by Mary Kubica
I’ve reached the end of my rope. I can’t keep living with this secret. I need to go to the police. I need to tell them what we’ve done, and suffer the consequences. I deserve that.
My own guilt aside, Jason deserves closure. He needs to know what happened to Shelby. I’ve been following the investigation on the news, and it’s not good. All roads lead to Jason. Jason has been rumored to have been having an affair. It’s damning. I’ll never be able to live with myself if Jason gets convicted of murder. If that were to happen, what would happen to the baby? Who would raise her? Who would care for her special needs? Would she be institutionalized?
At some point I must have drifted off to sleep. Because when I wake up, Josh is gone. Beside me, on the nightstand, is a tepid coffee. The bedroom smells of his cologne.
He was here. But now he’s not.
I get out of bed. I go downstairs to see if he’s there, but he’s already left for work. Back upstairs, in their bedrooms, Delilah is still sound asleep but Leo has begun to stir. Delilah won’t be going to school today. I debate keeping Leo home. There’s really no reason for him to go to Charlotte’s if Delilah and I are home.
But he’s been having such a hard time at Charlotte’s of late. It would be confusing to him if I were to keep him home. Tomorrow he’d cry twice as hard. And besides, Charlotte promised me that that Brody boy wouldn’t be there. The thing Leo hates most about Charlotte’s is gone. I can’t just keep him here to catch Delilah’s germs.
I go into Leo’s bedroom. He’s out of bed, playing with his toys on the floor. I sit down beside him and pull him into my lap. “Hey, baby,” I say, kissing the top of his head. His hair is mussed up. He smells like sleep.
We play with his toys together for a while. It’s a firehouse playset. He’s the fireman while I’m the Dalmatian. There’s a fire on the other side of the bedroom. Our fireman and dog hop in the toy fire truck and Leo pushes it across the floor to put the fire out.
After a while, I say to Leo, “Miss Charlotte called last night. She said you’ve been having trouble with another boy at her house.” I pause, wait for Leo’s reaction. “A boy named Brody.” Leo’s whole body stiffens at the sound of this boy’s name. His face turns red, his eyes fill with tears. I wrap my arms around him. “I wish I had known that this boy was being mean to you, Leo. I would have liked to help,” I say. It isn’t an indictment. I’m not blaming Leo for not telling me about the abuse. But I want Leo to know he can tell me anything. “Miss Charlotte says that Brody won’t be coming back to her house to play. It’s just you and the other kids from here on out. How does that sound?” Leo shyly smiles. He likes the sound of that.
Delilah wakes up. Her fever is back. She looks glassy-eyed. Her voice is rasping and she holds a hand to her throat like it hurts. I take her temperature. Again it’s one hundred and three. I give her another dose of medicine. I help her down the stairs to the sofa and get her something to drink. She has no appetite. She watches cartoons while Leo gets ready to go to Charlotte’s house.
Delilah waits in the car when I drop Leo off. I tell Charlotte that Delilah won’t be coming after school because she’s sick. “It’s just Leo,” I say. Leo steps up to the door. He looks inside. He doesn’t cry.
Back at home, Delilah returns to the sofa. She’s all tuckered out from the quick drive to the sitter’s house. This fever has gotten the better of her. I sit beside her for a while, with her head on my lap. In time, I get up to look for my phone, to let Josh know that Delilah is sick. I take a lap around the house but don’t find it. I must have left it in the car when I took Leo, along with my purse. I peek on Delilah before going to the garage to get the phone. She’s sound asleep.
The garage is detached. It a good fifty feet from our house to the garage door. The day is wet. I step out the back door and into the weather. I pull the door closed. I don’t like the way I feel as I turn my back to it. But Delilah won’t be alone long. I’ll be back in thirty seconds if I’m quick. I run through the rain. The yard is covered in puddles. I step in them and they splash, soaking my lower half. I’ll need to change my pants when I get back in. The lower-lying parts of the yard have begun to flood.
