by Sara Beitia
After maybe a couple dozen entries, most of them short, Albert came to the last one, just a couple months after the journal had begun. It ended on the day before Lily’s accident. The cheap paper was stained with dark drops that wrinkled the pages of dark, hasty script.
I hate myself. I hate my mother. I HATE HIM.
He thinks he can get away with it, just does whatever, that it’s my word against his. Slutty little crazy teenage liar versus him. Said I’d get to like it. It’s not like you’re a virgin, he said. He said he could tell.
But you’re not really good at it yet, he said. I’m going to teach you about screwing.
He was drunk—barely drunk—as he always is when he’s bothering me. I don’t blame the alcohol, though. I think he drinks for courage, for something to blame it on. So he can forget why he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing while he’s doing it. Maybe so he can look us all in the face the next day, I don’t know. I don’t know how he could this time, though.
It’s driving me crazy to think it might not have happened if we hadn’t been alone in the house. I want to die. But I won’t give him the satisfaction.
Guess what, you fucking asshole: you shouldn’t have been so hot to have the lights on. I can remember everything from the size and shape of your tiny little dick to the birthmark on your ass. I was looking, because I knew I had to remember every bit. Now I’m going to crucify you with it.
Mom, if you find this and read it: Hope you had fun at your girls’ weekend.
I have to make this quick because I have to get the hell out of here before I lose it. He thinks I’m in here sleeping, not sitting on the floor of my closet writing it all down. He’s probably passed out by now and if I’m lucky he won’t hear me shut the window when I leave.
So:
At seven-thirty this evening I was getting ready to go out. My stepfather, Perry Kogen, came into my room without knocking. He was wearing …
Albert was spared the more graphic details, maybe because there were things about that night Lily couldn’t bring herself to write. But there was enough he could hardly stand to read, though he read it anyway because he knew, from the way the letters wavered, that it had to have been almost more than she could bear to put on the page.
Albert was caught in Lily’s words and it was like being tangled in a nightmare. The Bad Thing That Happened wasn’t the accident at Dr. Perry Kogen’s dental practice, but the revolting thing that happened right here in her bedroom. His skin was clammy, and his breath short. He thought he might vomit. He thought he might cry. He wondered what a panic attack was like, and if he was about to have one.
Lily, Lily, Lily, he thought, as if repeating her name enough times could take back what happened.
Albert was so unaware of anything outside of Lily’s journal that he actually jumped when he heard a voice above him.
“What the hell are you doing in my sister’s room?”
Every muscle in his body seemed to be vibrating. He looked up to see Olivia Odilon standing in the closet doorway. He knew that this must look bad, and perhaps he was infected by Lily’s acid writings. As he watched Olivia’s eyes flit from his face to the journal and back up again, demanding an explanation, he felt dirty and awkward and guilty.
He asked, “Are you going to call the cops?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “It depends on if you have a really spectacular reason for sitting on the floor of my missing sister’s closet and reading what looks like a diary. You have about ten seconds before I start screaming and dial 911.”
A flood of words rushed, panicked, from Albert’s mouth. “I think I know where Lily is.”
From the look on Olivia’s face, of all the things she expected him to say, it wasn’t this. But her expression of surprise gave way to suspicion almost immediately. “How do you know? Did you do something?” She backed away a couple of feet, tripping over the mess on the floor.
He scrambled to his feet, an awkward thing given his size and the cramped space. “No! I can explain. Like this—I found it in the back of the closet.”
She snatched the journal from his outstretched hand, keeping her distance. “I thought there’d be nothing left here at all, between the cops and my parents. To say they’ve been through this room thoroughly is an understatement. They took her cell phone, her computer … and a bunch of stuff I don’t even get why they need.”
“I guess they didn’t find the space under the floorboards in her closet.” Albert was shocked at his own pale joke and he felt like he might just lose it.
Still not understanding, Olivia was surprised into a grudging bray of a laugh. “I’m not going to say I’m not creeped out—and a little concerned for my safety—but I guess I’m sort of impressed.”
He hesitated, trying to figure out how to tell her. “You should probably read it.”
She snorted. “It’s that good, huh?”
He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, then immediately regretted it. She reached up and slapped his hand away. He said, “You really don’t know anything about what happened with Lily and your stepfather … ?”
“I guess you’re going to tell me.” She sighed heavily and covered her face with her free hand.
“He raped her,” Albert said. The words were evil and poisonous in his mouth. It was too raw a topic to be discussed by two people who barely knew each other, but he couldn’t help that. He was acutely aware of the grim absurdity of this moment: the location, the players, the reason these things had all come together. It wasn’t a scene he could have imagined just a few days ago, and the thought made him even sadder.
“What?” Olivia said, holding the book up like a prop. “It says that?”
He nodded. “She wrote it right before her accident. Read it yourself—it’s on the last page.”
She read it quickly, her eyes darting across the page. When she was done, she closed the journal, her head still hanging. She mumbled into her chest, “I can’t take this. I really can’t.”
“I know.” His eyes welled and he brushed them roughly with the back of his hand. Lily had never given him the slightest indication of what had happened to her, so it made her words—angry and raw—even more of a punch in the gut.
