第3章 第3節 父が知っていたこと
What Thomas Knew
Nora called her father from the cold hallway of the inn.
The line crackled, and for a moment she thought he would not answer.
"It's me," she said. "I'm in Saltmere. I know about the cannery."
She heard him breathe, a long, broken sound that aged him further.
"I told you to burn whatever came," Thomas said. "Why do you never listen?"
"Because you have lied to me my whole life," she answered.
There was a silence, and then the last of his defences fell.
"I was there that night," he admitted. "I will not pretend I wasn't."
Nora gripped the phone as if it might slip from her hand.
He told her that Edwin had gathered a few men.
He said that they had been promised money once the cannery burned.
"They put a can of in my hands," Thomas went on.
"They told me to light it, and I refused, and I have paid ever since."
"You refused," Nora repeated, needing to hear it stay true.
"I refused," he said, "but refusing did not save that boy inside."
Edwin had warned him that a talking man makes a of his wife.
So Thomas had swallowed the truth for twenty years, one day at a time.
"I sent your mother away to protect you both," he whispered.
"The drowning was a story we told so that you could grow up alive."
Nora's eyes stung, and the hallway blurred around the small hard phone.
"You let me her," she said. "You let me stand at an empty ."
"An empty was better than two full ones," her father said.
"I have hated myself in every language I know," he added, and coughed.
Then the line went dead, and she did not know if he had hung up or fallen.