Page 64 of The Children of Eve

“If that’s true, I have no idea why.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you. Has Jennifer shared something else with you, something important?”

“No,” said Sam. We were concealing nothing from each other now. “It’s the secret Jennifer holds, the one she won’t reveal: why it’s so important that they, whoever ‘they’ are, don’t find out about you.”

“Much as I’d like to accept that the universe does, in fact, revolve around me,” I said, “thereby proving any number of ex-partners wrong, your mother included, that makes no sense. After all that’s happened, after all I’ve done, the worst of men—and worse than them—can’t but be aware of me. I haven’t hidden myself. I have the wounds to prove it.”

“Unless you’ve hidden something from yourself, something crucial, and you’ve buried it so deep that it’s been forgotten. Isn’t that what happens if you stay undercover for too long? You start to become whoever you claim to be, and your real self gets buried so deep that you struggle to find it again.”

“But the real self is never lost, not completely. It’s in there, somewhere.”

“Which begs two questions,” said Sam. “Who are you, and what have you suppressed that’s so dangerous?”

To that neither of us had the answers, and the one who might have was elsewhere.

“Can I ask you something in turn?”

“Of course,” said Sam.

“What do you remember of the night Steiger died?”

The man named Steiger had died on the beach at Boreas, a resort town in Maine. A sand dune collapsed, suffocating him shortly after he had killed a woman and moments before he was about to shoot me. When the dune came down on him, Sam was standing nearby, watching. She had refused to speak of it ever since, even to a therapist friend of Rachel’s, and I had let it go—until now.

“I remember being scared,” she said. “I thought I’d be blamed for it. I blamed myself.”

I waited.

“That man was going to kill you,” she continued. “I was frightened, and didn’t know what to do. Then—”

She closed her eyes, pictured, opened them again, resumed.

“It was like a series of images or outcomes came into my mind all at once: a gun materializing in your hand and firing, a wave sweeping him from the beach, the ground swallowing him up, all these things that couldn’t occur, until finally, I saw an avalanche of sand. That was when Jennifer came. I felt her. She was in me and of me, and shepushed. She took what was in my head and made it a reality. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to evade responsibility, because I’m not. I visualized Steiger’s death. I wanted him to be buried under all that sand, conceived it as a solution, but I couldn’t make it happen. Jennifer could, but she needed me to envisage it. So together, we killed him. Afterward, I was shocked, but I wasn’t sorry. I’m still not sorry. He was a vile man.”

“He was,” I said.

Sam touched my hand.

“Can someone have no regrets about something yet still want to make up for doing it?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Then that’s why I want to find a way to help others. And when I toldyou that Jennifer keeps her distance from me, I’m also keeping my distance from her. She came to me when I needed her—Steiger, the Dead King—and she’d come to me again if I called her, but it’s better that I don’t. I may not feel remorse for what happened to Steiger, but I didn’t enjoy it. If he hadn’t died, you’d have taken his place. It wasn’t as though I needed time to consider the choice. But Jenniferdidlike it. Dad, she’s angry, she’s so angry: not at me or you, but at someone or something else. There’s a nucleus to it, but Jennifer keeps it concealed. Like you, she hides her secrets. I wonder—”

She stopped talking, so I finished for her.

“If we’re hiding the same thing,” I said.

We ordered coffee and returned to Sam’s plans for the immediate future.

“I didn’t just visit Amherst on this trip, like I told you and Mom,” she said. “I also went to Lowell. Again.”

“Why Lowell?”

“They have a criminal justice program. I might have applied and forgotten to mention it.”

“Ah.”

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