The thing Everett never told anyone — not the club, not the lawyers, not the kind grief counselor the court had suggested in a pamphlet — was that the last day had been an ordinary one, and that the ordinariness was what he could not forgive the universe for. If there had been signs, he could have hated the signs. There had been nothing. There had been Lily's drawing taped to the refrigerator, and Ruth singing off-key to the radio, and rain coming in off the river in the late afternoon, turning the Louisville streets the color of slate.
He had been at the shop. That was the shape of his guilt, and it had a shape — he had held it so long he knew its edges. Ruth had called at six: she was taking Lily to her sister's, the roads were getting bad, did he want them to wait? He'd said no. He'd said drive careful, I'll finish this transmission and be right behind you. He had said it with a wrench in his hand and his mind already on the next bolt. He had not said anything else. There had not been anything else to say. That was the hell of it — the last words were about a transmission.
Ray Maddox had been drinking since noon. This came out later, in the dry language of reports: a bar tab, a witness, a blood level with numbers in it. Ray had gotten behind the wheel of his truck in the rain because men like Ray always believe the rules of physics are a kind of suggestion that applies to other people. He crossed the center line on a curve outside Louisville at a quarter past seven, in the dark, in the rain, at a combined speed that left the investigators quiet when they did the arithmetic.
Ruth had time — the trooper told Everett this gently, later, as if it were a mercy — Ruth had time to turn the wheel. She turned it toward herself. It is what mothers do with the last second they are given; she spent it putting her own side of the car between the truck and her daughter. It was not enough. The arithmetic was not interested in what mothers do. But Everett has always believed that Lily, in her car seat, in the rain, was held those final seconds inside the fact of being loved that completely — and that if a soul can be accompanied anywhere, she was accompanied all the way to the edge of the world by her mother's whole heart arriving there first.
He did not remember the drive to the hospital. For years he believed the memory was gone mercifully, burned out like a fuse. In fact it had only been stored somewhere his waking self wasn't allowed. It came back in dreams on a schedule he never learned: headlights, the wet corridor, a nurse who was too young, a doctor whose mouth he watched instead of listening to, because he understood that if he listened he would have to live in the world the words made, and he was bargaining, standing there in his shop clothes with grease under his nails, for one more minute in the old one.
The funerals were on a Thursday. It did not rain. He has always resented that Thursday its sunshine with a purity that surprised him; it seemed to him an insult offered by a sky that owed them weather. The club rode escort, forty bikes, rolling thunder at ten miles an hour, and the whole route was lined with people from the neighborhood who had known Ruth from the school and Lily from the sidewalk chalk. Two coffins. One of them was so small that carrying it used only three men, and Everett carried his side alone, because no one on earth was going to help him carry that, and the men who loved him understood and walked with their hands hovering, useless and faithful, all the way to the grave.
He did not cry at the funeral. He cried three weeks later, alone, in the garage, holding a small yellow rain boot, and he made sounds he had not known were in him, and the dog from next door came and sat against the outside of the door until he was finished.
There had been a trooper, years later — the same one, retired by then — who found Everett at a gas station by chance and stood with him a moment, hat in hand, and told him the thing he had never put in any report: that at the scene, in the wreck, Lily's small backpack had been found neatly zipped, with her library book inside it wrapped in a plastic bag against the rain, because Ruth was the kind of mother who wrapped library books. Everett had thanked him and driven fifty miles before he had to pull over, not because the detail hurt — everything hurt — but because it was new. After twelve years he had believed the inventory of his loss was complete, and it was not, and it never would be; the world would keep handing him small, ordinary, devastating evidence of the two lives, forever, one library book at a time.
What he did after that was simpler and worse. He dried his face. He went to court. And he did the thing that would follow him for twelve years, and bring a man with a gun to a travel plaza on a hot afternoon: he sat down in a witness chair, and he told the truth, carefully, completely, in front of Ray Maddox's face — and he watched the truth put that man in a cage.