The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  “Was he looking for something down there?”

  “Something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A phone, maybe?”

  “He didn’t say anything about a phone,” Nick replied. “Maybe that was what he was doing, but he wasn’t exactly being efficient about it if he was.”

  I tried to think of a slick transition to asking about Brian and Anna. When none sprang to mind, I went for a less subtle approach. “Was his, uh, girlfriend with him?”

  “His girlfriend?” He frowned. “I don’t think Brian’s dated anyone since Mona.”

  “Oh, I thought I’d heard something about him hanging out with someone—maybe some girl on the cross-country team.”

  Nick shrugged. “I never heard anything about that. He took it real hard when Mona broke up with him. I think he’s still pretty hung up on her even now.”

  I kept my face as neutral as possible, trying not to see an image of Mona unconscious in the middle of a football field, her shirt ripped open. Because I didn’t want to see that. Didn’t want to hear the guy I like championing the guy who in all likelihood had done that to her. Had taken her away from herself. Didn’t want to hear about how sad he was to have lost her. Some people didn’t deserve my pity. Some people didn’t deserve second chances. And I really hoped Anna hadn’t given him one.

  Nick propped himself up on his elbows. “What’s with all the questions?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Nice try there, Ace Detective.”

  I looked up at the sky and noticed a plane flying above us, almost lost behind a cloud. “I found a phone in the quarry the other day. I wanted to try to give it back.”

  He shrugged. “That’s a nice thought, but I doubt it would have been from that night. Even if it was, they’ll have replaced it months ago. No one is going to wait around for their phone to turn up for that long.” Then he paused. “Wait, why were you at the quarry? Were you, uh, hanging out with someone?”

  I looked at him blankly for a second and then I remembered Sarah’s comment about why people went to the quarry, the reason I’d first gone to look it over to begin with. And I almost smiled at the idea that he seemed to think I might have other guys in my life.

  “No,” I said. “I was just, you know, by myself. Taking it in.”

  Taking it in. I had no idea what I might mean by that. And apparently neither did he.

  “Is everything okay, Jess?”

  He looked so sincere, so sweetly concerned, that for a moment, I considered telling him the truth. Not just about the quarry and the phone—everything. Telling him about Anna and the alcohol and my suspicions about Mr. Matthews and now Brian. I was afraid, though, that going down that road, that telling him any part at all, could lead to my unspooling in front of him until there was nothing left. That said out loud, it wouldn’t sound at all like the straightforward, logical process I liked to think of it as, but like evidence of how desperate and sad and deeply, deeply messed up I was. You think I’m strange already, I thought. I don’t think I can handle your knowing how far it really goes.

  I forced a smile onto my face. “I’m fine. I was just curious about the quarry because I’d never gone there.” Then I stared out at the sky. The plane had disappeared, only a faint trail of white left in its wake.

  I DIDN’T SEE IT AT first. It was buried among the other mail—obscured by an athletic clothing catalog and a water bill. An envelope from the Montana medical examiner’s office, addressed to my dad. Who was fortunately not around to intercept it.

  I deposited the other mail on the kitchen table and then retreated to my room, holding the envelope close to me like someone might suddenly appear in the empty house and snatch it away.

  I’d thought I’d rip the envelope open once I finally received it, tear it apart so fast I’d risk harming the autopsy report inside. But that was before it was in my hands. Before I’d thought about what it might do to me—reading the description written by someone who’d cut into Anna, another written by someone else who’d tested the contents of her insides. It had been hard enough thinking about someone touching her clothes.

  Still, here it was. Answers, contained within a thin envelope. I had to move forward with it.

  I delicately ripped the envelope along the side, tipped out the sheet of paper within, and braced myself.

  It was difficult to read the autopsy report, seeing it laid out in black-and-white. Her injuries, the clinical description of them, of her—Caucasian female, 5'2", brown hair, brown eyes. Her birthday, my birthday. A paint-by-number version of her.

  I read it all, unsure where the toxicology results would be listed. Where the part about the alcohol would be. I read carefully, in case they used different language than I expected, in case it was reduced to a simple check in a box.

  I am a good reader, a close reader. I don’t miss things—not facts, not details.

  But that didn’t matter this time. Because the toxicology information simply wasn’t there.

  * * *

  —

  THE WOMAN WHO PICKED UP the phone at the toxicology center was less than excited to take my call.

  “We cannot provide any information to you over the phone. You’d need to officially request the report,” she said, with pauses between her words that indicated she was probably working over a piece of gum. “There’s a form online for that.”

  “I did request the report. I have it right in front of me,” I said. “I just had some questions about it.”

  She sighed. “If you already have the report, then all the information you need should be there.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It should be. But I think there may have been a mistake.”

