It has been—minutes. And I want to fade out. I want to fade out and be on my feet, past this, but every ugly moment is one I have to live and so I’m sitting beside Leon, on his couch, waiting for my heartbeat to decelerate and the ache between my legs to disappear. He’s waiting for me to speak and if I can talk—if I can figure out how to do that—then I can figure out how to walk, I can leave.
“I have to go.” My first words in this after.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Leon.”
I stand. My legs are stiff, trying to work around the ache, my body’s betrayal. I pass the couch and step into the kitchen. I see the door I came through.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Leon says. “Talk to me, come on—”
“I have to go.” My tongue feels as thick as my head, nine shots thick, and these are the only words I can get out. I reach the door and I say, “This was a bad idea. I’m sorry.”
He puts his hand on my arm. “No. I don’t know what just happened—”
I pull away slowly. I don’t want to be touched because I feel too touched. I have to go home. There are miles ahead of me. I press my head against the door and Leon stands there, so helplessly, all this beyond anything I could or want to explain to him.
“I don’t want to talk. I have to go home.”
“I don’t know what I—” He breaks off. “You don’t look—”
Don’t tell me what I look like. I fumble to open the door, don’t coordinate enough at first, to get out of my own way. I squeeze my eyes shut and then I open them and I put all I can into making myself sound steady.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t follow me.”
I step outside, closing the door behind me but he catches it, holds it open. I wish he wouldn’t. He doesn’t follow me, but I feel his eyes on my back, on the awkward, uncomfortable way I’m carrying myself, trying to move in spite of how sore my body wants to believe it is.
When I’m outside of Ibis, I get a text from him.
WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT WHAT THAT WAS
And then I know what I need to do.
I head for Swan’s. Tracey is shocked to see me and tells me I look awful. We sit in her office, where it’s too hot and the fluorescent lights above us make my head hurt. I tell her I need to quit. I tell her there’s too much school and missing girls. She tells me she understands but that it could’ve waited, that Swan’s is the last place I need to be right now. She seems to want to say more, but doesn’t.
“There’s always going to be a place for you here,” she says. She frowns. “There’ll be some people pretty sad they missed their chance to say good-bye.”
“I have their numbers,” I say.
She gives me a hug and tells me to check my apron pockets before I leave. I find a few hair bands, a bracelet that must have slipped off my wrist at some point, and a crumpled napkin, with black markered numbers on it. I shove it all into my pockets.
It starts to rain on the way home. I’m drenched by the time I get there, cold, shivering, but not numb. I feel the prickling of my skin, the way it has me.
“Romy?”
Todd was in the recliner in the living room, but he’s on his feet by the time I’m at the bottom of the stairs. He takes one look at me and gapes. I feel wet strands of hair stuck to my neck and face. My shirt clings to me.
“Where the hell did you come from?”
“Where’s Mom?” I don’t know if I want her close or the assurance she’s far away.
“She wanted to take the flowers for Penny over to the funeral home herself.” Todd peers at me. I’m dripping puddles onto the floor. “You okay? Where were you?”
“I’m fine.”
I drag my feet upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom. I start a bath, running the water as hot as it will go because I want to stop shivering. I let the water get dangerously close to spilling over while I strip out of my clothes, avoiding the mirror. I turn the tap off and step into the bath without testing it first, letting it burn. This. This is what pain feels like when it’s happening now and I beg my body to know this difference.
It won’t listen to me.
I lower myself in, but that ache persists and I can’t. I can’t. I open my legs, resting the outside of my knees on either side of the tub. I put my hands in the space between, exploring with my fingers, pulling skin apart, half expecting it to feel the way it did then.
It doesn’t.
This isn’t then.
But I can still feel it.
I lean my head back and cover my face, let the water get cold around me. I wait until I’m shivering again before I pull myself out. By the time I’ve dried off and crawled into bed, I’m sweating. I lick my lips and they taste like dirt. I pull my sheet up over my head and cover my body. Her body. I wish I didn’t have a body.
when i open my eyes, the house is quiet and I blearily wonder why Mom let me sleep past my alarm when I remember they’re burying Penny today. Her ashes.
I get out of bed slowly and make my way downstairs. No sign of Mom or Todd, but there’s a note.
Errands in Ibis, back before dinner. XO, Mom
Even though I just woke up, sleep is the only way I can think to turn myself off again, so I lay on the couch and between the inhalation of one breath and the exhalation of another, the sound of the car comes round but that almost seems too soon. But then I hear a knock.
“Anybody home?”
I open my eyes.
“Romy?”
I get off the couch and make my way into the hall, thinking I’ll just check, I’ll just peer through the front door and see if it’s really him, and if it is, I’ll walk away, but Mom and Todd left the door open, laid the view out for Leon through the screen, so I can’t hide. He sees me. He looks so together, and I’m—not.
“We have to talk,” he says.
“No.”
“You just quit,” he says. “You owe me an explanation…”
I don’t say anything.
“Please.”