I go in through the side door, not the roll-up door. I step inside and go to the car. I yank open the passenger’s side door and there it is: my purse. Except that I’m in a hurry. When I go to pick it up, I grab from the bottom. The contents of the purse spill onto the floor mat. “Shit,” I say as I lean in to collect them. A tube of lipstick has rolled beneath the seat. I lower myself down, stretch my arm beneath the seat to get it.
“Good morning, Meredith,” I hear.
The sound of her voice throws me into an even greater state of imbalance. I jolt upright. I wheel around to face her, standing behind me. “Bea,” I say, putting my hand to my heart. “You startled me.” I’m on edge all the time.
Bea comes fully into the garage. “You don’t look good,” she says to me. I haven’t showered. My hair is thrown into a sloppy bun. I’m wearing sweats, which I wore to drop Leo off with Charlotte. If not for that, I’d be in my pajamas still. Other than the coffee Josh left, I haven’t had anything to eat or drink. I feel weak, small in comparison to Bea. My heart thumps. It’s dizzying, loud. I’m certain Bea can hear it. “Are you all right?” she asks.
“Every time I close my eyes, I see her,” I confess. “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep going on like this.”
“You need to keep your shit together, Meredith,” Bea warns, “for a little while longer. We are so close to getting away with this.”
“I’m done,” I breathe out. “I can’t keep this secret anymore.”
“The husband is already guilty, according to the court of public opinion. He’ll be arrested soon. Then our lives can go on. Everything will go back to normal.”
“Normal?” I ask, staggered. What even is normal anymore? I will never be normal again. I tell her, “They won’t arrest him if they don’t find her body.”
“What do you know, Meredith?” she asks reproachfully.
“Without a body, how can anyone be sure she’s even dead?”
She picks holes in my theory. “People have been convicted of murder without a body before. All they need is enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury she’s dead.”
“Circumstantial evidence?” I ask. “Like what?” The details of the investigation are hush-hush. We only know some. There were dogs looking for her. They didn’t find her, or else we’d know.
Bea says, “Her bloody clothes.”
“What did you do with her clothes?” I ask. I think of the way she wrenched Shelby’s clothes from her body that night, letting her head drop, unsupported. It was ungentle.
Bea doesn’t say what she’s done with Shelby’s clothes. But from her silence, I surmise.
“You’re going to frame Jason. You’re using her clothes to frame him.” My hand goes to my mouth in disbelief.
“Since when are you and he on a first-name basis?” she asks.
“Have you forgotten that Shelby was a client of mine?” I ask. “I know Jason. I know him well enough. He has a child, Bea. A baby girl. She just lost her mother. She can’t lose her father, too. I won’t let you do this to him,” I say, and for the first time, I’m sure. Killing Shelby is one thing. But letting Jason take the fall for it is another, because that’s premeditated and purposeful. I can’t get Grace off my mind, imagining her growing up without a mother’s or a father’s love. “I’m calling the police.”
The conviction in my voice is unmistakable. I see a change come over Bea. She’s bemused at first. She stares, openmouthed. “You can’t do that,” she pleads with me. Her voice changes, becoming less domineering, more desperate. She softens and for the first time since we killed Shelby, I see that tough exterior crack. “Please, Meredith. Please think this through. I beg of you,” Bea says. “I can’t go to jail. I wouldn’
t survive it. I’m not as strong as you are.”
“No, you’re not,” I tell her. “You’re stronger.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t believe that she is stronger than me. “If I go to jail, Kate will leave me. She’ll move on while I’m gone. We’ll have nothing when we finally get out. You and me. Not one fucking thing, Meredith.” She’s begging now.
I close my eyes. I imagine a world ten or twelve years from now, when Bea and I are finally released from prison. Delilah and Leo would be teenagers by then. They’d be in high school. I wouldn’t get to see them grow up. They might hate me because of it. They might be resentful, embarrassed, ashamed. Would Josh bring them to visit me? Would I even want them to come, to see me incarcerated? Josh, in my absence, might find and fall in love with another woman. It kills me to consider these things.