  “That’s very unlikely,” she said. “We have a state-of-the-art facility here.”

  “I’m sure you do, but my issue isn’t with the results, but with the fact that none are listed.”

  Her sigh was louder the second time. “You know,” she said, “I’m going to transfer you to Dr. Travers. I’m sure she’ll be able to answer any questions you have.”

  Before I could reply, music came on. A few minutes later, it switched off, and a brisk, slightly clipped voice came on the line.

  “This is Dr. Travers. I understand you have a question about one of our reports?”

  “Yes, I do—”

  “Could you please provide the name of the tested party?”

  “Anna Cutter.”

  “One moment, I’ll bring it up in our system.”

  I could hear the faint sound of her typing and then a pause.

  “Can you please confirm the spelling of the last name?”

  “Yes, it’s C-U-T-T-E-R.”

  The keyboard keys clicked again in the background.

  “It’s not coming up. When would this have been submitted?”

  I thought back. “Early December, probably.”

  “Okay, it’s possible, then, that we just don’t have that uploaded into the system yet.”

  I shook my head, forgetting for a moment that she couldn’t see me. Because my parents had told me about it weeks ago, and they’d sat on it for a while before that. “Oh, this would have been processed at least a month ago.”

  “Well, that’s just not possible,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ve been backed up. We only just started tackling toxicology reports from December last week. It’s not like the TV shows, you know. It takes a long time to process these kinds of reports.”

  “They told us, though,” I said. “They told my—me that they had the results.”

  “You must have misunderstood them,” she said. “Or perhaps they misspoke.”

  She sounded confident, like that must have been what happened. And it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before, my misunderstanding someth
ing. But I didn’t think that was what happened here. This time I’d been paying very close attention.

  He didn’t text me back after I sent the photo, and when I next saw him, he didn’t mention it. A foolish part of me hoped that meant he’d deleted it, or that it had gotten lost along the way—vanished into the ether.

  “I NEED YOU TO EXPLAIN something to me,” I said.

  The police chief looked up from his paperwork, pen poised over the form he’d been working on. He looked at me and then at the officer behind me. Then he slowly put down his pen, setting it beside the framed picture on his desk.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, addressing his question not to me but to the officer.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “She demanded to see you, and then when I asked her to wait, she just marched on in.”

  Demanded was a strong word, I thought. I would have said that I asked politely but firmly. Marched, however, was probably accurate.

  “It has to do with my sister’s case,” I said to the police chief, ignoring the officer. “You’re in charge of that, right? You called my parents about the tox screen?”

  The police chief nodded. “I did, that’s true.” He addressed the officer. “It’s all right. I’ll talk with her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” the officer said again. “She really did just barrel past me. I couldn’t stop her.”

  The police chief raised his eyebrows. “I think you have about a hundred pounds on her,” he said. “So I’m not sure she’s exactly the unstoppable force you seem to think she is.”

  “Yes, sir,” the officer said, his face reddening. “Would you like your door open or closed?”

  “Closed is fine,” the police chief said.

  After his door was closed, he turned to me. “Officer Heron mentioned that you came by a few weeks ago. She was worried she’d upset you.”

  “This isn’t about that.”

  He tilted his head. “I thought you said this was about your sister and the tox screen. Didn’t your conversation with Officer Heron focus on the alcohol she’d had?”

  “Yes, but this is something different.”

  “Okay,” he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “So why don’t you tell me what it’s about, then?”

  “There wasn’t a tox screen for Anna.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I requested Anna’s autopsy report and there was no toxicology information. I called and they don’t have anything on file.”

  “You requested your sister’s autopsy report?”

  The question had an odd weight to it. It fell heavily between us, reminding me that I’d had to forge my dad’s signature to make the request.

  “I meant, my dad requested it. Because I asked him to.” I hurried along, trying to move past the whole forgery issue. “Anyway, the point is that there wasn’t any toxicology information. But my parents told me you said the tests had shown alcohol. Could you have been looking at the wrong report? Did they send you the report for someone else, maybe? Or did my parents get confused—were you basing this all on the bottles in her room?”

  I forced myself to stop at that point, to wait and let him reply.

  And at first, he didn’t say anything. He only looked at me. Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward against the edge of his desk, settling his forearms in front of him like a judge proclaiming a sentence. “Do your parents know you’re here?”

  “I don’t see why that matters,” I said. “I want you to check your file for Anna. I want you to make sure the toxicology report is there, and that it’s for her.”

  “It was an accident,” he said slowly. “A horrible, tragic accident. I understand, of course I understand, why you’re so upset, why you’re looking for some kind of loophole or mystery to solve here. But there’s nothing you can do, nothing I can do, that will change what happened. I’m not sure what you’re doing is healthy.”

