We leave the room, go through the metal detectors without any further issue, and retrieve our bags. JJ’s flight is leaving first. It feels weird to be saying goodbye, dangerous and sad. Together, we could face whatever’s coming, but apart . . .
“Keep in touch,” she says.
“Of course.”
“Also, start eating solid food?”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t make me make you be the first guest on my show.”
“I won’t.”
She swoops in for a hug. Her arms are powerful around me, but mine still ache from the paddle. I have trouble reaching above my head, and getting dressed is a chore.
She releases me. “See someone if you need to. You’ve been sleeping badly. It’s normal.”
“That’s risky, isn’t it?”
“They’d be bound by confidentiality.”
I’m not sure that’s right, but I nod anyway. “We’ll see. I’ll be okay once I’m back in New York.”
“With Liam?”
“Maybe.”
“Get back to writing.”
“Journalism? No, that’s over for me, I think.”
“People love a comeback story.”
“Is that what this is?”
“If you leave out a detail or two, I think so.”
“You might have something there.”
She laughs. “See? Glass half-full.”
“Thanks, JJ.”
“You betcha.”
She slings her backpack over her shoulder and gets in line for her flight. Veterans board first, and she’s taking advantage of it, as she should. My flight’s leaving in thirty minutes. Maybe I’ll be able to get some sleep. I should eat something before it leaves, but the lump is still there in my throat.
It’s always there, reminding me.
I killed someone.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget.
Chapter 38
A Warm Embrace
Liam picks me up at the airport. This makes me so happy that I burst into tears when I see him, which also makes me that girl making a scene at the airport. Liam clearly thinks it’s the stress of everything that’s happened, and it is, but I’m having trouble stopping the blubbering, even once we’re in his car and stuck in traffic.
Part of the reason is the wedge I feel between us now. A wedge made of deceit. I was always keeping things from him; there was so much that had happened in my life that I’d never told anyone, but I used to be able to keep those things in a separate compartment. I was a need-to-know kind of person, and I had it under control. But the techniques I once used don’t seem to be working now. I need to find a way to get back to that person, pronto.
Liam takes me back to his apartment, where he’s decided to make me dinner, he says. This is so sweet I almost start crying again, but I hold back. He’s trying to impose a bit of normalcy, I’m guessing, because he hasn’t asked me one question about Jessie since I got here.
I bring this up over the poached salmon paired with a dry Australian wine that we’re eating at his kitchen island.
He puts some salad onto my plate. “I thought I’d probably asked you enough questions.”
“You were worried I’d start crying again.”
“Maybe.”
He smiles and I feel close to the brink. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to take his kindness or convince myself I deserve it. He looks so Liam sitting across from me, in a dark button-down shirt that he’s rolled up to his elbows and a five-o’clock shadow across his chin.
He’s watching me, though, so I take a small bite of the fish. It’s delicious, cooked in a mix of wine, lemon, capers, and dill, but I can’t get it past that ever-present lump, not even with a large gulp of wine.
“You’re not eating,” Liam says as I put down my fork.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I haven’t been eating well these last couple of days.”
He frowns. I like the way his forehead crinkles and then relaxes. When I was younger, I used to say things to make him frown on purpose. It was easy to do. What a punk I was. He should’ve remembered that. People don’t change; they just get better at hiding who they are.
“I’m sure it’s just the . . . stress,” I say. “Like the tears earlier. It’s all catching up with me.”
“You’ve been through a lot.”
“Have I?”
He stares down at his plate. “I shouldn’t have let you go after her alone.”
“Let me?”
I say it with a challenge, which he hears.
“You know what I meant.”
I reach my hand across the table and place it on top of his. We lock eyes for a moment, his gaze intense and probing. “Liam, let’s not fight my first day back.”
“Okay.”
I let go, then try another bite of food. The wine goes down easily, which I should watch because drunk Jess is not a good idea right now, if she ever was.
“Thank you for making this,” I say. “Maybe I’ll be able to eat it for lunch tomorrow.”
“Whatever you need.”
“I missed you.”
He smiles again, less intense this time. “I’m glad to hear it.”
He is so far away from me even though there’s only two feet of concrete between us. I need to see if I can bring him close again. I need to feel something other than this.
“Are you going to stay on the other side of the counter all night?” I ask.
He puts his fork down deliberately and stands. He walks around the edge of the counter until he’s in front of me. I turn on the stool and raise my arms up to him. He steps into them, and I wrap my legs around his and bury my head in his chest.
I breathe him in. He kisses the top of my head and I look up. There are so many reasons why this shouldn’t work, whatever there is between us, but it does work in moments like this. Because now he’s kissing me gently with his soft lips, his stubble grazing my chin, and I can push the thoughts away.
I can bury them in him.
