My eyelids felt heavy and I wondered how my body was managing to remain upright. It felt like the sole of a boot was pressing down on the top of my head, slowly but firmly working me into the ground. “No one deserves anything,” I said finally. And the truth of that was enough to make my knees give way.
Allison
In the half-light of the morning, just before I’m fully awake, I smell the damp sweetness of mulch and the faint gray tang of smoke. For a second, I think I’m in my childhood bedroom. I can hear my mother’s voice calling to me from the bottom of the stairs, promising pancakes and orange juice. I can feel the weight of the comforter, the soft fur of the plush toy dog I slept with, the cool smoothness of the pillowcase against my cheek.
I open my eyes. A shroud of fog has descended overnight. I sit up, every muscle in my body complaining, pull the blanket around my shoulders, and shiver. I feel old, like my body has aged a hundred years in a matter of hours. I try to remember what it was like not to feel pain, but it’s impossible. The night was colder than I expected, and my fingers and toes prick as the blood comes back into them. My head feels heavy, like it’s filled with sand, and my mouth tastes faintly of metal.
I’m alive.
I need to find water before I go any farther. I’m running low and there’s no way I can climb a mountain without a decent supply. That’s my first priority.
A papery laugh floats from my lungs. Climb a mountain. Jesus Christ.
I pull down my leggings and inspect the gash on my thigh. The bandage is dark with old blood and the edges are filthy. It has to be changed. I peel it off slowly but that doesn’t stop it from hurting like hell. The cut looks angry underneath, the skin around it pale and slightly swollen. I take out the rubbing alcohol and brace myself. I swear I see the blood fizz slightly when the alcohol hits it, or maybe it’s just my brain’s way of dealing with the pain. I patch it up with a fresh bandage and try not to think about when I had my last tetanus shot.
My finger has turned a nasty purple underneath the splint but seems less swollen and sore. It could be healing or it could be nerve damage. Add that to the list of things I’m not thinking about.
I rummage around in my bag and pull out the bag of nuts. I am suddenly, ravenously hungry, but I can’t afford to eat too much. I don’t know how long I’ll be out here, and I have to make the few things I have last. I nibble at the edge of a brazil nut and pretend it’s a bagel. Not that I allowed myself to eat a bagel in my previous life.
My previous life—that’s what it has already become, sepia tinged and pressed flat between pages, a place where I counted carbs among my enemies. I try to remember standing on the tarmac, the heat so intense that it made my ears ring, or in the house overlooking the beach, all whitewashed floors and chrome finishes, but I feel nothing, just the sickly fear starting to creep back in. They could be out there somewhere already, searching for me.
Move.
It’s early still, and the sun is weak beyond the tree cover. The wildflowers are still tightly tucked into themselves, just the smallest tip of petal peeking through the leaves. Yesterday felt like one sort of dream—a visceral, terrifying nightmare—and today feels like another. Drowsy. Unreal.
A chipmunk stops short in front of me, cheeks pumping rapidly, then disappears into a pile of leaves. I climb over a fallen tree trunk, the underside of it covered in thick green-blue moss and speckled with tiny mushrooms. The air smells fresher now. And then I hear a gentle shushing. Water.
It’s barely a stream, more of a trickle, but it’s enough. I finish off the rest of yesterday’s water, dunk the empty bottles into the stream, and sit back to wait for the iodine to work. I tug off my sneakers, peel off my socks, and dip my feet in. Fresh blisters sting. I rub at the sores through the water. They’ll toughen up, I figure. They’ll have to.
I splash water onto my face and neck, careful not to reopen the lacework of cuts, and pat myself dry with a fresh scrap of shirt. I briefly consider my toenails, still painted a delicate shell pink from a recent pedicure. Absurd, really. Hilarious, even. I pull on a fresh pair of socks and rinse yesterday’s in the stream before hanging them to dry on the back of my bag.
