“So, no one but me really knows you were friends?” I asked. Jake bit his lip and nodded. “And she was just going home afterward?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said hesitantly. “She mentioned meeting someone. Helen talked sometimes about this one guy; he sounded sketchy. I think he worked at a bar.”
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked. Jake shook his head.
“No. I just figured I had my friends and she had hers. She only mentioned him a couple of times, but I didn’t think he sounded like a good guy. He was older than her and she seemed really into him, like in love.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, dazed that Jake hadn’t considered any of this information valuable enough to be shared with the police. It was obvious that he was keeping quiet so his father wouldn’t find out he’d been sneaking around with Helen. I wondered if things would have been different if he’d contacted the cops. Still, it was hard to be angry with someone who had just lost a good friend in a brutal murder. Besides, I knew what it was like to keep secrets about your friends.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” I asked suddenly. “To try to act normal after you lose someone?”
“Yeah,” he whispered, his tears returning. “I just feel so guilty that I’m still here and she’s not. And I can’t even tell anyone. I have to pretend like nothing’s changed.”
“It’s almost easier not to,” I said. “To just accept that you’re different now and you’ll never be the same.”
“I-I wanted to say I was sorry about Chloe,” Jake said hesitantly. “I saw you guys together so much, ever since we were little. What happened to Helen…I hope he didn’t get Chloe too.”
“Thanks,” I whispered. “That’s nice of you to say.”
Jake nodded and I got up from the couch. I didn’t have any more questions, and I could tell by the relieved look on Jake’s face that he wasn’t burdened with any more answers.
I walked down the steps, distracted by the nagging suspicion that I was missing something. Suddenly, the thought dislodged from the murk of my subconscious and floated up to the surface.
“Jake, wait,” I said, whirling around. He stood in the doorway, the light from the hall casting a deep shadow across his face. It distorted his features, leaving me with the unshakeable feeling that I was now talking to a stranger.
“Yeah?” he asked. I checked for people nearby, but it was close to dinnertime now and all the children and mothers were tucked away inside.
“You told me Helen was shy around new people. And that she wasn’t going directly home.” I ticked the points off on my fingers and then looked up at Jake, who nodded. “Everyone assumed she was hitchhiking that night. But she doesn’t sound like the kind of person who would ever hitchhike.”
“She never mentioned hitching. I don’t think she would have done that,” Jake said with a frown, trying to understand where I was going with this.
“Then maybe someone picked her up that night,” I said slowly. “Maybe Helen knew the killer.”
Chapter Eleven
February 28, 2006
The next day, I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from school. I did most of the grocery shopping in the family, my way of reducing my mom’s endless list of parental responsibilities. My mother always seemed tired, and I wanted to make her life as easy as possible. Sometimes this entailed doing extra chores around the house, sometimes it meant keeping a bundle of secrets.
“Jenny?” I looked up from my grocery cart and right into the faces of Chloe’s parents, Linda and Greg Shaughnessy.
To see them in a place as mundane as the grocery store was surreal. My throat tightened as I noticed how normal they looked. How could tragedy be concentrated so inwardly that grieving parents could have clean hair and scarves that matched their hats?
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Shaughnessy,” I said. Linda smiled, but the wrinkles around her eyes didn’t deepen. Her hands, which rested on the handle of her cart, were shaking.
“Hi, Jenny,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m okay. You know, work and school…,” I said awkwardly. My vague answer left out so much that it felt like a lie. But what could I tell her? How, since I had lost Chloe, my life felt flattened and stretched thin? That I was spending more time investigating a teenage girl’s murder than doing my homework? The Shaughnessys didn’t need any more unpleasant truths.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you…,” Linda said wistfully. “You should drop by sometime.” I nodded, aware that I would never go near Chloe’s house. It was too painful.
Greg glanced away, distracted by a child pitching a temper tantrum in the checkout line. I had known Greg for over half my life, but he still felt like a stranger. His presence was usually marked by a closed office door or the back of a steel-haired head watching CNN. He had the air of a person who generally disapproved of any excessive noise or extravagance. Chloe and her father had never been particularly close.
“Well, uh, I hope to see you soon,” I said, my heart beginning to splinter as I stared at Linda’s face and saw her resemblance to Chloe. It occurred to me that this might be the closest I would ever come to seeing what Chloe would look like as an adult.
As they turned away, I thought of something, the words coming out before I really had time to consider them. “Hey, this is a weird question, but that night, Chloe was complaining about losing one of her mittens. Did you guys ever find a mitten, blue and pink stripes?” I asked, flinching at saying her name in front of her mother. It seemed so callous to ask a woman with a missing daughter about a lost mitten, but I couldn’t tell her the truth.
“No, sorry, we didn’t,” Linda said, a faint frown crinkling her forehead. “But I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Thanks,” I said awkwardly.
“Take care, sweetie,” Linda said.