“Why didn’t she ever say anything?” Olivia asked, not really asking Albert.
But this was a question he thought he maybe had an answer for. Or at least a working theory, which had popped into his head as a fully formed idea. “She didn’t say anything because she didn’t know,” he said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. I think … it … happened, and she wrote about it, obviously planning to turn him in to the cops or whoever. Then I think she put the journal back in the closet, and that same night there was the accident, and everything that happened with that. She lost all those months, including the memory of—that,” he said, pointing to the book. He couldn’t bring himself to say it again.
“There’s no way she could have stayed here, otherwise,” Olivia said, thinking out loud. Pretty soon Albert saw her thin shoulders shake. She was so much smaller that Lily. Whenever Albert saw her at school—if he ever noticed her—she looked like a dark, scowling twelve-year-old. These thoughts crossed his mind and he felt low and mean for thinking them while she was right in front of him, crying for her sister.
“Look, this is all really overwhelming—” Albert began.
“It’s a nightmare, is what it is,” Olivia interrupted fiercely.
“Maybe I should go. I can put the journal back for now—I’ll show you the hiding place—and when you think you’re ready, we can—”
“God, stop treating me like a—I don’t even know what.” She rubbed her eyes, and the tears were gone and the scowl was back. “I don’t like it. While you’re handing out answers, maybe you can tell me why she’s gone, then, if she doesn’t remember anything.”
To him it was obvious, but then he remembered that Olivia didn’t know about Lily’s letter. “Because she was starting to remember.
And your stepfather knew it. Somehow. The police have witnesses who say the night she left she was fighting with someone. They think—everyone thinks—it was with me. I think the fight was with him.”
“How did you get all that?”
“She sent me a letter.”
Olivia held out her hand. “Why didn’t you say so? Let me see it.”
“It’s at my house, hidden.” But he was able to recite it pretty much word for word from his memory. He felt self-conscious as he did so. When he was done, he was amazed at how successfully Lily’s sister fought another storm of tears. He said, “I’ll show it to you later, but you can’t tell anyone about it. Not until I figure it out—”
“Didn’t I tell you to stop being an idiot? Who the fuck am I going to tell?” Olivia sat on the edge of her sister’s bed. “We can’t leave this journal here, either. It’s evidence. You have to get out of here, and you have to take it with you and hide it. I’ll sneak out later to meet you and you can show me Lily’s letter. Then we’ll take both to the cops.” She was almost smiling, now that she had a strategy. “To keep things simple, I’ll tell them it was me who found the journal in her closet.”
Albert didn’t have the same confidence in the police that Olivia seemed to have. “Do you think they’ll believe it, though? Lily didn’t think so.”
“Shouldn’t this be enough to make them open an investigation of Perry, at least?” She barked out another humorless laugh, holding up the book. “And since Lily obviously doesn’t even remember what’s written here, we have to keep it safe. It’s the only proof left from that night.” She stopped abruptly, biting off the word.
“What?” Albert asked.
“This stuff about … Perry.” She spat out the name as if it tasted bad. “If she really did forget, I’m glad that for her it doesn’t exist.”
Except she hadn’t forgotten, not completely. Albert shivered, the thought of these things that hadn’t stayed buried making him feel ill, and with that feeling was something darker. Then another thought occurred to him, and it was so strange that he spoke it out loud without even meaning to. “It’s funny—you and I are the only two people she has who really want to help her, and we hardly know each other.”
“Yeah, it’s just hilarious. I feel like I’m trapped in a nightmare and if I could just wake up …” Olivia trailed off. “But I can’t, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Like you said, we take it to the police. If we can make them understand, make them believe Lily’s story, he’ll go to jail. And then she’ll be able to come home. Simple.” He hoped.
“I’m thinking that maybe we—”
But she never finished the sentence, this time because just then a voice called from the front of the house, “Olivia? Are you home?” There was a pause, then louder and closer: “Olivia?”
Olivia and Albert exchanged a terrified glance, and then Olivia was shoving him into Lily’s closet and closing the door on him.
“Hide the journal,” she breathed intensely, almost too soft to qualify as a whisper, before the closet door latched with a tiny click.
Not knowing what else to do, he tucked the book down the back of his pants and held his breath.
He heard her scramble away from the door, but before she could get out of Lily’s room, Perry Kogen must have walked in through the open door. Even with the closet door closed, Albert could hear everything clearly.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Oh, you know,” Olivia said. “Just thinking.”
Albert heard a step. “Honey, have you been crying?” The concern in Kogen’s voice sounded genuine, and Albert wanted to pinch the bastard’s windpipe shut. He had no right to care. “Come here.”
“No!” she said, too sharp. “I mean, I just kind of want to be alone, you know?”
“Sure,” her stepfather replied after a moment. “I just came in because I thought I heard talking. I thought maybe Lily—”
Albert was suddenly sure both Olivia and Kogen could hear the rabbit-kicking of his heart.
