Seize the Night

met my eyes and held my gaze for longer than two or three words, “Your mother. Genetics. Her work. That's how you know so much about this.” I didn't take the opportunity to explain more to Lilly, for fear she might reach the correct conclusion that my mother was not merely a righteous whistle-blower, that she was among those fundamentally responsible for what had gone wrong at Wyvern. And if what happened to Jimmy was related to the Wyvern cover-up, Lilly might take the next step in logic, concluding that her son was in jeopardy as a direct result of my mother's work. While this was probably true, she might leap thereafter into the realm of the illogical, assume that I was one of the conspirators, one of the enemy, and withdraw from me.
    Regardless of what my mother could have done, I was Lilly's friend and her best hope of finding her child.
    “Your best chance, Jimmy's best chance, is to trust us. Me, Bobby, Sasha. Trust us, Lilly.”
    “There's nothing I can do. Nothing,” she said bitterly.
    Her clenched face changed, though it didn't relax with relief at being able to share this burden with friends. Instead, the wretched twist of pain that distorted her features drew tighter, into a hard knot of anger, as she was overcome by a simultaneously dispiriting and infuriating recognition of her helplessness.
    When her husband, Ben, died three years ago, Lilly had left her job as a teacher's aide, because she couldn't support Jimmy on that income, and she had risked the life-insurance money to open a gift shop in an area of the harbor popular with tourists. With hard work, she made the business viable. To overcome loneliness and grief at the loss of Ben, she filled her spare hours with Jimmy and with self-education, She learned to lay bricks, installing the walkways around her bungalow, she built a fine picket fence, stripped and refinished the cabinets in her kitchen, and became a first-class gardener, with the best landscaping in her neighborhood. She was accustomed to taking care of herself, to coping. Even in adversity, she had always before remained an optimist, she was a doer, a fighter, all but incapable of thinking of herself as a victim.
    Perhaps for the first time in her life, Lilly felt entirely helpless, pitted against forces she could neither fully understand nor successfully defy. This time self-reliance was not enough, worse, there seemed to be no positive action that she could take. Because it was not in her nature to embrace victimhood, she could not find solace in self-pity, either. She could only wait. Wait for Jimmy to be found alive. Wait for him to be found dead. Or, perhaps worst of all, wait all her life without knowing what had happened to him. Because of this intolerable helplessness, she was racked equally by anger, terror, and a portentous grief.
    At last she unclasped her hands.
    Her eyes blurred with tears that she struggled not to shed.
    Because I thought she was going to reach out to me, I reached toward her again.
    Instead, she covered her face with her hands and, sobbing, said, “Oh, Chris, I'm so ashamed.”
    I didn't know whether she meant that her helplessness shamed her or that she was ashamed of losing control, of weeping.
    I went around the table and tried to pull her into my arms.
    She resisted for a moment, then rose from her chair and hugged me.
    Burying her face against my shoulder, voice raw with anguish, she said, “I was so … oh, God … I was so cruel to you.” Stunned, confused, I said, “No, no. Lilly, Badger, no, not you, not ever.”
    “I didn't have … the guts.”
    She was shaking as if in the thrall of a fever, words stuttering out of her, teeth chattering, clutching at me with the desperation of a lost and terrified child.
    I held her tight, unable to speak because her pain tore at me.
    I remained baffled by her declaration of shame, yet, in retrospect, I believe an understanding was beginning to come to me.
    “All my big talk,” she said, her voice becoming even less clear, distorted by a choking remorse. “Just talk. But I wasn't … couldn't … when it counted … couldn't.” She gasped for breath and held me tighter than ever. “I told you the difference didn't matter to me, but in the end it did.”
    “Stop,” I whispered. “It's all right, all right.”
    “Your difference,” she said, but by now I knew what she meant.
    “Your difference. In the end it mattered. And I turned away from you. But here you are. Here you are when I need