As I walked past her, she reached out and lightly touched my arm. When I glanced back, it was as if her face had cracked open, revealing the raw emotion swirling beneath the surface: confusion, fear, frustration. But there was something else. Her face was shining with hope, like she was waiting for God to vindicate her pleas and put an end to the slow-burning loss of her daughter. Even after Helen’s murder, this mother believed her daughter was coming home, that no one could ever hurt a girl like Chloe. The faith in her face made me look away.
—
That night, I sat on my bed and stared at Helen’s picture in the yearbook. I kept switching from it to the pictures of Chloe and me layered on the walls. It was a chronology of our life, the new pictures covering up the years of captured moments that had come before.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Chloe’s mother and the fact that her life at the moment was completely defined by what wasn’t in it. Linda had left her job when Chloe was born because she’d always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. Now she was just a mother-in-waiting, marking time until she found her daughter.
What remained of a life once it was over? I thought of Chloe’s clothes hanging silently in her closet, of the binders and stray gloves that surely remained in Helen’s locker. I thought of the pictures in the newspaper, and how quickly that paper aged and degraded, as fast as it took people in town to move on from yesterday’s sadness. Finally, I thought about the mitten I had stashed under my pillow. It haunted me to think that once a person was gone, all that remained of their life was a random collection of possessions and a shadow in other people’s memories.
It made me feel as if I should live my life in a way that would transcend a closet full of clothing and the private sadness of a mother. More than that, I wanted to right the wrongs that had already happened. I felt a flush of anger as I thought of the people who had hurt Chloe and Helen. I wanted to make them pay, but I felt completely useless.
I looked up at the picture of Chloe and me hugging on her last birthday. She was wearing orange sunglasses and bright pink lipstick. My face was colorless, and I was hunched down like a tissue draped around her shoulders. One of those girls looke
d like the kind of person who could make her life matter, the kind of girl who could force the whole world to sit up and listen. The other girl would never even be a footnote in a book. She wouldn’t be forgotten, because she would never be noticed. The problem was that the wrong girl had disappeared.
—
I lay in bed for hours that night, tossing and turning as the same thoughts ran through my head like a dog chasing its own tail. Finally, when I couldn’t bear to spend another moment thinking about Chloe and Helen, I gave up on sleep and got out of bed.
It was past midnight when I padded downstairs, the house quiet and as still as a photograph. I slipped my snow boots on and shut the door carefully behind me. The night air poked my face with cold needles as I hastily zipped up my snowboard jacket and pulled a hat down over my hair. I was still wearing pajama pants and I could feel my legs grow cold as I walked to my car.
I turned the key in the ignition, gasping at the cold air that blew out of the heater. The steering wheel was frozen, but I knew that my hands would thaw once the heater kicked in.
It was crazy to be out at this hour; I was going to feel terrible in the morning after so little sleep. But my only other option was to stay in my room and obsess over the myriad things that made life unfair. Better to drive.
On nights like these, I always ended up in the same place, parked near Liam McAllister’s house. He was the only person I blamed as much as myself. I parked across the street and turned off the engine, just in case anyone was awake to notice me. Pulling my gloves on, I huddled in my rapidly cooling car and examined the McAllisters’ home. I found myself searching for Chloe’s other mitten, poking out of a snow bank or frozen in the driveway, but that didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t come here that night.
It was a large brick house that glowed with the comfortable wealth that the McAllister family possessed. They were the kind of family who went on European vacations every few years and had money for the constant hockey equipment purchases required to outfit growing boys. Things had always come easy to Liam, and this house was the epitome of that successful life. I had never liked it when he gave me a ride home; he would peer out his window at my neighborhood like he was on some sort of African safari. So often, I wanted to scream, “Yes! Some houses don’t have hot tubs and barbecue pits! Get used to it!” But I never did. Chloe loved him, and I didn’t want to ruin our friendship, so I kept quiet, like always.
I balled my gloved hands into puffy fists and tried not to cry. Was Liam in that house, asleep in his bedroom? Were any guilty thoughts poking his conscience? Liam’s life remained on track even as mine was completely derailing.
I stared up at the McAllisters’ tranquil home and wished that I could burn it to the ground.
Chapter Twelve
October 15, 2005
Chloe and I were sitting on top of the chairlift at the ski hill. It was mid-October, so the hill wasn’t open yet and no one was around to stop us from climbing the ladder. Just under the cable was a small platform used by the technicians to fix the lift. Chloe and I had been coming here for years. It was just around the corner from her house, a spacious four-bedroom home with a hot tub in the backyard.
We were sitting on the platform, our feet dangling high above the chairlifts. We had our backs turned to the forest that bordered the ski hill and stretched north without interruption for ages. The whole town was spread out in front of us, curled around the base of the ski hill. At night, surrounded by the inky darkness of the forest and the vast sky, Thunder Creek’s cluster of lights seemed to belong to a larger city. You could pretend that the lights kept going beyond the hills. That maybe those lights were nightclubs and modern art museums instead of an endless number of suburban houses and twenty-four-hour convenience stores.
It was a beautiful night, unseasonably warm for October. A breeze slid up the hill, ruffling the long grass and reminding me that while it was warm tonight, I would be in a winter jacket within a month.
