“No,” he said. “Did you see your dad?”
I sat beside him. Pulled my knees up, dipped my head down so I could see only the blades of grass under my shadow. “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand that picture. It doesn’t make sense. He said he was driving near the caverns. He said he was there. But that’s all he said. That’s all.” Tyler reached out, took my hand. “Did you lie to me?”
“I don’t lie to you, Nic,” he said.
“But . . . what do you think happened to Corinne?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I imagined her on this porch, inches away—her hair falling out of a blanket, the shadow hovering near the edge of the frame.
He cut his eyes to me, held tighter to my hand. “Don’t you see? I don’t care what happened to her.”
“Well. It’s time to start caring.” I took a deep breath. “There are pictures, and she’s dead. So tell me. Tell me what happened.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. I promise. Let it go.”
I nodded, let him wrap an arm over my shoulder. And I let myself believe him.
* * *
I HAVE TO TELL it this way, in pieces. I have to work my way up to it. Work my way back to it. I have to show you the beautiful things before I get to the ugly.
You have to understand that she was messed up.
First, I have to promise you that I loved her.
Corinne stood on the side of the road, her thumb sticking out. I didn’t slow down.
“You’re not gonna stop?” Tyler said.
“No,” I said.
My eyes went to hers; her thumb was down, and she was staring right back. I pressed the gas harder—Screw you, Corinne—and I blinked. Just once. Once, and she was already stepping into the road, right in front of the truck.
Tyler’s hands went out in front of him just as I slammed on the brakes—I cut the wheel hard and squeezed my eyes shut as the tires screamed for traction. The seat belt felt like it was cutting me in half, and I couldn’t breathe as we spun, the window cracking, then the thud of metal as we came to rest.
I struggled for my bearings as the adrenaline sharpened everything into focus at once, and then there was too much to process. We were facing the wrong way, pressed up against a guardrail, hovering too close to the edge. A branch jutted through the window in front of me, the edge slicing my shoulder, where it would leave a scar. Tyler’s voice, not making any sense, not coming all the way in. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel.
Until I could—everything all at once.
I felt a wave of nausea and a pain that began in my stomach and worked its way up my back. My hands were desperate and ineffective at the seat belt button. Tyler had to do it for me. We were too close to the edge, near a drop-off, so Tyler pulled me out his side.
There was a ringing in my ears, and the earth kept spinning on me, or I was spinning, looking for Corinne. I put my hand on the hood of the truck and realized it was running, hot to the touch. Everything tingled.
“Where is she?” I whispered.
Tyler had his hands on the hood of the truck, too, his arms shaking like he was about to fly apart.
“Corinne!” I screamed. “Answer me! What the fuck is wrong with you!”
In a panic, Tyler checked under the truck, and my stomach ended up in my throat. The road was dark and empty, the woods even darker, our headlights pointing back toward the caverns.
“Corinne!” I yelled again, bent over as I screamed her name.
Tyler peered over the edge of the drop-off, jogged down the road a bit before coming back. “I don’t see her,” he said.
“Did I hit her? Did I hit her? No, no, no,” I said, frantically making my way down the rocks. I tripped, my knees catching the sharp edges, my palms gripping the cold stone. The drop-off was dark and steep, and I couldn’t make out any shapes in the shadows.
“Stop, Nic. Stop.” Tyler was following me down the rocks. I couldn’t see her.
“Why would she do that? She jumped in front of me!”
“I know, I saw.” He grabbed my arms to keep me from going any farther. “Your shoulder,” he said, pressing his hand to it. But the pain was in my abdomen, radiating across my back.
My hands were shaking. “She stepped in front of me. They’ll believe me, right?”
His grip on my arms loosened for a moment as something twisted in his face.
“Call 911,” I said, because I couldn’t find her and she wasn’t answering.
He took his phone out with his uninjured hand and looked deep into my eyes as I felt another wave of pain roll through me. “I was driving,” he said.
“What? No. I was driving. Look at your hand. You shouldn’t be driving!”
“You were drinking. You can’t.”
“I didn’t swallow any, I swear.”
“You reek of it. No, it was me.”
“How can you even be talking about this right now? I was driving.” I was yelling now. “Not you. I won’t let you say it. People saw me driving when we left. Remember?”
He shook his head again. Slid his phone back in his pocket. I heard movement in the trees, and I whipped my head in that direction.
“Corinne?” I called. No response. No movement.
Tyler narrowed his eyes at the trees. “Just the wind,” he said.
“Where is she, Tyler?”
He looked into my eyes, but the world was still spinning. “You didn’t hit her,” he said. “This is all one of her fucked-up games.”
“Where is she, then?”
“Hiding. Fucking with us. Laughing right this second. Because she’s fucked up.”
I closed my eyes, picturing it. I could see it so easily. It was so her. Of course she would do that. Of course she would try to ruin every good thing in my life.
“I can fix the truck,” he said almost silently.
