“Elaine,” Hannah whispered. “Take them. We’ll figure this out.”
Elaine wiped the tears from her cheeks as she tried to think of what to do. There had to be a way out. She didn’t want Hannah’s jewelry, she didn’t want Hannah’s TV. She wanted freedom; she wanted a new life.
“Elaine. We’ll figure it out,” Hannah repeated, tugging her friend into a tight hug and shoving the necklaces into her hand. The cold metal burned Elaine’s palm as she cried into Hannah’s hair. Hannah gripped her tighter, holding her up and soothing her.
“This isn’t you. I know this isn’t you right now,” Hannah assured her. “Now go.”
The more Hannah tried to soothe her, the more inconsolable Elaine became. She wanted Hannah to pull her out of the nightmare, to take her hand and drag her out of the darkness. She opened her mouth to plead for help, but it was too late. Donny had crested the top of the stairs before she could get the words out. Elaine heard his footsteps in the hallway and she lunged to lock the bathroom door just before Donny’s boot kicked it open. The door slammed against the wall, punching a hole in the drywall.
Elaine backed up, trying to conceal Hannah behind her as Donny stood silhouetted by the light from the hallway.
“You fucking whore,” he yelled, bounding forward and shoving Elaine into the wall. She winced as sharp pain radiated through her shoulder.
“Was this your plan all along?” he asked, crowding over her. His spit flew into her eyes and his boot held down her chest, threatening to break her ribs. “Get yourself a little witness so you could pin the robbery on us and then slip away like a little rat?”
She tried to push away from the wall, but Donny reached down and yanked her up by the throat. His meaty fingers closed in around her windpipe and her vision blurred. Black shadows loomed in the corners of her eyes as she fought him off, scraping at his fingers and kicking at him as hard as she could.
“LET HER GO,” Hannah screamed, holding out her cell phone to show that she’d placed a call to 911. The call rang twice before a dispatcher picked up on the other end.
“911, what city?” the dispatcher spoke from the receiver.
“LET HER GO AND LEAVE,” Hannah yelled.
Donny’s grip loosened around Elaine’s throat as he turned his sights on Hannah.
She braced herself and held the phone out toward him with a shaky hand.
“Leave right now and I’ll hang up the phone,” she declared with a confident voice.
“Hello? 911, what’s your emergency?” the dispatcher repeated.
Hannah held the phone to her ear, frantically trying to get out their address. “Send the police to 145—”
Donny backhanded the phone out of her grasp. It flew against the bathroom mirror, splintering the cheap glass into a million pieces. Shards rained down over them as Donny shoved Hannah to the ground. He pinned her stomach down with his knee as he reached for her neck.
Elaine coughed and forced breath back into her lungs, trying to regain the strength to save her friend. Hannah’s phone was lying a few feet away from her. She reached out for it, slicing her hand on the shards of glass as she pressed buttons, trying to reconnect the call. The screen was black and cracked down the center, too broken to be fixed.
Hannah struggled and screamed, trying to land a solid punch to Donny’s face as he strangled her. She thrashed like a fish out of water, clawing at his eyes and digging her nails into his face.
Elaine grabbed a half-empty perfume bottle on the bathroom counter and chunked it at the back of Donny’s head. She jumped onto his back, hammering her fists into his head, trying desperately to pull his attention back to her. She scratched at his eyes and screamed at him through her sobs.
“GET OFF HER!”
She could handle his blows, she could take his punishment, but she couldn’t watch Hannah’s face turn purple beneath Donny’s grip.
“Please, Donny, please,” she begged, pounding against him. “STOP!”
She felt a pair of hands yank her off him and felt Carl overpower her. She recognized his arm around her throat and his mouth against her ear. His dark words warned her to stay put, to cooperate and make it easy.
She knew she was helpless to save her best friend and yet she couldn’t give up.
She stared at Hannah’s hazel eyes as they bulged, reddened, and began to dim.
