Emily is home again, glad for the moody D.C. weather. She opens her windows to a constant drumming of spring rain, putting on a thick sweater to make herself some tea. She likes the sound. It makes her think of childhood, Saturdays and mornings cold enough for flannel and slippers. She carries the steaming mug into the living room. She sits on the sofa. She takes a tentative sip and puts the cup on a coaster, sliding her laptop onto her knees.
Her fingers tap at the keys:
In a way, I was right: a woman acting alone. Except she was inside a male body, using it, sharing space with a man. Two-for-one.
She pauses.
Hotch keeps circling me. He thinks I don’t notice, but how could I not? I’m waiting for the day when I’ll get the summons.“We need to talk, Emily. About what’s going on with you. You haven’t been right since Texas.” I can imagine the meaningful pause behind that piercing gaze and his soft, soft voice:“Is there anything I can do?”
She sits back and looks out the window. It’s a beautiful view made atmospheric and accessible by the dark clouds and blowing curtains of rain. Lights reflect in the droplets of water on the glass. The wind changes and she smells rain, cold, exhaust and beaten-down jonquils. Was there anything he could do? She’d crossed into no-man’s land.
There’s no way to say “there’s nothing you can do for me.” I could say it but he wouldn’t hear it. Hotch, tools in hand: let me fix you. Except I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not like a broken pipe or a hole punched into the drywall. I’d ask myself if I’ve lost my mind but that’s too dramatic. A statement like that needs sinister music in the background, and there is none. There’s just me, and an old song used like a tool to pry into my mind. It’s ridiculous of me to even type this, to think my computer is a safe place. I know there aren’t any.
So here’s your progress report, George. Here’s what’s happening: Hotch has wind of this and you know Hotch. He won’t let it go. Sooner or later he’ll spring his concern on me like a trap and where will we be then? I bet you like that: “where will we be then.”Me naming myself as your co-conspirator. It gives you whatever passes for jollies in your sick little world.
I might as well tell you everything, if only because I have to tell it to myself. I’m afraid of Hotch because I’m afraid of how I feel for him. Not in the Hallmark Hall of Fame way. It’s very functional. I suspect that it’s chemical, some sort of response on the atomic level to the knowledge that he would step between me and a bullet. He doesn’t even know that you’re the bullet and still he’s trying to intervene. I’m convinced there’s a whole world happening between people at the chemical level: famines, wars, reconstructions, long fractured times of peace. The bottom line is that if he wanted me I would allow him to have me. I’m not sure I could stop it; the undertow of all that chemical history would pull me down. People like you don’t believe in love, but I’m not sure that people like me believe in love, either, at least not the way we’re taught to see it. Roses and kisses and moonlit walks on the beach are inadequate letters used to try and spell out the things that exist beyond words.
At different times of the day, Emily imagines different times in Foyet’s life.
She’s read his file. A copy of it sits in the trunk of her car, pored over on lunch breaks and before visits to the shooting range. Its skeletal nature is infuriating. How could someone go through life with so little definition? It’s a blueprint she’s seen hundreds of times: abusive father, inadequate mother, hints of retroactive suspicion surrounding the death of his biological parents but nothing substantial”who would want to believe a nine-year-old capable of murder? He has an IQ of 150. This tested at ten, by the state of Massachusetts, just before the Foyets stepped onto the stage. What makes some survivors of abuse and not others develop into murderers? It details a childhood otherwise uneventful, spent in good schools, summers on Nantucket. Is it some quirk of the brain, some misfiring knot of neurons unidentified by modern science? Long dry periods of hibernation, killer’s instincts dozing.
Is it something else?
Emily doesn’t believe in evil the way Rossi does. When she looks at unsubs, she sees broken minds, crippled growth, shattered personalities. What is deformed by the vagaries of life can’t be made right, and through the mind’s countless attempts to reconstitute itself, the birth-map becomes warped. Wires short out. Things fall to rot.
In the mornings, while on her way to work or sorting through her mail, she knows the day’s weather and imagines him in it: sitting at a bench with a newspaper in the sun, in a parked car in the rain, drinking coffee beneath the brim of a baseball cap at a table in an outdoor café. She sees him framed by four dingy walls, eating frozen dinners, sunlight snuffed by curtains, watching television until his thoughts drown.
How is it to live on the outside of everything? I imagine you like an animal in a bolthole. Some small hunched thing, sleeping surrounded by the bones of its kills: cheap anonymous hotel room on skid row, surrounded by the broken and abandoned. Is that you? Maybe you want me to think so, want us to think so, but I don’t. You blend in, you creep across the land, you change your presence, and I’m starting to admire you for it. I couldn’t. I’m too tied in by the families I was born to and those that I have chosen, held down by my work. I think we choose this work for its weight. People like me, growing up like a leaf on the wind, need the ponderousness and gravity of a cornerstone. We need to be pulled back from the edge.
By lunchtime she’s honed in on a single phrase: Summers on Nantucket. She’s been a couple of times and both times she felt the press of the sea, its numbing alienation from the mainland. Island life is small. How did that feel? Was it like a tight skin, something pushing down on his grandiose ambitions? She imagined those long-faced New England girls, blue-blooded blondes, girls with coltish legs and big white teeth. As his teenage friends imagined how those small white breasts would fill up their curved palms, what was young George Foyet thinking of? What filled his sticky dreams? Did he sleep with a hunting knife, its thin hot gleaming edge more arousing than salty post-pubescent cunts wrapped up in sand-chafed bikini bottoms? She sees him in the moonstruck darkness of a heavy summer night, laying on top of the covers, knife tight in his hand. Beveled blade and the silver moon running back and forth, back and forth, his eyes racing those deadly curves. Mesmerized by a dream of…what? The resistance of lycra-wrapped elastic? The yield of skin? The heat of released blood? Teenage and slender, well-built in a cold wash of moonlight. Heavy breath. Letting go, the flat of the knife resting on his swollen cock, perpendicular and trembling beneath the ferocity of his pulse.
Emily takes a sip of tea. It warms up the inside of her mouth and her face gets hot.
Those ties are the harness holding me over the pit. What is swimming around beneath me? You are.
Evenings slide straight into dreams. She sees his imagination like a warped bud, folded tight and hard around his grandiose sense of self. How constraining are the limits of skin. Would he sleep in bowers built of his own bones? How to let go, sliding into the pool of the unconscious, when the universe of your reality lives in your flesh?
She wants a lever to pry open the petals. She would shove her fingers beneath them and peel until they come apart, until there is blood all over her hands.
It is very close now. That moment, that night, the hour when Hotch finds his way into me. He’ll ask his questions, he’ll bring his tools. Then the real work begins. How long will I hold on?
Oh, Hotch. I’m so heavy in your arms.