There I was, standing in bird shit, wearing nothing but a white silk nightgown, staring at the dead body of a boy who’d brought peace into my home, feeling myself crack—inches and seconds, at best, from losing my mind—when something dawned on me: I was the adult in this situation. Adults don’t get the luxury of melting down. My job was to convince the kids everything was under control. And so I went back inside.
Jonah and Kayla were waiting as I’d instructed, sitting on the edge of my bed like a couple of schoolchildren in time-out. I crouched in front of them and asked what had happened. In turns, they told me about how all three of them had been at a party the night before, and how the party had been broken up, but how they didn’t want the night to end, and so Nick said he wished they could camp on the beach, but Jonah said he could do one better. He snuck Kayla and Nick up to the crow’s nest so they could pretend to be camping under the strangest summer sky.
They’d gone up long after I’d fallen asleep, and Robert had been sleeping in his office, so he wouldn’t have heard them sneaking around. At some point very late that night, though—or early in the morning, rather—I did hear something. It had been an utterly unfamiliar sound, and I’d shot out of bed and turned on my light, trying to place the source—whether it was coming from the house, the ceiling, the sky—and stepped into the hallway, where the door to the roof was ajar. At first I’d been frightened, but then I heard laughter and relaxed. I closed my door behind me and tiptoed up the spiral stairs toward the crumbling cupola we only visit twice a year to check for leaks. Jonah, Nick, and the girl who turned out to be Kayla were burrowed in blankets and sleeping bags, sprawled on the benches below the windows in our crow’s nest. I didn’t want to embarrass Jonah in front of her, so I held a finger to my lips and whispered, It’s time to go to bed, and all three of them started packing up without protest. Then I went back inside with Nick behind me. I said good night to him, and he went downstairs and presumably out to the guesthouse while I went back to bed. I assumed Jonah and Kayla were on their way down too. But they weren’t.
In my room that next morning, Jonah and Kayla told me about how the two of them had talked a little more, then accidentally fallen asleep. They woke up to the sound of Robert’s car leaving for the gym in the morning, at which point they stepped outside to stretch in the sun. Kayla told me she then thanked Jonah for being nice to her. She said her friends had turned on her that year and she never thought she’d trust again, but that Jonah and Nick had been so kind and respectful, so she told Jonah how much she appreciated it, and I guess Jonah replied, Of course. We’re friends, and he’d opened his arms and Kayla had hugged him—as friends.
This is how both of them swore it went down.
This is when Jonah gazed over Kayla’s shoulder, over the pool and the yard to the open door of the guesthouse. This is when Jonah made eye contact with Nick, who was standing just outside, staring up at his best friend hugging the girl he liked.
Yes, Jonah knew Nick had a crush on Kayla. In fact, he told me the only reason he didn’t try something with her is because Nick had called dibs. Bro code, Jonah called it.
I know. Don’t start.
Nick jumped to conclusions. He stormed inside and up the stairs, which is what woke me, surely, and he called Jonah a traitor and accused them of screwing around after he’d gone to bed, at which point Kayla stomped downstairs and defended herself to me. Nothing happened, she begged me to believe. We didn’t do anything, I swear.
Jonah claims he and Nick exchanged insults on the roof. They exchanged secrets Jonah still won’t tell me to this day. Nick was upset about something bigger than jealousy—something personal, and serious, and big enough to warrant hysterics—but Jonah insists on preserving his friend’s dignity on this one point, at least, and so I’ve let it go.
Believe me, that was the least of my concessions.
The boys fought for the first time that day, and the last. Jonah was still trying to get inside to enlist my help, but Nick pushed him in the chest. Nothing like that had ever happened before. I’m sure both of them were stunned. Jonah was still blocking the exit, so Nick stormed out of the crow’s nest and across the widow’s walk. Jonah has never been a fighter. His instincts are for shit. But he was shocked and hurt, so he ran after Nick anyway and pushed him from behind, intending to shove him against the balcony, not through it, but the wood was rotten.
I didn’t mean to, Jonah kept saying. He was hyperventilating, whimpering like a sick animal. I didn’t even push hard.
