“When’s the last time you saw your sister?”

Trout had to think about that. He and Meghan had never been close. They swapped cards at the holidays, but the last time he’d actually seen her?

“Couple of years ago.”

She arched an eyebrow. “A couple?”

“Okay, four years ago.”

“So, you’re not close. If she died, would you go to her funeral?”

“Sure.”

“You say that without thinking about it. Why?”

“She’s my sister.”

Selma nodded, and Trout got it.

“Well, yeah, okay,” he said, “but she’s a nurse and a mother. She’s not a serial killer.”

“Neither was Homer last time I saw him. He was a scared, lost young man who hadn’t gotten much of a break or a kind word from anyone. His mom gave him up when he was just born—and let me tell you, that leaves a mark—and he was in and out of foster care until he ran away. You ever do a story on foster care, Mr. Trout?”

Trout said nothing.

“Yeah, I bet you have. So, you know what kind of meat grinders they are. Half the foster parents are in it just for the paychecks and they don’t give a flying fuck about the kids. The other half are pedophiles who shouldn’t be around kids. You think Homer got to be the way he was because he had bad wiring?” She tapped her skull. “Fuck no. He was made to be what he was. The system screwed him every bit as much as those baby-raping sonsabitches they call foster parents. Don’t try to tell me different because then you’d be lying.”

“No,” he said. “I know what those places are like. A lot of kids get torn up in there and that makes them victims of the predators and victims of the system.”

“And it turns them into predators themselves,” observed Aunt Selma.

“Not all of them,” said Trout. “Not even most of them.”

“Enough of them. Enough so that people became used to them being killers and when that happened it stopped being an aber … aber … what’s the word I’m thinking of?”

“Aberration?” Trout supplied.

“Yes. And then they say that since most people don’t turn bad then those that do have done so because of choice.” She threw her cigarette into the cold dirt and ground it under her heel. Trout noticed that she wore bedroom slippers with little hummingbirds on them. A touch of innocence? Or a memory of innocence lost? Either way it made Trout feel sad for her. He wondered how much of her life was forced on her and how much was choice? And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they’re too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they’ve become habituated to them.

He’d have to talk to a psychologist about that. It would make a great motif to string through the whole story, be it a book or a screenplay.

“Are you saying that none of what Homer did was his fault?”

Selma did not answer that right away. She took out her Camels and lit another and puffed for a while, one arm wrapped around her ribs, the elbow of the other arm propped on it, wrist limp so that the hand fell backward like someone considering a piece of art in a gallery. Only this wasn’t an affectation, he was sure of that. She was really thinking about his question. Or, he thought a moment later, carefully constructing the content of her reply. On the roof of the barn one crow lifted its voice and sliced the air with a plaintive cry that was disturbingly like that of a child in pain.

“No,” she said at length, “that wouldn’t be the truth and we both know it. Homer may have been pushed in the wrong direction, but over time … yeah, I think he got a taste for it.”

“And yet you wanted to have him buried here.”

Selma nodded. “Yes.”

“Why?” Trout asked.

“You asked that already.”

“You never actually answered the question.”

“He’s family.”

“Okay, but it’s not like this is your ancestral home. You were born in Texas. Homer was born in Pittsburgh. Why here?”

“It’s the family place now.”

“Is there more of the family around?”

She shook her head. “I don’t expect you’d understand, Mr. Trout.”

“I’d like to.” He intended it as a lie, but he surprised himself by meaning it.

She smoked her cigarette and stared at the line of gray clouds that had begun to creep over the far tree line.

“I’ve got cancer,” she said.

Her comment startled Trout. “What? I mean … God, I’m sorry. Is it very … advanced?”

“I’m a corpse,” she said. “I’ll be dead by Christmas.” She waggled the cigarette between her fingers. “Three packs a day for forty years.”

“I’m … sorry.”

“Fuck it. The warnings are right there on the side of every pack. I knew what I was getting myself into. Slow suicide. Knowing that these coffin nails would kill me one day made them taste a little better.”

Trout said nothing.

