The room is filled with deadly silence. I can’t see Hunter’s face in the darkness, but I can feel his disappointment and anger pushing out all the air. He sits up. The wood floor creaks with his steps. He opens the door and is outlined with the blue of moonlight.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to get out of here,” he growls. “I need to be alone.”
“Don’t go,” I plead. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t respond, just walks out and shuts the door hard behind him.
“I’m sorry, Hunter,” I cry as his footsteps pound down the steps.
“She’s dead, Kinsey,” he hisses, and even filtered by the cabin walls, the words are strong enough to take my breath away. “You need to fucking move on already.” A wave of hurt and sadness rushes through me; a pit of loneliness opens up and sucks everything away. Tears mix with the sweat on my cheeks.
But then something else. Fire in my throat. Claws tearing through the sadness, drawing blood. “Fuck you,” I say quietly. “Fuck you!” I say louder.
He says nothing but I know he can hear me. I hear the muted but familiar sound of the car trunk opening, Hunter rooting around, a glass bottle knocking against something hard. Then a new sound, something small and slightly musical, like a rattle, like pills shaking in a bottle.
“You’re right,” I holler. “She’s dead. Your girlfriend is dead. And you’re trying to fuck her best friend. That’s been your plan this whole trip.”
The words slice through me. I want to hurt him, but I just tear myself open even more. I cannot breathe through my sobbing. I choke on my shame. We’re both to blame. We’ve both betrayed her. I’m sorry, Camille. I’m sorry.
And so old Hunter has returned, gone off into the night to destroy himself. And old Kinsey is here as well, too scared to let go. The only difference is the tears, the shame, the raw emotion rushing through me in waves. There was a time I didn’t feel things like this, a time when I didn’t feel anything, when I could turn off my heart and go cold. But now that is not so easy. Now there’s a crack in my armor where feelings pulse through, an irreparable hole where I let somebody in, then pushed him back out again.
Again, white. The pale, dusty infinity of no-man’s-land. This place where you live now. This place where you want me to join you.
I can’t see you but I can feel your hand on my wrist. Cold. Sharp. Your skin made of wind.
“You should leave,” the wind says.
I keep walking even though I know there’s nowhere to go.
“Just take the car and run. Just leave him. Just go.”
“I can’t do that to him.”
“Why not? He’d do it to you. How do you know he’s not already planning it? Now that he knows you’re not going to put out. Now that he knows there’s no point in keeping you.”
So cold. The wind and the emptiness. This ice in my veins.
“I’m not the cold one,” you say.
The sky swirls around us, outlining your empty space. You are a window. You are a door. The blizzard makes a halo around your body. A storm of snow, a storm of ash—the white-gray flakes don’t know the difference between freezing and burning.
I never knew thunder could laugh. “Frigid!” the clouds burst. “Prude!” the sky roars.
“Stop it!” I try to scream, but it comes out all wrong—warm and thick and slow.
“Cock tease!” The sky shakes, and the ground shakes with it. So above and so below, heaven and hell laughing, and I am the joke.
“God, you’re worthless.” It is your voice now—closer, sharper. “Not even good for a lay.”
“Shut up!” I try to shout, but my words turn to ash, to snow.
“It should have been you,” your voice booms. The sky is falling. Heaven cracks into tiny splinters.
You’re right, Camille. It should have been me who died. Hunter’s scars are worth nothing.
TWELVE
I am tied down.
My arms can’t move.
I am in a tunnel, a cave, and it is burning.
I am in a bag.
The fire gets closer.
I am sweating rivers, but it is not enough to stop the heat.
I fight my way out of the blankets that are tangled around me. The air in the cabin is thick even though the windows are opened to their screens. Hunter is not beside me. I open the door but it offers little relief. The air outside is almost as hot, made even worse by a buzzing swarm of mosquitoes.
I stand on the porch, swatting the air. My skin is sticky with sweat, chlorine from the pool, traces of Hunter, and the residue of uncertainty of whether or not I did the right thing. I don’t know if the regret I feel is for starting what we did last night or stopping it.
What I need is a shower. Immediately.
There’s an empty vodka bottle tipped over on the ground between the cabin and where the car is parked in the gravel spot next to it. Half a dozen crows scatter as I approach, leaving the remains of a torn-open bag of chips. I look for other signs of Hunter’s trail of destruction—the trunk left open, our belongings a haphazard mess spilling out, his wadded-up shirt on the ground next to the driver’s side door in what I’m guessing is a puddle of vomit.
“Jesus, Hunter.” My stomach turns as I catch a whiff of his puke on the hot breeze.
The side of his face is pressed against the window. What is he doing in there? The windows aren’t even cracked. It must be at least a hundred degrees inside the car.
But I don’t care. Let him roast in the juices of all he drank last night. Let him breath in his own toxic air.
I grab my toiletries bag out of the chaos of the trunk and head toward the bathroom. What am I so angry about? Why am I even surprised to find him like this? How could I be so stupid to expect anything different? Camille is right. Hunter hasn’t changed. Maybe he’s not even capable of it. Maybe no one is, including me. I am frigid like she said. I am a prude. What was I thinking last night, throwing myself at him? Like I could ever be that kind of girl, someone sexy and confident. That was Camille, not me.
