bare feet into boots, my arms into a parka. Just in case, I grab the fireplace poker, and then I slip outside.
The cover of snow masks my footsteps as I walk the few feet to the garage. As I get closer, the huddled black shape is too large to be a raccoon. The head is bent into the trash. It isn't until I smack the poker against the can like a gong that the man even lifts his head, dizzy and ringing.
He is dressed like a cat burglar, and my first, too-charitable thought is that he must be freezing. His hands, covered in rubber gloves, are slick with the contents of my refuse. Like condoms, I think-he does not want to catch any dread disease, and who knows what you can contract by looking at the detritus of someone's life?
"What the hell are you doing?" I ask.
A war plays across his face. Then he takes a tape recorder out of his pocket. "Would you be willing to give me a statement?"
"You're a reporter? You're going through my trash, and you're a reporter?" I advance on him. "What did you think you would find? What else could you possibly need to say about my life?"
Now I notice how young he is: Nathaniel, give or take fifteen years. He is shaking, and I don't know if it is the temperature out here, or the fact that he has come face-to-face with someone as evil as me. "Do your readers want to know that I had my period last week? That I finished a box of Honey Nut Cheerios? That I get too much junk mail?"
I grab the tape recorder and punch the record button. "You want a statement? I'll give you a statement.
You ask your readers if they can account for every minute of their lives, every thought in their heads, and be proud of it. You ask them if they've never jaywalked . . . never gone thirty-one miles per hour in a thirty-mile zone ... if they've never sped up when they saw that yellow light. And when you find that single, sorry person who hasn't taken a misstep, that one person with the right to judge me, you tell him he's just as human as I am. That tomorrow, his world could turn upside down and he might find himself capable of actions he'd never believed possible." I turn away, my voice breaking. "You tell him ... he could have been me."
Then I take the tape recorder and throw it as hard and far as I can, into a high drift of snow. I walk inside and lock the door behind me, lean against it, and catch my breath.
Nothing I do will bring back Father Szyszynski. But nothing I do will ever wipe from my mind the error I've made. No jail sentence can punish me more than I will punish myself, or turn back time, or keep me from thinking that Arthur Gwynne deserved to die as much as his half-brother didn't.
I have been moving in slow motion, waiting for an inevitable ax to fall, listening to testimony as if these witnesses are discussing the destiny of a stranger. But now, I feel myself waking. The future may unfold in indelible strokes, but it doesn't mean we have to read the same line over and over. That's exactly the fate I didn't want for Nathaniel ... so why should I want it for me?
Snow starts to fall, like a blessing.
I want my life back.
The bird looked like a tiny dinosaur, too small to have feathers or know how to open its eyes. It was on the ground next to a stick shaped like a V, and a yellow-hatted acorn. Its mouth folded back, a hinge, and one stub of a wing flopped. I could see the outline of its heart.
"It's okay." I got down on the ground so I wouldn't be so scary. But it just lay there on its side, its belly swelled like a balloon.
When I looked up, I could see its brothers and sisters in the nest.
With one finger I pushed it onto my hand. "Mom!"
"What's the matter? Oh, Nathaniel!" She made that click with her tongue and grabbed my wrist, pushing it back to the ground. "Don't pick it up!"
"ESut . . . but . . ." Anyone could see how sick it was. You were supposed to help people who were too sick or sad to take care of themselves; Father Glen said so all the time. So why not birds, too?