She yanked at the hold Carl had on her, crying and screaming for them to stop. They had to stop. They had to listen.
“PLEASE!” she yelled, digging her nails into Carl’s arm and carrying away strips of skin.
He hissed in her ear and reared back to punch her in the side, right above her kidney. Sharp, blaring pain radiated through Elaine’s body, but she was numb to the sensation. She could have been sliced in two, right down the middle, and it would have hurt less than watching her best friend die before her eyes.
Donny’s grip stole the breath from Hannah’s lungs without thought or remorse, like a gust of wind taking a flame from a match. Elaine watched from two feet away as Hannah’s body slowly, slowly deflated.
Everything was loud, so deafeningly loud as Elaine’s screams ricocheted around the bathroom, and then there was no sound at all.
There was nothing.
Hannah was dead and she’d taken Elaine’s senses with her.
Carl and Donny scrambled from the bathroom and Elaine crawled toward Hannah’s lifeless body.
She felt nothing as her fingertips skimmed across her best friend’s pale cheek. She saw nothing as she gripped Hannah’s body and pulled her up, trying to shake her back to life. She tasted nothing as her salty tears coated her lips. She heard nothing as she whispered for her friend to come back to her. She could smell nothing, not the sweat coating her body or the spilled perfume coating the bathroom floor.
She needed to follow Hannah. She belonged with her in life and in death. They were entwined deeper than lovers and more intimately than family. Without Hannah to guide her, Elaine was a lost soul. She hovered in the twilight of life, begging for death so she could join her friend. Heaven or hell, it didn’t matter.
She’d cling to Hannah anywhere, always.
Chapter Forty-Five
Lilah
I wanted his words to be a lie. I wanted my life to stay neatly packaged. I wanted to wake up every morning and pretend that my mother, even with her problems, still had her redeeming qualities. Now, I had nothing left to cling to. Chase had ripped that away from me like he was ripping stitches from a fresh wound. Without the delusions to keep together, I was forced to remember the last time I’d ever seen my mom alive.
She had gone missing after Hannah’s death, but somehow I had known she’d be at Hannah’s funeral. Everyone had gathered at the Matthews' house so that close family and friends could share in their memories of Hannah’s life.
My mother arrived like a tornado. She was impossible to miss as she stormed in crying and screaming at all of us. The image of her oily skin and yellowed teeth haunted me. She looked nothing like the woman who’d tried to raise me for seven years before calling it quits. She looked wild, like a feral animal.
“You don’t understand! None of you understand!” she screamed, flailing her arms out, trying to get someone to listen. “It wasn’t supposed to happen!”
She staggered down the back stairs, sobbing incoherently, but the second her eyes locked on me, her insane delirium seemed to lessen.
“Lilah, come give your mom a hug. I miss you so much, baby,” she crooned, stumbling over her own feet as she tried to reach me.
Chase stood up and put his body in front of mine. Even at sixteen he was bigger than she was.
“Don't you dare come near her,” he threatened. “My mom wouldn't want you here! I don't want you here!”
She kept trying to come closer and I sidestepped Chase to get to her. She was my mom, but Chase wouldn't let me get by him. He held his arm out to block me.
“We don't want you here! This is your fault! You did thi
s to her!” he yelled, and finally his words started to sink in for her.
She stopped her pursuit to get to me, a blank zombie stare tainting her bright green eyes.
My dad and Mr. Matthews rushed out of the back door trailed by two police officers.
“Elaine, what are you doing here?” my dad yelled.
Mr. Matthews bypassed the pleasantries. “Get the hell out of here! So help me god, if you don't get out of this house, I will kill you myself!”
I'd never heard Mr. Matthews yell in my life, but he wouldn't stop. He yelled at my mom to get out over and over again until I started to scream at him to stop.