I know I shouldn’t go in the bathroom. I know it is empty, that Camille is in there waiting for me. But I don’t care. I need a shower more than I need to hide from a ghost.
I take my clothes off and step into the musty concrete shower. The cold water stings, makes my mind sharp. I can’t even count how many days I’ve been on the road, but it feels like we’ve gotten nowhere.
No more tourist stops, no more scenic detours, no more sightseeing. I can’t remember why I wanted to go to San Francisco in the first place, but I can’t think of any good reason to go back, either. I’m just lost somewhere in the middle of the country, between a beginning that never felt like home and an end that never really felt like a destination. What happened to me? I’ve always had a plan, always had such a sure vision of where I was going, every detail in high-definition. But now, every possibility seems so unsure, so precarious. Every path has a million detours that wind around in tangled webs. I can’t tell which ones intersect, which ones dead end, which ones lead me off a cliff plummeting to my death. Which path is the right path? I always thought I’d be able to tell. But now I don’t even know if there is one.
The fluorescent lights flicker. The stall doors bang violently open and closed. The shower water turns so hot I have to jump out.
I am getting so sick of this.
“Fuck you, Camille,” I say, toweling off. “This shit doesn’t scare me anymore.”
“Oh really?” says her voice, echoing off the concrete walls.
The room darkens and turns cold. A force pushes me against the stall door and onto the wet, filthy tile of the floor. The room seems to suddenly lose pressure, like an airplane descending, and my ears ache. The sound of a faucet dripping is magnified and echoing inside my head. I try to pull myself off the floor, but Camille pushes me down again.
Sh
e doesn’t have to say anything. I know why she is angry.
“I’m sorry I kissed him,” I say.
The mirror above the sinks shakes so hard it breaks, sending glass shards flying. I cover my eyes and feel the glass fall around me. A sound like an animal screaming throbs inside my head; claws tear at my skull.
“Camille, stop!”
“You think he loves you?” she cries. “You want him to?”
“No!”
“You just want to win. You’ve always wanted to win. You’ve always thought you were better than me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me! I hate being lied to.” She slams me in the chest and my head pounds against the wall. Pain shoots through me and the room goes even blacker.
“Hunter!” I scream, but I know he can’t hear me. No one can hear me.
“Oh, poor Kinsey, crying for her little boyfriend to save her. Can’t be alone for three minutes without getting scared.”
She pounds my head against the wall again and I actually see stars. All sound is sucked away.
My body is frozen, immobile, except for my right hand crawling across the floor. I try to stop it. I try to make a fist, but it moves without me, finds a shard of glass on the floor. My fingers curl around it, feel it cold and hard against my skin, the sharp edge cutting into my palm.
A force moves the blade against my wrist, pushes slightly, teasing. Blood beads just barely on my skin.
“Camille, stop!”
“Say it, slut,” Camille says. “Say I win.”
The blade presses harder against the bulging vein in my wrist.
I could just give up. I could just let her take me with her.
“You win,” I say.
I close my eyes, ready for whatever she wants to do to me.
“You win, Camille.”
The light turns back on and the bathroom returns to normal; even the mirror is still intact. I look at my wrist and there is only a benign little scratch. It could have been made by anything.
But she is not really gone. She’s playing with me, tossing me around like a cat with a mouse, having some fun before she sinks her teeth in. She’ll come back. And next time, it will be worse.
I gather my stuff and run out of the bathroom as fast as I can. I am shaking. My head hurts. The scratch on my wrist stings. I have to wake up Hunter. We have to get out of here.
A knot of anxiety burns in my gut as I walk toward the cabin. I rehearse in my head what I’m going to say to him, something about how I don’t care if he’s emotionally wounded, or an alcoholic, or whatever the hell is wrong with him; I’m not looking to hook up; I just want to get to San Francisco like we planned.
I won’t say anything about being sorry. I won’t say anything about being afraid of his dead girlfriend’s revenge.
I open the car door, ready for my speech, but Hunter falls out, lifeless, into his own vomit. He doesn’t wake up, doesn’t even seem to notice he’s on the ground.
“Hunter,” I say. “Wake up.”
Nothing.
“Hunter, this isn’t funny.” I nudge him with my foot. His shoulder slides a few inches in the slimy old contents of his stomach. My brain tells me to stay calm, but my heart is already pounding too hard in my chest. This is not a hangover. This is something else.
“Hunter.” I can hear the desperation in my voice. I nudge him with my foot harder, more like a kick, and he still doesn’t stir.
The forest morphs into a too-familiar place; Hunter becomes someone else, another broken person I love without wanting to. The pine needles are carpet. The trees are walls. Hunter’s muscular arm is now my mom’s thin one. She is splayed on the floor like a shattered ballerina. They share the same pale skin, the same smell of poisoned insides. I am a seven-year-old girl trying to shake my mother awake, trying to convince her to come back to me, begging her to believe I’m worth it.
