“Maybe never,” she replies, feeling her cheeks grow hot.
She doesn’t know something. When she doesn’t know something, Gillian freaks out. She has spent her whole life pursuing knowledge of things, so when she is in the dark on a particular topic—any particular topic—she loses her mind.
When she doesn’t match their sense of levity about the whole thing, eventually they settle down, and the mood of their conversation dries up entirely.
Madeline eyes her from over yet another drink, her face twisted into a grimace, and then she says, “Do you really want to know?”
She does. Of course, she does. She wouldn’t have chided them, if not.
Gillian takes this all in, as she does most things, analytically. Without judgment.
For a moment, she is possessed of the impulse to tell them about the sickness they very obviously suffer from, but she doesn’t.
It’s not her style.
Instead, she cogitates on it, trying to think through the logic of their decision. She supposes maybe it makes sense that they would keep it from her for so long, especially if they were somehow worried about prosecution in the matter.
Or if Mary Ellen somehow found out about it.
She would definitely have a claim for...something.
But first, she needs to know what it is.
“Tell me everything,” she says, half a demand.
Audrey leans forward, her breath a cloud of liquor in front of her. “Only under an oath of secrecy. We need to know you’re still...one of the girls.”
“I am,” she manages through gritted teeth.
She doesn’t like the rah-rah girl stuff. It reeks of the same tribalism which got her into that jam all those years ago.
But she figures she must, for the time being, fall prey to it. She needs to know what they did.
Or, she thinks, what else they did.
“The night,” Audrey begins, glancing once at Madeline before continuing, “we ended up leaving your place after...what happened with Mary Ellen.”
She sips her drink, now more cognizant of herself—and maybe a little more reflective, too—and takes a moment to calm down.
“We were supposed to go home, but—and I should say this is not how I feel today—but we were so hyped from the idea of what we had done—”
“The actual inception,” Madeline interrupts.
“—That we just couldn’t let go without seeing it. We had set this thing into motion, and it was, like, we couldn’t just turn our backs on it.”
Gillian is already ahead of them, at this point, her mind racing up to the end of their whole scenario. She can see their teenage selves driving to the Coughlin residence and standing in the darkness of the family’s garage, waiting for the right moment to peer in.
She is almost choking when she asks the next question.
“What did you do when you got there?”
Her hands quiver with the loss of humanity. It’s as though something else—another person—is being taken from this world, from the mere insinuation of the story.
And these girls—not women, not at all—have no idea what they hold in their hands.
But as Audrey talks, Gillian sees something in Madeline’s face, a changing countenance. There is now a darkness in her that was not present before.
Madeline was always cruel, but Gillian thinks she is witnessing something else.
Could it be—empathy?
“We chickened the fuck out!”
Audrey still has the fiery look of the anointed, as if she could do it all over again. Her face is wide and open and joyous, and though she is laughing, there is something grim about it. Like delirium.
Madeline—the voice of reason, for once—steps in and says, “Neither one of us could do it,” she says, putting Gillian oddly at ease. “I mean, it was never really an option.”
“You say that,” Audrey says, “but you seemed pretty gung-ho about it that night.”
“It was the adrenaline,” Madeline counters. “I thought I was such hot fucking shit, that nothing would touch me. I was wrong, and that was wrong.”
“You sure this isn’t all in retrospect?” Audrey probes, an edge in her voice.
“It was fun in that way everything you do at sixteen is fun. Like nothing can kill you. But then something does. We were just lucky we didn’t play those games with one another. It could have really gotten out of hand.”
This is the first truly poignant thing either of them has said tonight, Gillian thinks. Otherwise, it’s a couple of fried brain cells smacking against one another.
She is surprised Madeline is forthright about her monstrous behavior from back in the day, but maybe that’s a case of too little, too late. No one from the Coughlin family would accept this disgusting show of attrition.
Why should Gillian?
“So, neither of you approached the house?” Gillian asks, refocusing their attention.
Madeline shakes her head. “We watched from the driveway.”
Audrey, her eyes gleaming from the drinks, says, “We could see the light. But no. Neither one of us went even near that garage. Scout’s honor.”
She hiccups, laughs, and downs her drink. It takes every bit of Gillian’s restraint not to slap her across her smug face.
Gillian is confronted with an immediate conundrum.
Does this information warrant relaying to the police?
Or to Mary Ellen?
She lives up in Portland or Seattle or somewhere now, so it’s not like she will be coming home anytime soon.
It’s almost like she’s sublimated, gone from a human being to a phantom. Gillian knows she still exists—she suspects Mary Ellen has some fake profile—but she’s yet to reach out.
There’s never a perfect time.
Until now.
And the now of a situation like this is all that matters.
But then she comes to the realization that if she tells Mary Ellen right now, she might be playing into the hands of some complicated scheme of theirs. The way they’re looking at her, they could absolutely eat her for dinner.