My dad wrapped a hand around my mom's bicep and pulled her through the side gate before Chase or his dad lost it even more. I was in a daze, trying to comprehend the fact that I'd just seen my mother for the first time in a year and she’d looked like she was on the brink of death. Her sunken cheeks belonged on a skeleton, not the woman that had given birth to me.
The police officers followed them out of the yard and pulled out their handcuffs. They were trying to arrest her, but she struggled, screaming at them to let her go.
“Chase, let me get to her. Let me get to her!” I yelled, trying to shove him away. I needed her. With Mrs. Matthews gone, I needed my mom even more, but Chase wouldn’t let me go. He held on to me so tightly, his fingers leaving marks on my arms, my screams doing nothing to deter him.
They pulled my mother toward the police cruiser as she dragged her feet, wailing for them to let her go. I had to watch them cart her away and I broke down in sobs, completely helpless to save her.
The sick memory of that day faded as Chase repeated my name over and over again on the stairs. Reality sank in like a sharp knife and I looked up into Chase’s hazel eyes, trying to find reason within the chaos.
“You wouldn't let me near her. I wanted to hug her so badly. She needed me and I couldn’t get to her.” I dropped my head and let the tears fall. “After everything, I just wanted her to go back to being my mom again.”
“I'm sorry.”
He couldn't have known that’d be the last time I’d ever see her. He couldn’t have known how important that moment would become in my life. My emotions had been stirred up with the grief of having to say goodbye to Mrs. Matthews. I had been mourning her death when my own mother decided to show up and make everything so much worse. I’d needed someone I could pin my anger on for the unfairness of it all, and I’d chosen the one person who could take it: Chase.
I stared up into his eyes, expecting to find anger. Instead, there was only grief. He hadn’t been given the chance to say goodbye to his mom either.
“I'm so sorry she took your mom away from you, Chase,” I said, stepping away from him. I knew tears were slipping down my cheeks but I was numb to their touch.
I should have known there was even more my mother had to atone for. It wasn't enough to ruin her own family, she had to ruin Chase's family too.
“She didn't kill her, Lilah. At sixteen, I was angry and sad. I wanted to blame someone and when I saw your mom, I just reacted.”
I shook my head. He was so wrong. “Your mom wouldn't have been killed if… She was just so consumed with her own demons, she was blind to everyone else.”
“We'll never know, Lilah. There's no point in holding on to that anger.”
I inhaled a shaky breath, feeling the sadness well up inside me even more.
“Your mom was good. She didn't deserve to die.”
Chase stayed silent for a long while and when he finally spoke, his voice was calm and resolute. “I've had two years to think about that night, and I’ve truly come to believe that my mom would still have gone back to the house even if she’d known what would happen to her. That night didn’t just happen the way it did because of your mom’s need for salvation. It was just as much a result of my mom’s need to be her savior.”
There was so much misplaced blame surrounding our mothers’ deaths.
The only thing I could do was take a deep breath and realize that I'd been looking at the situation from one perspective. For years, Chase had been the scapegoat for my grief. As I stepped back, I realized Chase wasn't at fault. Through some alchemy, he’d found a way to turn his hate, blame, anger, and sadness into forgiveness. Now, he had shown me how as well. The blame I'd harbored for him could be deflated and thrown away. Just like that.
Poof.
Gone.
Chapter Forty-Six
August 2013
Blackwater, Texas
Elaine didn’t know where she was going, but she’d been running all her life. Her body knew what to do; she was built to flee. Her feet hammered against the pavement. Left, right, left, right. She’d lost her breath a mile back, but the sobs kept coming, ripping through her like they were trying to tear her in two.
She’d already lived a week without her friend, she wouldn’t last much longer. The police would find her and haul her back to jail. She’d have to deal with Donny’s people on the inside.
It will never end.
Lilah would never have the mother she deserved. She’d spend her weekends visiting Elaine in jail, wasting her spare change on the vending machine in the visitor’s room.
It will never end.
She hadn’t slept since Hannah’s death. Every time she swallowed, she was reminded of the raw flesh of Donny’s grip around her throat.
