I’d tried calling the number a third time at lunch, dialing and then scanning the room to see if someone might answer, if I could connect a voice with a face. No luck. I tried a fourth time, calling from my own phone. Again, no one answered, and there were too many people looking at their phones to tell if any of them had received and ignored the call.
It was a relief when the last bell rang and I could finally start making my way toward the police station. The station was located near the top of a small hill, a good twenty minutes from school—or closer to ten if I jogged. Which was, of course, what I did.
Jogging is much easier when you’re not wearing jeans and loafers and carrying a heavy backpack, so I was slightly winded when I arrived. I paused to catch my breath and stared at the station. It needed a new coat of paint, and had for some time—the original color, a rich forest green, could still be seen in some of the protected crevices of the walls, but the passage of time had bleached most of it to a muted mint.
Inside, I walked up to the first person in uniform I saw, a middle-aged woman with a blond ponytail and an excess of eye shadow who was reading something on a clipboard. She moved her lips slowly as she read, and her forehead creased with effort.
“I would like to speak to Officer Heron, please,” I said.
“I’ll see if she’s available,” she said, sounding bored and barely looking up from her clipboard. She disappeared through a swinging door. As it was closing, I caught a glimpse of two officers standing up, arguing, while another one sat at a desk and consulted his watch.
I waited. The walls of the front room were decorated with a few photographs of Montana’s finest scenic vistas, their edges turning sepia.
Officer Heron appeared from the back area. She blinked when she saw me.
“Jess Cutter?”
“Yes,” I said. “Hi.”
She paused and scanned the room behind me. “Are you here with your parents?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just me.”
“All right,” she said. “Would you like to come back and talk?”
I nodded, and she held open the door for me.
We went into a small side room with grayish-brown walls and a musty smell. In it were a small table and two chairs, all of which had a look of resignation to them, like they were tired out.
“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the chairs. “What can I help you with?”
Now that I was here face to face with her, I stalled.
“You gave me hot chocolate that day,” I said. “It was kind of you. I didn’t realize how cold I was until you did that.”
She smiled. “A mixed blessing, then.”
“It gave me something to do with my hands,” I said. I realized, in retrospect, it had been helpful. Some small thing to concentrate on. Small like a button. I might as well ask about that too, I thought. Get it all out now. Start with something concrete.
“There was an item missing from the box of Anna’s things,” I said. “I wondered if you might have it here.”
“Okay, what was missing?”
“A button.”
Her eyebrows went up. “A button?”
“Yes,” I said. “There was one missing from her dress. It should have been somewhere on the ground right next to her.”
The skin between her eyebrows folded together. “I don’t think we found anything like that. I can check, though. It might take a couple of minutes.”
While she was gone, I played sudoku on my phone. I’d almost finished my fourth round when she came back.
“I’m sorry,” she said once she’d sat down again. “I checked the report and there was no button picked up at the scene.”
The scene. Otherwise known as my backyard. “Well, thanks for checking.”
“Of course,” she said. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Okay, I thought. Now you have to do it. Now you have to ask.
“You came to the school, to talk about DARE. I thought…” I closed my eyes, trying to make myself power through it. “It seemed like you looked at me, right after you talked about how badly it could have gone, with you in the car….”
I trailed off, feeling foolish, my gaze dropping to the desk. This is when you say you have no idea what I’m talking about, I thought.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I hope you know I didn’t mean anything by it.”
I looked up again, frowning in confusion.
“Accidents happen all the time—without or without alcohol being involved,” she continued. “It doesn’t make what happened less tragic, doesn’t make it anyone’s fault. It wasn’t even like she’d had all that much—but when you’re petite, like—well, you, it can certainly have an effect.”
She wasn’t making any sense.
“What are you talking about? Anna hadn’t had anything to drink. They were supposedly going to drink at Lily’s place, but Anna never got there.”
“No, they found—” She cut herself short and searched my face, looking for some kind of understanding, some sign that I knew what she was talking about.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I must have been confusing her with someone else.”
There are lies that are subtle and hard to spot, and then there are lies that burn with the brightness of a million suns, blinding you with their sheer audacity.
“With someone else?” My disbelief was palpable.
“Look, I shouldn’t have said anything.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…”
I continued to stare at her. She shook her head. “Shit.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying Anna was drunk?”
“I’m not saying anything. I didn’t say anything.” She wrapped her fingers together, squeezing them tight, as if trying to regain control of the situation. “I’m sorry, but I think you should go.” She didn’t look at me as she said it, not in the eyes, anyway, instead focusing on an area between my mouth and my chin.
“I don’t understand,” I repeated, at a loss for any other words.