So she pulls back, thinks to think on it a while.
“Who else have you told?” Gillian asks.
Madeline holds up a big old donut, placing her thumb against her other fingers and looking through the hole. “No-fucking-body.”
“Huh,” Gillian responds. “So, there’s no there there. You just went over there and then, I don’t know, went to get ice cream afterward?”
“We stayed there for a while,” Audrey admits. “I don’t think either of us wanted to back away, so we just kind of stood there and prayed for the courage.”
“Courage?”
“Yeah,” Audrey says, clearly not hearing the horror in Gillian’s voice. “The cojones to do it, to walk up and look in his frightened eyes as he—”
“Aud, that’s enough,” Madeline interrupts, the blush in her cheeks more than makeup.
Gillian allows Audrey’s last outburst to linger in the air like old smoke, and then she frames her final—and most important—question as directly as possible.
“Why now?”`
Back in the moment, after her story, Gillian looks up at me, as if to beg me for the answer to that question.
I don't have anything of the sort.
I just have more questions of my own.
“What did they say to that?” I ask. “Certainly they had a reason, beyond hey we’re drunk. That can’t be it, can it?”
She shrugs. “It seems like maybe they felt the need to unburden their souls, even if it came off like two kids admitting to a childhood crush.”
The thought of it makes my skin crawl. “Why do you think they did it?”
“I dunno,” she says, sounding tired. “I’ve thought about that a lot. Like, they could have spent the rest of their lives without risking telling anyone about it.”
“What’s the risk?” I ask. “I already paid the bill for all of it.”
“Yeah,”
she says, “that’s the part I can’t figure out. Maybe they thought there was some chance they could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.”
“Or maybe they had buffed the scratches out of their personal lives enough that the shiny coat on the outside gleamed.”
“Could be,” she says. “They could be hiding it so they don’t suffer any present-day consequences, but that doesn’t seem likely.”
She finishes off her drink. “Also, there’s the issue of Madeline.”
“What about her?”
“She looked...spooked about it.”
“Like how?”
“Like she was being forced into saying it against her will,” Gillian says.
“Maybe like she’s been receiving threats?”
“Or like she genuinely wanted to get it off her chest. I don't know. You know how hard it is to read her. Everything is below the surface.”
“And now she’ll never be able to do it. To unburden her soul.”
“It makes me wonder if somebody else plans on doing it for her.”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me, either.
“Jesus,” I say. “What am I supposed to do with all of this?”
“Do with it what you want,” she replies. “I’m just the messenger.”
“I wonder what Audrey thinks of it.”
“I think maybe that was the beginning of the rift between those two,” Gillian says, and I nod along. “Why else would they suddenly separate, when they’ve been so close for all these years?”
“Maybe it got to be too much for them to keep this mutual secret.”
“Maybe the wrong person found out,” Gillian says. “And this is the result.”
I think about that for a while. “Everett’s mother always seemed to have something inflammatory to say. You don’t think—”
“I don’t know,” she replies. “All I know is, if somebody went after Madeline, then they could go after us, too.”
My next thought about Madeline’s death—her interactions with the cousin—is interrupted by my phone’s ring.
I check the number, and by the time I answer, I’ve left Gillian behind, hoping she’ll lock up on her way out the door.
13
By the time I get to Mom’s room, she’s unconscious. She’s turned a sickly yellow color, like someone’s doused the room with a bad Instagram filter.
They don’t quite know what’s wrong with her, but whatever it is, it’s bad.
“Can you tell me what the fuck is going on?” I ask, when the first nurse is able to tear herself away to speak with me.
She runs through a whole list of possibilities, though none of them sound certain. However, one thing she says catches me off-guard.
“If I didn’t know any better,” she says, “I’d think she’s been poisoned.”
“And you can’t do, like, a test or something to find that out?”
“Anyone who knows what they’re doing could use any number of impossible-to-trace substances to get away with it. Polonium, for example, is what the Russians use when they—”
“My mother isn’t a spy, for chrissakes,” I say, desperation edging into my voice. I don’t know jack shit about anything medical, but I do know that, whatever my mom has going on, it isn’t some Russian plot to get rid of her.
The woman is a font of compassion. She smiles sadly and says, “Just know that we are doing everything we can to help her, but sometimes these things can be difficult to pin down, especially with someone as—”
“Crazy?”
“—sick as your mother obviously is. I’m not asking you to put your emotions on hold, but I do hope you can bear with us as we do everything we can to save your mom.”
Once she’s done, I’m left feeling better and more optimistic than before. Mom stabilizes, even if she looks like she’s curled up on death’s door, and I take up residence outside her room as I wait for updates.
As I sit there, a whole litany of possible outcomes become apparent to me, but only two make any real sense. Either she’s going to survive this and be forever disabled, or she will die.
It’s that simple.
