by Mary Kubica
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, deadpan. It comes as a slap to the face. “Theoretically, Meredith, what would you do?”
I swallow hard. “I’d call her husband. Express my condolences. See if there’s anything I can do.”
“Then do it,” she commands. “Do it today.”
She leaves the same way she came. I walk to the front window to watch her go, to be sure she’s really gone.
Outside the world is charcoal gray. It’s foggy. I can only see to the other side of the street. The world beyond evanesces into clouds.
* * *
In the coming days, police descend upon our neighborhood like snow in winter. I watch from a distance. No one comes to our house asking questions, though I obsess over what I’ll do when and if that happens.
What we learn, we learn from word-of-mouth and the news.
Josh is all worked up about it. “How does a grown woman just disappear?” he asks no one in particular. He’s pacing the house. He tells me that he doesn’t want me out after dark for anything, not until they find the person who did this to her.
“You’re going to drive me to and from my births?” I challenge. “Wake the kids up in the middle of the night and make them come?”
He thinks it through. His answer to this is, “You’ll take a cab. The driver can drop you off and pick you up at the hospital door.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I say, trying hard to control the tremor in my voice. “You do hear what they’re saying, don’t you, about the husband? How he killed her? I think I’m safe, unless you have plans of killing me,” I say, fleeing the room. I’m more contrary than I should be.
The guilt ravages me. Not only Shelby’s death, but that Jason may take the fall for it.
“Are you mad?” Josh asks when he finds me later in the bathroom getting ready for bed. “Did I upset you?” He comes up behind me. He lays a tender hand on my lower back. He wraps around me from behind, so that his arms circle my midriff. He knots his hands. He lowers his chin to my shoulder. He says, “I couldn’t live without you.”
I don’t deserve Josh after what I’ve done. Josh is a good man.
I can only stand it a few seconds before I free myself of his hold. “What’s wrong, Meredith?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I snap at him. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
“I am fine.”
I find myself searching things online. How exactly does one die in an auto-ped accident? Head trauma is often to blame. So, too, is organ damage, internal bleeding, damage to major arteries. I get sucked down a rabbit hole of information. Shelby’s body should have ricocheted off the hood of the car when we hit her, because of the force of impact, and because of Newton’s laws of motion. She shouldn’t have toppled over in front of it. This leads me to believe she wasn’t standing upright. That she was hunkered down, doing something as innocuous as tying a shoe. Who’d ever think you could be killed while tying a shoe?
Another thing I look up: Do corpses make sounds after death? The answer is yes. When a body is moved after death, the air left in the windpipe can escape. The result is a groan or a moan.
I obsess over this. I try to replay the sound I heard as we laid Shelby in the trunk of Bea’s car. Was it the contents of her trachea leaving? Or was she still alive?
Did Shelby ricochet off the hood of the car and land in front of it? Or, like a domino, did she fall over?
It doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s still dead.
The rain won’t let up for anything. I’m tormented by images of Shelby cold and naked, lying in the rain, shivering, soaked to the bone. I can’t stand it.
One morning, I stand at my closet looking for something to wear. My mind screams at me to pick something. Just pick something. The indecision paralyzes me. It’s like this every day. But it isn’t just the clothes. It’s every one of the seemingly million inconsequential decisions I make every day. The kids are at my feet, arguing. I don’t have the energy to react. Their voices sound muffled, as if I’m underwater and they’re up above, as I stare into the endless abyss that is my closet. It’s all too much.
I settle on something. I get in the car. I take the kids where they need to be, though Leo begs and cries as I leave him with Charlotte. I can’t go on with this guilt. I can’t live like this, thinking of nothing but what Bea and I did. All day and night I replay the moment of impact in my mind. I feel it still, the car crashing into her, and then, seconds later, the repulsive sensation of driving over her body, not once but twice.
I’m snowed under by what-ifs. What if I’d gone home with Josh? What if Bea and I hadn’t had that last drink? What if I’d insisted on driving? What if Shelby had been on the sidewalk? What if her shoe hadn’t come untied, if she hadn’t been bent down tying it, if that’s even what happened.
The guilt is a heavy burden to bear. I feel battle-scarred.
I go to the store. I no longer enjoy driving. I’m overattentive. I drive below the speed limit. I step on the brakes when I see even the slightest movement in my peripheral vision. My heart races the entire time. It’s not that I think I will be hurt. It’s that I think I will hurt someone else. My hands on the steering wheel are slick. I can’t get a good grip of the leather. Cars honk at me. I’ve become a danger, because of my extreme caution.
At the store, I buy a blanket. It’s plaid and fleece. I take it to the woods alone, where I last saw Shelby. I have to search awhile because the trees, the riverbank all look the same to me, though the river is higher than it was the last time I was here.
The days have become squally. We no longer see the sun.
I find Shelby. It’s been days since her death. The sight of her wrecks me. She’s still mostly buried, but the rain has washed much of the forest floor away. I see parts of her. A single bloated leg, lying on a bed of miry leaves. Strands of her dyed hair.
