When he talked to Hunter, he thought it’d be the last time. Tried his best to keep his voice even when he told Hunter to tell Savannah hi and he hoped to see them soon, the next time they left Montana for Kentucky—Christmastime. Instead, Rye pictured them flying in with their baby for his funeral once his body was found, if it was found. And he hated himself for having to do that to them—kill himself and bring more darkness into their lives when they’d recently been warmed by so much light.
He’d called his parents and talked to them like normal, too, neither of them asking where he was or what he was doing, because he was a grown man. He told his parents he loved them. Got off the phone, ditched it for his new one, and cried privately before hitching to Sugar Maple, a town seventy-five miles away from Bloom. He’d sold his truck a week before, lying to his parents and saying he was on the hunt for a new one.
Rye caught rides with two more truckers before making it to Louisville and walking aimlessly. Louisville because Christine and Brenna loved the Louisville Zoo, especially the baby elephant. They came as a family to visit at least once a season. And he’d thrown that money in his backpack because when he was released from prison, people had given him the money they’d raised for him when he was inside. There was more of the money; he’d left it at his parents’ place, and his suicide letter would’ve told them exactly where, once they received it in the mail.
He had prayed for life to give him a break. He had prayed for God to give him a sign. He had thought All this will haunt me forever before he climbed up on the bridge on Thursday, praying. He didn’t want to die, but he had no other option. It was the only way. How else could he make it all stop?
TALLIE
Tallie couldn’t help but cry, seeing photos of Christine and Brenna for the first time, photos of Rye with them. His Eleanor Christina and Briar Anna. Christine was bright-eyed and so cheerleader-pretty that she looked as if nothing bad could ever happen to her. Brenna had Rye’s hair, the same splash of cinnamon freckles. She was so small and alive in the photos—in one of them, holding both hands straight up in the air, with her mouth wide open in squeal. Tallie stared at it, half waiting for the picture to make a sound. One of the websites offered a link to the audio of the 911 call Rye’s neighbor made, and Tallie caught her breath. Closed that tab on her phone as quickly as she could before it played.
Rye sat and then stood while Tallie looked at his mug shot: a T-shirt the color of peas, his eyes weary, his mouth an arrow. A photo taken the Christmas before Christine and Brenna died: the three of them laughing, wearing antlers on their heads and ugly Christmas sweaters, Brenna on Rye’s hip, Christine with her hand on his stomach, looking up at him. A family portrait: Rye playfully smushed between his strawberry-blond mother and his dark-haired father, a wide oak tree flush with green behind them. She stepped away and smoked as she flicked through article after article, photo after photo of his life before she met him.
A kaleidoscope of contradicting feelings spun in her heart, the colored glass of it shattering and revealing a new emotion with every turn. Rye was a wet petal, still grief-stricken and tender; Rye had betrayed her trust and gotten himself involved with Joel out of pettiness. Rye’s story was true, and she had pages and pages of news articles and YouTube videos to prove it; Rye had stayed with her in her home and lied about who he was. Rye was gentle and sweet to her at all times, especially when they’d been in her bed together; when they were in her bed together, it was twinned loneliness and she was worried about her brother, dizzied and desperate for a sexual connection and release to numb her.
Rye had saved Lionel.
She felt sorry for Rye; how could she not?
He may have lied about who he was without her picking up on it, but the core of her instincts had been right. She didn’t believe he’d killed his wife and daughter, and some would call her a fool, but she didn’t doubt her ability to read people’s energies just because she didn’t pick up Joel’s cheating husband energy as quickly as she could’ve. She’d been wrong about Joel, but she’d never been wrong about pure evil.
Rye was a lot of things, a lot of things she couldn’t know yet, but he wasn’t a sociopath or a murderer. She’d read about Christine’s autopsy, the drugs she’d had in her system, her history of mental illness. She’d watched a ten-minute video of an episode of a crime show he’d pulled up on YouTube, a team of attorneys explaining how he couldn’t have done it. The video had half a million views.
Diagnoses: Acute grief from the deaths of his wife and young daughter three years ago. Survivor’s guilt. PTSD from being accused and convicted of their deaths and subsequently falsely imprisoned.
* * *
“This is all so gut-wrenching, and I’m sorry…I’m just so sorry you’ve had to deal with this,” Tallie said. “Did you tell the cop who pulled us over who you really were?”
“Yes. And he recognized my name immediately. Googled me as I sat in his patrol car, and he got the same pitiful sorrow in his eyes everyone gets when they hear the story.”
Tallie changed the expression on her face, careful to not have those pitiful-sorrow eyes when she asked him, “Weren’t you worried someone would recognize you when we were at the party? The unicorn…my friend who thought you looked familiar? Did anyone say anything?”
Rye shook his head. “No one said anything, but there were a couple of times this weekend when people looked at me too long. In the pub…and an older woman stopped me in the grocery store. It’s usually older people. Old people love the news. Li said something about me looking familiar, though. And I thought your mom definitely recognized me when she came over. I thought your neighbor did, too. She looked at me weird.”