I’ve been hiding from the truth of this eventual outcome for too long to prepare myself for it. The bridge is too rickety. The tires are too flat. The infrastructure has crumbled. I am brittle but also too distant from it.
And yet, I can still push it away for a little while longer. She needs me to be strong right now. There is no one else—no sisters or brothers, no remaining parents—so I am literally all she has.
I’d like to think Dad is looking down on us, that he is keeping watch over the two of us, but it’s a blurry sort of wish, like the desultory career choices of children.
I want to be an astronaut.
I want to be President of the United States.
I want my dead father to make sure I survive my mother’s death.
There is no solace. This last stretch of road is paved with misery, and I’m going to have to drive it, either way. Might as well throw the shifter into drive and pull forward.
Selfishly, of course, I want her to stick around. I always want my mother, though not in the urgent way most people do. I want her the way lapsed Christians want their gods: passive, present, and almost always in the background of their lives.
At a certain point, I nod off.
I wake up at dusk, desperately thirsty.
When I step out to pick up a soda from the downstairs vending machine, Detective Ciccotelli is waiting for me. Like I brought this on myself.
He looks older than the last time I saw him. Something about his face. The basset hound eyes and the high-grit sandpaper stubble. The gin blossoms. Eyes under cavernous brows. They shift to me slowly, filled with a grim perspicacity. As though he’s seen everything and just needs it to be revealed to everyone else.
“Miss Hanneford,” he says quietly, almost pleasantly, as if this is a chance encounter.
“Detective,” I reply, eyeing the rows and rows of diet drinks in the machine.
I swipe my card and select a Diet Dr. Pepper.
He dispenses with the pleasantries this time, but his tone is flat and emotionless.
“How would you characterize your relationship with Madeline Ambrose?”
“St. Clair. She never actually changed her name.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. She could use one when she wanted but rely on the other when it was convenient for her.”
“Either way, what would you say about how you two got along?”
“Am I under investigation?”
“No,” he says leaning against the Coke machine. “Just getting a sense of the case, as it is right now. It’s like a broken mirror, the shattered pieces flung in all directions. Each one reflects something different—I just need to know what.”
“How big is the shard you’ve got me trapped in?”
“It’s not like that,” he says, and for some reason, I believe him. Foolishly, I suppose, but I guess that’s where we are.
“Nonexistent,” I say, going back to his question. “She and I only picked things up recently, when I came back to Nashville.”
“And she didn’t mention any conversation, any communication, that might have provoked someone to act in a violent way toward her?”
“What, like she deserved what she got?”
I don’t quite know why I’m defending Madeline, but there is an innate defensiveness in me when it comes to cops. It’s like I’ve spent my whole life in solitary, when the opposite is true...mostly.
“No, like, did she say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and set a series of actions—Listen, I’ve spent a whole hell of a lot of time investigating cases. You remember the one story about the guy who stabbed his wife to death because she served him fried eggs instead of scrambled eggs?”
“I don’t.”
“Guy gets up at the ass crack of dawn to go to work. Never thinks about the fact that his poor, beleaguered wife gets up even earlie
r to cook his ungrateful ass some breakfast. Anyway, she can’t read his mind, so she makes fried eggs and French toast. Son-of-a-bitch has some sort of psychotic break, takes one of them giant, Michael Myers type knives out of the drawer and stabs her until the cops arrive.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Then, he just kind of drops it and walks over to us, explaining what happened.”
I can only stare. He seems to have lost me back at the off ramp.
“My point is,” he says, “sometimes people are victims of circumstance, and the random nature of the crime cannot be assembled from the disparate pieces and threads that make it up.”
I nod. This part, at least, makes sense.
“Other crimes, though, they are the result of a direct line drawn from A to B. It might not be evident, at first—the way it was with the breakfast fellow—but eventually the thread becomes visible, and we can follow it to its ultimate destination.”
“And you think maybe I am the thread?”
“I haven’t decided that yet,” he replies, looking me over speculatively. “Could be, in which case I should be demoted for telling you so much.”
“I didn’t do it,” I reply.
“But my other instinct,” he continues, ignoring me, “is that you have something to do with this, even if you’re not directly involved.”
I’m appalled, and I tell him so.
Detective Ciccotelli isn’t perturbed in the least bit, however. He’s chewing at something he feels like he can grind down into a kind of malleable paste. He just hasn’t quite figured out how to get his teeth on it just right.
So I help him along.
“All right,” I say. “She and I have talked—or just talked, past tense—a few times since I came home. Really only the once, I guess, when she—”
“Showed up past midnight at your rental home,” he finishes my sentence.
He knows more than he lets on, so I have to be careful with what I have to say. Which is weird, considering the fact that I don’t really know anything, at least not anything that would have any sort of bearing on the case.
Her exsanguinated corpse flashes through my mind. I can see the blank, half-lidded eyes, staring up at nothing. The growing puddle of crimson beneath her neck. The ragged, hamburger meat quality of the wound on the side of her head.
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