I pull with my shoulder, and the casted arm moves away. She looks hurt and for a moment, I regret the action. “It’s fine. Thank you for talking to me when I called. I appreciated the update.”
When her cheeks flush, she looks younger, and I wonder how old she is. “It was before you confessed. I was—well, anyway.” She stands. “I should get the doctor. And then get back to Jeremy. I just wanted to have something to tell him—” Her face breaks and she looks away, letting out a huff of breath. “When he wakes up.”
I am my mother, and everyone that I love dies. I look up into her red face and smile. “I’ll be up there once they clear me.”
She takes my lie and swallows it with my smile of sugar. “Great. Thanks.”
I watch when she opens the door, but do not see a cop.
CHAPTER 88
Present
SO IT WAS all you?” David settles into the chair, the metal creaking from his weight. Across from him, Simon Evans glances nervously up at Brenda.
“That’s right. But I told you, it was an accident.”
“The push out the window.”
“Well… everything.” He raises his hands, and the cuffs clink loudly, the boy jumping just from the sound. He lowers his hands to the table and she watches the tremble in his fingers. Not an essential tremor, not nerves, this was something more. Drugs. She steps forward.
“You don’t accidentally stab a person, then drag his body to a Dumpster, Simon.”
He swallows, his eyes darting away, his mouth flipping his lips in and out in an obsessive cadence. “Yeah.”
She leans on the table and stares at him. “Unless you start talking right now, we’re going to book you, take you down the hall, and lock you up in one of the cells. Whatever habit you have going on, you’re going to go through weeks and months of withdrawal. Your skin is going to crawl all night, your head is going to turn inside out from insanity, and you’ll be Big Earl’s ass bitch within hours just for a snort of some backwoods shit that will cause you to piss blood.”
His eyes flip to David, his face paling. “It’s true,” David says quietly, and he always can manage to communicate more with a calm tone than she can with screams. “It’d be in your best interest to just tell us the truth.”
Simon swallows, his eyes dropping to the table, his fingers dragging a slow set of lines across the wood. “When he fell… I didn’t know what to do. Deanna… she was just lying there, for all I knew she was dead. And he…” He lifts a hand to his mouth and chews on the edge of his finger. “He was down there and it was an accident! I was just trying to get him away from her—”
“Yes, Simon. We know that part.”
His eyes twitch up to her. “So I called Chelsea. And she came.”
“And did what?”
His shoulders rise, his fingers spreading slightly, a shrug that stretches into unease. “She fixed it. Like she always does.”
Brenda is out the door, her shoes slapping on the floor, Simon’s final statement ringing in her ears as she fumbles for her phone, dialing into dispatch, then requesting the head of crime scene. Chelsea Evans. She should have known. She should have freaking known. “She fixed it. Like she always does.”
Like she always does.
Like she always does.
Like she always does.
CHAPTER 89
Past
WHEN SIMON EVANS tackled Jeremy, it was an act of chivalry. You don’t hit a woman, especially one like her. A man who made that mistake deserved to be beaten to a pulp.
That was how it began: chivalry. Chivalry paired with 800 milligrams of oxycodone and a line of coke. The drugs pushed the chivalry into hatred, three years of animosity pushing him further further further until he was swinging at the man’s face with wild abandon, chivalry a forgotten stimulus that was already packing its bags and taking the next bus.
Poof. When the deliveryman’s fist connected with his stomach, it hurt, the breath whooshed from him, stars dotting his vision for a moment before he staggered back, his hand out, asking for a moment from the man. Remarkably, Jeremy straightened, wiping his mouth, and stopped. Rested his hands on his hips and turned his attention back to Deanna, who remained on the floor, still and silent.
They both saw the knife at the same time, Jeremy’s head turning the wrong way, then right, Deanna’s outstretched hand acting as an arrow to the blade, which had skidded over to the wall, still open. Simon lunged for the knife at the same time Jeremy stepped toward it, the reach suddenly a race, Simon’s jump over Deanna’s body awkward, his boot landing on something delicate that gave beneath his heel, his body pitching forward and once again plowing into Jeremy. Only this time he hit Jeremy’s back instead of his side. And this time Jeremy was in the act of leaning forward for the blade. And this time there wasn’t empty floor behind him, but an open window. Jeremy fell, and Simon expected a scream, but there was only silence and the occasional whistle of the night air.
He hadn’t wanted anything more, had dry heaved when Chelsea had pushed the knife into his hand. “We have to do it right,” she had instructed. And then, when he couldn’t do it, couldn’t stab the man just to make sure he was fully dead, she had taken over. Punctured his chest a half dozen times with quick and efficient strokes, then called him a pussy as they’d lifted his body, one of Jeremy’s arms around each of their shoulders, their drag across Glenvale and behind the Quik Mart fairly painless, if you ignored the fact that it was a dead body in their arms.
Simon had felt a sigh come from Jeremy, a twitch in the hand that he gripped around his neck. But he hadn’t said anything, had prayed a silent prayer that the man may live, had hesitated before his body once it was pushed into place behind the Dumpster.
His sister was right; he was a pussy. But not for the reasons she thought.
