Chapter 16
"Why didn't you paddle to the riverbank and ask for help?"
"It was pretty empty country south of where I lived."
"Still, there must have been towns or a highway or something."
"Sometimes."
"So why didn't you try to get help?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Find a phone someplace and call the police?"
"I don't know."
"Call your father?" Susan said.
"I don't know."
The trees and grass muted the traffic noise outside the Public Garden. The swan boats glided. The ducks followed. We watched them for a while.
"You were a boy," Susan said.
"Yep."
"Up against not only an adult man, but a big, brutish adult male."
"Yes."
"Because Jeannie was your friend."
"Yes."
"Did you think you loved her?"
"No," I said. "I knew she wasn't the one."
"How did you know that?"
"I just knew."
Susan smiled.
"You seem not to have changed a lot since you were fourteen," Susan said.
"I'm bigger," I said.
"True."
I opened my coat.
"I have a gun," I said.
"Yes."
"And I'm with the one."
"Me too," she said.
"So, see, I have too changed," I said.
"If you were in the same situation today," Susan said, "would you go to the riverbank and call the cops?"
I looked at her. She looked at me.
"Well, now I could kick Luke Haden's butt," I said.
"You know as well as I do that you would not go ashore and ask for help," Susan said.
I shrugged.
"It has to be you," Susan said.
I shrugged again.
"Do you know why?" she said.
"Ego?" I said.
"Oh, probably some of that, but self-sufficiency comes to mind."
"Isn't that sort of like independence?" I said.
Susan smiled.
"I would guess," she said, "that independence was the result of self-sufficiency."
"Wow," I said. "You must have a PhD from Harvard, way you talk."
"Aw, it's nothing," Susan said.
"You think I was born that way?" I said. "Or did I learn it from my family?"
"Nature or nurture?" Susan said.
"Uh-huh."
"I don't know," Susan said.
"You don't know?" I said.
"Nobody else does either," Susan said.
"But you have a PhD," I said.
"From Harvard," Susan said.
"And you don't know either?" I said.
"No."
"Then it must be unknowable," I said.
"That's the only explanation," Susan said.