I wake up two hours later shaking and naked in Liam’s bed.
“Jess! Wake up! Jess.”
“What? Where am I?”
“You’re here,” Liam says. “With me.”
I feel like I’ve been drowning. Like I can’t get enough air. The room is pitch-black, Liam’s blackout curtains doing too good a job at keeping out the light from the streetlamps.
“You were yelling,” Liam says.
Oh God. “What was I saying?”
“Nothing, just no, over and over again.”
He snaps on the light on his side of the bed. I pull the covers over my face.
“What’s going on, Jess?”
“I was having a bad dream.” The blankets muffle my voice. I sound like a child.
“Clearly, but—”
“Can you turn off the light?”
It turns off with a snap and I feel safer again. Why do I feel safer in the dark?
I lower the covers and Liam is there. I can see his profile. I reach up and stroke his face.
“Will you talk to me?” he asks.
“I had a bad dream. It happens.”
He rolls onto his back. “When I first helped you escape, you used to have bad dreams all the time.”
“I did?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No, tell me.”
I reach out for his hand. Our fingers interlock, and he moves his thumb over my knuckles in a circular pattern. “Not much to tell; you’d start thrashing in the middle of the night until I soothed you.”
“How would you soothe me?” I ask teasingly.
“I’d rub your head and tell you everything was going to be okay.”
I prop myself up on my elbow and reach out to Liam’s head. I run my hands through his close-cropped hair; I’ve always loved the silky thickness of it. “Like this?”
“Well, not exactly like that. That would�
�ve got me arrested.”
“I was eighteen.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“It wouldn’t have been illegal, though.”
“Maybe not. But not right.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It was.”
He turns over and kisses me, then breaks away. “What’s brought the nightmares back?”
It’s Jessie, but I can’t tell him that. But I feel like I have to tell him something. If we have any chance of surviving this, I need to open up to him.
Lucky me, I have so many stories to choose from.
“Has Covington ever told you his theory about how Todd died?”
Liam stiffens next to me. “No. What?”
“I just wondered because he mentioned it to me a while back. Anyway, he has this whole theory that someone poisoned Todd’s IV solution, because Todd was an exercise freak, and he died of a heart attack.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Shhh. Listen.”
He settles against the pillows, and I reach down and take his hand again. This time, I’m the one making slow circles with my thumb.
“Covington’s right. Todd didn’t die a natural death. My mother killed him.”
Liam grips my hand tightly. “That’s not funny, Jess.”
“I’m not joking. I should’ve told you this forever ago, when I learned about it, but I didn’t know how. But I want to tell you now, okay? Will you let me?”
He squeezes my hand in answer.
“But not a cross-examination, all right? Let me tell it my way.”
“No questions, got it.”
“Are you mad?”
“Just tell me about Todd, Jessica.”
So I do.
Chapter 39
A Note to Follow So
This is what my mother told me in the cornfield. She’d been having doubts about Todd for years. Things he said, preached, and commanded that she didn’t agree with and didn’t see the point of. Then there were other things that she closed her eyes to. How he favored some children, especially Aaron. The eighteenth birthdays and his “special” celebrations with certain girls. Too many things to name. She’d thought about leaving, but everything they had was with Todd. They had never held jobs, had no money, and their families had disowned them. They had no idea how to live outside the LOT. And when she tried to talk to my father about it, which was almost impossible to do given the strictures they lived under, he’d always have some rationale to stay. He had access to the real world because of the work he did for Todd, and he’d tell her enough—about the war in Kosovo, for example, or all the Iraqi children who died in the bombing during the Iraq War, some famine in Africa, whatever news horror of the day—and then she’d look around her, and everything seemed so much better in comparison.
“He never showed you the good parts,” I said. “He wanted to stay. Your families would have taken you back.”
“I guess I didn’t want to leave either. All the things that drove me there, that drove both of us, they were so ingrained that I thought there was a good possibility that I’d die if I left.”
A large black crow landed next to one of the cornstalks and started picking at it. They needed a scarecrow or they were going to lose their crop. These people were hopeless.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know that now, but then . . . You didn’t hear the things that Todd said in his sermons, not most of them. You blame me for letting him take you up the hill, but you were protected from the worst of it up there. As Todd got deeper and deeper into his paranoia, I’d guess you’d call it, his sermons got longer and darker. And then people would leave, and he’d tell us he had spies out there in the world, and those people would be dead within a year. And then we’d hear that they were dead.”
“He was lying to you.”
“Yes. But again, I didn’t know that then. Not for sure.”
“You could’ve asked him to look them up on the internet.”
