I said, “You asked what they could do if you decided not to be silent,
not to play this their way. Anything. That’s what they can do.” I
hesitated. Then, “I don’t know where my mother was going on the day she
died. She was driving out of town. Maybe to break this conspiracy wide
open. Because she knew, Lilly. She knew what had happened at Wyvern. She
never got where she was going. Neither would you.” Her eyes widened.
“The accident, the car crash.”
“No accident.” For the first time since I’d sat across the table from
her, Lilly met my eyes and held my gaze for longer than two or three
words, “Your mother.
Genetics. Her work. That’s how you know so much about this.” I didn’t
take the opportunity to explain more to Lilly, for fear she might reach
the correct conclusion that my mother was not merely a righteous
whistle-blower, that she was among those fundamentally responsible for
what had gone wrong at Wyvern. And if what happened to Jimmy was related
to the Wyvern cover-up, Lilly might take the next step in logic,
concluding that her son was in jeopardy as a direct result of my
mother’s work. While this was probably true, she might leap thereafter
into the realm of the illogical, assume that I was one of the
conspirators, one of the enemy, and withdraw from me.
Regardless of what my mother could have done, I was Lilly’s friend and
her best hope of finding her child.
“Your best chance, Jimmy’s best chance, is to trust us. Me, Bobby,
Sasha. Trust us, Lilly.”
“There’s nothing I can do. Nothing, ” she said bitterly.
Her clenched face changed, though it didn’t relax with relief at being
able to share this burden with friends. Instead, the wretched twist of
pain that distorted her features drew tighter, into a hard knot of
anger, as she was overcome by a simultaneously dispiriting and
infuriating recognition of her helplessness.
When her husband, Ben, died three years ago, Lilly had left her job as a
teacher’s aide, because she couldn’t support Jimmy on that income, and
she had risked the life-insurance money to open a gift shop in an area
of the harbor popular with tourists. With hard work, she made the
business viable. To overcome loneliness and grief at the loss of Ben,
she filled her spare hours with Jimmy and with self-education, She
learned to lay bricks, installing the walkways around her bungalow, she
built a fine picket fence, stripped and refinished the cabinets in her
kitchen, and became a first-class gardener, with the best landscaping in
her neighborhood. She was accustomed to taking care of herself, to
coping. Even in adversity, she had always before remained an optimist,
she was a doer, a fighter, all but incapable of thinking of herself as a
victim.
Perhaps for the first time in her life, Lilly felt entirely helpless,
pitted against forces she could neither fully understand nor
successfully defy. This time self-reliance was not enough, worse, there
seemed to be no positive action that she could take. Because it was not
in her nature to embrace victimhood, she could not find solace in
self-pity, either. She could only wait. Wait for Jimmy to be found
alive. Wait for him to be found dead. Or, perhaps worst of all, wait all
her life without knowing what had happened to him. Because of this
intolerable helplessness, she was racked equally by anger, terror, and a
portentous grief.
At last she unclasped her hands.
Her eyes blurred with tears that she struggled not to shed.
Because I thought she was going to reach out to me, I reached toward her
again.
Instead, she covered her face with her hands and, sobbing, said, “Oh,
Chris, I’m so ashamed.” I didn’t know whether she meant that her
helplessness shamed her or that she was ashamed of losing control, of
weeping.
I went around the table and tried to pull her into my arms.
She resisted for a moment, then rose from her chair and hugged me.
Burying her face against my shoulder, voice raw with anguish, she said,
“I was so … oh, God … I was so cruel to you.” Stunned, confused, I