The woodwork was rotten to its core.
That morning, I stayed crouched on my bedroom floor, still barefoot in my nightgown, while Jonah and Kayla blurted out details piecemeal; and although I’ve considered it, I’m certain they couldn’t have corroborated a fake story in the short time I’d left them alone. They weren’t strategizing; they were confessing, spilling their guts in acts of spiritual survival. I believed them and believe them still, so I allowed myself a minute to pause and assess our options.
My brain knew to call the police before three minutes became four, then five, then suspicious, but I stretched each second to the limit, because right there in front of me were two kids whose lives are still fat spools of ribbon. They had what the rest of us long for and mourn: opportunities, chances. So much potential. So many possibilities.
Everything got really slow—like being on acid, you know? Remember how it seemed as if hours had gone by and we’d look at the clock and it had only been two minutes? That’s how this was. Everything was bright like that, too. So crystal clear. It’s like I was possessed by a sense of purpose, and that purpose was two-fold: to keep Jonah from becoming That Guy whose best friend shattered right in front of him, and to keep Kayla from becoming That Girl who bears the sins of reckless men, again and again. She’d been broken once and had managed to build herself back up. Was it fair to ask her to go from being seen as the slut who ruined a rich man’s life to being known as the prude who caused a duel to the death? Would it have been fair to expect her to trust anyone, to love anyone, to make friends, to be forgiven or ever forgive herself if, once again, she was disregarded, discarded, forced to live with a truth no one believes?
Would it have been fair to deny her a say in what came next?
We had one minute, maybe two, to decide.
So I asked her. Kayla, what do you want to do?
Her chin twitched. She pouted like an infant overcome with a primal need for love and relief. Then, suddenly resolute, she said, I want to leave here and have none of this be real. For none of it to have ever happened. I want it to all go away.
I turned to Jonah, who answered without being asked, Me too. I want it to go away, too.
I told them that if I helped them, they could never talk about it. Ever. I warned them that it would be a lonely secret and a haunting one. Kayla said the truth would haunt her whether she kept it a secret or not, but that at least she could live with the truth. Another round of lies and accusations might kill her. The atrophied part of my heart began to twitch, and I could feel myself at twenty, living inside of an obsession with all the things I wanted to take back—the stupid concert, the stupid car, the stupid decisions that wrecked my life and ended yours. How many nights have I tried to dream a different route: exiting for food, leaving an hour earlier or later, taking a backroad, taking a bus? Me driving. Me dead. How many times have I woken up certain heartbreak had killed me already?
My twenty-year-old self flickered: a body on a journey, my parents urging me to fill my life with my life, my father telling me to never settle, my mother asking, But are you happy? Their lives crackled in my atoms, and I could feel how hard they worked to give me choices, and how I chose until the choosing frightened me by shedding light on me, and how bright I was then, but how late it is now, and how the rules weren’t written for me, anyway.
Kayla was right: reality is painful enough.
I asked if she needed a ride. I don’t think she understood the implications o
f my question when she answered, No, so I asked how far away she lived, and she said, Six miles. She said her parents would be at church. They let her sleep in on Sundays. They wouldn’t notice she’d been gone. I told Kayla to leave through the back door, to circle the block if necessary, but to avoid our side yard, no matter what. I made her promise to never tell anyone she’d been to our house. Jonah’s ass was on the line, I reminded her. Mine, too. She promised, thanked me and was gone.
Then it was just me and Jonah.
He slid from the bed onto the ground, struggling to steady himself on all fours. I rubbed his back and shushed him, knowing time wouldn’t pause to comfort us—time couldn’t support the weight of my adult stepson dry heaving on the floor, mucus swinging from his face like a blown-glass pendulum—and that police aren’t big on excuses.
Jonah was begging, Please help, Elizabeth, please. I’d been the source of so much pain in this boy’s formative years, and now he was in my arms, moaning, Please. He wailed, They’ll put me on trial for murder. I accepted his fear as fact.
