Chloe turned around and shuffled toward her door. I saw the teal dress beneath the shifting hem of her coat and her hair glow copper in the porch light. I put the car in reverse and pulled away.
That was February 2, 2006. I never saw her again.
At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing, leaving Chloe to fall asleep in her own bed. Now I think that Chloe never went inside the house, never did more than rest her hand on the frozen doorknob and wait for me to leave. They found her snow-covered cell phone under a porch chair. She must have left it there after I drove away.
I hope she didn’t go inside. I can’t bear to imagine Chloe walking down familiar hallways, examining old family photos and pausing at her parents’ door to listen to familiar snores. I want to believe that she wouldn’t have been able to leave forever, not after all the reminders of those who loved her. But like so many things that come up when a person disappears, I’ll never know for sure.
Chloe couldn’t drive, so I’m sure she left her home on foot. Maybe she hitchhiked out of town. Maybe a kind stranger spirited her away to a new life where her past was wiped clean. Or maybe she met the same kind of predator as Helen, and Chloe’s last moments were spent fighting for her life. But deep down, I don’t believe any of that happened. Chloe had been so desperately distraught that I can’t imagine her forming a coherent plan to leave. Anyway, her problem was no longer just the people of Thunder Creek. By the end, Chloe hated herself so deeply that no trip could have helped, not unless she could somehow leave herself behind.
On the morning of February 3, before school, the phone rang at my house. I picked it up thoughtlessly. I was mentally running through what clothes I could resurrect from my dirty laundry pile, so I never even wondered why someone would call so early.
“Hello?” I asked, standing in the watery light of my kitchen window. I had been eating cereal for breakfast, mechanically spooning it into my mouth as I tried to move past a sleep-deprived night.
“Hey, Jenny, it’s Linda Shaughnessy. I just wanted to ask Chloe about her plans after school. Her cell phone’s off, could you put her on?”
I felt my knees buckle, the phone almost falling out of my hand. In a single revelatory moment, I knew that my best friend had killed herself. I felt the events of the last few days arrange themselves into a sickening chronology with a foregone conclusion. She committed suicide. I knew what Chloe had gone through that year, and I also knew who Chloe was. Everything that made her special, her sensitivity and flighty emotions, also made her incapable of understanding that the present didn’t dictate the future. Her suffering had narrowed her vision so profoundly that she couldn’t understand that these days would soon fall away in the rearview mirror.
If it had been me, I would have put my head down and trundled through the indignities. But that didn’t make me superior to Chloe. Maybe I was better at surviving, but Chloe was always better at living. If Chloe hadn’t been betrayed, she would have led a life much more brilliant than mine.
I didn’t know how Chloe killed herself. She might have taken pills or climbed through a crack in the ice to drown. She might have jumped off something tall or she might have slit her wrists. But I knew that she was likely somewhere in the woods next to the ski hill. It would have been a ten-minute walk from her house, and Chloe was so distraught that the idea of a dark and quiet forest would have been appealing. I wondered how far into the bush she’d gone. The forest up there was wide and uninterrupted for hundreds of miles.
I opened my mouth, steeling myself to tell her mother where I thought Chloe was, but the words stuck in my throat. I was sixteen years old and the responsibility of that message seemed impossibly heavy. It would take so much explanation. I would have to tell her about the bullying, the sex, the drinking and the ultimate betrayal by Liam. The truth was an unwieldy bundle of explosives, and I lacked the courage to thrust it into a mother’s hands. I didn’t want to shatter the cheerfulness of Mrs. Shaughnessy’s voice, didn’t want to be the person she always associated with tragedy. And what if I was wrong? What if Chloe had just run away and would return within a couple of days? She would hate me for exposing her secrets, and her mother would hate me for not telling her earlier.
But even then, I didn’t really believe Chloe had run away. Over the years, our thoughts had become so aligned that it was hard to distinguish our memories. Now, I realized that I couldn’t feel her anymore. It was almost as if I had been listening to an amazing song and someone had snuck up behind me and torn off my headphones. Where Chloe had been in my mind was now just a silent space.