“We’ll get a good lawyer,” I tell her. “Josh has clients who are defense attorneys. We’ll find one who can help us. Think about it, Bea. We have no prior criminal charges. Neither of us has been charged with a prior DUI. We can work out a plea bargain.”
“And what would that be?” she asks, miffed. “Five years instead of ten? Do you have any fucking clue what five years in jail would be like? We wouldn’t survive five minutes.”
It doesn’t matter what the consequences are. I can’t live with Shelby’s death on my conscience. I don’t want to live like this. Shelby will never see her daughter grow up. Why should I?
“I’m sorry, Bea. I have to do this.”
Another change comes over Bea. She turns hard. “The hell you are,” she says. Suddenly I’m a liability. I am the only thing standing between her and her freedom.
I go to leave, but Bea is in my way, blocking me from leaving. I’m wedged between the car door and the garage wall. There’s hardly any room to scoot past.
I ask, “What if I told the police that I was the one driving the car that night? What if I said that you had too much to drink, and I offered to drive? I was the one who ran into Shelby. It was my idea, taking her out to the woods, hiding her. I did it while you were passed out drunk in the back seat.”
Her tone is flat. “No one will believe you,” she says. She steps toward me. The lights in the garage are off. The only light comes from outside, though the day is gray. Hardly any light gets in.
“Why’s that?” I ask. I’m not a good liar. But the police have no proof to the contrary. It would be my word against theirs. They’d have no choice but to believe it.
“Because you couldn’t have pulled all that off without me. You weigh like a hundred pounds, Meredith, sopping wet. There’s no way you could have moved her all on your own. There’s no way you could have buried her.”
“I did my part,” I tell her. “I pulled my weight that night.”
“But you couldn’t have done it without me. No one will believe you. We’ll still both go to jail.”
I remind her, “We killed a woman, Bea. We took a life.”
My phone is there on the car’s floor mat. My eyes fall to it. I lean down and reach for it before she can stop me. Bea sees what I’ve done and she comes at me, trying to take the phone out of my hands. She’ll never let me call the police. The battery icon shows red. Soon my phone will be dead.
We tussle over the phone. She tries to rip it out of my hands. I pull back; I shove her. I don’t mean to. I just react. Bea reels back, into the sheathing, which is riddled with exposed nails. Josh and I talk about them all the time. We talk about how those nails on the garage walls are a hazard. We worry about the kids cutting themselves on one. We worry about things like tetanus. Josh has talked about using the bolt cutters to cut the nails back, but he never did.
Bea falls into them. They lance her arm. She’s bleeding, but I don’t think she knows that she is. She’s slowed down because of the fall. I use it to my advantage, to move quickly. I have to get away from her. If I get to the house, I can lock the door behind myself. There I can call the police. I’ll confess to what I’ve done. I’ll let Bea decide what she wants to confess to when the police come looking for her.
But I only get as far as the other side of the car. She’s quick. She catches me there, grabbing me by the arm. “Give me the phone,” she snaps, clutching my arm so tight it hurts. “Give me the fucking phone, Meredith.”
I try to pull my arm away, but can’t. I spin around to face her. Bea’s eyes are enraged. I’m about to tell her no, that I won’t give her the fucking phone. But the words get stuck in my throat. Bea now wields a hammer. Josh’s hammer, which she must have grabbed from his workbench on the way past.
“What do you think you’re going to do with that?” I ask.
“Just give me the phone and I’ll put it down,” she says. I almost believe her. Bea doesn’t want to hurt me. I know this. Until what happened with Shelby, Bea bore no malice toward me, toward anyone. She was benevolent.
But the Bea I see now has her back to a wall. I have no idea how far she’s willing to go to protect herself and her freedom.
She holds her free hand out. “Give me the fucking phone, Meredith.”
I tell her no. I can’t do that. I glance down at my phone and find the keypad.
