Ash, I’m not a journal—”
“I know you’re not, Mr. Cale,” she replied, her words coming out in a tired breath.
“Do you know why I’m here?” he asked, trying to make it sound less of a challenge.
“They gave me some idea,” she said. Turning with her shoulders slightly sagged, she walked back into the house before she realized he was still waiting on the porch, needing an invitation. “Come in, Mr. Cale, come in.”
The décor was what he expected. Tasteful, coordinated, like a layout in a home furnishings magazine, right down to the wooden curios the Ash father and mother probably bought on holiday in Peru. Mrs. Ash waved him to a cream white couch and asked him if he wanted tea or coffee. He didn’t want either, thank you. Then Mrs. Ash confirmed that yes, her daughter was home—in fact, she was upstairs in the room she had grown up in, but “you’ll want to ask me some questions first.”
“I will?”
“They all do,” said Mrs. Ash. “Everyone who comes to see her. The doctors, the government men—I think they’re afraid of her.” Her face looked pinched again for a moment, as if on the verge of either tears or a strained smile that seemed to tell him: I’m afraid, too.
She was past the exuberant joy of the miracle, of a reunion with her daughter that involved grateful hugs and tears, of excited confusion over how she could possibly be back. Now there was living with the miracle; with the knowledge that her child was still a victim, even if revived.
“I’m supposed to know her. I’m her mother. Do you have children, Mr. Cale?” But she didn’t wait for the answer. “I’m supposed to know her,” she said again with more emphasis.
He stopped himself before he offered the clichéd answer, the obvious answer: that even if Nickelbaum hadn’t murdered Mary Ash, she had been tortured and repeatedly raped, sometimes with foreign objects. There was no way the girl would have woken up from this horror in a hospital bed without being a different person, forever changed. But he was sure Mrs. Ash already knew this.
She must know it, he thought, because she had made a family impact statement at Nickelbaum’s sentencing. She had given a five-minute speech that didn’t curse her daughter’s murderer or talk about the robbed life of a sweet young girl, only how someone capable of such depraved acts must have so little human empathy that he merited extermination. She had got her wish. And she had got more.
Tim watched her go to the sideboard and pour what looked like a rye for herself. She lifted the bottle to him in afterthought. He shook his head.
“Her fingers are back,” said Mrs. Ash, sipping her drink. “The ones that monster cut off. They were just—suddenly—back. I noticed them on her fifth day with us. The doctors told us on the second day that all the… damage to her insides was gone, no scar tissue. They chalked it up to some reviving effect of this … this booth thing. All right, I can accept that. I’m not a religious person, but I can accept that my daughter’s privates are healed after the things he did to her and the way he violated her. But people don’t grow back digits like salamanders.”
“No, they don’t.”
“You think I’m ungrateful.” She took another long pull of her drink. Through the French windows to the back yard, Tim saw the shadows growing longer on the grass.
“No, I don’t,” he said carefully. “It sounds like you were doing your best with your grief, and now a stranger has been foisted on you.”
“Please don’t patronize me, Mr. Cale.”
“I’m not, Mrs. Ash. Quite the contrary. I imagine you have all sorts of people looking to you to help explain what’s happened or worse. They pretend they actually know what’s going on.”
“Yes, they do. But they don’t know at all, do they?”
“No, they don’t.”
She deserved the truth.
Her fingers drummed on her glass tumbler for a moment as she looked out the window to the garden. The shadows were still lengthening, as if darkness could acquire weight. Then she said, “You can go up and see her now if you want to.”
He muttered a thanks and went up.
It was quiet in the hall.
He knocked softly on the door to the girl’s room, and the light voice that answered adopted a formal tone: “Yes?” No grown-up child that’s come home ever answers Yes to a knock at the door like that. You call out Mom or Dad or say Come in or say Hey. Maybe Mary Ash had heard the doorbell about half an hour ago or was getting used to the parade of visitors.
When he pushed the door open, he found her sitting on her bed with a large charcoal sketchpad. The pad was propped up against the improvised drafting table of her knees. She smiled at him pleasantly but with no effort to rise or to interrupt her drawing. It was the smile of a self-absorbed toddler greeting a polite friend of her daddy’s. A pleasant enough smile. The eyes, however, weren’t young. They were a wise and vivid green, so striking that he almost took them for another color, one that belonged on a flower from the family garden or on a bright, newly born grasshopper chewing its leaves, knowing what its singular purpose and arrival was for.
“Mary, my name is Tim Cale.”
She nodded and smiled again expectantly, reaching out her hand to shake his without a word.
The hand with the re-grown fingers.
Her touch was cool, with a limpness thanks to a tutored grace. And then her eyes were down, back to the drawing.
The room itself told him very little, relentlessly neat and clean like the lounge below. Whatever she was now, Mary Ash had once favored pastel colors, and the acrylic paintings on the wall owed a lot to the European Fauvists. There was a framed computer store ad on the wall—obviously one of her first compositions as a professional graphic artist.
With the high angle she had for the sketchpad on her knees, he couldn’t see what her composition was. Not yet.
“Mary,” he tried again. “Mary, I know you’ve had a lot of visitors, and I’ll probably have the same questions…”
Her eyes flicked up from the sketchpad and down again as she let out a soft giggle. “I doubt it.”
“You do?”
She hadn’t invited him to sit, but he sat down anyway in the white wicker chair, making it crunch. I doubt it. He could infer a lot from those three little words, and he was instinctively certain he didn’t have to explain what his job was or why he was here.
Okay, he thought. If she expects you to ask different questions, go ahead and ask them. You planned to anyway.
He wouldn’t ask her what she remembered of Nickelbaum’s attack. He wouldn’t ask if she had any consciousness of the… transition to wherever she went. He wouldn’t ask where she had been all this time before her return. Others had inquired, and the girl had shaken her head dully or told them she couldn’t remember. She was just… back.
“Mary, what are you going to do now? I mean, after you’ve rested. Will you go back to your old job? The design firm will probably be glad to have you.”
Her eyes lifted off the paper with new interest.
“What did you feel like doing after Paris?” she asked.
After Paris…?
Don’t show it, he thought. Don’t show surprise. Don’t show you’ve been rattled. It was possible someone had filled in the girl about details of his career.
Her voice remained soft, almost ethereal. The charcoal pencil scratched the page.
“Well, it’s not like I was ever murdered and brought back from the dead,” he answered reasonably.