“Chloe decided that she wanted to go home last night,” I began, my cowardly voice cracking as I clutched the phone so hard that the plastic flexed. I leaned against my wall, steeling myself for the anxiety I was about to invoke. “I dropped her off around midnight. She’s not here. She should be home.”
And that was the day my life changed forever. Believing that Chloe had killed herself, I also believed that she would be found quickly and that I would never need to explain my suspicions. But they didn’t find her. Of course, everybody looked. The police organized volunteer search parties to investigate the ravines, the woods, the frozen rivers and lakes. But it was slow going, wading through snow that seemed to fall continuously, obscuring every footstep and beaten-down path. It was just so easy to disappear in the winter, when a soft spot in the ice or a crust of snow hiding the edge of a ridge could catch you unawares.
By the weekend, Thunder Creek was pinned down under a snowstorm and the volunteer parties dwindled. It was the worst thing that could have happened, the snowstorm wiping away precious clues and covering everything in so much snow that the searchers could have been in the same clearing as Chloe without even realizing it. I sat at home that weekend, wondering in my more desperate moments if I should look for her myself. But I couldn’t bear the idea of finding her. As long as her suicide was just a belief, I could entertain the possibility that she had run away and was living it up with a bohemian boyfriend in Toronto. If I found Chloe in the woods, the full weight of what had happened that year would crush me.
—
The police came to talk to me two days after Chloe went missing. Bragg and Trudeau visited my house that time. It should have been less intimidating than going to the police station, but there was something unsettling about seeing your home through the eyes of the police. You felt as if you had something to hide.
“Jenny, do you want me to stay with you?” my mom said worriedly, standing at the door in her coat. I shook my head. She’d already taken the day after Chloe’s disappearance off to be with me. We couldn’t afford to lose any more shifts.
“It’s okay, Mom. I’m not in any trouble. I’ll just tell them how I dropped her home that night,” I said, my heart racing. My mom nodded.
“You’re right. They’re just trying to find Chloe and want your help,” she said, pulling on her toque. “Bye, baby, see you tonight.”
I watched her leave and then sat down in the living room. Officer Bragg was sitting in the armchair and Officer Trudeau roamed around the room, picking up framed photos and examining them.
“So, was Chloe upset about anything?” Bragg asked. I took a deep breath before giving the most sanitized version of the truth that I could muster.
“Well, she was disappointed that her ex-boyfriend Liam didn’t want to get back together,” I said feebly. I felt as if we were playing Twenty Questions, the cops slowly backing me into a corner by asking the right questions.
“Any other problems at school? Any reason she might run away?” Trudeau asked, stopping and staring at me.
I paused, feeling the truth froth my stomach into a churning mess. I wasn’t sure if I could stop the ugly story from rising up my throat and foaming out of my mouth.
I wanted desperately to tell the police that the last few months had been hell for Chloe. I wanted to tell them what Liam had done, how he’d betrayed her that night. I wanted to tell them that Devon and Mik
e had taken advantage of her when she was barely conscious. They might not have realized quite how drunk she was, but I doubted they tried very hard to find out. That was the uncomfortable fact about these kinds of situations; alcohol added a level of ambiguity that made the girl wonder if she was really the architect of her own troubles. But the thoughts I had been skirting all year finally crystallized into one inescapable conclusion: Chloe had been raped.
She had never said that word out loud and neither had I. It was almost as if we thought it was better for her to decide that she had made a drunken mistake. Maybe, unconsciously, Chloe and I had both concluded that it was better to be a slut than a rape victim. But labels couldn’t change what actually happened. I wondered if I had only done more damage by letting Chloe blame herself and deny the truth she must have sensed. I wondered why I had ever thought that the two of us could just shut our eyes and pretend to see something else.