I wear gloves as I take the blanket out of its packaging. I use care not to touch it. I go to her, lay the blanket on what’s visible of her body. I don’t want to look. But I can’t tear my eyes away. What I see is unspeakable. Where the blood has settled, Shelby is purple. Gravity has taken its toll, pulling the stagnant blood down. Her lower half is entirely bruised. The flies have discovered Shelby’s body. They buzz around; they land on her. I try to dispel them. But they’re not scared of me. They leave, and then they come back.
When I look closely at Shelby’s body, there are maggots.
What I don’t think about is my shoe prints left in the mud. I see them only as I’m leaving. I’ve seen enough cop shows to know that this is how people get caught. For a split second I think about leaving the footprints there. Then it’s out of my hands. If I’m meant to be caught, I will be.
I think somewhere deep inside that’s what I want: to be caught.
But I can’t do it. I step out of my shoes. I retrace my steps. I sink to my knees, smear the shoe’s tread away with my gloved hands, moving backward. By the time I’m done, I’m bathed in mud. I let the rain rinse me clean. I carry what remains into the car with me.
Halfway home I have to pull to the side of the road to hurl.
Now when I think of her, she’s alone, but at least she’s not cold.
It’s the only thing that gets me through the night.
LEO
NOW
Before bed, Dad comes into my room where I’m doing algebra. Algebra is about the only class I like because there’s a right and a wrong answer, and no in-between. There’s no gray area, unlike in life. Life is all gray area.
“Can I come in?” Dad asks.
I shrug. “It’s your house.”
“Don’t be like that, Leo.”
“Then how do you want me to be?”
I’m not usually so stubborn.
He comes in and sits on the edge of my bed. I turn my back to him.
>
“I want you to listen. To hear me out. You’re not giving her a fair shake.”
I turn around in my chair. I look at him. It’s a swivel chair. I can go back to not looking anytime I want.
I tell him, “I’m listening.” The way I say it is petulant. All my life I’ve had to be a grown-up. It’s nice acting like a child for a change.
Dad ages every day. He aged about a decade when Mom died. He’s aged another now that you’re home. His hair is gray. He has a paunch. There are dark circles under his eyes because he doesn’t sleep. He’s always tired. He doesn’t eat much, either, not real food, though he’s taken to feeding his depression with potato chips and beer. It’s the reason for the paunch. He was an athlete once. I was a skeptic when he told me he competed in a marathon before I was born. I called bullshit. He showed me the medal to prove it. The only reason he ever runs now is when there’s been a potential sighting of you.
I don’t remember Dad before. But there are the pictures, the home videos. In them, he’s pretty jacked. He’s a stud. He has brown hair, and plenty of it. His hair wasn’t thin like it is now. It wasn’t gray. His smile wasn’t bogus back then, either.
He’s let himself go.
“The way the psychiatrist explained it to me,” Dad says, “being isolated in the dark for as long as your sister was drives people to the brink of insanity. It impairs their sense of time, their sleep cycles. Without being able to see, they suffer sensory deprivation. It fucks them up, Leo,” he says. I go rigid because Dad just said fuck. Dad doesn’t swear.
“This friend of Delilah’s was a hallucination. But to her,” he says, “he was entirely real. Where she was kept, she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. In the absence of all other stimuli, Leo, her mind kept working, and it created Gus, who, to your sister, was as real as you are to me. She wasn’t lying. She’s not a liar. She believed one hundred and ten percent that Gus was real. It’s possible that Gus was the only thing that got her through all this.”
When he says it like that, I feel like a shithead for calling you a liar and a schizo.
Dad doesn’t make me apologize. I do it, anyway.
I get an idea then. I ask Dad to drag out the home videos and we watch them. For just a little while, it’s like you are you again and Mom is still alive.
MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
I can’t keep going on like this. Josh can tell that something is wrong. He asks me about it. He saunters up behind me when I’m at the stove or the sink. He massages my shoulders. As he does, I tense up. It isn’t that I don’t want Josh touching me. It has nothing to do with Josh. It’s that Shelby is on my mind all the time. I see her when I’m awake. I see her when I’m lucky enough to sleep. The memory of her lying naked on that bed of leaves makes my flesh crawl. It will only be a matter of time before the animals find her, if they haven’t already.
Josh says things to me like, “Hey, babe, everything okay?” and that trite old saying, “Penny for your thoughts,” because he can tell I’m being pensive.
I shrug him off when he does, tell him I’m fine. He says that he’s beginning to hate that word. Fine. The tension between us grows exponentially.
Bea comes by almost every day. She skulks over when I’m home alone. She must monitor my comings and goings, or keep an eagle eye on my car in the driveway.
When she comes, I ask her things like, “What did you do with my clothes?” and, “What did you do with Shelby’s clothes?” I feel breathless all the time, in a constant state of panic. What makes it worse is having to hide my feelings from Josh and the rest of the world. Only when Bea is here can I speak freely.
Bea, on the contrary, is always composed. She tells me not to worry about it. “I took care of it,” she says, about the clothes, which doesn’t answer my question. Took care of it how?
“You didn’t go to work today,” Bea says accusatorially. “You had a class to teach at nine. I saw it on the website. You should have been there.”
