Chapter 175: The Question

Chapter 175: The Question
Oliver and Del checked out of the motel at seven in the morning and were on the road before the town had fully woken up.
Oliver drove with the window cracked two inches and his elbow resting on the door frame in the easy way he had when he was comfortable with a drive, and Del sat in the passenger seat and watched the road come toward them and pass under them and disappear.
The crossing was a couple of hours out.
She'd known that before they got in the car. She'd been running the hours in her head since she woke up at five-thirty and lay in the dark listening to Oliver sleep.
Oliver was in a good mood. He'd been like this since they left the motel, since yesterday really, and she understood why. They were close. The life he'd been building in his head was just a couple of hours away from beginning to be real.
"Can I ask you something?" she asked.
Oliver glanced at her. "You're going to regardless, so yes."
"If someone had stopped every person you ever went after," she said, "before you got to them—do you think you would have found a way to feel okay with your life anyway?"
Oliver opened his mouth and then didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at the road.
"What do you mean by ' stopped '?" he said.
"I mean exactly that. If somehow every person you decided was rotten and needed to be gone, someone else had gotten there first, or they turned their life around before you found them." She kept her tone conversational, genuinely curious. "Do you think you'd have been all right?"
Oliver was quiet for a moment. "I'd have found others."
"Okay, but hypothetically. Say the world just ran out of rotten people. Everyone was fine. No predators, no abusers, no one on your list. Would you have been okay?"
"That's not a realistic scenario," Oliver said.
"I know it's not. That's why it's a hypothetical."
He shifted his hand on the wheel. "I'd have found something else to do with my life," he said. "Something purposeful. Something that contributed."
"Like what?"
He thought about it. "I don't know. Something."
"You've been doing this since you were seventeen," Del said. "You were learning to do it, basically, from your father, so it's really most of your life." She looked at the road ahead. "When you imagine something else, does it actually have a shape?"
Oliver's jaw moved slightly. "It has a shape."
"What is it?"
He was quiet.
"Oliver, what does the something else actually look like?"
"I don't know exactly," he said, and his voice had changed into something that’s less comfortable than it had been thirty seconds ago. "A life that mattered. Work that meant something."
"But every time you describe what makes your life feel meaningful," Del said, "it comes back to this. The people you've removed. The rotten apples. When you talk about purpose, that's what you're talking about. The removal."
"Because that's what I've done," Oliver said. "That's been my life. Of course, that's what comes up."
"Right, but the question is whether the purpose came from the removal or from the idea that the world needed removing." She paused. "Because those sound like the same thing, but they're not, really."
Oliver looked at her briefly. "What's the difference?"
"If the purpose came from the world needing it, then yes, you'd have been okay if someone else had done it. The world would still be better. That would still matter to you. But if the purpose came from the doing itself, from being the one who did it, from how it felt to be that person, then no. Someone else doing it wouldn't have helped at all. You'd still have needed it."
Oliver was quiet for longer this time.
The road moved under them. A truck passed going the other direction and the car shifted slightly in the wake of it and then settled.
"I'm asking whether the people you went after actually needed to be the reason, or whether they were just the justification," Del added. "Because from the outside, looking at the whole shape of it — your father, the way you grew up, the way you were taught to find what was wrong and act on it — it looks less like you found a calling and more like you found a way to keep doing the thing you'd already learned was the only thing that made you feel like you existed."
The car was very quiet.
Oliver's hand tightened on the wheel slightly. His expression had gone somewhere she hadn't seen it go before. Not closed off. More like the particular look of someone who was good at having a position and had just found the position had a hole in it they hadn't noticed before, and they were standing there looking into it.
She let him be quiet. She'd asked what she needed to ask, and it had done what she needed it to do.
Oliver looked at the road. He didn't say anything for long.
Del looked at the road ahead. Presidio was getting close. She could feel it in the geography, the way the town's proximity changed the feeling of the distance, even before you could see it.
"Why are you asking me this?" Oliver said.
"I just wanted to understand you," she said.
Oliver didn't look at her for a long time after that until he spoke again a moment later. “So you just want to understand me, huh?”
Del looked at him and then said, “Yes.”
Suddenly, he flicked on the blinker and turned off onto a narrow dirt road that cut between low scrub brush and scattered mesquite trees. Dust billowed behind the tires as he drove far enough that the main road disappeared from the rearview mirror.
He exhaled through his nose.
“Get over here.”
“What? Why?”
“Just get over here, Del.”
Del hesitated for half a second, but something in his tone made her unbuckle anyway.
Oliver pushed his seat all the way back and reclined it as far as it would go, the space suddenly feeling even tighter than before. He reached for her hips and guided her over the console until she was straddling his lap, her back against the steering wheel.
The car was too small for this. Her knees pressed awkwardly against the sides of the seat, and she had almost no room to move.
Oliver didn’t seem to care. His hands slid under her shirt, gripping her waist hard enough that she could feel the lingering frustration in his fingers.
“You really want to understand me?” he muttered, eyes dark. “Now understand this...understand how I need you to help me calm the fuck down.”