“Don’t leave me,” I cry, to Hunter, to my mother. I put my face close to his, listening for anything. I feel nothing, hear nothing. His lips are blue. He smells like death. I shake him. Nothing. The day is already too hot but his skin is so cold.
“No!” I scream. “No no no no no no.” But there is no one here to hear me.
Mom, on the floor of her bedroom, bathed in morning shadows. Mom, so sad she couldn’t wake up. Despite my fear, I was a good girl. I called 911. I called Grandma. I remember the silence of waiting. I remember curling tight around her still, limp body. I remember promising to go with her wherever she went.
No one told me anything. No one ever said the word “suicide.” I had to stay with my grandmother while Mom recovered in the hospital, and she never once hugged me, never bothered to tell me everything would be all right. She might as well have been a ghost, floating through her big old house, just out of reach. I searched the place, snuck from room to off-limits room against her orders, looking for something that might comfort or entertain a scared kid, some artifact of my mother, but the whole place was musty with loneliness.
The mosquitoes buzz a good-bye song.
“No!” I punch Hunter in the chest as hard as I can. “You can’t leave me.” I punch him again. I keep punching over and over. I will beat life back into him. My cries will give him breath.
And then, just barely, his mouth opens. I hold my breath. I am immediately still, my senses sharp, focused. The world is a tiny pinprick. I hear the faint whisper of the intake of breath. It is not mine. There is life in him, somewhere deep and stubborn, still holding on.
“Hunter, what did you take?” The only response I get are his faint, shallow breaths.
I remember the prescription bottle next to my mother, the little white pills I thought were candy.
I remember Hunter storming out of the cabin last night. I remember the sound of rattling. I remember his mysterious disappearance from the café in Chicago, the secretive texting while we were at the aquarium.
I look on the ground around him, but all I see are pine needles and gravel.
“Hunter, what did you take?” I say again, but I know he can’t hear me. I look in the car—the glove compartment, the cup holders, the floor. I feel a bump under the floor mat. I lift it up, find a half-empty pill bottle.
Diazepam. Valium. WARNING: Do not take with alcohol.
Even as he was starting to die, he went through the trouble to hide his drugs.
To my grandmother’s and my relief, Camille’s family offered to take me in until my mom “felt better.” I remember dinner that first night at her house—everyone was being so nice to me; Camille’s mom made sloppy joes and didn’t even make me eat any vegetables. I remember the table going silent when I asked what pumping someone’s stomach meant. Camille’s dad carefully explained how it’s what doctors did to make someone throw up when they ate poison. No one had to fill in the rest, that that’s what the doctors did to save my mother.
So now, eleven years later, at a campground in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa, I stick my fingers down my friend’s throat to make him throw up. There’s no 911 this far away from everything.
“Come on, Hunter.” I roll him onto his side. I feel his teeth on the back of my hand, his soft tongue on my palm, the squishy length of his throat. It’s still warm inside him at least, still alive. I push my fingers deeper, feel the strange fleshiness of his tonsils. I push and poke frantically, my finger searching for the magic spot that will trigger him to live.
And then I feel the spasms starting in his throat, the constriction and release. I feel his whole body shudder where my arms hold him, hear him gagging. I remove my hand and tip his face toward the ground just in time as he starts emptying his insides.
The sound and smell are horrible. I try to do as I’d done before with Camille the couple of times she drank too much—rub his back, hold his hair away from his face, say “let it out”
over and over. Except I can’t hide the terror in my voice. I can’t stop my hands from trembling.
Once he starts, he can’t stop. He empties himself in waves, his whole body contorting in spasms, then resting briefly before the next round. Even after there’s nothing left, not even bile, when all he has are dry, empty heaves and streaks of blood from his ravaged throat, his body acts as if it still wants to purge itself of something that goes much deeper than his stomach, something at the core of himself.
After what seems like forever, the vomiting finally stops. Hunter is slippery with sweat and limp in my arms. His breathing is still shallow but closer to normal and some pink has returned to his skin. His lips are no longer blue. The area around his eyes and throat are bruised red and purple with broken blood vessels. He smells and looks like shit, but he is alive and I think he’s going to stay that way, at least for a while.
His eyelids flutter but don’t open. “Hunter,” I say. “Are you okay?” Such a stupid question.
His mouth moves and some sounds come out, but nothing coherent.
“Can you eat?” I say. “Can you drink some water?”
Air escapes his lips in the shape of the word “Camille.”
“What?” I say.
“Camille,” he mumbles.
“No, Hunter. This is Kinsey.”
“Camille, I’m sorry.”
“Hunter, do you see her? Is she here?” Of all the things to feel right now, I am suddenly excited. Maybe he sees her too now. Maybe I’m not crazy. Or maybe we both are.
But he does not hear me. He’s in a different world, somewhere between here and the place of my nightmares. “Camille,” he says. His eyelids flutter. “I’m dead now too.”
My chest clenches tight and my throat turns to concrete. I cannot hold him close enough. “You’re not dead, Hunter.”
His eyes open to slits for a split second, hinting at a sliver of reluctant life inside.