“Well…just so you know, my neighbor looks at everyone weird,” Tallie said.
“Noted,” Rye said.
After a moment he launched into why the letters were so important to him. He told her he got rid of everything else that belonged to Christine and Brenna except the wedding ring and those butterfly wings. And that the letters, although simple and, in Brenna’s case, unfinished, were his first attempts at sharing the part of his heart that had gone mute. He hated that he couldn’t even bring himself to finish Brenna’s letter, and the letter he’d written to Christine embarrassed him because it didn’t say enough. How could it? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get it right. Like he’d failed her all over again.
“I know they didn’t seem important, but I’d never even tried to write Brenna a letter before. And I’d started letters to Christine in the past, but that was the first one I’d been able to finish…if it’s even finished…I don’t know.” He paused and looked up before continuing. “The letters aren’t the same thing at all, but just in general…I’m tired of people going behind my back and reading shit about me and knowing everything or thinking they know everything. I didn’t even get to tell you their names myself. You saw them first,” he said.
“I’m sorry I read them,” she said, attempting to fully understand his frustration as well as she knew her own.
“Well…I overreacted.”
“Tell the truth: Did you really send your parents that suicide letter?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m being honest with you about everything now.”
He kept talking. Told her where the money had come from. Told her he took antidepressants for about a month years ago and hated them. Told her he didn’t even smoke weed anymore. He was prescribed the beta-blockers after everything because he thought his adrenaline would never let off turbo-boost.
Tallie smoked another cigarette and another with Rye as she listened to him. She had to force herself to think of him as Rye, and she’d gone from angry to sad to frustrated, braiding those emotions into one thick mess, only stopping when she fell into the habit she was so used to. What she got paid hundreds of dollars by the hour to do: To be a therapist. To listen. To ask the right questions. To listen and ask the right questions some more.
* * *
Tallie would
’ve rallied and protested for Rye’s release if she’d lived in that town. She pictured herself staying up late, squeaking a black marker across white poster board. #FreeRyeKipling. Rye was arrested and tried because of racism. She could only imagine how hard it’d been for him, growing up in a little, mostly white town like Bloom, marrying and having a baby with the town princess like that.
* * *
“As far as honesty goes…I wouldn’t believe any of this if I hadn’t read it myself,” Tallie said to him, holding up her phone in the owl-light. The sky was lowering. She focused on the two pretty nurses—one zaftig, one skin and bones—sitting on a bench on the other side, smoking and speaking quietly in their cartoon-printed scrubs. A ring of white lights encircled them, like little moons. “I mean, obviously I understand why this would’ve sent you to the bridge,” she said, understanding fully now why he’d been so calm about Lionel catching fire. When he’d seen all he’d seen, what could possibly shock him?
“Thursday was my birthday,” he said, looking up. Four words revealing yet another cavernous truth.
“You were going to jump on your birthday.”
“Christine and Brenna…it was October. Even the sound of the fallen leaves reminds me of them. I can’t escape.”
“I can’t even imagine how unbearable it seems…how hard October is for you,” she said, falling into her rhythm of repetition again, signaling to her clients that she heard them. Rye’s eyes were red in the whites, rimmed with violent pink.
“I told myself if I could feel better, after being out of prison for a year…back in the world…I’d stick around. But this week came, my birthday came, and I didn’t feel better. Every day I had to look for a new reason to stay alive, and it became more and more difficult to find one.” He paused and took a tender breath in. He told her his parents had tried so hard to help, but he’d been completely closed off. They didn’t know what else to do, and neither did he. “I thought grief would kill me, and I wanted it to, but spending time with you…being there to help Lionel out…this weekend happened.”
“Well, I’m listening, and I hear you,” Tallie said.
“I had no clue what I needed, and you helped me—”
“But I still don’t understand what you talking to my ex-husband has to do with all this,” she said, aggressively fizzing out the s sounds so he couldn’t be mistaken about how she was feeling.
“It doesn’t. I have no excuse. It was a stupid thing, and it got out of hand—”
“What did you say to Joel?” she asked.
Rye talked, told her about the emails and Joel’s replies. He told her about telling Joel she was considering adopting a baby and that she had a boyfriend, too. She scratched at her neck, which had become unbearably itchy, and before she could open her mouth to say anything, he apologized again.
“I betrayed you, thinking I knew what you needed after only knowing you for a couple of hours, and I’m a total asshole for it.”
“Correct,” she said, scratching, wishing he could feel it, too. “And who was this supposed boyfriend?”
Rye looked at her.
“You?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Rye—”
“I’m so sorry.”
“So you told him everything. All the stuff I told you, when I thought we were getting to know each other, the things I didn’t want him to know. The things I could’ve told him myself but didn’t want to,” she said, nodding angrily.
“What he has with her…he always thought it’d be you. Wanted it to be you,” Rye said.
“He said that, even now, after everything?” Tallie sniffed and wiped her nose with an old tissue she found at the bottom of her purse. She smelled the dirty musk of tobacco on her fingers, and it nauseated her. What the hell had she been thinking? How had she lost control all weekend? She’d never smoke again. Never.