I sucked in a breath from another wave of pain, and I nodded.
And in that moment, we made a decision, a pact. We nudged a domino, and it set something off.
“Stay here,” he said. He handed me the key to the caverns. “Go wait for me there. I’ll get my dad’s car. I’ll come back for you.”
“I can make it from here,” I said. “I know the way.”
But I wasn’t going to make it home in time. As another wave of pain rolled through me, I knew I was losing everything tonight.
He looked over his shoulder, his body on edge. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I waited until I heard him in the truck, and then I ran. I headed for the caverns, because it was the way I knew how to get home. But I pictured her calling Come find us, and racing into the depths, like she always did, like we used to do together. I unlocked the chain—would she lock it? If she was fucking with me—Yes, I thought, yes, she’d do this. Then I slipped inside, called her name as I gripped the rope. I yelled her name into the dark again and again. “Joke’s over, Corinne!” I left the rope, used my phone to illuminate the space in front of me, searching for her in the darkness, so sure I could hear her breathing but seeing nothing. No one.
One more wave of pain, and the fear gave way to anger. She was ruining me without even flinching.
I gripped the rope as I pulled myself back out.
It wasn’t until much later that night, when I was all alone, that I realized I had lost Tyler’s ring.
* * *
SHE HAD TO HAVE jumped out of the way. She had to have hidden. She had to have been killed in some other way—another car, another accident, throwing herself from the ledge to the rocks below. It cannot be that my dad heard us and knew it had been me. It cannot be that he found her after we left. Not that he took the body and moved it so I wouldn’t be found out, so my life wouldn’t be ruined.
Tyler promised I had done nothing wron
g. And so it must be something else.
Otherwise, it’s too brutal in its simplicity.
Ten years later, and the past is still here. A picture shifting into focus. A memory gaining clarity. Something whispering to me in the dark: Look, Nic, do you see?
It was time to open my eyes.
The Day Before
DAY 1—
Night
I was tired from the long drive and the visit with Dad, and dirty from an afternoon of housecleaning, but there was still so much to do. Be the responsible one, I thought. But I already was—I just wished Daniel could see that. I’d made promises, and trades, and decisions that Daniel could only begin to understand.
The sink faucet and the drain had turned brown with rust. I rummaged through Daniel’s box of supplies, poured the rust remover down the drain, listened to the crackle of the chemical reaction.
I slid the thick yellow gloves over my hands and took out the scrub brush, but the ring was twisted, the rock catching on the inside of the rubber any time I bent my fingers. I removed the glove, slid the ring off my finger, and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table, in my direct line of sight. Something to tie me to the outside, a reminder that I had moved on from Cooley Ridge.
I tackled the sink and the counters, vaguely satisfied with myself, meticulously scrubbing and buffing it all to a shine. The ringing phone was a welcome relief. My eyes had started to go blurry, and I wiped my arm against my forehead to brush the hair back, pulled one of the gloves off my hand. “Hello?”
“Hey. Sorry I’m calling back so late,” Everett said.
I sank into the kitchen chair, pulling off the other glove with my teeth. “No worries. I know you’re busy.”
“So, you made it.”
“I made it,” I said.
“How’s it going so far?” he asked.
“Pretty much as expected. Dad’s the same, Daniel’s the same. Dropped off the paperwork for the doctor. I’m tackling the house already.” I stood, doing a quick tidying up before heading upstairs.
“How long until you can list it?”
“Not sure. I don’t want to list it until everything’s fixed. First impressions are everything.” I saw that it was almost midnight and yawned.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
“I’m about to.” I turned off the downstairs light, backing out of the room. Turned to face the window, to see the trees and mountains illuminated in the moonlight as I stood in the dark. Goodbye, I thought.
And thought for a moment that I saw a flicker of light between the trees.
“I’m going to try to get my dad to sign the papers on his own. Doesn’t feel right, taking it out from under him,” I said.
“Well,” Everett said, his own yawn making me smile, “do what you need to do.”
“I always do,” I said.
* * *
TEN YEARS AGO, I’D stumbled through these woods, trying to get back home. Desperate for the safety of the walls—just make it home. As if that could prevent the inevitable. Dad’s car and Daniel’s car were gone, and I sprinted across the yard, holding my arm to my stomach, pain shooting through both. The porch light swinging, and the screen door creaking, and me gasping, alone in the house.
I was alone.
The rest of the night I can handle only in flashes. I’m not sure what that says, that I can stare back at Corinne for minutes on end but not at this. I have to come at it from the side, grazing pieces here and there. Not looking it directly in the eye. I’ve never told it before. This is the only way I know how.
I’m getting there.
* * *
STRIPPING OFF MY CLOTHES in the bathroom in a wild panic, trying to stop something I had no control over—furious that I could not—and the fury giving way to something quiet and hollow the moment I surrendered. When I remembered that the world would not bend to my will, that it never had, and it certainly wasn’t about to start now.