And if Chloe and I weren’t going to use the word rape, why would anyone else at Thunder Creek High? Chloe had always thought she was a bit too special for this town, and a lot of jealous hearts might have been glad to see her humbled. You could almost understand how everyone had believed the boys’ stories.
I wasn’t going to tell the cops that she was raped. I had no evidence and I didn’t want to add to her family’s sadness by tainting their memories of her last year. Instead, I opened my treacherous mouth and let the lies spill out.
—
I stayed home from school for almost a week, lying in my bed and pretending that the world beyond my room didn’t exist. I tried to keep myself distracted by reading books, but every now and then a wave of grief would crash over me like a tsunami. I would double up in bed, in pain but unable to cry. From the moment I found out Chloe was missing, not a single tear had escaped my eyelashes. I could feel the secrets I was holding back simmering inside of me, and I wondered if that slow boil had dried me from the inside out. I felt my organs begin to cook and my arteries shred under the weight of the toxic things I knew. Nothing made sense anymore, so why should the normal rules of biology apply?
For a culture that talked nonstop about the importance of friendship and how friendship meant forever, no one ever talked about what happened when you lost a friend. There were no support groups or self-help books. We didn’t have a word to describe a grieving friend, like widow. Apparently, “best friend” was just a motif to decorate the necklaces of little girls. Everyone expected to someday lose their parents, and most had considered the idea of losing a spouse. But no one thinks they will have to mourn a friend.
I finally returned to school the following Thursday, and that was only because my mom forced me to go. It was the anniversary of the last day I saw Chloe. It had been a decade since I’d gone a week without talking to her. The idea that I might never talk to her again made me want to climb back into bed and never come out.
That was the day I discovered how visible a person could be. Everywhere I went, I could feel a torrential wave of whispers crash over me, the phrase “she must know” echoing down the halls. I didn’t realize at the time that it would become a constant refrain in the coming weeks, but even then I could tell that my world had irrevocably shifted. I had always been a face in the crowd, and I had been content to be invisible. I blended into the background like the freckles I covered in foundation.
I spent my lunch hour in the bathroom, annoyed at myself for choosing the most clichéd place in a high school to hide. Still, it was a relief to know that I had an hour in which no one was watching me and waiting for me to crack.
I waited until the first bell rang before I came out, hoping everybody would be too busy hurrying to class to notice me. I threw the door of the bathroom open and walked right into someone, the force of our collision sending me staggering.
“Oh! Sorry about that!” a familiar voice said, and then I heard a sharp intake of air. I looked up and Liam McAllister was staring at me, a stunned look on his face.
“Uh, hey, Jenny,” he said, attempting a bargain-basement version of his usual charming smile.
“Hey,” I said flatly. The muscle above his eyebrow creased, a momentary frown that took flight before I registered it.
“Jenny, actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you…,” he began, stepping toward me. I shuffled back so quickly that I smacked my tailbone on the water fountain.
“Well, it’s not mutual,” I said. “I don’t think I have anything to say to you.”
“Hey, I don’t know where this is coming from,” Liam said, his voice dripping with faux outrage. “I thought we were friends.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, my voice as flat and unadorned as my face. Inside, I could feel an emotion other than sadness begin to emerge: anger. It was the first thing I’d truly felt since Chloe had disappeared.
Liam had barely talked to me when they were dating. I was a minor annoyance who had to be driven home from the party before he could hook up with Chloe. I was the girl he had to make pained conversation with when he picked his girlfriend up and found me hanging around. I was the bland barnacle to whom he had to be civil as long as he was dating her hotter friend.
I knew that a popular guy like Liam probably struggled to relate to girls like me. I was shy around guys because I’d never spent much time with males. My best friend was a girl and my family consisted of one other person, who happened to be a woman. I had no brothers, no male cousins, not even an assortment of guys I was proud to call my friends. I didn’t know what guys talked about, since it seemed like everything that Chloe and I discussed (reality television, crushes, emotional needs) was acutely feminine. Applying what I knew about guys from television, I could only assume that boys talked about sports, cars and the challenges they had shaving their face.