“—No,” she interrupted, “it’s just me. You caught me talking to myself.” Nervous chuckle. Albert winced. “What are you doing home, anyway? It’s barely three o’clock.”
There was a sound like someone fiddling with a drawer, then Perry said, “Phil called asked me to play some racquetball. My last appointment was at two, so I thought I’d squeeze a game or two in before dinner. I was just coming home to change my clothes. Hey, you want to come down to the club with me? Swim some laps or something?”
“No,” Olivia said again. “But thanks. I just want to be alone. You understand, right?”
“Fine, honey. I’ll see you in a couple of hours then, all right?”
“Sure.”
Albert heard footsteps and the door shutting. Seconds later, Olivia’s face appeared in the crack in the closet doorway. Stay there, she mouthed to him. Albert shot her a thumbs-up to indicate he understood he should stay in the closet until Kogen left the house again. He heard the bedsprings creak as Olivia sat on her sister’s bed.
After a few long minutes, Albert heard Olivia get up and go to the bedroom door, closing it. Then the closet light went on and she was looking up at Albert.
“Is he gone?” Albert whispered.
“I think so. I heard the front door close.” Olivia was whispering, too. “You have to get out of here. Go out the window and cut through the back yard.” She had him by the arm and was pulling him from the closet toward the window.
“But—”
She stopped trying to hustle him out of the room and whirled on him, her eyes snapping more than ever. “Look, do you want him to come back and find you here? To find her journal ? It’s the only proof we have—and the best chance we have to help my sister.”
“Fine,” he said after a moment.
She opened the window blinds with an abrupt jerk. As she was struggling to open the latch, she said, “I’ll call you tonight after dinner when Mom and Perry aren’t around. Maybe we can ditch tomorrow morning and turn the journal over to the police then.”
Albert shouldered her aside and lifted the sash. He wasn’t sure about Olivia’s plan, and even now the weight of Lily’s journal was almost more responsibility than he could bear. He wasn’t eager to argue with her, either. Suddenly it was all too much, and he was afraid that if he pushed her, even just a little, they might both break. All he could say was, “I guess I can’t think of anything better.”
“You really are an idiot, you know that? You do know who Phil, is, right?”
Albert was confused. “What?”
“Phil Andersen. Perry’s workout buddy and best friend. As in, Detective Andersen, the guy who is investigating Lily’s case.”
A light was beginning to dawn. “Ah.”
“So we have to be careful and do this right, because Perry has Andersen’s ear.”
Albert swung one leg out the window, bending awkwardly at the middle. “You have my number?”
Olivia gestured toward a small, silver feather-rimmed bulletin board hanging next to the mirror. Her voice was too calm, too steady. “It’s tacked up over there. Cell phone?”
Embarrassed, he shook his head. “Nah. My parents won’t let me get one. But don’t worry—when the phone rings, I’ll pick it up. Just don’t forget to call.”
“I won’t,” she said, and pushed him the rest of the way out the window. As he darted around the side of the house toward the back he thought he heard the wet rasp of a sob, right before the window sash thudded shut behind him.
The sound of that lonely, angry cry echoing in his ears was like a sharp kick. He could hardly stand the sound of it.
Now he was across the back yard and in the alley, where he could cut across to the road and then home. Albert picked up his pace, his long legs covering the ground at not quite a run.
Olivia’s sob still rattled in his head—a surprise from a girl he’d already come to view as brittle, sarcastic, and tough. Though he’d f
ormed this impression in a very short time, he’d thought he had her pegged. Then it occurred to him that in the few months he’d known Lily, he hadn’t seen her cry, not really. She was quick to laugh, loud, energetic … and tough.
When Lily cried—as the droplet stains on the pages of her journal told him she had—had it been anything, Albert wondered, like that angry, reluctant sound her sister made?
How long had these memories been threatening to surface? How long had the situation with Kogen been simmering before whatever happened between them, on the night Lily left, sent her running? And why, Albert asked himself, hadn’t he noticed anything wrong? He really couldn’t remember anything that seemed strange. Either Lily was very good at hiding it, or he had been unforgivably blind. He suspected there was something he should have seen, and this made him really pathetic as a boyfriend.
The only thing he could do about it was stop being a dumbass and try to help her now that he did know.
Even as he promised himself he would be a man of action instead of a boy of angst, a picture of Lily crept into his head and refused to be pushed away. He saw her crying in her sleep, half-buried memories surfacing as nightmares, not knowing exactly what had happened to her but knowing it was bad; he saw her paralyzed with guilt and fear, retreating, wounded, from the memory her brain was trying to recover.
But he was done being lost and powerless and stupid. Now, he had what the adults—his parents, Lily’s parents, their teachers, the cops—didn’t have: the key to the puzzle. He only had to deliver it safely, and Olivia Odilon would help him make that happen. Then Kogen would be locked up and Lily could safely come home.
It was funny how both devastation and hope could come at the same time in the same afternoon. When Lily had first slipped away, it had been impossible for Albert to understand why, but now he had more of the story, including the identity of the villain, and he planned to take a hangman’s pleasure in bringing Kogen down before he could hurt Lily again. Cook the bastard’s goose.