I hear it, his need. It’s hard to shut myself off to it, when I said that same word to him yesterday and he answered. I do owe him something: I need to end this, I think.
I hesitate and then I open the door. He steps inside. I keep my eyes on the wall just behind him because I’m afraid to look him directly in the eyes. This already hurts. Like every time my heart beats, it makes a bruise.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asks. He sounds so uncomfortable. “Because all I know is one second, you’re there—we’re there—and then you’ve got this look on your face and then you’re pushing at me, like I’m—”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Then why can’t you look at me?”
The bitter urge to cry closes in on me.
“You didn’t do anything, Leon.”
“I think I triggered you.”
“What?” I let out a breath, something that wants to be a laugh, something to make him reconsider what he said enough to take it back. But it’s weak and it gives me away. I know what that word means, but he shouldn’t. “What, you think you know something because—”
“Because what?” he asks. “Why can’t I know something like that?”
“Because you don’t know anything.”
“Romy—”
“Stop. You don’t know anything.”
And he says, “Romy, I’m sorry.”
Anyone begins anything with I’m sorry after you’ve told them they didn’t do anything wrong—whatever follows won’t be good. I step back, instinctively distance myself from it.
“I—” He pauses. “I drove down here to see you last night. I was worried and I was … so tired of doing this runaround with you because I felt like we were just getting back to a good place after the search … I came here, but I didn’t have the guts to talk to you and on my way back, I got gas at Grebe Auto. There were a couple kids there, talking about Penny Young and the funeral, and they brought up this ‘wasted search’ on Romy Grey. I tol
d them to go fuck themselves and they told me—”
His voice. His voice is all over me. I want to rip it off my skin. And his face—the shame on Leon’s face for what he’s saying makes me want to rip it off his face and—
Stop.
“Romy, they told me.”
They told him.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
He’s so sorry.
I close my eyes.
“But I could see through it, I could see through all the bullshit. I don’t know the details—I don’t need to know them—but the way you were at the search, what you said about everyone here, your dad and how you fell out with Penny—everything just started to click into place…”
Click into place. This is how I make sense to him, when I’m a dead girl. He can’t even believe I’m a liar, the only thing that makes it barely tolerable at school—that they think I’m a liar before they think I’m a dead girl.
“I didn’t mean to find out that way,” he says.
I open my eyes. “But you did.”
“I’m so sorry that happened—”
“Don’t.” My heart thrums, more bruises. I look for exits, but this is my house and he’s standing in front of the door. “Don’t be. Just go.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again and he is. He sounds so sorry that he found out this way, so sorry that he had to tell me he did, sorry that I make more sense to him now. But it’s not enough that he’s sorry because now, when he looks at me—
I’ll be her.
“You need to leave,” I say.
“Romy—”
“I don’t want you here if you know.”
He steps back, puts space between us and I swear the space makes every part of me I’m trying to hide more visible. He’s not going. I want him to go.
“Tell me what I can do.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“There has to be—”
“Make me feel like I wasn’t—” I falter and then my voice starts breaking all over the words and I can’t stop it, any of it. “Like you did when you didn’t know. Because I hate her, Leon, and when I was around you, I wasn’t—her. You … stopped. That’s why you were the good part. So if you want to help, pretend you don’t know and we could—”
I can’t finish. It’s too impossible to finish. And I wait for him to speak, all of this washing over him slowly, too slowly.
“You’re right,” he finally says. “I can’t help you if that’s what you need from me. And if I’d known, this whole time, you were using me like that…”
I bring my hand to my forehead and dig my nails into the skin there, hard as I can, because I want to be able to choose what hurts me for once.
“How did you think you would help?” I ask faintly. “Tell me to accept it?”
“I wouldn’t do that. You don’t have to accept it.” He pauses. “But maybe you should hate the people responsible. Because it’s not you.”
“I don’t want you here if you know,” I say again.
He sighs and turns away, his footsteps leading him out and I close my eyes until I hear the screen door whine closed, until I hear the sound of him driving away and the only thing I feel after is her, this slit, this dead girl, trying to burn herself out of me—
“hello?”
I’m on the phone in the kitchen. The man’s voice on the other end of the line is gruff and half-awake. The sound of it sends a surge of adrenaline through me, enough to make me light-headed. For a moment, I forget how to speak.
“Who is this?” He’s more awake now, and still I can’t speak. I pick at one of the phone buttons and accidentally push it in. The tone blares in my ear, in his, and I startle, pull my hand back.
“It’s the girl from the diner,” I manage.
“Who?”
“The one who doesn’t like to talk.”
The longest pause before he laughs. “This a joke?”
“You said you’d tell me how.”
“I’ll be damned. That doesn’t usually work.”
I stare at the phone cord, twirled nervously around my finger. My body tremors, a sick chill up and down my spine like a warning.