By midday, I reach the first ridge. The forest is still thick and it’s difficult to tell if I’ve been heading in the right direction, so when I reach the clearing and can finally see, it takes me a minute to get my bearings. The tops of trees dip into the valley below, and beyond them, through the deep V, rises the peak of the mountain where we crashed.
It’s all undulating waves of treetops rising to harsh, jagged peaks. The mountain looks like a picture on a postcard or an ad for hot chocolate, benign and surreally beautiful. How could catastrophe be hidden so quickly? I had expected a scar on the landscape, a blight, but there is just the smooth surface of nature staring blankly back, like a painting bought in a suburban mall.
And then I see it. It’s quick and at first I think I’ve imagined it, but then I notice something else and I know that it’s real. The glint of sunlight off metal and then, faint but steady, a wispy line of smoke snaking its way through the trees. It exists. It happened. And now the plane is on fire. Fire means smoke. Smoke gets attention.
They’re coming.
The panic rises in me like the tide. My animal brain returns.
Fuck fuck fuck. Move.
Go, climb, faster. Up up up you can’t stop. Keep going. Do not stop.
You have to move.
I can feel the grief behind the fear, just pushing through. I’ve lost the man I loved. I will have to come to terms with that at some point.
Not yet.
Maggie
I spent a night plagued by visions. Ally’s face contorted in terror. Ally crying out in pain. Ally bloodied and bruised. Ally on fire. Ally’s flesh melting from her bones. It was the world’s most brutal newsreel.
I tried over and over to change the tape but it was stuck on a loop, and I was stuck there with it. This was my life now. This tape would always be playing in my mind. Years later, even if some shadow of normal life had resumed, I would be grocery shopping or in the doctor’s waiting room or on hold with the gas company, and there would only ever be this: Terror. Pain. Blood. Fire. Bone. Ally.
I got up, went downstairs, clicked the lid off Linda’s sleeping tablets, and took four of them. I climbed back up the stairs, got into bed, waited for Barney to settle himself back on my feet, turned out the lights, and lay there watching the tape until the heavy hood of oblivion settled over my head and pulled me into a deep, blank sleep.
I woke up feeling like I’d gone ten rounds in the ring and lost, badly. Every muscle in my body was sore. Grief had been my well-worn companion for the past few years. I thought I was used to it—over time it had slowly ground down my edges and dulled my senses—but this was something else. This was a gut punch. Charles’s illness and slow death had been a long, arduous plod up an unforgiving hill. This, though, was a violence.
The reel started up again: Terror. Pain. Blood. Fire. Bone. Ally. My body ached with the weight of the grief, like there was lead lining my skin.
Barney, now up on my pillow, shot me a dirty look as I shifted out of bed. Seven a.m. I’d been asleep for ten hours. I would have to thank Linda for the pills. I would have to ask her if she could get some more.
The stone tiles in the kitchen were cold underfoot. It was early July, but the mornings were still cool and there would be dew on the grass. The answering machine blinked at me, demanding to be heard. I hit Play. It was message after message from Jennifer and Chip and Mark and Sandra from various news organizations across the country, all telling me about the sensitive portraits of Allison they were working on and how they needed only a few minutes of my time. How it was sensitive to keep calling a woman whose only child had just died in a plane crash, I couldn’t tell you.
I deleted them all and thought about pulling the phone cord out of the wall, but there was a part of me—the same part that had pried the wedding ring off C
harles’s finger in the end—that knew I had to keep it plugged in. They hadn’t found her body. This could still all be a horrible mistake. I could still get a call putting it right.
The kitchen was filled with a sour, fermented smell, and I followed it into the pantry. I knew the source immediately. I lifted the tea towel off the glass bowl on the shelf and saw the lump of dough lying there, collapsed. A thin skin had formed on top, which bloomed with blue-green mold. The sight of it lying there, ruined and forgotten, was too much. So much waste. Tears streamed down my face as I tipped the bowl into the garbage. The dough landed with a resigned thud.
I saw the orange pill bottle on the table and shoved it into the junk drawer. Ally needed me clearheaded and sharp eyed.
