The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  “Is there a problem?” the bartender called from behind the bar. “Because otherwise, I think you should let her by.”

  “There’s no problem,” the man said, without taking his eyes off me. “No problem unless she makes one.”

  He stepped aside when the car horn sounded again.

  “Take care, little girl,” he said.

  Little girl. I looked at him, with his baked skin, his cold, mean eyes. Thought of him looking at Anna’s picture.

  I only just made it out the door before I vomited, everything I’d eaten that day pouring out onto the gravel.

  And one of the men from the bar did help us.

  But after he fixed the car he kept Lily’s keys tight in his hand. He said that if we wanted them back he’d need something in exchange.

  A photo. A photo of me.

  LAUREN WAS, AS SHE OFTEN was, in a bad mood. I’d snagged the changing room first, and when I emerged she’d glared at me like I’d stolen her most valued possession.

  “Christ, what were you doing?” she said. “I could’ve changed four times in the time you were in there.”

  If this was meant to make me feel bad, or to make me hurry out, she had miscalculated. Because after last night, I wasn’t exactly in the best mood myself. I’d spent an hour in the shower after I got home, and another hour this morning, and I still felt unclean. Taking too long in a changing room was not something I was interested in being made to feel bad about.

  So I leaned against the curtain, still half inside the changing room. Tried to think if there was anything I wanted to ask her about while I had the home court advantage. And I realized there was.

  “I meant to ask you about something, actually,” I said.

  Lauren sighed, a long, exaggerated sigh. It was not endearing. “What?”

  “You said once that the police were incompetent assholes,” I said. “Why?”

  “I don’t remember talking to you about that.” She crossed her bony arms and narrowed her eyes. “Are you, like, spying on me?”

  “You have a very distinctive voice,” I said. “It’s pretty hard not to hear you.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched upward. She seemed to take “distinctive” as a compliment. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Yeah, I do think that. They don’t see anything other than what they want to see—they don’t ask the right questions.”

  “Do you mean the interviews they did about Anna?”

  “Among other things. And yeah, I’m sorry, but those were a mess. It was weird—they even asked if I’d seen her at the party at the quarry, when clearly I wouldn’t have, since she didn’t even leave the house.” Then she paused and looked a little embarrassed. “Aside from, you know. Falling. Anyway, I guess I was one of the first people they interviewed. Sounds like later they figured it out.”

  I remembered the police officer telling us about the chief being on his way back from Boise, as though he’d been the key to getting the investigation under way. “They probably hadn’t talked to Lily yet,” I said, then paused. “You didn’t see Lily at the quarry, did you?” I asked, wondering if I could catch Lily in a lie, prove she wasn’t telling the truth about her and Anna’s plans for that night.

  “No, I didn’t see her—thank God.”

  “You didn’t like Lily?”

  Lauren shrugged. “Usually she was all right, but she’d been a total nightmare at practice that day.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She did that sometimes. Got all pissy or whatever.”

  That was less than helpful, so I tried to get back on track. “So, the police asked you if you’d seen Anna that night and that’s what makes them incompetent assholes?”

  “Yeah, well, that and other stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  Lauren paused for a moment. “They just have their own agenda, okay? Just look out more for each other and their friends than anyone else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I meant what I said—they’re assholes. And now I’m done playing twenty damn questions, Jess—move already so I can get changed.”

  Slowly, deliberately, I moved aside.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I GOT HOME, MY mom’s car was in the driveway and the door was unlocked. I wandered into the kitchen and then through the living room, expecting to see her camped out with a book, waiting to tell me about how a bunch of people had canceled their appointments at the last minute. She wasn’t there.

  I headed up the stairs to find my door open and Mom sitting on my bed, a basket full of laundry at her feet. Next to the basket was Anna’s box, and she was holding Anna’s cardigan.

  “Mom?”

  She looked up, startled, the cardigan falling out of her hands and into her lap.

  “What are you doing in my room?”

  “We had some cleanings canceled,” she said. “I was going to do laundry and I thought you might have some socks under your bed. And I found this.” She gestured to the box.

  I said nothing. She had come into my room without permission, I thought reflexively. She should never have found the box.

  “How long have you had it?” she asked.

  “A while.”

  “How long?”

  “A couple of weeks. A policeman brought it over.”

  “Were you ever going to tell us about it?”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t planned on telling them. Not really.

  She waited, her eyes searching my face. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I know that you…” She looked down at the box. “I know that your relationship with Anna was special, but we miss her too. We lost her too. And I don’t—”

  Her voice cracked and she stopped. She got up quickly, leaving an impression in the quilt. She brushed past me as she left the room, her eyes never reaching my face.

  I straightened the quilt and returned the cardigan to the box before I went after her. I found her sitting on the couch, rigid against the cushions.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her back. “It wasn’t personal.”

  She inhaled slowly and then breathed out.