We were sharing a water bottle filled with whiskey stolen from Chloe’s father’s liquor cabinet. He drank a lot, so he didn’t really notice how often we skimmed off his bottles. We never took anything from my house. My mom didn’t like to drink alone. The only booze in our house was an unopened bottle of Baileys from her work Secret Santa.
The whiskey filled my throat with flannelly warmth even as my mouth puckered. We were drinking because it was the only way we knew how to make something happen. Sometimes we would run into people who knew about a party in the woods. Once, we found discarded office chairs on a curb and rode them down the hill. Usually, we just ended up wandering Chloe’s neighborhood, the secret drinking electrifying our conversations.
But that night, Chloe seemed distracted. She was drinking quickly, almost with purpose. I caught her glaring at Thunder Creek’s lights, which looked like a swarm of fireflies hovering by the lake.
“Look at it, Jenny,” she burst out as she took another deep swig.
“Yeah, it’s pretty,” I said. The Milky Way looked as if someone had smeared stardust across the sky like butter on bread.
“Pretty?” Chloe said with a snort. “It’s an ugly town, full of ugly people.” She forced the bottle into my hands, but I had barely taken a sip before I felt her fingers clawing it back.
Earlier, we had been in the bathroom at school. I was washing my hands when I heard Chloe gasp from inside the stall. When she came out, she didn’t say anything, but she was quiet and distracted. Later, I went back to the bathroom, furtively checking over my shoulder in case Chloe had left her class at the same time.
In the second bathroom stall, someone had written in black Sharpie: “Chloe Shaughnessy is a Slut with AIDS.” People had written comments underneath, all agreeing that she was a whore. I sat in that bathroom stall for the rest of my class, methodically covering each comment with white-out, wishing that I could erase it from Chloe’s memory as easily. It didn’t seem like enough, even then. I wanted to teach them a lesson, force them to leave Chloe alone, but I didn’t know how.
“Chloe, are you okay?” I asked. She glanced down at the goose bumps on her knees, poking out from underneath a floral skirt.
“I just wish they’d stop. No matter what I do, they’re there,” she muttered. I nodded and took another sip of whiskey.
That was the terrible thing about reputations. As soon as a story got started, there was no way to reverse it. Maybe someone gets their stomach pumped after a party. Maybe a boy has an embarrassing erection at the beach. Maybe a girl sleeps with a few too many guys who aren’t her boyfriend. In a place like Thunder Creek, there were no pardons. Any black mark on your reputation would count against you long after whatever you’d done to deserve it.
The worst offense was a girl being labeled a slut. Stories would be exaggerated, lurid and seedy details added and narratives exchanged like currency. Everyone would be sickened by the details but would glory in the fact that they were obviously superior to that girl. I had heard the same stories about older skanky girls my whole life. There was a girl named Rachel who had graduated high school six years ago, but people still talked about her. They shared her stories when they went off to university, another nameless whore joining endless variations all over the country.
I just never thought Chloe would become ours.
“Don’t worry, Chloe. Two more years and you’ll be out of here,” I said, using the countdown that had comforted her since we were little. Chloe snorted and began to climb down the ladder. She paused on the rails and looked at me, her wild red-brown hair blowing in the breeze.
“Two years might be too much,” she said.
I sat up on the platform, drinking the last sips of whiskey while I waited for her to climb down. By the time I started descending, she was far away, walking across the parking lot. All I could see was her shadow, stretched long and thin over the asphalt, disappearing behind her like a fading memory.
Chapter Thirteen
March 1, 2006
Tom w
as waiting for me at my locker in the morning. He was sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out, impervious to the people awkwardly stepping over him. There was something admirable in his commitment to taking up space when I spent most days trying to be invisible.
“Hey,” Tom said, a smile pulling at his lips when he saw me. I felt myself smiling back, my heart pounding a quicker rhythm.
“Hey,” I said, trying to ignore the people who were curiously staring at us as they walked by.
Tom stood up and stepped close to me. I could smell pot smoke trapped in his hair and the humid but clean scent of his skin. My stomach squirmed at his closeness, but I knew that he was just trying to speak privately.
“I was wondering, do you want to come over for dinner tonight?” he muttered near my ear. I could feel his breath on my earlobe and a shiver ran up my spine.
“What? Like a…,” I asked, panicking that whatever we had been doing was about to culminate in a public show of relationship. I had never dated anyone before, and I didn’t know how serious this was to Tom. I couldn’t even tell what I wanted, since I was still spending a good part of the day convinced that I was becoming permanently unhinged. I wanted to investigate an unsolved murder with him. And I wanted to kiss him. But I was scared that he would realize how flawed I was if he actually became my boyfriend. Of course, the idea wasn’t totally unappealing…
Tom must have seen the stricken look on my face, because he stepped back and patted my arm.
“Jesus, chill out, Jenny!” he said with a laugh. “I want you to come for dinner because my dad’s having his girlfriend over. The one who works at the police station?” He glanced around and then whispered, “I thought we could wait until she has a few drinks and then see if we can get her talking about the case.”
The Lives of Desperate Girls Page 7