CHAPTER 90
Present
WHEN MY HOSPITAL room phone rings, I pick up.
“Hey, killer.”
I smile weakly, the nickname suddenly sour. “Hey, Mike.”
“Ready to get out?”
“Am I clear?”
“Babe…” His confident drawl makes me smile. “I got you out of Alcatraz. You think I can’t handle an overworked hospital?”
I laugh. “It wasn’t exactly Alcatraz.”
“Easy. You don’t want to offend the hand that frees you.”
“Good point. And yes, I’d love to get out of here.”
“I’m putting in discharge instructions for you now.” I can hear a chorus of keystrokes, the sound of freedom with a new ring.
“Am I heading back to jail?”
“God, they don’t tell you anything in that place, do they?”
“Meaning?” I pull at some lines leading to my cast and wonder if I can remove them.
“Simon confessed, blamed the psychotic shit on his sister, some chick named Chelsea. You know her?”
I forgot the cast and sank back against the pillow. So the police got the confession I was gunning for. I should be happy, but a part of me feels cheated. “Yeah. I know her. But I’m still in trouble, right? I mean… I did break out of Alcatraz.” And stab Simon. That pesky little detail.
He laughs. “You’re in a little bit of trouble. You’ve got to report for a hearing, and you might have a short stint in for assaulting an officer, that type of thing. But we’re talking weeks, not months. And if you hire some hotshot attorney, they can probably get most of that gone.”
“What about what happened at Simon’s apartment?” My next stab was neither slow nor gentle, hitting quick and hard into his bare shoulder.
“Well, I don’t know your side of it, but Simon and Chelsea declined to press charges. Apparently Simon is saying he stabbed himself, though no one is believing that. I think the detectives are more focused on pinning the attempted murder charge on them right now, and will deal with you later.”
Surprising. Christmas has come early for psychopaths this year. I glance toward the windows and wish that I had asked Lily to open them. ??
?Can I ask you a favor, Mike?”
“Anything.”
“I need a new ID. And a credit card attached to it. How long would that take?”
“I’ve got those I made for you back in the day. There’s nothing wrong with them; they’ve been collecting dust waiting for some excitement.”
“What are the names?” I reach for the ice water and come up short. I scramble for the bed control and lift myself closer.
“Damn you are picky.” His voice drops away for a moment. “Just a second, let me pull them out.” I can hear movement and picture him walking through the house. “By the way, are you gonna want your stash back?”
I succeed, the edge of my fingers dragging the cup closer, until I can wrap my hand around it and bring it to my mouth. My stash? I think of the knives, all carefully picked out during late-night fantasies, the sadistic thoughts that pushed me to each and every purchase. My guns, some of them with sins already to their credit. “No. Not right now.”
“Good.” He huffs out a breath. “’Cause they’re in a place that’s a bitch to get to. Okay, let’s see… I got a Mindy, a Whitney, and a Marisol.”
I wait, because surely he has something else. “And…”
“And… what?”
“That’s it?”
“God you are high maintenance. Who needs more than three backup aliases?”
“The names suck.” I huff out my own breath and set down the water. “What real-life individual is named Marisol?”
“You don’t have to go by Marisol, you can go by…”
“Mary?” I finish. “I’m twenty-three, Mike.”
“Actually, you’re twenty-six on this batch of IDs.”
I grunt out a laugh. “You are worthless. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I just want to put that in as a side note.”
“Pick one. Mindy or Whitney, since you hate Marisol.”
“Whitney. Can you overnight it to me?”
“Yeah. Are you running?”
I smooth a hand over the blanket. “I can’t go back, Mike.”
“It’s only a few weeks, Deanna. Jail isn’t so bad.”
Says a man who has never been. “Just send it, please.”
“Anything, babe. You know that.”
We say our good-byes, and I hang up the phone.
“I can’t go back, Mike.”
“It’s only a few weeks, Deanna. Jail isn’t so bad.”
I hadn’t been talking about jail. I’d been talking about my life.
CHAPTER 91
Present
THERE WAS A time in my life, a very short one, when I thought that my sickness might be a gift. At that time, I had just saved a little girl’s life and killed a very bad man. I thought that maybe all of the self-imprisonment and urge suppression had been building up to some greater purpose. I had driven back to my apartment with peace in my soul, and had closed the door and returned to my life with warmth in my heart.
But then, the cold came back. And the two people closest to me in the world suffered. And so I closed further off. Removed any element of freedom, scaled down more, plucked away temptation points until there was just Jeremy and me and Jess Reilly. That layer of sequestration didn’t stop anything. Jeremy still, for all intents and purposes, died. Because of me. Because of my ridiculous systems and connections and the world I built with a thousand sharp edges and safety nets with predesigned holes, because, let’s face it, I like to fall out.
Jeremy is the first man I have ever loved. But our love is a safety net riddled with holes.
I love him because he looks at me like I am normal. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know the whole of my depravity. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that the reason my box spring was missing was because I used it to carry out a dead body. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that I once chopped off a man’s finger and mailed it to Mike as a cute little joke. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that I killed my own mother and then drove back to my grandparents’ house.
