Part Ten: What He Was
People asked me, when they found out — the careful circle of people who eventually found out, friends and a few family members and the therapist — when I had realized Caleb was dangerous.
I gave different answers at different times. I said: I never did. I said: I think I felt something and didn’t look at it. I said: he was very good. I said: I was not looking for it.
All of those were true. None of them was complete.
The complete answer was that he had been exactly what I had believed him to be, for six years, in all the ways that I had been able to check. He showed up when he said he would. He remembered things I told him. He was kind to Noah with a consistency that I had watched carefully in the early months, the way parents watched new presences around their children, and had decided was real.
Perhaps it was real. That was the possibility I found hardest to look at directly: that some of it had been real, that the man who’d read bedtime stories and called to say he’d be late had contained genuine feeling, and that genuine feeling had not prevented any of the rest of it. That a person could be both things. That the smile in the wedding photographs could be honest and dishonest at once.
Owen Price smiled in those photographs because he was good at smiling. But I had smiled back, and my smile was real, and I wonder sometimes what it means that we are in the same photograph, equally composed, equally present, for entirely different reasons.
The fox that Noah still slept with — the one Agent Ramirez had bought at a gas station at five in the morning to give a frightened child something to hold — was kept on his pillow every day, washed once a month, and brought on every trip we took.
He named it Mara.
My sister, when she heard this, made a face that was trying to be dismissive and failing entirely, and said that a fox was an extremely appropriate animal to name after her, and then she went to make pancakes, and they were bad, and she ate them anyway.
