“Okay,” said Jake.

She had picked up the single gray braid of her hair, and was twisting the end around and around her fingers in a way that was almost hypnotic. He loved so many things about the way she looked, but that silver hair, it occurred to him, he loved most of all. Thinking of it swinging loose made a kind of weighty thump inside his head. He had been traveling for days, and worried for months. Now, with so many of the pieces finally in place, he was deeply tired, and all he wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she was leaving tonight. Maybe he needed some time to recover. Maybe they each needed a couple of days to themselves.

“So after the accident,” said Anna, “our bereaved mom keeps heading south. Lemonade out of lemons, right?”

Jake nodded his heavy head.

“And when she gets to Athens she registers in Rose’s name, and gets permission to live off campus for her freshman year. And that gets us up to the end of the 2012 to 2013 academic year. What happens after that?”

Jake sighed. “Well, I know she left the university. After that, I’m not sure where she went or where she’s been, but it doesn’t really matter. She can’t want to be exposed for her real crime any more than I do for my imaginary one. So tomorrow I’ll send her an email and tell her to fuck off. And I’ll cc that asshole attorney to make sure she gets the message.”

“But don’t you want to know where she is now? And what her name is? Because obviously, she’ll have changed her name. You don’t even know what she looks like. Right?”

She had taken his bowl to the sink and she was washing it. She washed his spoon and the pot she’d used to heat the soup up. Then she put all of those things in the dishwasher, and started it. She came back to the table and stood over him. “Maybe we should get you lying down,” she said. “You really do look beat.”

He could not deny it, and he wasn’t up to trying.

“It’s good you got that soup into you, though. One of the only things my mother gave me, that soup.”

Then he remembered what he wanted to ask her.

“You mean, Miss Royce. The teacher?”

“No, no. My real mom.”

“But, she died. She drove into a lake when you were so young. Didn’t she drive into a lake?”

Suddenly, Anna was laughing. Her laugh was musical: light and sweet. She laughed as if all of that—the soup, the teacher, the mom who’d driven her car into a lake in Idaho—was some of the funniest stuff she had ever heard. “You are so pathetic. What self-respecting writer doesn’t know the plot of Housekeeping? Fingerbone, Idaho! The aunt who can’t take care of herself or her nieces! I didn’t even change the teacher’s name, for fuck’s sake! And don’t think that wasn’t a risk. Tempting fate to prove a point, I guess.”

He wanted to ask what it was, that point, but getting his throat to breathe and talk at the same time had suddenly attained the complexity of juggling with knives, and besides, he already knew. How hard was it, really, to steal someone else’s story? Anybody could do it—you didn’t even have to be a writer.

Still, there was something about this he just couldn’t work out. In fact, there were only a few things he seemed capable of understanding at all, and whatever powers of concentration he still possessed had gone to those things, like blood to the vital organs when you’re stranded in a snowbank, dying of frostbite. First: that Anna was leaving for the airport soon. Second: that Anna seemed to know something he didn’t. Third: that Anna was still angry at him. He didn’t have the strength to ask about all three. So he asked about the last one, because he had already forgotten the first two.

“You’re still angry at me, aren’t you?” he said, speaking the words extremely carefully so as not to be misunderstood. And she nodded.

“Well, Jake,” she said, “I’d have to say that’s true. I’ve been angry at you for a very long time.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

That Novelist’s Eye for Detail

“I wasn’t going to do this yet,” said Anna. She had the crook of her elbow under his arm and she was lifting him, or helping him up, one of the two. He must, at some point, have become terribly light, or else the floor of the apartment had helpfully tipped to a forty-five-degree angle. She held him tightly as they passed the kilim-covered couch, and it slid up one of the walls as they went by, but magically, without actually moving. “There was no rush. And then you had to start running around like Lord Peter Wimsey. It’s something I don’t really get about you, this compulsion to understand everything. And all the sturm und drang! If you were going to be this troubled about what you’d done, why steal someone else’s story in the first place? I mean, torturing yourself about it after the fact. Such a waste of energy, especially when I’m right here, and I’m so good at it. Don’t you think so?”

He started to shake his head no, because he hadn’t stolen, but then he understood that she was good at it, so he nodded. She probably didn’t notice either one. She was helping him along the slow walk into their bedroom and he was shuffling beside her, his arm over her shoulder, her hand gripping his wrist. Jake’s head was down, but he could see the cat, darting past them into the living room.

“I have some medicine for you,” Anna said, “and then, I don’t see any reason not to tell you my story. Because if there’s one thing I know about you, Jake, it’s how you appreciate a good story. My singular story, told in my unique voice. Do you see any reason?”

He didn’t. Then again he didn’t understand the question. He sat on the bed and she gave him the capsules, three or four at a time, and he really didn’t want to but he swallowed them all, until there weren’t any more. “Good job,” she said, after each handful. He drank the water from the glass. That went onto the bedside table, next to the empty pill bottles. He did want to know what they were, the pills, but did it really matter?

“Well, we’ve got a few minutes,” said Anna. “Was there anything you wanted to ask, in particular?”

There was something, thought Jake. But now he couldn’t remember.

“Okay. I’ll just, sort of, free-associate. You stop me if you’ve heard any of this already.”

Yes, said Jake, though he couldn’t actually hear himself say it.

“What?” said Anna. She looked up from her phone. His phone, actually. “You’re mumbling,” she said. Then she went on with whatever it was she was doing.

“I don’t want to be that person who’s always whining about her childhood, but you need to know it was always about Evan in our house. Evan and football. Evan and soccer. Evan and girls. The guy was an imbecile, but you know how it is with families. The pride of the Parkers! Scoring goals and passing his classes—wow! Even when he started doing drugs they thought the sun just shined out of his ass. As for me, it didn’t matter how smart I was or how good my grades were or what I wanted to do in the world, I was still nothing. So there’s Evan getting girls pregnant right and left and he’s an angel from heaven, but when I got pregnant it was like their job to punish me, and make sure it stuck for the rest of my life. It was all: you’re dropping out of high school and keeping this baby because that’s what you deserve. Zero chance of an abortion. Zero support for giving the baby up for adoption, either. You were spot-on with all that, actually, the way you wrote it. That’s absolutely what it was like for me. Which isn’t a compliment, by the way.”

He didn’t take it as one.

“So then I have this baby I don’t want and they don’t want and I’m out of school, sitting at home with her all day getting yelled at by my mom and dad about the shame I’ve brought on the family, and one morning when they’re out of the house I hear this beeping down in the cellar. The carbon monoxide alarm’s going crazy, and I didn’t know what that meant, but I did a little research. I just took the batteries out, and replaced them with a couple of dead ones. I didn’t know if it was going to work, or how long it would take if it did, or which of us were going to go, and I did keep the window open in my room, where the baby was, too, but to be honest, I think I was okay with whatever happened.”

She stopped and leaned over him. She was checking his breathing.

“You want me to go on?”

But it didn’t matter what he wanted, did it?

“I tried my best. It wasn’t fun, but you know, I thought, it’s just the two of us here. There was no one to count on, but also no one for me to blame if it went downhill. I kind of lost my drive after the rest of my class graduated, I’ll admit to that. And I got to thinking, maybe this is the way it’s supposed to go, giving up my own life for this other life. I thought I could make my peace with that, and besides, I wasn’t against having that thing you’re supposed to have with a kid. Companionship or whatever. But that girl.”