He was giving me a choice: to help or not. I’d been so eager to support Jonah on my terms. Book club, Proust. But this was gravely different. This was my chance to do something big and daring and meaningful for him, a gesture wide enough to swallow all the ways I’d done him wrong, even if—no, especially because it gave me no pleasure. This was my test, my one true opportunity to heal the broken thing. It wasn’t about favor. I could have let Jonah hate me, if he’d had anyone else to turn to, but he had no one. He’d lost his best friend. He was so alone in the world, and so I said, Leave it to me.
I started giving orders. Jonah helped me clean the house, the roof, the stairs. We checked and double-checked the warped flooring for sneaker scuffs. I couldn’t bring myself to inspect Nick’s body for signs of a struggle, and for days afterward, I agonized, thinking, Maybe Jonah was wrong? He swore up and down he hardly touched Nick, but, What if I could have saved him? And, What if Jonah’s fingerprints are bruised onto Nick’s skin?
The autopsy showed death on impact, by the way. There’s nothing we could have done.
Yes, of course I wanted to call the police. Of course I wanted to call Robert, to tell him everything and ask for help, but in allowing for a pause, I’d let the whole thing turn watery. Jonah was begging me, begging, to let Robert hear the truth from him, his own son. Jonah wanted to handle it like a man, he said, which apparently meant facing Robert alone. Maybe this is simple, but I kept thinking, Jonah knew him first. I kept telling myself that I had to honor their relationship by letting Jonah choose how he would reveal this most wretched truth. In the end, I decided Jonah had the right to confess on his own terms, so I tricked Robert into running errands, which bought us time to hit reset—and while we reset, Jonah told me about Kayla, and all the things she used to want, and how Kayla’s favorite person in the world was her grandmother, and how her grandmother had given Kayla an around-the-world ticket as a high school graduation present. She’d planned to leave for Bangkok the following week. I chose to focus on this: Kayla shopping for dragon fruit at a floating market or dropping coins in bronze bowls at Wat Pho. I pictured her dwarfed by the reclining Buddha’s golden feet, wishing on pearl-tipped toes.
I had no clue what I was doing. Was I helping Jonah? Leading him astray? There was no time to predict. I only knew that once we made the decision to cover tracks, there was no reversing course. By the time I could see straight, it had been over an hour, at which point I panicked. What kind of psychopath waits hours to call the cops? Who cleans and disinfects in the meantime? Crazy people and criminals, right? I could’ve pretended to have just discovered Nick’s body, but the thought of lying to the police sent me into a dissociative state. Like Kayla and Jonah, I wanted it all to go away. I just kept thinking: floating market, pearl-tipped toes.
Robert couldn’t know that I’d deceived him. If he found out, he’d have every right to leave me, or commit me, or report me—yes, report me, because I’d made myself an accessory to something that might now be a crime—and so, quid pro quo, I agreed to let Jonah confess his own way if he agreed to erase me and Kayla from the story altogether.
Two hours after Robert had left for the gym, I helped Jonah pack a duffle bag with all of our cleaning supplies and every object that had come into contact with Nick that morning. Later on, Jonah threw some of it away and washed the rest at his mother’s house. When Robert finally returned from the gym, he was so happy, insisting I choose a dinner spot. He wanted to make me happy. We had a chance to reset, too. So I picked a Thai restaurant where I could eat noodles and drink broth and drink spirits in a secret ritual unfolding in my mind. Every time I swallowed, I thought, floating market, pearl-tipped toes, tabula rasa.
A week after the disaster, Kayla left the country as planned, and she’s out there now, exploring and seeing and being herself as a person at the market, in a temple, in the world, and she hasn’t been decided yet. She still gets to decide.
And Jonah was spared from something awful, whether something as abstract as gossip or as fixed as an involuntary manslaughter charge. A felony record. A lifetime of doubt. I’ve decided if there’s a possibility Jonah will find the freedom to forgive himself—maybe even to believe, in time, that his worst day wasn’t his fault—I’d probably make the same choices again.
