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Emma plunges straight in. “If we’re being informal—your questionnaire answers pissed me off.” He throws his hands up, turns back to his books. “And now we’ve lost civility altogether.”
He adds another note to his paper. “A personal acquaintance is no excuse for abandoning courtesy. How have you been, Simon? Thank you, Emma, I’ve been very well. It’s the small details that lubricate our daily interactions.”
“You and Kristin have both placed yourselves in positions where you can indulge your post-traumatic peccadilloes. She’s at Chesterfield, where she can relax into fantasy. You’re with the FBI, where you can channel your fury.”
“Listen. No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks—Mary Shelley, of course. Our Pennsylvania friend seeks his happiness. Every creature on earth has wants and desires, has things they turn toward—flower to sun, snake to warmth, moth to flame. Daniel Huxton saw something in you, Emma. He could not resist your shine.”
New-made ghosts live inside those walls, and now she’s not sure she wants to know them.
She takes a shuddering breath in through her nose, registers the ozone scent of decaying metal. The smell of heat from the lights, and sweat from the people in the space. The low, raw notes of slaughter.
The keening in her head magnifies. Resolves itself into a piercing, endless scream. She looks for as long as she can. Records everything behind her eyes, as Cooper instructed. Records it also in her viscera, in the marrow of her bones, in the sinews of her legs, in the mysterious recesses of her mind where no light enters.
“Well, you don’t ‘handle’ your momma. That’s how she is—that’s why I married her. I mean, look at her. The sparks coming off her.” He gazed through the glass, his face full of pride. “You don’t try to tame the lightning, son. You just give it the respect it deserves.”
But Kristin is pressing herself against the metal, clasping her brother’s hands, touching his face, as Simon strains forward to kiss her cheek, press his forehead to hers. Kristin is crying. Simon’s eyes are glistening. Their matched coloring makes them hard to distinguish from each other. They really are one flesh, Emma thinks numbly. Two people connected at the most basic level, through blood and breath shared in the womb, skin and muscle and hair and nails formed from the same material. But the division was imperfect: Instead of two mirror images, they are one being split apart—Kristin the
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It’s quite possible that Simon Gutmunsson would talk underwater.