“Honey, I didn’t even know what the internet was. Your father had to go take special computer classes just to do what he did for Todd. And because of it, Todd monitored us much more than the others. There were cameras and microphones in our house. We were with him all the time. There was barely any time where the two of us were alone, and never a time where we felt safe expressing our thoughts. And this is me saying this now, with the benefit of hindsight. Then, it was all looks between us, I guess, at night, in bed, when at least Todd couldn’t see us.”
“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you?”
“No. I’m only trying to explain.”
“How you killed Todd?”
“Yes.”
“Seems like you waited a bit too long.”
She held her hands out in front of her, flat, as if telling some invisible someone to stop. Was she seeing things? Was she completely unhinged? She couldn’t have killed Todd, could she?
“I kept him away from you,” she said. “When Liam took you . . . that was me.”
“You know Liam?”
“No, but I’d heard of him, like we all had. I was able to get a message to his family after they left with Aaron.”
“You’re shitting me.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You were the one who told Liam to come get me?”
“Did you think I was going to let Todd . . .”
“That’s exactly what I thought. What had you ever done to make me think anything different?”
She lowered her hands and rested them on her thighs. “I couldn’t do that to you, Jessica. No. Your father told me one night that he’d received an email from Aaron’s parents, offering help if we needed it. He’d deleted it before Todd could see it, but he memorized the address just in case. When the time came, he told them about your birthday coming up. They knew what it meant.”
“And you arranged for me to go to the farmers’ market that day?”
“Yes. I saw Liam approach you. I was worried you weren’t going to keep your cool.”
“Keep my . . . what? What?”
“It’s an expression—”
“I know the expression. What about when Tanya took me shopping for the dress? Did you arrange that too?”
“Did you think she didn’t notice that you’d left the store?”
My mother was calling me a moron, but she was right. I should’ve noticed, but I was so indoctrinated that I didn’t. I thought I was getting away with something. I was proud of myself for being so brave. Instead, it was my mother, and my father, the whole time, letting me go. The whole narrative of my life since I was seventeen was unraveling right there in the cornfield.
“I did think that, yes.”
“And you thought I didn’t care, or didn’t know, what Todd was planning?”
“Either. Both.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I failed you.”
“You got me out.”
“Yes, but not Kiki.”
I felt a stab of pain. “Todd wasn’t interested in her, though.”
“Not while you were there.”
The consequence of what she was saying hit me all at once. I dropped to my knees on the hard ground and threw up. My mother crouched down behind me, rubbing my back, holding my hair away from my face.
I retched again, and then again, tasting bile. There was nothing left inside me, but my stomach wouldn’t give up.
Finally, it subsided. I spat and rocked back on my heels, away from the mess I’d made.
“Come into the house,” my mother said.
“No. Finish it.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked her in the eye. My own face was buried in hers. “Please.”
“Todd was so angry when you left. He suspected us of helping you. He brought all the children down from the hill, and we had to stay in the Gathering Place for weeks. He wouldn’t let us sleep. He’d take us away one by one, interrogating us, ev
en the little kids. He left your aunt and uncle, and Kiki, and your father and me for last. Tanya and Tom didn’t know anything. I’d told Tanya to let you use the phone because your father had gotten a message that his mother was dying. And that if she got caught, she was to say that you had escaped, briefly, but since you came back, she didn’t want to get you in trouble. That’s the story she told Todd. She came out of that meeting with a welt across her cheek.
“I was shaking so hard in my meeting with him, I almost passed out. Todd knew I was keeping something from him, but I stuck to my story, that your dad was worried about his mother, so I’d arranged to have you call them. You hadn’t been able to get through because they must’ve changed their number. I told him over and over that I had no idea how to communicate with anyone outside of the LOT other than by making a phone call, which was true. And he knew from the phone logs, which he checked carefully each month, that no calls had been made. And then . . . and then I told him I was disappointed that he couldn’t complete the ritual with you. He got this horrible look on his face and said that it didn’t matter. Your replacement had been there all along.”
“Kiki,” I said.
“Kiki.”
“You should have killed him then.”
“I wanted to, but I didn’t see how I could. Everyone was so paranoid. He broke all the couples up and matched us with someone else so there wouldn’t be any loyalties. I had to share a house with one of the other men for months. And he isolated Tanya and Tom, sent them up the hill, and then . . . and then it all seemed to return back to normal.”
“Normal?”
“Three months after you left, Todd let us out of the lodge, and life went on.”
I struggled to get to my feet. “Not for Kiki, though, right, Mother?”
She looked very sad, but it wasn’t enough for me. “No, she wasn’t the same after that.”
“We all killed her, each and every one of us.”
“Yes.”
“So that’s why you killed Todd? Because of what he did to Kiki?”
“In part.”
“Why, then?”
“Kiki didn’t tell you?”
It was a mean thing to say, though I don’t think she meant it that way. She was as surprised as I was at the secrets Kiki had kept from me.
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