As for Robert—a week or so later, I came home to find him nursing a migraine, staring at the wall. He told me Jonah had moved out, alluding to a difficult conversation they’d had. It became clear Jonah had kept his word. He’d told Robert about the argument, the shove, the accident, but left me and Kayla out of it. He’d taken the fall.
My heart broke for my husband, sitting in that chair wanting to tell me an enormous secret but believing that to do so would betray his own son. I wanted Robert to forgive his child, whose only offense, as far as he knew, had been self-preservation. Yes, I could have filled in the details Jonah omitted, but doing so would have disrupted the fragile balance of our truths, and so I swallowed the scraps and tried to move on.
The irony is, for as hard as Robert and Jonah work to protect how they’re seen by the other, they actually would understand each other perfectly—better than anyone in the world, really—if they showed themselves fully. Jonah learned his coping skills from his father, after all. He inherited Robert’s wiring. It’s in their blood, their mannerisms, their ways of moving through the world, their pride—which is also their shame—and their defense mechanisms: image and privacy. What they present, what they hold back. What they believe people need to believe, when in fact, no one does except for them. They’re cut from the same cloth, and they don’t even know it.
But it’s not my cloth, not my wiring. All I can do is try to get on with my life, with our lives, even if I can’t stop reliving that day in my head. Again and again.
I’ve been reliving so many things.
Do you remember Belize? When our guide’s lantern died halfway down the cave? How dark it was? And how the water was just deep enough that if I’d lain down and filled my lungs with air, I could have floated all the way into the belly of that mountain? It felt like the world had swallowed us whole. I tried to touch the person in front of me to get my bearings, but when I reached out, no one was there. I panicked but couldn’t tell you so. It was like my body and voice had disappeared. Then you put your hands on my shoulders from behind and said, I’m with you I’m here. The darkness only lasted a few seconds, I bet. Someone turned on a headlamp and everyone laughed. But I remember feeling as though you’d read my mind, and I could feel myself again, even in the abyss.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. About how, if you were the one in a body, in a crisis, and I was your neglected spirit guide, I’d do my best to steer you through the abyss, too, whispering in your ear, I’m here.
I am here, aren’t I? Still. I’m the one who has to live with me, still. Always. It gets lonely sometimes, even with love in my life. Shae, forgive me. I have something to tell you: I m
ade a new friend. You’d like her, honestly. She’s fiery. But believe me, she’ll never replace you. She couldn’t. We’re all on the same current, I promise.
• • •
A stranger is shouting at me. I blink, stirred from my daze, and he shouts again. He’s ordering me to smile. I hadn’t even realized I’d been crying, but I don’t stop crying, and I don’t smile.
My Saltine neighbor tells the stranger to fuck off, and the stranger fucks off, so I give the Saltine man a tiny nod. He returns my greeting. Then he breaks his last cracker in half, feeds it to a rat-with-wings nesting on his chest, and resumes his repose.
With the backs of my freckled, sun-spotted hands, I drag tears across my wet cheeks. A cluster of angry drivers lay on their horns all at once, drawing my attention to the jarring chaos of Tenth Avenue. It’s just an ordinary avenue. Just a few million ordinary people navigating the drama of their lives below a manmade garden of earthly delights. I lick tears from my lips, stand from this bench, hoist my bag high on my shoulder and head toward the stairs, toward the chaos of ordinary lives. One worn-leather step at a time.
Back on the street—brick and pavement, trash and spices, no trace of the bamboo or prairie and peace overhead—I buy a bar of chocolate-covered marzipan at the nearest bodega. My train leaves at ten to six, which ought to allow just enough time for me to return to myself. What a strange day this has been. So many strange days in my not-yet-long life.
The strangest of late runs through my head again, as it has all month, on a loop. It was the evening Robert told me I looked pretty in setting sunlight. Everything was half an inch out of place that night. He’d had a migraine. I’ve never known Robert to get migraines in his life, but he asked me to pick up a medicine I couldn’t find, and when I came home empty-handed, he was sitting in the dark all alone. He wasn’t himself. Somber. Still. I chalked it up to the migraine. I used to get them with my periods when I was a teenager, and I remember hiding from light and the whole nine, too. I felt sorry for him.
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