Part Three: The Name
Marcus set down his coffee cup.
Later, thinking about this moment — and he would think about it many times, in the way you think about the precise second when the direction of something changed — he would remember the quality of the silence inside him when she said what she said next. Not silence like emptiness. Silence like the moment before a sound you have been hearing distantly suddenly becomes loud and close.
“What is your mother’s name?” he asked.
His voice came out steadier than he expected.
Lily looked at him with the particular directness of children who have been asked an important question and understand its importance.
“Sarah,” she said.
The diner continued around them. The griddle hissed. The television described a pressure system moving in from the northwest. The child with the spoon had been persuaded, finally, to stop.
Marcus Reeves sat very still.
Sarah.
Not an uncommon name. There was no reason, statistically, for it to be her. There were thousands of women named Sarah who had daughters and lived in the interior of the country and knew things about wolf tattoos — well, perhaps not thousands, but there were possibilities, coincidences, explanations that did not require the thing he was already feeling in the center of his chest, the thing that felt like a door being opened in a room he had sealed and stopped entering years ago.
But the wolf.
She had specifically described the wolf. Not a tattoo in general. Not any marking. This sign.
“How old are you, Lily?” he asked.
“Eight,” she said. “Eight and a half.”
He did a calculation he had not planned to do. It arrived at a number that made his hands want to do something — he was not sure what — and he pressed them flat on the table instead.
“Did your mother give you anything?” he asked. “Anything to show me, or anything she told you to say?”
Lily reached into the pocket of the oversized jacket. She withdrew her hand and held it out toward him, palm up.
In her palm was half of a metal pendant — a small disc, slightly tarnished, with a ragged edge where it had been broken.
Marcus reached slowly into the interior pocket of his jacket.
His fingers found it by feel alone, the way you find things you have carried so long they have become part of the landscape of your body. He drew it out and held it in his own palm.
The other half.
He placed the two halves together.
They matched perfectly, the break fitting exactly, the image on the front resolving into a complete wolf — mid-stride, head slightly lowered — identical to the one on his arm.
He had bought the pendant in a market in New Mexico, twenty years ago, the summer before everything went wrong. He had broken it in two the night before he and Sarah were supposed to leave together, and he had given her half and kept half as a kind of promise: these two things belong together, and so do we.
He had carried his half for nineteen years. He had not, in all that time, put it down.