I love him because he has shown me a life outside of 6E. He took me on a first date where I tried not to stab him. He drove me to buy a car and I came home and called my shrink. He gave me a taste of freedom in outside foods, outside experiences, in the scent of fresh air, in the rumble of fireworks, in the sound of I love you. I became a freedom addict and he was my pusher. I loved seeing him because every moment included one more push for more more more Deanna and I yielded to him and ripped my fragile world open wider and wider.
I love him because in our relationship, I see a normal future. I cried in his bed and thought about the possibility of more fuckin’ bacon. About a life where I might forget my old memories and make new ones. About a life where we watch cartoons and go for walks and he pulls me to him and laughs into my neck then makes love to me on the floor of our house. I picked up a photo on his mantel of him and his niece and thought about having his child. I love him for a future that can’t exist, that isn’t possible because fuck all the other roadblocks, I am not normal. And staying with him will mean a hundred more lies to myself, omissions of thought, excuses of self, a house of cards built to justify an existence that will never be.
I love him for a hundred reasons that are paper thin, an illusion I’ve created and he’s bought into. He is my finest Jess Reilly moment and he has no idea. He is my knight in shining armor made of tinfoil. I cannot be rescued; there is no Happily Ever After because, at the end of all this, Cinderella isn’t allowed to kill the prince.
I should have, from the beginning, run from him. Run from anyone. I can’t take back that mistake. But I can, right now, end the madness.
This isn’t about whether it’s true love. It’s about whether the love is true. And it’s not. My love for him is selfish and wishful. His love for me is pure and naïve. He may never wake up. But if he does, I won’t be here to break any other pieces of him. He doesn’t deserve that, not anymore. I’ve been too unfair to him as it is.
And right now, I’m going to give him the only thing that he does deserve.
The truth.
I unfold my letter to him and read it one last time. It’s my third draft of the letter. The problem with confessing all of your sins is that you try, for some perverse self-preservation, to paint yourself in a good light. I did that with the first few drafts. I was ending things, confessing my sins, but I was trying to retain his love, trying to justify my actions. It was great for me, I was practically beaming with pride by the end of it, but it was useless for the purpose I was trying to accomplish. So I sat back down and wrote a fourth, then a fifth draft. This one is as close to perfect as I can do. And by perfect, I mean ugly and real. He will not love me by the final word but he will know me. And that is what he deserves, to really know the girl that he, at one point in his life, loved. And I can only hope that one day, that is all he will think of me as. The girl who passed through his life. The girl he loved, then got over. The girl who was a pain in the ass until the day when she wasn’t. The girl who lied more than she told the truth. The girl with the brown hair and all the webcams. The girl in 6E.
I close the letter back and slide it into the envelope, addressed to him, care of Lily. She seems to think he will wake up once the swelling on the brain goes down. I’m glad she has hope in her heart, I’m glad that he has someone like her in his life. I like to think that, if Summer had grown up, she’d be like Lily. She’d have been the one waiting in my hospital room, eating my chips.
I stand and look around the sea of boxes. It is funny that boxes are what brought Jeremy into my life and now, with my largest delivery, a stranger will take my life away. Everything that once sat in this apartment is now in cardboard. It took nineteen hours. In some ways, that seems long. In retrospect, it should take longer to pack up a life. Now the boxes are in three piles. One is for Goodwill. They are scheduled to pick up my furniture and donations tomorrow at ten a.m. I will not be here but the super will l
et them in. The second pile is for FedEx. I couldn’t bear the thought of another man in brown picking up my packages. FedEx will deliver those boxes to my storage unit back home, where I’ve arranged for them to join all of the pieces of my childhood, boxes with my webcams and sex toys slid next to photo albums and Summer’s art projects. Maybe one day I’ll return and go through the unit, maybe I won’t. The final stack, a small cluster by the window, is trash. The super will cart it downstairs and throw it away. His wife will clean the place and prepare it for the next tenant. I hope the new resident treats it well. I hope they understand and appreciate its beauty, its sanctuary. I will miss this space, these walls. If I didn’t have so much to run from, I’d stay here forever. I was happy here. Through the screams and the breaks and the crazy, there were whispers in time when I was happy. Times when I laughed. Times when I smiled and meant it.
There is a knock and I run a last, slow hand over the top of my boxes, then step to the door. When I open it, it isn’t FedEx, and I blink in surprise and angle the door to block any view inside.
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s fine.” I scratch an itchy spot on my neck. “Is everything okay? My attorney said my hearing isn’t until next week.”
Detective Brenda Boles waves her hand dismissively. “Everything’s fine. I just saw these come through and wanted to return them to you.” She holds out a plastic bag and my eyes drop to the contents.
“Oh. Thanks.” I grab the bag with the meager items from my intake. Eighteen dollars, the lotto ticket, and my watch. Yippee.
“You have to sign this.” She holds out a clipboard, a form attached to the front. “It’s a receipt.”
I sign my name Deanna Madden and pass it back. Whitney McTucket. That is my new signature.
“And here.” She reaches in her blazer pocket and pulls out something small, holding it out to me. “It’s the key to your car,” she says unnecessarily. “We never impounded it, but Evidence had the key from the day of the warrant search.”