“She was like a daughter to me.”
“I know,” I say.
“You best pray this don’t come back around to you, Romy.”
Mom and Todd pick me up at the sheriff’s department and by the time they get there, I’ve thrown up and they only find out because Joe Conway tells them. Mom puts her hands to my face and says, soft and surprised, “You have a fever.”
On the ride home, I struggle to keep my eyes open.
“Go upstairs, Romy,” Mom tells me when we get there.
I do what she says.
I go to my room and I peel out of my clothes.
By the time I’ve found my way into bed, I hear my mother in the bathroom, the water running. I drift. She comes in a few minutes later. The mattress dips and she starts me awake, a little, when she presses a cold washcloth against my forehead.
“What are you thinking?” she asks quietly, like she always does. “What on earth were you thinking?”
“It was a funeral,” I say because nothing feels like the wrong thing to say anymore. It’s not long before I hear her crying and it breaks my heart. I break her heart. I grip her hand and tell her it’s okay and don’t cry and you don’t have to cry but I can’t make myself convincing enough.
time passes or it doesn’t, but it must—because it has to.
When the fever breaks, I don’t know what girl is left.
I don’t know what I’ve done to myself.
* * *
on friday, i open my eyes to the late-afternoon sun and the sky is empty. No clouds, no blue, just white nothingness stretched across town.
I hear Mom’s and Todd’s voices drifting through the window, along with the crackly sound of music playing from Todd’s old radio, some golden oldies station. I get out of bed and follow the song to the front porch. They stop talking when I come out.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You could use the extra rest,” Mom says. “And now you should eat. Let me make you something up.”
She slips past me, inside, and Todd says, “Come on, kid.” I follow after her, to the kitchen, and he follows after me. I open the fridge and stare at the food inside. My stomach doesn’t connect with any of it.
“I said let me make you something.” Mom nudges me gently. The song on the radio changes. She points to the table. I sit beside Todd. “I’ll make you toast, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
I think of Alek. I wonder what he’s doing. If he’s still in his bed, so leveled by grief he can’t move, or if he has the kind of grief that doesn’t settle, that pushes him from one moment to the next so fast, he never has to think about how much it hurts.
I wonder if he can make his own toast.
Mom sets a plate in front of me.
“Oh.” She touches the top of one of my fingernails, a ruined canvas. All ragged edges and chips, red disappearing a coat at a time. The girl I was, or only tricked myself into thinking I was, quietly making her exit. “Do you want me to fix them?”
I want to ask her what the point of that would be, when the song on the radio cuts off abruptly for the DJ’s voice.
“Breaking news this afternoon. A suspect is currently being held in custody in connection with the disappearance and death of seventeen-year-old Penny Young. The Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments are releasing no further details at this time. Young was last seen in Grebe, at a party at Wake—”
“What?” Todd asks.
“Oh my God.” Mom brings her hand to her chest.
Todd turns the radio up and the DJ says things we already know, like when Penny was last seen, and about how desperately hard we tried to find her, but something is gathering in the spaces between what’s been said and what hasn’t, gathering in me. The Vespa, the road.
You best pray this don’t come back around to you, Romy.
But if it didn’t come around to me, who did it come around to?
I go upstairs and grab my phone off my desk and dial the sheriff’s department. Joe picks up. I ask for Leanne. She comes on the line and she sounds unhappy. When I tell her it’s me, it only makes it worse.
“Why are you calling?” she asks.
“Who do you have in custody?”
“I’m not about to tell you.”
“What about the Vespa?” I ask and the line goes silent. “Does where they found it have anything to do with this? The road I was on? What about Tina Ortiz?”
“I can’t comment on this, Romy.”
“Please—”
“I can’t,” she snaps. She lowers her voice. “You promised you wouldn’t repeat what I told you about Tina leaving you on the road and you did.”
“But—”
“And I got reprimanded. I’ve been on desk duty ever since. I can’t tell you who we have in custody, Romy. I wouldn’t. I need to keep this line clear.”
She hangs up on me.
Later, when Mom and Todd are in bed, I open my laptop and light my room with the cold glare of its screen. I search Penny’s name, over and over, and keep the Grebe and Ibis Sheriff’s Departments’ Web sites up for any further details. The only trickle of something new is that the suspect in custody is a minor. A stranger—or someone we knew? Maybe it was someone from a class below us or a senior just weeks or months away from their next birthday.
I can’t picture a familiar face, not for this.
Everyone who knows her loves her.
Except people hurt the people they love all the time.
I try to tie so many of our classmates back to her death, but it’s impossible. I can’t even tie it to Alek, who loved her the most. If it was me, it would be different, I could draw those lines so clearly from myself to them, and all the pain they’d want to cause me.
My phone buzzes. I pick it up.
Texts from Leon.
I WANTED TO CALL, SEE HOW YOU WERE DOING.
I DIDN’T THINK YOU’D WANT THAT, THOUGH.
I delete them and stare out the window, at the stars scattered across the sky. I don’t know why he still cares. What a stupid thing it is, to care about a girl.
but nothing can stay secret long in Grebe.