Before she could stop him, Rye began reading to her from his screen. Joel’s emails, spilling his heart. She listened to the words of a kinder, less defensive Joel. A contrite Joel.
“He thought he was talking to you, finally being able to tell you these things. I was going to send you these emails when I left. I thought they’d make you feel better,” Rye said when he was finished. “I told him men need to get better at taking care of the women they claim to love so much, and I said it to myself, too, about Christine. But it was arrogant of me to assume you wanted what I didn’t get. I mean, like…closure.”
“Look, I had closure in my own way with Joel. And I’m incredibly angry with you right now, but from what I’ve just read and from what I’ve seen in you…all I’m saying is it’s not your fault if someone you love is mentally ill. Sometimes there’s nothing any of us can do. And that’s the most terrifying thing about it all,” she said.
After some quiet Tallie asked, “What email address did you use?”
“TallieCat007.”
A birdlike squawk of a laugh shot from Tallie’s mouth, taking her by surprise. She wiped her eyes.
“I made it that first night. I was drunk on wine, and you were in your bedroom. Joel kept responding, grateful you’d reached out,” Rye said.
“Grateful you’d reached out,” Tallie corrected him sharply. “And you did it…knowing I’d hate you once I found out—”
“Do you hate me?” he asked. “I understand if you do.”
“I don’t know, Rye. I introduced you to my entire family as Emmett. You met my neighbor! I’m so embarrassed about this. I look like an idiot.”
“No. You could never look like an idiot. Don’t take the blame for something that’s not your fault. Isn’t that what you’d tell me?”
“Oh, I’m doing exactly that. I’m going to tell Joel I knew about it. I’ll apologize, and it’ll be over and he’ll go home,” Tallie said. No way would she let Joel know this happened behind her back.
“You don’t have to. I’ll man up and apologize.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll take care of this,” she said, imagining Joel up there, moving behind the stone and glass of the hospital.
* * *
“Yeah, so were…were you pretending everything this weekend?”
“No, Tallie. I wasn’t pretending everything this weekend.”
* * *
Rye followed Tallie into the stairwell heading to the burn unit. She hadn’t asked him to, and she hadn’t turned around to look at him until she stepped back and stood next to the fire extinguisher in the glass box on the wall.
“Listen. That was a big deal for me…what we did together. Letting you come into my bedroom. I don’t do that. I’ve never done that before with someone I’d just met…with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with,” Tallie confessed. Flashes of him with his mouth all over her in her bedroom lit across her brain. Equal parts guilt and shame and excitement. Seeing his naked body—not so unlike her beloved David—smelling it, tasting it.
“Tallie, it was a big deal for me, too. Seriously,” Rye said, touching his chest with one of his bandaged hands.
“I didn’t even know your real name then. I didn’t even know who you were. You could’ve told me, and I would’ve been fine with it. I just wish you’d told me,” she said. The hypocrisy of what she was saying thick in her throat as Rye reached out for her. “Don’t—” she said, turning away and opening the door to the hallway. Dazed, she went to the bathroom to hold a cool, wet paper towel to the back of her neck.
* * *
“Joel, can I talk to you?” Tallie said when she found him. She stood over him, sitting in the hallway, scrolling through his phone.
“I just talked to your dad…that was interesting. I mean, he obviously didn’t kill me, but he said I was the last person he expected to see here. I told him I’ll never stop caring about your family or you,” Joel said.
“Did you see Lionel?”
“Yeah. I talked to him and Zora. Your dad left, but he’ll be back with Glory. And your mom and Connie stepped out, too. Your mom told me I was still an
asshole, by the way. She told me if I came here to break your heart some more, I can go to hell. So good to know she hasn’t changed. And River’s gotten so big, I—” Joel said, stopping himself. Joel, knowing so much about her family, knowing the name of her mom’s best friend, and remarking on how much River had grown in the past year made her blood itch. She felt faint, but she’d never fainted. The dizziness would simply pass like it always did, without taking her with it. Joel looked at Rye, neither of them saying anything.
“If I could just talk to you over here,” Tallie said, refocusing.
Rye took Joel’s seat when he got up, and part of her worried that Rye would bolt, even though he’d promised not to leave without telling her first. Did that still count? She looked back at him before she walked around the corner with Joel.
* * *
“Here’s good,” Tallie said as Joel sat in another one of the chairs in the hallway. She skipped a chair and sat, leaving a block of space between them that may as well have been a million miles. “Joel, the emails were a prank. Immature. And I’m sorry. Rye was drunk and joked about emailing you, pretending to be me. And once I found out he’d done it, I didn’t stop him. It was stupid, and it got out of hand.” She stared at her ex-husband, shaking her head. “I can’t even believe you’re here. And don’t get me wrong. It’s kind of you. I believe you came here out of the kindness of your heart because I know how much you love Lionel—”
“A prank? You hate pranks,” Joel said, guffawing. “You’re serious?” he said after examining her face for what felt like a full minute.
“I’m serious and I’m sorry. It was so stupid,” she said.
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