Turning the water on hot, leaving the clothes on the floor, folding up my knees and sitting in the tub, my head resting on my arms, my eyes squeezed shut, letting the water hit me everywhere.
Two days. It had been a hypothetical two days ago in Corinne’s bathroom, had just barely morphed into something real and hopeful in my mind, and now it was gone. Like it had never truly existed.
* * *
DANIEL, KNOCKING ON THE door a while later. “Nic? Are you okay?” More knocking. “I can hear you.”
Holding my breath so I’d stop crying.
“Answer me or I’m coming in.”
The door handle turning, and a cold gust of air, and Daniel sucking in his breath as his shadow stood beside my clothes in a heap on the floor.
“Are you okay?”
Letting out the breath along with a sob. “No, I’m not okay.”
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how I can help.” Tyler had told Daniel I was pregnant after hitting him. I knew from the way Daniel had looked at me with so much regret.
“It’s too late.”
“Get out of the tub, Nic. I can’t help you unless you get out of the tub.”
“I don’t want your help.”
And him: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
His shadow retreating. The door closing.
The water eventually running cold, pulling myself up, grabbing a towel from the bar.
My clothes off the floor and the laundry running downstairs. Wrapping myself in the fleece pajamas I used in the winter, sinking into the center of my bed, hearing Daniel on the phone in his room. “No, Tyler, you don’t understand. You have to come.”
Me calling back through the bathroom between our rooms: “He can’t.”
Daniel hanging up, standing in the doorway to my room, looking as helpless and lost as I felt. “What do I do? What can I do?”
Me, crying again—everything from that night too tangled together—and wanting to go back years, a decade, to a time when every possibility could exist. Saying, “I want Mom.” The most unreasonable request.
And Daniel, expression unreadable, with his chin set, his nose swollen, his eyes faintly bruised, saying, “Well, I’m all you’ve got,” as he came to sit beside me.
* * *
TYLER MADE IT ANYWAY. On foot. Over the river. I heard him downstairs later, with Daniel.
I’d tell him in the stairwell, on my feet. I’d stop crying.
I’d lost his ring. I’d lost everything. And I wasn’t sure if his offer still stood. If he still meant it. It was easier to pretend it just never happened at all.
* * *
EVERYTHING IN THAT BOX in the police station had belonged to me: the pregnancy test, the ring, the stories, even. And in a way, it was fitting. That girl faded to nothing from the curve of the road on the last night of the county fair. She disappeared. She changed her hair and her accent, her phone number, her address. She did not look back.
Do what you need to do, Nic.
Pick yourself up.
Start over again.
PART 3
Going On
It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Two Weeks Later
DAY 15
The sirens were faint in the distance but growing louder, and Tyler was halfway across the room, and his words—body at Johnson Farm—echoed in my mind. I pictured sunflowers. The ghost of Corinne, spinning in the field. Her body resting there now, ten years later.
But Daniel had said he was taking her to a job site. It couldn’t be Corinne.
“Annaleise?” I asked. “Is she dead?”
“Yes,” he said. “She was just lying there in the middle of the field.”
“Was she shot?” I asked, because Daniel had acce
ss to Dad’s gun, and he’d been chasing her through the woods. Because I’d found that purse buckle near the river, where Daniel said he’d lost her, and he had her key, which must’ve been inside her bag.
Tyler nodded. “This family found her—the kids had run off after pictures and . . .” He tugged his fingers through his hair, leaving the thought. “This guy I work with, his wife works dispatch, and she got the call. I tried to get there first when I heard. I tried.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Daniel?”
“I don’t know, Nic,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at me when he said it.
Everett was probably at the airport by now. I couldn’t call to ask for advice again—not about this, and not after everything else.
What was Daniel thinking? The body, all the evidence, leading right back to him. And Annaleise . . . Jackson had told me there were rumors, that Laura had left Daniel for a time because of them. The rumors would spin to fact, into motive, in someone else’s hands. I knew my brother could fall for the wrong person—he’d done it once before—but I couldn’t imagine Daniel allowing Annaleise to take his picture if he’d truly been seeing her. Except someone had gone through her computer late at night, deleting images from months earlier. I’d heard his steps through the woods, seen his shadow in her home. Someone who knew his way in the dark, in these woods, by heart. Daniel. Annaleise must’ve taken them when he wasn’t looking or when he was sleeping. Like all those pictures I’d seen in her files, pictures of girls caught unaware. They had no idea someone was watching. Annaleise, with her big wide eyes behind the camera, fading into the background. You’d never know she caught you.
He should’ve been smarter than this.
Daniel had reached her at the river and grabbed her purse, and the buckle broke. He took her purse, her phone. He must have buried it all somewhere or ditched it in his car, because I knew he didn’t have it when he met up with us again behind the house. He’d kept her house key, which was now tucked away in my father’s slipper. Add my brother to the missing gaps, and the story begins to take shape.
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