Word travels. It gets slurred in bars, murmured over fences between neighbors, muttered in the produce section of the grocery store and again at the checkout, because the cashier always has something to add. When Mom tells me Todd went out to run errands, I wait for him to return with a name. It takes forever for the sound of the car rolling back up the driveway, and I think I’m prepared for anything, but really, I’m not.
I’m afraid.
I don’t move until I hear heavy and unfamiliar footsteps on the porch, until Mom wanders into the hall and says, “Oh.” It’s not Todd.
A wolf’s at the door.
“Hello, Alice Jane.”
He’s wearing his uniform.
I hang back, my arms wrapped around myself while Mom lets Sheriff Turner in. My stomach turns as he paws through, his eyes skimming over the space, nose picking up scents. I don’t like this and when he says, “I need a few words with your daughter,” I like it even less.
He lays eyes on me like he’s seeing me for the first time, like I somehow escaped his cursory glance. I shrink under the look. I don’t want to think about why he’d want to talk to me because there’s only one reason he’d want to.
“Why?” Mom asks.
“I need to go over some things concerning the developing situation with Penny Young.”
There it is. And even though I expected it, hearing it is different. The shock of it turns everything in front of me to black spots for a second. I blink them away, and when they’re gone, Mom, who I expect to crumble, doesn’t. She straightens, looks from him to me. I open my mouth; nothing comes out.
Mom says, “Of course. Let’s … sit and talk about this.”
She gestures to the kitchen. Sheriff Turner looks like the last thing he wants to do is settle in, but she stares at him until his boots walk him there. The clomp of them
on the floor is something I never want to hear again. The sound of him moving the chair, sitting in it. I stay where I am and Mom says, “Romy, come on.” And then she makes a promise she can’t keep, that no one could. “It’s going to be okay.”
She holds her hand out and I move forward tentatively, and then, behind her, through the door, I see the New Yorker pull up to the front of the house. Todd is forced to park on the curb because Turner’s Explorer took the driveway. He gets out empty-handed, but I see bags in the backseat. He moves quickly up the walk and pushes through the door.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “What’s he doing here?”
“Levi wants to ask Romy some questions about Penny,” Mom tells him. Todd stares into the kitchen and he looks like he wants to say something but he just shakes his head and goes in.
“Romy,” Mom says. I step forward, facing the kitchen. Turner sits at the head of the table. Todd sits across from him. Mom positions herself beside Todd and I stay where I am, just in the doorway.
“Romy, sit down,” Mom says.
“I’m fine here,” I say, and I cross my arms. She doesn’t push it, but Turner looks like he wishes he could, like he had no intention of having this conversation, whether it’s about Penny or not, from a place where he had to look up at me to do it.
“It’s just a few questions,” he says. “Romy, you have no memory of Wake Lake and you have no memory of ending up on Taraldson Road afterward, am I correct?”
“Yes,” I say.
“We have multiple accounts that this was owing to the fact you were extremely intoxicated, is this also correct?” I nod. “Is that a yes?”
“Yes,” I say.
“That Saturday, when we first talked, you gave me the impression you must have blacked out and wandered to the road but that evening, Tina Ortiz called us. She told us she drove you out there and left you there as a joke—”
“What?” Mom looks at me, and then Turner, and I watch her become as furious as she was the day she told Dad to get out, something I thought I’d never see again. “You’re telling me that Tina Ortiz endangered my daughter and you didn’t tell us—”
“Alice, come on,” Todd says. “That’s Ben Ortiz’s kid. Think of the golf club.”
“Your daughter knew,” Turner says and Mom looks at me, a slow realization of what it means, if I knew all along. Her face falls and I can’t stand seeing it. Turner eases into his seat a little, likes that he did that. He asks me, “You have no recollection of this?”
“No.”
“And when I asked if you were injured in any way, you told me you were unharmed,” he continues. “Is that correct?”
“Is this about the Garrett boy?” Todd asks, before I can say yes, even as I’m seeing myself in the dirt, with my bra undone and those words on my stomach.
At first I don’t understand what Todd is saying, but the question does something to Turner. It makes his face red, a red that hints at the level of control it’s taking to not give something away. Except it’s too late.
The Garrett boy.
“Brock?” I ask.
“Yeah, that’s who they have in custody,” Todd says. “And you’ve got to charge him soon, don’t you? If you haven’t already.”
Turner leans forward. “Where did you hear that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Todd says.
“Like hell it doesn’t. That’s not officially released information yet. If you don’t tell me where you heard it, Bartlett—”
I don’t know how I have room for this, more of this. Every time I think I’ve been maxed out, there’s something else. Brock Garrett, in custody for Penny’s death, and every memory I have of him knifes through me. The fucked up things he did, things I believe he’d do—to me.
But her?
Penny?
“Why are you asking me questions, if he—” I bring my hand to my mouth. I see a road. I see a road and two girls on it. No … no, no, no … “Was I there when she died?”
Sheriff Turner doesn’t answer. But he doesn’t have to. Mom moves to me, wants to bring me back from this, but I shake my head, keep her where she is. There is no coming back from this. I was there when her light left her.