Selma cocked her head and looked up at him. “I won’t pretend that I’m anything but what I am, Mr. Trout, and being a whore and a madam is far from the worst things I’ve done. I’ve lived down in the gutter since the day I was born. Shoved into the life but chose to stay there. My choice. I make no apologies and I’d spit on anyone who said they felt sorry for me. This is my life, and I had some good times, too.” A tear glittered in the corner of one eye and she wiped it away irritably. “I can’t fix anything I ever done. Most of the people I wronged are long dead, so there’s no way to make any kind of amends, even if I wanted to. I don’t regret most of it, but there’s one thing … one single thing that I wish I hadn’t done. Or, maybe it’s a thing that I wish I had done.”

“What’s that, Selma?” Trout asked softly.

“When my sister Clarice got knocked up, she came to me and asked if I’d take the baby. She was really far gone, even then. Her hurt went so deep that she lost herself in her own darkness and she knew—like anyone else knew—that she was never going to find her way out.”

“Who was the father? Where was he in all of this?”

Selma gave a bitter laugh. “He was any one of a hundred ten-dollar tricks. Even if she knew his name there was no way he’d ever do the right thing because nobody ever does the right fucking thing.”

“So she asked you to take the baby?”

Another tear formed and this fell down her cheek, rolling and stuttering over the thousands of seams in her skin. “I had a place and I had a little bit of money. I was running ten whores, and I could have made them take care of the kid in shifts. I could have done that and it wouldn’t have been no skin off my nose. It would have been nothing to me.” Two lines of tears fell together. “But it might have been everything to Homer. Nobody would have laid a hand on him. None of those foster parent fucks would have stuck their dicks in him. No one would have whipped him with electrical cords or burned him with cigarettes or made him kneel on pebbles.” Selma suddenly grabbed Trout’s sleeve. “Homer might have had a chance, you see?”

“Yeah,” he said thickly. “I see.”

“And all the hurt he did to other people. All those killings. The bad things he did to women and little kids. He might not have done any of that…”

“You don’t know that, Selma. He might have had this in him from birth.”

She pulled her hand away from his sleeve and gave a derisive shake of her head. “A bad seed? Bullshit. I don’t believe in that. Babies don’t carry sin.”

“I’m talking a chemical imbalance or—”

She shook her head again. “No. It was the system that made him into a monster. It’s their fault. Theirs and mine.”

They stood in the cold wind, watching the sunny day grow gradually darker.

“So,” Trout began slowly, “bringing him back here…?”

“Homer never had a home,” she repeated. “I didn’t give him anything before. Now … at least I could do that much. A home … and maybe some peace.”

Trout had a hundred other questions he wanted to ask, but he left them all unsaid. They tumbled into the dirt like broken birds as he looked into those lambent green eyes. Windows of the soul, and hers looked in on an interior landscape that was ravaged by storms and blighted beyond reclamation.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but she set her jaw. Trout watched as she stubbed out her second cigarette and lit the third.

Without another word he turned and walked slowly back along the road to the Explorer. This story was solid gold, no question about it, but he knew with absolute certainty that it was going to break his heart to write it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

WOLVERTON REGIONAL HOSPITAL

STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA

Dez braked hard and jolted to a stop in front of the emergency room entrance and was out of the car before the ambulance passed her and pulled into the turnaround. Orderlies, nurses, and a doctor were running in a pack and converged with Dez as the back door of the ambulance opened and JT jumped out.

They brought the stretcher down, dropped the wheels, and then the swarm turned and ran with it into the hospital amid a flurry of technical medical jargon neither JT nor Dez understood.

Instead of taking Diviny to a regular curtained bay in the emergency department, they wheeled him into the trauma bay, which was a large semi-operating room intended for a single patient. Dez and JT stood in the open doorway, not wanting to enter but needing to know something—anything—that would make some sense of this.

An argument broke out between the doctor and paramedics over the vitals, and the doctor—an Indian man whose name tag read Sengupta—was loud and condescending. He ordered the nurses to “take a proper set of vitals, goddamn it.”