“I shouldn’t be talking to you about this,” she said. She got up and opened the door. “You should leave now.”
“She was my twin,” I said desperately. “How can it be wrong for you to talk to me about her? Why can’t you just tell me?”
She looked me in the eye for a moment. And there it was, that sadness again.
“I think you should talk to your parents,” she said.
Once, I made an effort to really talk to him, thinking that if I opened up, he’d follow suit. I told him about how you and I had been obsessed with Greek myths growing up. Told him about how angry you’d gotten with Orpheus, going into the underworld to find his wife, to bring her back, only to lose her by turning to see her right before they’d reached the surface again. Told him that I’d always loved the story of Icarus, that I’d been fascinated with the idea of this man who’d soared so close to the sun, wondered if those few perfect moments before the wax melted were almost worth it, to fly like that.
After I finished I thought maybe he’d tell me a story about himself.
He didn’t.
I don’t think he’d even listened to what I said.
AT DINNER THAT NIGHT, I was very quiet.
My parents were debating whether we had anything for dessert when I cleared my throat and made the words come out.
“Is there something I should know about Anna’s death?”
Mom looked up, confused. “What do you mean?”
“About her death, about that night, is there something you haven’t told me? Something the police told you?”
She looked at Dad. They exchanged a long look, as if trying to gauge whether the other one had slipped up and said something.
“Something like what?”
Mom asked carefully. “Did someone say something to you?”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t fish around to see what I already know. Just tell me.”
“We told you everything important,” Dad said. “We did.”
“What did you not tell me—what did you decide I don’t need to know?”
“It’s not like that. It’s just…” He looked over at Mom and this time she nodded. “They did a tox screen. They found some alcohol in her blood.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It wasn’t that much. And there was nothing else, just alcohol,” Mom said. “Really. It doesn’t change anything. Not to us.”
“Nothing else? What are you even talking about? She wouldn’t have had anything to drink.”
“The police found two empty beer bottles in her closet,” Dad said softly. “She must have drunk them before heading out. We already knew about them. The tox screen just confirmed it.”
“No, that’s not right. That’s not what happened. They must have gotten the test wrong. They must have mixed it up with someone else.”
“I don’t think so, sweetheart,” Mom said. “But this is why we didn’t tell you—we were worried you’d get upset. This doesn’t change anything. Kids sneak out, have a beer, all the time, and they’re fine—this was just a terrible accident. It’s no one’s fault.”
“But you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I found myself standing up, my words echoing through the room. Mom leaned forward against the table and began to cry silently. “Show me the report,” I said, trying to bring my voice down a notch, to sound calmer, more reasonable. “They’ve got it wrong.”
Dad put his arm around Mom, like he was sheltering her from me. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I know it isn’t what you wanted to hear.”
“That’s not what this is,” I said. “They messed up. Give me the report.”
“We don’t have a report,” Dad said. “We don’t want one. The police chief himself told us the findings, and they confirm what we already suspected. That’s all we need. You have to accept this. It’s important that we all accept it.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again and stiffly pushed away from the table.
Dad called my name but I kept on going, up the stairs, into my room, closing the door behind me.
I clambered into the top bunk and pulled the comforter tightly around me.
They didn’t understand at all, either of them. Because they thought I meant I didn’t want it to be true, that I didn’t want to face the idea that Anna might have, even in some small way, contributed to what happened to her. And maybe I didn’t, but that wasn’t what I meant. Because it wasn’t that I didn’t want her to have drunk those beers that night. It was that I knew she hadn’t.
I knew because we’d drunk them together, five months earlier.
BEER IS REVOLTING. WHICH HAD come as a shock. I’d really thought it wouldn’t be so bad. I’d figured it would be like mustard greens or radishes—foods you won’t touch when you’re little and then later you find out are actually delicious. Or at least not as terrible as you’d thought.
Beer wasn’t like that.
Still, between the two of us we’d made it through both bottles.
It had been an unusually warm autumn night, and our parents had gone out to the movies. We’d been bored and hot, so Anna had snuck two bottles of beer from the fridge. We’d drunk the bottles one by one, trading them back and forth. And there was something that had felt…cool about sitting on her bed, the warm night air flowing in through the window, trading the cold bottle between us, letting its neck dangle from our fingers.
Anna kept asking if I felt anything. I’d felt looser, maybe, my limbs less tense. When I asked her, she’d smiled and said she thought she might feel a little buzzed. We’d laughed a lot, at even sillier things than usual, but that could have just been from nervous energy, the edge of worry that our parents might suddenly show up again, their movie canceled, to find us with beer on our breaths and guilty expressions on our faces. And sometime after the second beer, we’d both fallen asleep on her bed, too warm to bother with blankets.