There was a knock at the front door and the particular set of noises of someone letting herself in. Linda. She bustled into the kitchen moments later, arms laden with plastic carrier bags from the Shop-n-Save and a stack of casserole dishes.
“News travels fast,” she said, dumping the dishes unceremoniously on the counter.
The women of Owl’s Creek were great believers in the healing power of casseroles. Birth, illness, tragedy, death: there was a casserole that would help. When Charles died, they were stacked high on my doorstep with a Post-it attached to each one identifying its contents and its creator. Joan Doherty’s tuna noodle, Sue Provencher’s green bean surprise, Diane Beaulieu’s meatloaf, Elaine McNulty’s sweet potato, Kathleen Sullivan’s macaroni mayo, Holly Parker’s ham and potato, Mary Bianchi’s baked ziti, Joy Chamberlain’s chili cheese. They sat in my fridge for weeks until I finally had the strength to scrape them out into the trash, scour the glass dishes with a Brillo pad, and return them to their rightful owners.
I understood that these casseroles came from a place of genuine concern, and that they were an expression of sympathy and thoughtfulness that would be difficult to put into words. But I’d lived in that town all my life, and I knew there was something else, too—something a little less generous. I’d never gotten involved in the Owl’s Creek casserole-making frenzy, which is probably why I got so many of the damned things: so that all of those women could prove that they were better than me. And God forbid you forgot to return their Pyrex.
“I picked up a few things from the store,” Linda said, gesturing toward the bags on the floor. Her hair was piled on top of her head and secured with a tortoiseshell clip, and her fingers wandered up to the stray hairs that floated around her face. “Feel free to chuck them out with the casseroles, but I couldn’t face coming over here empty handed, and you’re going to have to eat at some point.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I meant it. Linda was not one of the casserole women. She did kind things all the time, not because she wanted something in return but because it would never occur to her to be anything other than kind. I watched as she dipped a hand into one of the bags and pulled out a hunk of bread, which she started absently chewing. She looked tired.
“Did you get any sleep?”
I watched her shove the casserole dishes into the fridge. “I took your pills.”
“Good girl. Do you want any more? I can call the doctor for you. I’m sure he’d just call it in.”
I shook my head. “That’s all right.”
She nodded. “If you change your mind, just let me know. Any more phone calls from the jackals?”
“I switched off the ringer.”
She pulled a couple of cans of soup out of a bag and stacked them in the pantry. “Good for you.”
“Have you seen anything?” I asked. “On the news?”
“I caught a little something on the seven o’clock,” she said. She reached up and tucked a wisp of hair back into the clip. “I didn’t stick around to watch it all. They were mostly talking about that damn president of ours, as usual.”
I looked at her carefully. Linda had always had a terrible poker face. “What is it?”
She took another bite of bread and chewed it too thoroughly. She was stalling.
“Linda. Please.”
She swallowed, hard. “Jim showed me that picture of Allison in the blue dress you gave him. For the news people.”
Ally in sunlight in the blue dress. I nodded.
“Well, he gave it to them, but it’s not the photo they’re using.”
Was this my life? Not even the pictures of her were mine anymore. “What picture are they using?”
“It’s not one I’ve seen before,” she said. “Jim says they must have got it from the internet or something.” She paused, then leaned across the table. “The thing is, and I know I haven’t seen her in a couple of years, but I barely recognized her. She looks . . . different.”
A jolt ran through me. “Different how?”
“Just not like Allison. She was blond in the photo, and thin. I know she’s always been small but she looked tiny. Was she on a diet?”
“I don’t know,” I said quietly.
“Well, she must have been. I’m not saying she doesn’t look great in the photo, because she does. Like a movie star or something. When it first came on I said to Jim, that can’t be our Allison, can it? She looks so fancy! I know she works for a magazine and everything, and she always dressed nice, but—” Linda looked over at me and fell silent. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be running my mouth like this.”
I lifted my eyes to hers. It was time to come clean. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“What is it?”
I took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen Allison since Charles died.”
Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean? You went out to visit her last Thanksgiving!”
“I went to my sister’s in Florida instead. Ally didn’t invite me.”
“I don’t understand. Why would she do that? Why didn’t you say something? You could have had Thanksgiving with us!”
“I didn’t want to make a big fuss.” I’d been embarrassed, of course. What kind of a mother must I have been for my daughter not to want to see me? Even after everything we’d been through together. Especially after everything.
“Grief does strange things to people,” Linda said, shaking her head. “Whatever her reason, I’m sure she didn’t mean to shut you out like that.”
“Linda . . .” I felt sick at the thought of telling her the truth, but it had to be done. I’d come this far, and there was no room for any more lies. “When Charles was real sick, toward the end, he asked me to—to help him, if you see what I mean.” Linda’s face was blank. “He didn’t want to suffer anymore. He wanted it to end. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I watched it register. She flinched, just for a second, and then she nodded, eyes filling with tears. “Oh, Maggie,” she said quietly.
I looked away. I didn’t want to see the look on her face in case it held judgment. “I didn’t tell Ally about it, because I didn’t want to upset her.” I wanted to get all of it out, like sucking the poison from a snakebite. “I knew she wanted her dad to live as long as he possibly could, and I didn’t think . . .” I shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t tell her, but she found out anyway.” Linda shook her head, like she was trying to ward off what was coming.
I took a deep breath. “The doctor left the morphine unlocked. We hadn’t talked about it with him—we didn’t want him to get into trouble or, God forbid, lose his license—but he seemed to know what we were planning, and he made it easy. I thought Ally was still out for her run. Charles hadn’t wanted her to see it, and neither did I. We both wanted her to think it was natural. I don’t know why—it seems so stupid now, so cruel of us not to let her say goodbye—but it was like we were in this fog together, and neither of us could see clearly. I kissed him and then I turned on the tap and held his hand until he was gone. It was quick. Quicker than I’d thought.” I reached up and dashed away a tear. “When I turned around, I saw her standing there in the doorway.” I glanced over and could still see it, as clear as if it were happening right then. “I could tell
by the look on her face that she’d seen me kill him.”
She reached over and gripped my hand, tight. “Look at me, Maggie.”
I raised my eyes reluctantly to hers. There was nothing in her face except love and worry and kindness. I sagged with relief. It was Linda—I should have known. I should have told her years ago.
“You did not kill him,” she said gently. “You were helping him.”
I suddenly felt like I was being disloyal to Ally, looking for reassurance that I didn’t deserve. I pulled my hand away like I’d been burned. “That’s not how she felt. In her eyes, I killed her father.” I pictured the look on her face, a mix of grief and loathing and betrayal. A look a mother never wants to see on her child’s face. “She didn’t say a word, she just got her stuff and ran out of the house. That’s why she wasn’t at the funeral—it wasn’t because she was too upset, or because she had the flu, or whatever damn thing I told people at the time. It was because she knew I was responsible, and she couldn’t stand being near me.”
“The only thing responsible for Charles’s death is the goddamn cancer that ate him alive,” Linda said. “You were only doing what he asked you to do. I saw how much pain that man was in. Ally saw it, too. What you did was merciful, and I’m sure deep down she knew that.”
I shrugged. “All I know is the last time I looked my daughter in the eyes, I saw hatred in them. And now I’ll never look into them again.” The realization ripped through me once more. How was I still alive? How was my heart still beating in my chest when it felt so irreparably broken?
“Oh, Maggie.” Linda came over and crouched down by my chair. “I am so sorry. God, I can’t imagine . . .” Jim and Linda had three boys, each of whom had moved back to Maine after college. Craig, the oldest, had bought a house on the same street as them with his wife. Ben, their middle boy, lived an hour away in Portland. Every weekend, they had a houseful. It was why I hadn’t told her before: I knew that she would feel the pain of my loss too keenly, and I hadn’t wanted her to feel that sort of hurt. “She knew you loved her,” she whispered. “And she loved you.”
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