  “It is personal. It’s very personal. And right now, I need to sit here by myself for a while.”

  “I—”

  “Jess, please leave me alone.” Her back looked small, even frail. She had lost weight. I hadn’t noticed. I had spent so much time noticing things and yet I’d missed it. “Please.”

  “All right, I’ll go.”

  I thought that would be the moment when she’d relent and tell me it was okay, that she knew I hadn’t meant anything by it.

  That was what she always did. Always had done.

  Instead, she remained motionless on the couch, staring straight ahead. She didn’t so much as glance back as I left the room.

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I liked the sensation of running my hand over a wire mesh fence. Liked the feel of the cold metal, the bump of it against my fingertips, the bumps coming faster and harder as I began to run, dragging my hand across it.

  Once, I cut myself pretty badly on a raw edge. Anna helped me clean it, and neither of us said a word to our parents about it. We’d handled the situation, we thought. No need to bring them into it. No need for me to get a lecture about being more careful in the future.

  The bandage gave it away. Mom had promptly dragged me to the doctor and he’d given me a tetanus booster, which hurt.

  That night, she and Dad sat me and Anna down and gave us a lecture about the importance of not keeping things from them. We’d both nodded seriously and sworn we would never do such a thing again. But we knew: the real take-home message was that we should be more careful in the future not to get caught.

  That was my initial reaction to Mom’s discovery of the box. That I should have hidden
it better. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about her on the couch, unable to talk to or even to look at me. And I felt like maybe I hadn’t hidden it to protect Anna. Maybe I’d hidden it to protect myself.

  It wasn’t Lily’s fault that the man asked for my photo, not hers.

  It wasn’t her fault, yet it felt incredibly unfair that I alone was paying the price.

  So I took a photo of myself in the bathroom of the bar that night—angry, refusing to smile—and sent it to the man.

  And then, before I went back out to the parking lot, I sent it again. To a different number.

  I DON’T LIKE IT WHEN people hover. Which was exactly what Mona was doing as I sat in the computer lab, trying to print out my English paper. When I’d come in ten minutes before, we’d nodded at each other and I thought that would be it. But then she’d gotten up, and I could feel her behind me. Hovering.

  Reluctantly, I turned around in my chair to face her.

  “Hey, Jess,” she said. “I wanted to…” She paused briefly and then started again. “I wanted to ask if you ended up finding anything.”

  Finding anything. I’d been looking for so many things, yet hopefully no one, Mona included, knew about any of them.

  “Finding anything?”

  “On the phone?”

  “Oh.” I thought of the selfie. There was no way I was telling her about that. “No, not really. I mean, it was really helpful, though. Thanks.” Then I thought of the phone from the quarry. “Nothing you can do about a phone that’s been submerged in water, I suppose?”

  “In water? Probably not. You could try putting it in a bag of rice to dry it out and see if that helps. But it’s probably a brick at this point.” She smiled. “Did it fall into the bath or something? Don’t tell her I told you, but that totally happened to Lauren.”

  “Something like that.” A few seconds in a clean bathtub. Untold amount of time spent in muddy quarry water. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

  Mona smiled again. When she smiled, it was hard for me to believe I’d seen her so sad and broken on the roof. What happened to you? I wondered. Why do you keep asking about Anna’s phone? The question slipped out before I had time to think about it further, to weigh the pros and cons of asking. “What did you think I might find?”

  “Oh. I…” She paused and looked away, so that all I could see was her hair and the curve of her cheek. “I’ve been trying to understand something.” She looked back at me after a moment, a blush spreading across her face. “I know she didn’t…I know it was an accident, what happened to her. But when I first heard, I thought…I thought maybe she and I had something in common.”

  I stared at her. It took a second for the implications to register.

  “You thought she jumped?”

  “It was stupid. The police were pretty vague about it at first, and I…It was just me projecting, I guess. I’d—I’d been having a hard time. I am having a hard time. And she’d started hanging out with people who…I thought…I don’t know.”

  I could see her hand around her arm, clutching it tight.

  “What happened to you, Mona?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I do know, but I don’t. I…”

  I sat, waiting for her to keep going, but she didn’t say anything else.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  She took a deep breath. “There was a party last spring. Me and Brian had been having stupid little fights all week—whose friends to hang out with, what movie to watch, if we should even go to the party or do something different. Nothing big, nothing I thought was all that important. Then, at the party, Brian wanted to leave early, and I wasn’t ready to go. We had another fight about that, I think. I don’t remember, really.”

  She stopped.

  “You mean you don’t remember what you fought about?”

  “No, I mean I don’t remember anything. That’s the problem. There’s this vague memory of us fighting—me being upset, him being upset—and then after that…” She closed her eyes. “After that, there’s me waking up alone in the middle of the football field, my shirt wide-open.” She paused. “They took a photo of me like that. Took it using my own phone and left it for me. Like a reminder. Like a warning.”

