Blind Lake

“She’s—” He was about to deny it but stopped himself in time. Tess watched his face closely. “How did you know that?”

“I heard you talking to my mom.” The ultimate Porry story. “How did she die?” Tess asked.

The truth. Whatever that meant. Where did “truth” live, and why was it so alluring and so evasive? “I don’t like to talk about it, Tess.”

She shifted her weight deliberately, one foot to another. “Was it an accident?”

“No.”

She looked back into the pit. “Was it your fault?”

Another infinitesimal step closer. “She — I could have done better. I should have saved her.”

“But was it your fault?”

Those memories lived in a dark place. Porry’s murderous boyfriend. Porry’s boyfriend, weeping. I swear to God, I won’t touch her. It’s the fucking bottle, man, not me. Porry’s boyfriend, on the last day of Porry’s life, stinking of drunk sweat and promising redemption.

And I believed the son of a bitch. So was it my fault?

How to unravel this monument of pain he’d built? Mourning his sister with every self-inflicted wound.

Tess wanted the truth.

“No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t my fault.”

“But the story doesn’t have a happy ending.”

A step. Another. “Some stories don’t.”

Her eyes glistened. “I wish she hadn’t died, Chris.”

“I wish that too.”

“Does my story have a happy ending?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. I can try to help give it one.”

Tears rolled from her eyes. “But you can’t promise.”

“I can promise to try.”

“Is that the truth?”

“The truth,” Chris said. “Now give me your hand.”

He swept her into his arms and ran from the gallery, ran toward the stairwell, ran against the beating of his heart until he could taste the edge of winter and see at least a little of the sun.

PART FOUR

Intelligibility

Marvel not, my comrade, if I appear talking to you on super-terrestrial and aerial topics. The long and the short of the matter is that I am ru

Thirty-Eight

They crossed the Ohio border at the end of a languorous August afternoon.

Chris drove the last leg of the trip while Maguerite listened to music and Tess dozed in the back of the car. They were ultimately bound for New York, where Chris was scheduled for a series of meetings with his publisher, but Marguerite had lobbied for a weekend at her father’s house, a couple of days of gentle decompression before they were borne back into the world.

It was reassuring, Chris thought, to see how little this part of the country had changed since the events of last year. A National Guard checkpoint stood abandoned at the Indiana border, mute testimony both to the crisis and its passing; otherwise it was cows and combines, truckstops and county lines. Many of these roads had never been automated, and it was a pleasure to drive for hours at a time with no hands on the wheel but his own — no proxalerts, overrides, or congestion-avoidance protocols; just man and machine, the way God intended.

He nudged Marguerite as they approached the county limits.

She took off her headphones and watched the road. She had been away too long, she told Chris; she was distressed by the shabby mallways, drug bars, and cordiality palaces that had sprung up along the old highway.

But the heart of the town was just as she had described it: the century-old police station, the commons lined with chestnut trees, the more modern trefoil windmills riding the crest of a distant ridge. The several churches, including the Presbyterian church where her father used to preside.

Her father was retired now. He had moved from the rectory to a frame house on Butternut Street south of the business district. Chris followed her directions and parked at the curb-side out front.

“Wake up, Tess,” Marguerite said. “We’re here.”

Tess climbed out of the car smiling groggily at her grandfather, who came down the porch steps beaming.

Marguerite had worried that the meeting between Chris and her father might be awkward. That fear proved baseless. She watched in mild surprise as her father shook Chris’s hand warmly and ushered him into the house.

Chuck Hauser had changed very little in the three years since her last visit. He was one of those men who reach a physical plateau at middle-age and glide into their seventies only lightly touched by time — same salt-and-pepper beard, stubble-cut scalp, respectably small paunch. Still wearing the monochrome cotton shirts he had always favored, in and out of fashion. Same blue eyes, despite a recent keriotomy.

He had prepared a meal of meat loaf, peas, corn, and mashed potatoes, served on the big dining room table where (he informed Tess) Marguerite used to do her homework when she was a girl. That had been at the rectory on Glendavid Avenue. She had worked out math problems every evening after di

Her father’s di

He came back to the table with a pot of coffee and three mugs. “Until the day I got that call from Provo last February I didn’t know whether you were alive or dead.”

Provo, Utah, was where the people of Blind Lake had been held after the end of the lockdown — six more months of medical and psychological quarantine, living like refugees on a decommissioned Continental Defense Force base. Six months waiting to be declared sane, uncontaminated, and not a threat to the general population. “It must have been awful,” Marguerite said, “not knowing.”

“More awful for you than me, I imagine. I had a feeling you’d come through okay.”

The sky outside had grown dark. Chris finished his coffee and volunteered to keep Tess company. Her father switched on a floor lamp, illuminating the oaken bookcase behind the table. As a bookish child Marguerite had been both drawn and repelled by these shelves: so many intriguing buff or amber-colored volumes, which turned out on closer inspection to be marrowless church-related or “inspirational” works. (Although she had swiped the Kipling Just So Stories.) She noticed some books he had lately added — astronomy and cosmology titles, most published within the last couple of years. There was even a copy of Sebastian Vogel’s god-and-science doorstop.

He pulled his chair next to Marguerite’s. “How’s Tess dealing with the death of her father?”

“Well enough, given the circumstances and considering she just turned twelve. She still insists he might not be dead.”

“He vanished inside the starfish.”

Marguerite winced at that popular name for the O/BEC-generated structures. Like “Lobsters,” it was a gross misnomer. Why must every unfamiliar thing be compared to something washed up on a beach? “Lots of people vanished the same way.”

“Like those so-called pilgrims at Crossbank. But they don’t come back.”

“No,” Marguerite said, “they don’t come back.”

“Does Tess know that?”

“Yes.”

That, and perhaps more.

“There were times,” Chuck Hauser said, “when I despised that man for the way he treated you. I was more relieved than I let on when you divorced him. But I think he genuinely loved Tess, at least so far as he was able to love anyone.”