“I’m not feeling well.” It’s not a lie. Guilt isn’t only emotional. It manifests itself in very physical ways. My head aches. My back aches. My stomach is in knots, and I’m constipated. I could never stay focused through class, much less make it through without that overwhelming urge to vomit or cry. I spend so much time ruminating about what Bea and I did that night, second-guessing the choices we made, the choices I made. I can’t get away from it. I’m obsessed. My mind is in a constant state of flux. I can think of nothing else but what happened that night. I don’t sleep. I barely eat.
“You need to act normal, Meredith. Normal.”
I’m not particularly religious. Josh, the kids and I go to church on Easter and Christmas, but that’s all. Still, there’s a Bible verse that’s been running never-ending through my mind since sometime last night. The truth will set you free.
It sounds so simple. I make the mistake of telling Bea.
“We’ll make the police see it was an accident, that you didn’t mean to hit Shelby,” I say. “It was unpreventable. They’ll understand.”
Bea stares at me, incredulous. “Have you lost your damn mind?” she snaps. “They’ll just fucking understand? I didn’t step on a bug. I killed a person. We, Meredith,” she says, “we killed a person.”
I plead with her. “Please, Bea. I can’t go on living like this.”
“You have to,” she says. “You have to figure it out.” She takes a step closer. “I was drunk, Meredith. And you knowingly permitted me to drive the car home. It’s your fault as much as it is mine. You’ll go to jail, too, you know, if we’re ever found out. How do you think Josh and the kids would fare while you’re rotting away in jail for years?”
I’ve thought about this. I have an answer ready. “It’s not like they can do a breathalyzer now. It’s too late to prove anything and, if you weren’t drinking, it’s a much lesser offense, like a misdemeanor.”
For a second she just stares. And then, “Are you really that dumb? Since when did you turn into a lawyer, anyway?” I see now that Bea isn’t hamstrung by the same guilt as me.
The Bea I know isn’t cruel. She’s compassionate. She’s outspoken but kind. This Bea is scared. “We’re not just talking manslaughter anymore, or a misdemeanor,” she says. “Because we also carried her out to the woods and hid her. That’s concealment of a homicide.” She pauses for effect. “It’s time you set your fucking conscience aside and think about your kids.”
After she leaves, I collapse into an armchair. I don’t move until six hours later when I hear Josh and the kids come home. I hear them outside first. I try and make myself look busy before they come in.
LEO
NOW
Back at school, Piper Hanaka comes up to me. “Hey, Leo. Can I show you something?” I’m at my locker, trying to open it for the third time because Adam Beltner already slammed it shut on me twice. I let it slide both times. He called me a wuss for it. If I’d have fought back, he would have exterminated me. I can’t win, no matter what I do.
You’re lucky you never got to experience high school. High school is pretty fucked up.
I tell Piper, “Sure. Okay. I guess.”
It’s game day, which means the cheerleaders wear their uniforms. The skirts are short enough that Piper is all legs. It barely covers her crotch. I learned the hard way that I’m not supposed to look at her legs because if I do I get called things like peedy and perv. So I don’t look at her at all. I pretend to be looking for something in my locker.
“I saw Delilah’s picture in the paper.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“It’s all so sad.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Except it’s supposed to be happy, too, because she’s, like, back.”
I don’t know what to say so I say, “What do you want to show me?”
I’ve never had a girlfriend before. I’ve never even had a girl like me. Freshman year, someone told me in gym class that some girl named Molly liked me. I still have nightmares about it. It took me three days to get the guts to ask her to the homecoming dance. Turns out it was all a hoax. Kids laughed their asses off at my expense when she said no. Molly already had a date, a junior on the varsity football team, built like a linebacker because he was.
Piper says, “My mom, like, made me get rid of everything-Delilah after she disappeared. She didn’t think it was healthy to have it around. It sucked. Like, I used to have half of a best-friends necklace that I shared with Delilah. My mom made me toss my half in the trash. She was all, like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything without the other half.’ I cried over it. So she went and bought me a new best-friends necklace and told me I could give it to anyone I wanted. I might have been six but you don’t just, like, forget your best friend.”
“Who’d you give it to?”
“Lily Morris. Do you remember her? She doesn’t even live here anymore. She moved to, like, North Carolina when we were twelve.”
I shake my head. I don’t remember her.
“Doesn’t matter. Lily was never a good friend, anyway. In fourth grade she started a rumor that I, like, peed my pants when I laughed.”
I want to ask her if it’s true. If it is, I’d find it endearing.
“Anyway, my mom let me keep one picture of Delilah, though.”
“That’s cool,” I say, though it was a dick move for Mrs. Hanaka to make her get rid of everything that reminded her of you. Dad, on the other hand, kept everything. Your rainbow glitter shoes are still by the door and have been for eleven years. You’ve probably noticed.
Piper shows me the picture. You’re a little kid in it. It’s a close-up of yours and Piper’s faces smashed side by side together. You’re smiling. Half your teeth are missing. You’re all red hair and freckles, happy like the kid I saw dancing around on Dad’s home videos, not scared like the person you now are.