  “ ‘They’? You mean Brian?”

  Mona shook her head. “I don’t know. I think it must have been—I don’t know who else I would’ve gotten into a car with—but it’s all a big blank. I tried asking a couple of people if they saw us leaving together, but they’d all been busy getting hammered. I don’t even know what happened between me being at the party and being left in that field. It’s a just a big gap.”

  “I’m so sorry. That’s…” I didn’t know how to express what that was. “Did you report it?”

  Mona laughed, low and hoarse. “I went to the police that very morning, sure that they’d want to get to the bottom of it, that they’d believe me. Instead, they acted like I was insane, or worse, just a stupid drunk whore making up stories. They kept asking me if I was sure, if maybe I’d just had too much to drink and gotten confused walking home—took off my shirt for attention or because I was making out with my boyfriend. If maybe I was just trying to get Brian in trouble because we’d had a fight. I probably shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, Brian’s dad is the police chief’s best friend. No one wanted to know; no one wanted to look into it.”

  She looked away. A long silence followed. Someone else would have known how to fill it. Someone else might have been able to say something that might make her feel a tiny fraction better.

  “I don’t know if I really wanted to jump, you know,” she said eventually. “I just want it not to have happened. Just want whole minutes to pass by when I can feel like everything is still simple, when I can pretend I’m still who I thought I was before: a cheerleader in love with a guy who’d never hurt me.”

  “You were in love with him?”

  She finally turned back to look at me. “Yeah, I really was,” she said. “And the messed-up thing is, part of me still is. I can’t even ask him about it, because I’m afraid I’d believe anything he told me, and then we’d be right back together.”

  “Like magnets,” I said quietly, a distant echo.

  “Yes,” she said. “Like magnets.”

  Texting him that photo was a mistake. I knew that as soon as I hit the send button. The stupid thing was, I liked how I looked in it. Tough, like the kind of girl who knew what she was doing. A girl, I thought, so different from my former self.

  And even as I regretted it, I thought I understood what I’d risked. Thought I understood the worst-case scenario.

  ON SUNDAY, I SET OFF earlier than usual for my run with Nick, circling the park three times before he showed. When he did, I didn’t even slow down, just nodded at him and made him scramble to keep up.

  Ever since I’d talked to Mona, all I wanted was to run. Run and run and run and not stop until things made sense again. Mona had been drugged and assaulted, and she clearly wondered if Anna had experienced a similar trauma, and a similar despair in its wake. While I very much hoped she was wrong, I had to wonder if there might be some connection between them after all. Had to wonder if Brian had Anna’s number in his phone not because they were lab partners, not because they were friends either, but because they were something altogether different. It would fit, I thought. Fit with Lily’s text: And the boys may stop by first. Charlie and Brian, a logical duo. One for Lily, one for Anna.

  Nick slowed down a few times, but I ignored him until he finally shook his head and stopped outright. Only then did I stop.

  We sat together in silence for a few minutes, sucking in the warm air.

  “One of these days, you’re going to lead us all the way into the next town,” he said.

  “It’s hardly a bad thing to get out of Birdton every once in a whil
e.”

  “True,” he said. “When I graduate, I’m never coming back. I’ll go to any college that takes me as long they give me a scholarship and it’s nowhere near this place. I’ll be done with here forever.”

  I stretched my arms above my head and then let them flop back down. “I’m going to head to the East Coast for college. Somewhere where no one knows anything about me.” Where no one knows that I was once a twin. Where the worst thing that ever happened to me isn’t common knowledge.

  “Why the East Coast?”

  “I don’t know—it sounds nice. In my head, it’s all redbrick buildings, libraries, and perfect windswept beaches.” I hadn’t considered it closely before, but I was pretty sure my vision came half from The Great Gatsby and half from some admissions brochures that had come in the mail.

  “Sounds nice,” he said. “Preppy but nice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was tempting to stay on the topic forever, discussing this perfect future away from Birdton—a beautiful blank slate. I needed to ask him, though. Needed to find out if he knew anything that might help me.

  “You didn’t go to the party at the quarry, did you?” I asked. “The one back in November?”

  “Yeah, I went,” he said. “Not my usual scene, but I went for a couple hours. I wish I’d just stayed home.”

  “Something happened?”

  “Nah, I just don’t really enjoy wandering around in the dark. I was already not in the best mood anyway—Brian made a big deal out of wanting me to go, even had the nerve to tell me to look nice for once, when he practically lives in the same shirt all the time. Then, after all that, he forgot to pick me up—I had to borrow my parents’ car and drive over myself. I couldn’t even find him for ages.”

  “He wasn’t there?”

  “Oh, I found him eventually. He was wandering around at the bottom of the quarry, throwing rocks into the pool of water, drunk off his head. Not exactly the best company.”