She hoists the hammer above her head. “Don’t fucking test me,” she screams.
“Or what?” I challenge. “What will you do to me, Bea?”
She says nothing. I call her bluff. Bea is my friend. We’ve known each other for years. It’s not like I’m Shelby. Bea didn’t know Shelby. She had no affinity toward her. It was far easier to do what she did to Shelby than to hurt me.
I turn away from her. I’ll go back to the house and call the police from there.
But as I turn, I’m shocked to see Delilah standing in the open garage door, watching us. She holds the TV’s remote control in her hands. Her hair spills across her face. Her eyes are punch-drunk with fever and fear.
“Mommy,” she says. Her tiny voice wobbles, seeing Bea with the hammer just steps behind me, listening to Bea and me fight.
It all happens at the very same time.
Delilah’s eyes turn to swimming pools. They fill with tears. “Mommy. The remote doesn’t work,” she says as I feel the immobilizing pain of the hammer striking my head from behind. It’s more shock than pain. I try to speak, to tell her to run, but my words are suddenly slurred. My legs collapse and I’m falling. The garage spins. The cold garage floor catches me, and then, all there is, is blackness.
LEO
NOW
The cops brought you back to our place just long enough to pack up your stuff. The rest of us wait downstairs while you go up alone.
We’re all guilty of assuming you’re pretty much helpless. We’ve forgotten you’re the same girl who survived eleven years in some hellhole, who crafted your own shank to stab a man with and set yourself free. Not many people could do that. You’re stronger than we think. You’re stronger than you think.
This is what the cops came up with at the police station: there’s something called false memories. They feel real like real memories, but they’re not. People’s minds can deceive them, or they can be tricked into remembering things that never happened in the first place. Memory can be manipulated. Ideas can be implanted inside a person’s head. That’s what they think happened to you.
As the cops continued to pry, you remembered being read to from a newspaper, seeing Dad’s and Mom’s pictures in that paper before your world went dark. The cops dug up an old article from the paper online and Dad’s picture was exactly as you described it: Dad standing in front of our blue house. There was another picture inset into the text. This was one of Mom. The caption: Suburban mom found dead of apparent suicide. The article had been added to the AP newswire, which meant it ran in papers almost everywhere.
For whatever reason, Eddie and Martha found the article. They made you believe you were Delilah, and that the people in
the pictures were your dad and mom. There’s no saying why, not unless the cops find them. But the man cop guesses that Eddie and Martha were obsessed with Delilah’s high profile case, or they were copycat criminals. They got off on taking you. They either pretended or believed that you were that elusive missing girl who captured the attention of the world and quickly earned celebrity status: my sister.
It’s taking a long time for you to pack up your things. But no one wants to rush you because you’re going through a lot of heavy stuff right now. You need a minute alone. We sit in the kitchen and wait. Dad gets everyone water.
The good news is that your DNA is a real match to some missing kid in the database. Your name is Carly Byrd and you’re sixteen years old. You disappeared about a week after my sister did, from some place near St. Louis. You got snatched off your own street. There’s no saying why someone deemed my sister’s story newsworthy and yours not.
After about a half hour of waiting for you, Dad goes to see if you need help.
Almost immediately, he starts hollering from the top of the stairs. “She’s gone. She’s gone!”
I take the steps two at a time to find that the room is empty and the clothes Dad bought for you still in their drawers. You’ve run away. The window is open. My sister’s bedroom is on the second floor, but there’s a roof and a trellis just outside. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And you’re desperate.
MEREDITH
11 YEARS BEFORE
May
My hearing returns to me first, to a limited degree. What I hear is spotty, sporadic. Slurred words. Wind rushing through a tunnel. Drumsticks tapping a snare drum. I can’t make sense of it. I press my eyes closed, avoiding sensory input. It’s too much. Vomit rises in the back of my throat and I swallow it down. My head throbs. It pulsates in my ears, my temples, the backs of my eyes. Someone hums.
I don’t know where I am or why I’m here. I must have been dreaming.