An alarm began to sound inside me.
“You gotta admit it’s interesting timing that Senator Lord delivers this letter to you from Benton and now all of a sudden we’re over here going to Interpol . . . ”
“Let’s don’t do this.” I cut him off as my stomach tightened and my heart began to pound.
“You gotta hear me out, Doc ,” he replied. “In the letter Benton’s saying for you to stop grieving, that everything’s all right and he knows what you’re doing right this minute . . :’
“Stop it!” I raised my voice and threw my napkin on the table as emotions began crashing in on all sides.
“We got to face it” Marino was getting emotional; too. “How do you know . . . I mean, what if the letter really wasn’t written several years ago? What if it was written now…?”
“No! How dare you!” I exclaimed as tears filled my eyes.
I pushed back my chair and got up.
“Leave,” I told him. “I won’t be subjected to your goddamn UFO theories. What do you want? To make me live through this hell all over again? So I can hope for something when I’ve worked so hard to accept the truth? Get out of my room.”
Marino. pushed back his chair, and it fell over as he jumped to his feet. He snatched his pack of cigarettes off the table.
“What if he’s fucking still alive?” He raised his voice, too. “How do you know for a fact he didn’t have to disappear for a while because of some big thing going on that involves ATF, FBI, Interpol, shit, maybe NASA, for all we know?”
I grabbed my wine, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold it without spilling, my entire existence ripped open again. Marino was stalking the room and gesturing wildly with his cigarette.
“You don’t know it for a fact,” he said again. “All you saw was burned-up bone in a stinking black fire hole. And a Breiding watch like his. So fucking what!”
“You son of a bitch!” I said. “You goddamn son of a bitch! After all I’ve been through; and then you have to . . .”
“You’re not the only one who’s been through it. You know, just because you slept with him doesn’t mean you fucking owned him.”
I took quick steps toward him and caught myself before I slapped him hard across the face.
“Oh, God,” I muttered as I stared into his shocked eyes. “Oh, God.”
I thought of Lucy striking Jo, and I walked away from him. He turned to the window and smoked. The room was overcast with misery and shame, and I leaned my head against the wall and shut my eyes. I’d never come even close to violence with anyone in my life, not anyone like this, not someone I knew and cared about.
“Nietzsche was right;” I muttered in a defeated way. “Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that’s who you become most like.”
“I’m sorry,” Marino barely said.
“Like my first husband, like my idiot sister, like every out-of-control cruel, selfish person I’ve ever known. Here I am. Like them.”
“No, you ain’t.”
My forehead was pressed against the wall, as if I were praying, and I was grateful we were in shadows, my back to him, so he could not see my anguish.
“I didn’t mean what I said, Doc. I swear I didn’t. I don’t even know why I said it.”
“It’s all right.”
“All I’m trying to do is look at everything because there’s pieces that aren’t fitting right.”
He walked over to an ashtray and stabbed out his cigarette.
“I don’t know why we’re here,” he said.
“We’re not here to do this,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know why they couldn’t have exchanged info with us through the computer, over the phone, like they always do. Do you?”
“No,” I whispered as I took a deep breath.
“So it started sneaking into my thoughts that maybe Benton . . . What if there was something going on and he had to be a protected witness for a while. Change his identity and all that. We didn’t always know what he was into. Not even you always knew, because he couldn’t always tell you, and he would never want to hurt us by telling us something we shouldn’t know. Especially not hurt you or make you worry about him all the time.”