They arrive two hours later at the emergency ward entrance of the first hospital they encounter, at the farthest outward edge of Amarillo. Cooper helps Dawes inside to the admitting desk. He doesn’t know Dawes’s real name so he just writes down Sidney Dawes on the forms. When pressed for details by the attending nurse, Cooper tells her it was a hunting accident: that they work security for a private corporation which operates a remote facility, and some hunters strayed too close to the grounds, so he and his fellow officer went out to ward them off and she got clipped by an errant round.
Once she’s admitted, he stands at her bedside.
“I’m sorry I let you down,” she says.
“You saved Isaac,” Cooper says. “Without you, he’d be gone right now, no doubt. And Fran would be dead. You saved them both.”
“I’ve never even held a gun before.”
“May you never need to hold one again.”
“Everything you said out there was true? What you said in the street? And what he said?”
“Yes, it’s true,” Cooper says.
“Are you going to turn yourself in?” she asks.
“To who?”
She doesn’t answer, then turns her head toward the painted wall. He waits.
“I wanted to be change,” she says.
“You are,” he says. “And you’re not finished.”
He promises, over her protestations, to return and visit her again tonight. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, he says, once his one last errand is done. Then he leaves her to her bed and the ministrations of the staff.
Now it’s just Cooper and Fran and Hannibal and Spiro in the truck, driving over empty road. Two gas cans splash and rattle in the back of the SUV. The empty cans, from Orson’s yard, filled up at a filling station just beyond the hospital.
It’s nearly dusk. The sun, so bright and buoyant in the daytime, slides like a spent coin behind the horizon. The day’s last light blossoms pink and red and disperses in all directions, and it’s hard to tell, from behind the windshield, if this last light is fending off the darkness, or simply surrendering to it.
They pull into Dr. Holliday’s driveway. Only Cooper and Fran disembark.
Dr. Holliday greets them outside her front door with a smile.
“Calvin, I’ve been expecting you,” she says. “And you brought a guest.”
“I’m Fran Adams,” she says.
“Ah, yes,” says Holliday. “The source of all this trouble.” She gestures to the patio. “Care to join me? The sunset is spectacular from this vantage point.”
There’s no offered drinks, no further niceties, just three people seated at the table. Flickering torches illuminate the patio.
“Will they come back?” asks Cooper.
“Not if I don’t let them,” says Holliday. “I’m the gatekeeper, Calvin. I always have been.”
“So you let them come in the first place?” says Cooper.
“I didn’t seek them out. They approached me. You have to understand, Mark Vincent has been a very generous benefactor to this program since its inception. He shared my vision, even when Johann did not.” Holliday wears a long, flowing white linen top, with a heavy pendular necklace made of large turquoise stones of obvious value. The torches cast shadows that flicker across her face. “Mark was obsessed with the idea that your worst memories might eventually be erased. That they might no longer be part of who you are. Given his”—she searches here—“proclivities, and his eventual ambitions, I suspect he saw the possibility of erasure as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card. Or a stay-out-of-jail card, as it were.” She smiles at Fran. “He didn’t anticipate his wife’s more crude intervention.”
“But who were the other ones?” says Cooper. “Who were Colfax, and Gable, and Dean?”
“Colfax was just a common killer, you know his history,” Holliday says. “As for Gable and Dean—Vincent’s representatives contacted us six months or so after his incident, when it started to look like maybe he would survive after all. They offered us some further individuals whose knowledge of Vincent’s appetites might prove problematic. One of them was Lester Vogel, who was Vincent’s regular pipeline for his materials. The other was a bodyguard, Perry Garrett. Apparently, he and Vincent shared certain enthusiasms and had hit it off, and Garrett had acted as a kind of go-between. Both Vogel and Garrett were arrested and quickly funneled into our program. When we were done with them, neither of them had any clue who they’d been before, let alone that they’d ever known the other. But then Mark Vincent woke up.”
“That was years ago,” says Cooper.
“There was some question as to the viability of resuscitating his political ambitions,” says Holliday. “He had an extensive rehab, as you may know. Once a political comeback seemed possible, even inevitable, there was a new urgency to put the past to rest. Also, he became very interested in his former wife’s whereabouts. As you might expect.”
“I’m right here,” says Fran. “You can talk to me directly.”
“Yes, I guess you are—you finally are. In the sense of being the woman, Carla Milne, who came to us eight years ago. The bloodstained poet. You remember everything now, don’t you? My triggers worked exceptionally well.”
“What triggers?” Fran asks.
“The newscasts. The headlines in the papers. The book at the library. To be honest, I had no idea what it would take to reawaken your memory, or if it was even possible. We’ll have to discuss this in detail some other time, Ms. Milne. I’m very curious about your experience. What happens when you get yourself back in full, in all your . . . complexity.”
Holliday turns back to Cooper. “And then there’s you, my dear Calvin. My first. You always remember the first.”
“I was just another variable,” says Cooper. “For the experiment.”
“You were much more than that. First, you helped me solve my dilemma with Johann. He simply ran out of vision at a certain point, and I ran out of patience. Then, once you’d done that for me, you were a chance to find out whether, stripped of your identity, you’d relapse to the capabilities you’d previously exhibited. I was the one, of course, who pointed Rigo toward you. They’d clumsily approached Ellis Gonzalez, after they’d learned he was running illicit mail into the town, but he refused. So I told Rigo to try you instead. I was so curious to see how you’d respond to his proposal.”
Cooper watches Holliday talk, her elegant face framed against a backdrop of verdant foliage, the torches dancing, the curling leaves and tender flowers of the patio enveloping the three of them on all sides. This expansive garden is such a contrast to the arid plains around it, he thinks, it almost feels like an entirely different planet. Like they’re the only three people in some newborn world. Him, Fran, and Holliday, sitting here, in a virgin garden of Eden. Adam, Eve, and a third entity, regarding them. God, or the serpent, or both.