“Will you meet me?”
i scrawl a note under the note my mother left me. I keep it as simple as I love you because that’s always there to say. I get my bike from the garage and wheel it over the vines on the walkway, before I throw my leg over its side and push off. The streets are quiet, the pall of Penny’s funeral cast over everything. I feel more relief passing the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GREBE sign than I ever have before.
The bike ride to Taraldson Road tests me. All the running I haven’t done has made me soft where I should be stronger. I have to break halfway, my calves aching, my stomach churning.
The highway is some kind of nightmare, the way the cars and trucks rush by me. The feel of them, the sound. It hurts. It makes my teeth ache. It starts to rain and I bike so far, I bike through it—I can see the point I’ve left that weather behind me.
It’s forever before I make the turn off the highway onto the dirt road I’m looking for, my road. I drag my feet and come to a stop. I climb off my bike, letting it clatter to its side. I ease myself to the ground, on my back and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe in this air and I wonder what it’s like underwater, wonder again if she was dead before she hit the river or if that happened after. It’s hard to think of what’s left of her in any kind of dark.
I wait, listening.
I wait, tracing letters on my stomach.
I wait.
And then I hear it, the truck, ahead of me.
The truck slows, grinds to a halt and then it’s just the sound of the engine idling. I dig my fingers into the dirt, I dig them there, anchoring myself to it, while the truck stays where it is, its driver inside. Maybe someone nice. Maybe someone finally come to finish what’s been started. I don’t care, as long as it’s finished …
My heart beats frantically in my chest.
Her heart beats frantically in my chest.
The engine cuts.
And I—
I scramble to my feet, stumbling past my bike. I leave it there and move down the bank as fast as I can, trying for the trees before he gets out of his truck. The grass is slick from the rainfall and I lose my footing, end up sliding down on my thigh, turning one side of me grass-stained and mud-streaked.
I get my feet under me and look back once, glimpse the truck parked and silent, and I imagine the man inside not understanding, trying to understand what he’s supposed to do about this girl who was just there and isn’t anymore. I fight through a cluster of trees so close together, I’m afraid I won’t fit in their spaces but I do. The branches tear at my arms. I hear the truck door open and close and I stop, leaning against a dying birch.
“Hello?” the man yells. I don’t even know his name, didn’t ask for it, just like he didn’t ask for mine and it didn’t seem scary then, but now—“You there?”
I press my fingertips against bark. Silence. I wait for the sound of his driving away but it doesn’t happen. I hear the crunch of his shoes on the ground instead.
“I saw you,” he calls. “Your bike’s out here.”
I move back and my rustling interrupts the safe quiet I’ve carved out. I can’t see the road from here. Maybe he can’t see me. I listen for him, for his footsteps, ready myself to run, if I have to, and pray I’m fast enough.
Pray I’m fast enough.
“You think this is funny?” he demands. And then, “Think it’d be funny if I took your bike? How about I take your fucking bike?”
I hear it; my bike lifted from the road and tossed into his truck bed. The loud, ugly clatter of it makes me take another step back.
“I don’t fucking believe this. I know you’re there.”
And then the—graceless sound of him coming down the bank, slipping the same way I did. His curses fill the air and he’s furious and I don’t care how noisy I am, I run.
I cra
sh through a good half mile of woods before I see hints of light, the trees getting sparser. I break through them and there’s a different bank, overgrown and wild. I can’t tell if anything’s behind me because all I hear is the struggle of my own lungs gasping for air, and when they’ve finally settled, I listen.
There’s nothing.
And then I’m crying, I’m crying so hard and I can’t stop. I just want it to stop. I turn and there’s nothing there to turn to. I try to get a hold of myself as much as I can and I see—I see—
Pebbles skitter under my feet. I walk forward until I’m standing over a white Vespa, half-hidden in the trees, slopped onto its side, wearing weeks of neglect.
“you know that was there before? This whole time?”
“No,” I say.
“What were you doing out on the road in the first place, if you didn’t know?” Before I can answer, Sheriff Turner asks, “Was Penny with you that night? Were you lying to me?”
I’m in the backseat of his Explorer, behind the cage, and the space is getting smaller and smaller every mile. I try to think of anything but what I know. Penny’s Vespa in the woods. I shiver. I’m freezing but my skin is damp, sweaty. My eyes are swollen and sore from crying.
“I don’t feel well.”
“Answer the question.”
I don’t know if it’s right, that he’s asking me the question in the first place. But it never matters if it’s right, not in this town.
“I don’t—I can’t remember anything about that night, I told you…”
“Then what were you doing out there in the first place? How could you just happen to find Penny’s Vespa like that, if you didn’t know it was there the whole time?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
They came when I called them. I sat on the road, waiting until I saw the police and then I had to show them the Vespa, had to tell them if I touched it and where. Some of the questions, I didn’t have answers for, couldn’t think around the shock. Sheriff Turner shouldn’t even be here, but when he heard it was about her, and that I was involved, he came. He’s post-funeral; jumped out of one suit and into another. His whole face is pinched and ugly. Makes me afraid. I hate this man and I’m afraid of him.