Early the next morning, Anna had stashed the bottles in her closet so our parents wouldn’t see them. She’d said she’d sneak them down to our recycling bin once enough other bottles had accumulated that two additions wouldn’t stand out.
I’d offered to do it instead, certain she’d forget about them, but she’d insisted she’d remember.
Obviously, she hadn’t.
* * *
—
MY MOM’S SIGNATURE WAS CLEAN and smooth, each letter easily decipherable. My dad’s was little more than a line with a couple of small bumps in the middle, mere upward twitches of the wrist. It was his signature I forged on the autopsy request form.
On the rest of the form, I tried my best to infuse my handwriting with his particular style of borderline unreadable scrawl, to tick the necessary boxes with the kind of flick I’d seen him use.
While I wasn’t sure if I thought, like Lauren, that the police were morons, I was pretty sure they weren’t all the brightest lights in town. Also, they’d mislaid Anna’s things before, so it was no major leap to think they could have misread or misinterpreted toxicology results—made incorrect assumptions. They might have glanced over the report and come to the easy conclusion, the one that matched the bottles they’d already lifted from her room.
I needed to see a copy of the autopsy report myself to confirm whether it truly said what my parents had told me. So I’d mail in the form I’d downloaded from the county medical examiner’s website and wait for a response.
In the meantime, I had to revisit all my preconceptions about Anna’s death. I’d assumed, like everyone, that Anna had fallen leaving the house. If she’d had alcohol in her system that night, though, that pointed to an entirely different story. In that version, she’d had no problem at all leaving—the problem had been getting back up to her room. Which would mean that there was unaccounted-for time. Time when Anna had been out in the world, alive, while I’d been asleep. Time when she’d been with someone. Time when things had happened.
I wanted to be responsible, in at least one way.
The nurse I met with at the clinic called me “honey,” and her eyes were kind as she pressed the sample box of birth control pills into my hands.
I must have looked sad as I stared down at the box, because she asked what should have been a simple question.
Is he nice to you, this boyfriend of yours?
I didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t know how to tell her that he wasn’t exactly nice, and he definitely wasn’t my boyfriend.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY THE TRACK team had its first meet of the season.
My first race was the 100-meter. Longer distances could involve a certain amount of strategy, decisions about whether to try to take the lead at the beginning and hold on to it or save your energy for a burst at that final stretch, but the 100-meter was all about pure speed—strategy only got in the way.
I was positioned four lanes in. The girl on my left slowly cracked each of her knuckles, ignoring my pointed glare as she finished one hand and moved on to the other one. I wanted her to fall flat on her face and later develop early arthritis in all her finger joints.
Then I put thoughts of her and her hopefully unpleasant future aside and focused on taking deep, deliberate breaths. I could do this. It was running, and I was a runner. This is running and I am a runner.
“Ready!”
Inhale. Exhale.
“Set!”
Inhale. Exhale.
The starter pistol fired.
My feet hit the track. One, two. One, two. One-two, one-two.
My arms pumped, my legs reached forward, and everything else follow
ed.
This is running and I am a runner.
I was only dimly aware of the other people on the track. It wasn’t about them anymore. It was only about me.
One-two, one-two, one—
I hit the finish line in first place.
I came to a halt, feeling light-headed.
“Great job, Jess!” my dad yelled from the bleachers. My mom held his arm and beamed at me. I was glad they were here, that they had seen me win.
Sarah and a bunch of my teammates cheered. And Lauren looked unhappy, the ultimate sign of success.
As I headed back to the stands, Mr. Matthews grinned at me and put his hand up for a high five. I hesitated. It wasn’t clear how to avoid it without being obvious, though, so I quickly slapped his hand and then beat a hasty retreat to go sit with Sarah.
“Good job,” she said. “Your parents are pretty cute, getting all excited.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Did your parents come?”
“My dad did,” she said.
“But not your mom?”
“Nope, she had lunch plans with one of her girlfriends or something.” She gave a weird laugh. “It’s probably just as well. The last time she came to a meet she pulled me aside afterward and told me I should be careful—she’d noticed that my thighs were getting ‘bulky.’ ”
I looked at her thighs. They looked strong and hard. Bulky was not a word I would have applied to them.
“They look fine to me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re obviously not the thigh connoisseur she is.”
I shook my head and thought back to the last time I’d seen her mom, all willowy limbs, her hair up in a perfect chignon. Beautiful and ethereal, as if she’d be blown to pieces by a strong wind. Then I thought about my mom and how she’d always told me and Anna how beautiful we were, how proud of us she was. We’d laughed and made stupid faces and said what about now? Are we beautiful now? Are you proud of us now? And she’d said yes, always.
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