It will never end.
She was done with the suffering.
She would make it end.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Lilah
Saturday morning I found myself standing outside Blackwater Cemetery. I leaned on the wrought iron fence, dropped my chin to my arms, and counted down the row of gravestones until I landed on the one tenth from the left and five from the back. That was where Hannah Matthews had been buried a few months before my mother had taken the plot beside her, just like they’d requested.
They’d had wills drawn up before Chase and I were born that detailed their wishes after death. The wills had been short and silly, the result of two eighteen-year-olds trying to plan for an event they’d assumed would be seventy-years in the making. The concise instructions dictated their wishes to rest beside one another, two gravestones with a three-word epitaph. I didn’t need to see the front of their gravestones to remember the three words chiseled in memory of their lives.
Mother. Wife. Friend.
Three words inscribed in that order. At eighteen, they’d been young, pregnant, and in love with our fathers. Those three words seemed fitting, but now it all seemed like a cruel joke. Hannah’s words were correct, but out of order. Her epitaph should have read: Friend. Mother. Wife. After all, it was her unyielding friendship with my mother that had killed her in the end.
While Hannah’s words were out of order, my mother’s were just plain wrong. She wasn’t a mother, wife, or friend. I stared at the back of her gravestone and wished I could scrape off the lies inscribed on the other side. Chase had shown me how to forgive the living, but I couldn’t bring myself to absolve the dead.
The seed of sadness Chase had planted on the stairs the night before had bloomed into full-blown grief overnight. The details he’d revealed had torn open a wound that had never managed to heal properly in the first place. The bandages were rotten and so easy to tear.
I'd gone two years thinking I was fine, even relieved that my mom was gone, but as I stared at the back of her gravestone, rage boiled deep inside me.
I had thought you couldn’t be mad at a ghost.
I had thought once someone died, it’d be hard to look back in anger.
I’d been so wrong.
You can be mad at a ghost. You can be so royally pissed at a ghost that your entire body feels like a live wire about to explode.
I felt for the camera hanging around my neck—the one Chase had given me—and I focused the lens at the back of my mother’s gravestone. I adjusted the exposure and zoomed in. I pressed down and the shutter snapped, breakin
g up the silence of the cemetery.
Chase had given me the camera so I could use it like a private investigator, but my very first photo wasn’t taken to uncover other people’s secrets, it was to acknowledge my own.
…
I took the long way home from the cemetery, thinking over my confrontation with Chase. By the time I walked through my front door, it was well past dinnertime. I peeked into the kitchen, relieved to discover that the person scribbling at the table was my dad, not Chase. I couldn’t confront Chase yet. I felt like a glass vase teetering on the edge of a table; one soft breeze and I’d scatter across the floor into a million sharp pieces.
The soft glow of the overhead light cast my dad’s face into shadows. His head dipped forward as he jotted down notes onto a yellow legal pad. One glance from across the room and I knew he was working on baseball stats. It was his own form of therapy—everything was right in the world whenever he had a yellow legal pad.
I watched him run his hand through his thick salt and pepper hair, and then he finally glanced up at me as I rounded the table toward him.
“Hey, Lil, I was just about to call and see where you were. Are you hungry?” he asked, dropping his ballpoint pen on top of the legal pad with a thud and scooting his chair back against the hardwood floor.
I held up my hand to stop him from standing up. “No. I'll try to eat something in the morning.” My stomach was too knotted for food.
His brows scrunched together. “Is something wrong? You look pale.”
I didn't want to talk about it, but I had to know the truth. It would have been easier to turn and run, but instead, I pulled out the dining chair in front of me and sat down. Unable to meet his eyes, I said the words slowly. “I’m still mad at mom for what she did to Hannah.”
I took a deep breath and looked up. In a matter of a couple seconds, my father's entire demeanor shifted. He closed his eyes and heaved a sigh before rocking back to rest against the spine of his chair.