I’ve had that inside me.
“Bartlett, where did you hear it?”
“What’s Romy got to do with it?” Todd asks.
“It. Doesn’t. Matter,” Turner says tightly. “I came here today to establish that she’s not a viable witness and that’s what I’ve done. You tell me where you heard—”
“You can’t just come in here and do this to my family. What she’s been through—” Todd nods to me. “I won’t have it, Levi. You tell me what Romy has to do with this right now and I’ll tell you where I heard about Brock. It’s someone from your department. I promise you, you don’t want to fuck around with this one.”
Turner clenches his jaw, and the arrogance of him, that he can’t think of a single name in his office who would betray him, not even one as easy to reach for as Joe’s.
“If any of this goes any further than this room—”
“It won’t,” Mom says.
Turner’s frayed, worn down to the bone. Something I’ve never seen in him before. He glances at me, and there’s an anger I recognize. Why her? Why her, and not me. And because of that, he can’t bring himself to tell me directly. He hates me that much. He tells it to Todd, to Mom, instead.
“It wasn’t Tina who put Romy on that road. It was Brock.”
I’m still, rewriting a night. The one thing I thought I knew—I didn’t. I take Tina out of the picture, I put Brock in her place. He put me on that road. What does that mean? I was in his car? His arms? The idea of him, carrying me to his car—
“It was a practical joke,” Turner says. “Romy was unconscious and unresponsive the entire time. When he came back to the party, he told Tina what he’d done and Tina told Penny. Brock eventually decided he’d go back to the road and bring Romy home.”
“Bring me home,” I say faintly, because Turner says it like it could be true, that Brock would grow a heart, come out to that road and bring me home. But he hasn’t seen Brock look at me before, hasn’t seen me on the track with him before …
“Penny had the same idea. She went out to bring Romy home and arrived at the road shortly after Brock did.” Turner struggles to stay businesslike in tone. “The two had an altercation. Brock claims he can’t remember exactly what transpired, but her death was accidental. He panicked and disposed of her body. The morning we found Romy, Brock asked Tina to cover for him to rule out any possible connection between the girls’ disappearances. He wanted to make sure we looked elsewhere.”
I step back. “Tina knew—”
“Tina did not know Penny was dead. Tina thought Penny disappeared on the way to her mother’s house, just like everyone else,” Turner says. “And when we recovered the Vespa, we brought her in for questioning. She told us the truth. And then we brought Brock in…”
The kitchen falls silent, weak light streaming through the window. I stare at it, I stare at it while this simple truth fills me. She came back.
She came back for me.
He killed her for it.
My breath escapes me. They look at me and I turn from them, seeing all the things they can’t see. Things I haven’t said, never said.
“Romy,” Mom says.
Rape me. He put something in my drink. My lipstick on my stomach. My lipstick in his hand and his hand pressing it into my stomach. His hands. My shirt, still undone after the lake? Laid wide open for him. Rape me.
“He was going to rape me,” I say.
“What?” Turner asks.
Mom and Todd are silent from the shock of it, I feel their shock, but Turner lets his fury come first, no listening, no processing—just a demand for more, from a place that doesn’t believe what just came out of my mouth but she came back for me and she died for it. I turn back to them and I don’t want to say it because I don’t want it, I didn
’t ask for it—
But she died for this.
“I know—” My voice breaks. “When I woke up on the road, my shirt was unbuttoned and my bra … was undone and … rape me was written on my stomach in lipstick. Brock did that to me.”
The sound my mother makes is one I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to forget. You know what the hardest part of being a parent is? It was never supposed to be this.
“No.” Turner shakes his head. “You didn’t tell us this. Your shirt was open and you were written on? How come Leanne didn’t report seeing any of that—”
“I did my shirt back up before she found me.”
“Oh, really? And you think there’s no chance this happened at the party? I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of your mother, Romy, not at the time, but I have several accounts of you taking your shirt off there—”
“Levi, I’m warning you,” Todd says.
“Brock brought GHB,” I blurt out. “He drugged me.”
Turner’s mouth falls open. I know he doesn’t believe me, I know this, but I’m desperate for him to understand what was taken from her, the why of her being dead. For her—for her, he has to understand.
“How do you know this?” he asks.
“He was handing it out at the party. He gave—he gave Norah Landers some. But I think that he drugged me—”
“You think.”
“I don’t remember drinking. I don’t remember drinking once that night.” I close my eyes briefly. “He was planning to rape me—”
“Why would he ever—”
“Because he knew he’d get away with it, like…” This. This is why she’s gone. “Like Kellan did.”
Mom is crying, her hands over her mouth, and Todd, he’s pale. But Turner—
Turner laughs.
“Oh,” he says softly. “I see how it is.”
Two girls on a road.
“She saved me.”
“No,” Turner says. “No—”
“She saved me—”
“No,” he says, and he stands and I step back. “Alice, you want to do something about your daughter. I have never seen anyone so desperate for attention in my life.” He stares at me with such hatred and disgust and he tries to make me wear it. “You want to make Penny’s death about your lies—” I step back again. “Your lies about my son. I will not let you do it—I won’t—”