  “I’m not trying to change what happened, I’m trying to understand what happened. Because if she did have alcohol in her system, then I think she went out that night. That she was with someone.”

  He looked at me, his face flat. “Okay,” he said. “So what, then she fell coming back in?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she even fell somewhere else.”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that’s what happened. And even if she fell coming back inside the house, that doesn’t change anything. I don’t think your parents know you’re here, and I don’t think your dad requested the autopsy report either. I think maybe I should call your parents and ask them to take you home.”

  He reached for the phone on his desk.

  “Don’t,” I said quickly, remembering their faces across the dinner table, staring at me in horror as I tried, and failed, to explain to them about the bottles. Remembering Mrs. Hayes and her notes. “Please. They—I don’t want to upset them.”

  He paused, his hand hovering above the phone. Then he moved it back to rest on his desk again.

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t want to make things harder for you or your parents. I know it’s been hard enough for you all.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I paused and thought of the autopsy report, of the blank space. Of the call with the toxicology center. “Is there any way you could check about the report?

  He stared at me for a long, long moment. I wondered if he was deliberately counting to ten before speaking.

  “Look,” he said. “I have a meeting that’s starting soon, but if you really think something went wrong, then yes, I can check later today, and if I find that anything went awry, then I’ll let you, and your parents, know.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “And if you don’t find anything?”

  “Then there will be nothing to say,” he said. “And maybe you should take that as a sign that you need to find a different way to grieve for your sister. Need to stop forging letters and hiding things from your parents. All parents want is to protect their children, you know. So maybe you should let them for a while.” His eyes briefly settled on the framed picture. Then he looked at his watch, pushed his chair back, and stood up. “I need to go to my meeting, Jess.”

  And with that, we were done. And as I walked out of the police station, I started to wonder if he was right—if what I’d been doing made any rational sense at all. If it was crazy that a part of my brain kept coming back to the fact that he hadn’t exactly answered my questions.

  CROUCHED BENEATH MR. MATTHEWS’S WINDOW, I was starting to wish I hadn’t come. It was becoming harder and harder to remember what I thought I’d find, watching him like this. To believe that peering into his window, listening to him talk to his cat, would actually accomplish anything.

  It had been two days since I’d gone to the police station and talked to the chief. I’d heard nothing from him since, and while I’d held out hope at first that maybe he’d just gotten busy, I was steadily reaching the realization that the call wasn’t going to come. I felt foolish now for going. Felt foolish for being here, underneath Mr. Matthews’s window.

  To make matters worse, my left leg had begun cramping up. The best way to get the cramp to pass would be to get up and move around. Still, unobservant as Mr. Matthews was, I thought my prancing around his backyard might draw his attention. So I stayed put, quietly massaging my calf muscles.

  Mr. Matthews had been a little off this evening. For one thing, he’d let his tea brew for too long. He hadn’t set the alarm, so it had been steeping for at least ten minutes. He hadn’t gotten anything to eat either, just sat there with his tea steeping, cradling his phone, as if willing it to ring or gathering his strength to make a call. I’d seen him make calls twice before. They’d been polite, restraine
d conversations, one about a delayed package and the other about rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, and neither of them involved this kind of indecision.

  Finally, he began to dial.

  He hesitated for a few seconds before pressing the final number.

  Nothing happened for a long time. Then he twitched and tightened his grip on the phone.

  “Don’t hang up,” he said. “Please don’t hang up.”

  I straightened and leaned closer to the window, momentarily forgetting the throbbing pain in my calf.

  He opened his mouth and his shoulders fell. “I know. I know. I wanted—” The words came out crowded together, apologetic.

  I strained to hear the other side of the line, but it was too quiet to make out.

  “No, I don’t think anyone knows anything.”

  He turned his mouth closer to the phone and turned, making it difficult to hear everything he said.

  “—promised not to tell—”

  He began to shake his head vigorously.

  “How can you say that? You know it wasn’t like that.”

  “Of course I lied about that night.”

  “Of course the school wouldn’t have liked it—I know that. They don’t like anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow-minded understanding of how life should be.”

  His free hand froze beside his head, palm up, as if beseeching an invisible audience.

  “Why don’t you understand why I feel like this? I can’t talk to anyone, can’t explain….”

  He slumped down on the couch, his voice low, his eyes closed. “Don’t. I cared about that girl. You know that. But—”

  I stayed stock-still, not breathing.

  Then, right before he hung up the phone and put his head in his hands, before he sat motionless, devastated, it came—what I had both wanted and not wanted for so very long:

  “Anna’s death changed everything.”