In a way, I was almost relieved when Chloe and Liam started having sex, because she spent all her time alone with him. Suddenly, there were no more expectations that Liam and I hang out. It was refreshing, albeit in a lonely, wish-I-had-a-boyfriend-too kind of way.
“I did think we were friends, but anyways, it’s about the cops who came to my house. They wanted to talk about the last night I saw Chloe. Did you tell them I took her out that night?” he asked. Liam was still smiling but his eyes were like black ice. Black ice was the most dangerous ice for driving; you don’t notice it until you’re skidding out of control.
“Yeah, I did. And you should be thankful that’s all I told them,” I said sharply.
“There’s nothing else to tell. We got a pizza and caught up. Big whup,” Liam said, forcefully pushing the words out through his teeth. He was talking as if he had rehearsed those sentences, repeated them while driving and washing his hair until their sheer familiarity evoked the sensation of truth.
“You and I both know there was more to it than that,” I said bluntly. I had never talked to anyone like that. I had never had to—not when I had a fiery and vindictive best friend to fight my battles for me.
Liam’s face darkened, and I saw that he was clenching his fists so tightly that his hands looked like bulbous softballs. Class had started and there was no one left in the hallway. It was strange that we were having such a dramatic conversation standing in a hall festooned in construction paper hearts. Valentine’s Day was still a week away, but they always made a big deal of it at Thunder Creek High. I kept looking at the paper cupid hovering near Liam’s head and wondering if, before their pizza date, Chloe had been mentally planning what they could do for their second V-Day as a couple.
The thought that Liam might have killed Chloe later that night winged through my head. It was strange, imagining the guy voted “Most Likely to Succeed” killing his ex-girlfriend and then going about his life. Still, it seemed unlikely that Liam would ruin his future by murdering someone. He would have seen Chloe as a minor character in the grand life he’d planned for himself, not someone worth getting in trouble over.
“I have no idea what you mean,” Liam said, his anger inserting sharp pauses betw
een each carefully enunciated word.
“Then I guess you’re not as smart as everyone thinks. Stay away from me,” I said to him. Then I turned on my heel and walked away.
I tried to keep my walk casual, but it was hard to stop myself from breaking into a run. I was at the end of the hallway before I looked back. Liam was standing exactly where I left him, his eyes fixed on me. A chill shivered its way up my vertebrae. I shoved open the hallway door and left, deciding that I couldn’t be bothered to go to class.
For the entire walk to my car, I felt a weight on my shoulder blades, as if someone were watching me. But this time I didn’t look back. It wouldn’t do any good. Liam knew where I lived and he knew where I went to school. If he wanted to get me, he would get me.
But that meant I could get him too. Liam was going to have to spend the last four months of his time at high school seeing me and knowing that I knew his secret. That would make him nervous, but I wanted to do more. I wanted to make him pay.
—
On Saturday, February 11, I went to the waterfront. I wanted to feel close to Chloe. She had been there the night she disappeared. I hoped that by going to the same spot, I could maybe calm the roiling thoughts inside my head and understand how what started as a normal day could have ended so tragically.
It was 4 p.m. by the time I reached the waterfront, and the gray sky was already growing dim with night. I stared out at the frozen lake covered in snow, a white sheet beneath an ashy sky. It was bitterly cold, and I could feel a thick layer of stinging numbness settle on my face. The limited palette and oppressive silence mirrored what my life had been like since Chloe’s disappearance.
I walked around the parking lot, trying to guess which of the tire tracks embedded in the hard snow belonged to Liam’s car. I had hoped that coming here would give me a measure of understanding. But what had happened seemed just as incomprehensible as ever. Chloe had been betrayed twice that night—once by Liam and once by me. I should have stayed with her. Even if she’d wanted to go home, I should have insisted on spending the night. I knew how upset she was. Why did I let her go?
The Lives of Desperate Girls Page 22