Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  “Afternoon. Where we goin’?” A leathery old man flashed bright white teeth into the rearview mirror, and it took Kat a moment to formulate her response.

  “Can you take me to Juno Lane?” She handed him the scrap of paper.

  He pulled up his sunglasses and squinted at the address. “That up in Williamsville?”

  “I think so.”

  The man nodded and accelerated into the left lane. Moses was his name, or that’s what his cabbie ID said. It was clear that she didn’t know where she was and would be paying him whatever pumped up amount he decided to charge her for the trip. But she felt safe in the back of his car and relieved to be away from the traveling crowds, and that was worth a few extra bucks. She held tight to her duffel, pulled out a chocolate chip granola bar and ate it as tropical fronds whooshed by.

  Florida wasn’t what she’d expected. There were fewer broad expanses of Kelly green golf courses and gated communities with oceanic names. She thought, for some reason, that the palm trees would be arranged in precise lines along the highway, though she wasn’t sure why. Most of what Kat knew about Florida probably came from Disney World commercials and Miami Vice. She hated feeling so provincial, but it was the truth. No, this landscape was wilder than she’d imagined and she rather liked it.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Moses the cabdriver pulled off the highway and onto a broken road surrounded by swampy vegetation. For two miles, they passed only a man pushing a grocery cart filled with empty bottles.

  Then Moses took a right turn onto a neglected street that was reverting from pavement back to dirt. Run-down bungalows in faded pastels were packed neatly along the road. They were cute little homes—“good bones,” Sean would say—but in grave disrepair. Their overgrown lawns grew right up through stacks of old tires and rusted tricycles. Trailers had been parked on yards. You could see decades of changing fates on display at each residence: from middle class, to poor, to barely surviving. The fates seemed to move in only one direction.

  Kat pressed her forehead against the car window to take it all in. Dogs behind fences, windows mended with duct tape, and houses that had been converted to nail salons and then boarded up for good. If this was Kyle’s old neighborhood, then she had more in common with him than she’d thought.

  “This town’s seen better days,” Moses offered from the driver seat. He eyed her through the rearview mirror. “You from around here?”

  “Something like this.” She didn’t want to talk about herself. “Was it always so bad here?”

  “Nah, this is uglier and wetter than it used to be. These people got nothin’ at all now, but they used to have a little somethin’.”

  Kat understood. She’d nearly forgotten what this life looked like, the life of people squeezing everything they could from the nothing they’ve been born into. Aside from the blood money she carried on that day, Kat wasn’t much richer today than she’d been as a kid. But she didn’t live among the poor anymore, and that had changed her. Kat felt ashamed for escaping it all, not for reinvention, but for allowing herself to forget what this looked like, felt like. And in the time that she’d been away from these conditions, it seemed that America’s desperate places had somehow gotten worse. She hadn’t been aware of the change, until now. Kyle had led her back here, to something like her childhood.

  “Here y’are.” The cab pulled up in front of a house the size of a room with a deeply bowed roof. “You want me to wait here, or you stayin’?”

  She considered the question. Maybe Moses thought she was asking someone for money, taking something back that was hers, buying or selling a drug. He didn’t need the details for such comings and goings, but he was familiar with them.

  “You can go. Thank you.”

  The meter said thirty-nine dollars. Kat pulled three twenties out of her pocket and handed them to Moses.

  “You need change?”

  “No.”

  “God bless.” Moses reached back and handed her a business card. It had his full name, phone number and a biblical passage beneath the image of a gold dove.

  Kat put it into her back pocket and collected her things. “Okay, thanks. You too.”

  She shut the door behind her and watched him drive away.

  A row of cheap pinwheels turned in the breeze on a neighboring lawn.

  A nearby dog strained toward Kat, nearly choking himself with the fat chain around his neck.

  It might have been a bad idea to let Moses go. If this wasn’t the place, what would she do? Even if it was...

  Kat could see televisions flicker from inside of houses, but no one was out. God, it was hot. Surely someone was peeking around a curtain at that moment, sizing her up as potential predator or prey. She wasn’t afraid of these people. It had been a while, but she wasn’t going to be the sort of interloper who was afraid of these people.

  She wasn’t afraid of whatever she’d find in house number twenty-two.

  Kat walked up to the little house with the sagging roof, past an overturned Big Wheel, and knocked on the door. Through the window, she could see a detergent ad play on a large TV. The dog barked from several houses down. No cars in the driveway, but that didn’t mean much. Someone was home.

  Kat knocked again and waited.

  Her heel kicked a stack of unopened mail and she looked down. There it was: Tanya Billings. On the first letter at her feet was the name of Kyle’s mother. There could be no coincidences now, not after all she’d gone through to get there. Kat stared down at the mail. They were mostly bills, forwarded from another address.

  She waited for a moment, looked around and then knelt down to retrieve one of the letters. She peeled back the little postal sticker to find the original address. It was the very same street she’d started on, back in Jacksonville. So she hadn’t been entirely wrong. But now Kyle’s mom lived here, in this sagging house, and she wasn’t going to leave until she did the thing she came to do.

  “She’s in back,” a voice said.

  Kat spun around to find a young man wearing a stiff baseball cap low over his eyes. He didn’t look up or formally acknowledge her in any way. He just said it and kept walking down the center of the street because, she assumed, he’d seen something familiar in her. They were both humans who could use a break.

  “Thanks.”

  Kat walked around the side of the house, through a part of the shaggy yard that required long strides over saturated ground. Florida was as hot as she’d imagined, but the sogginess was a surprise. There was apparently nowhere on earth that the ocean wasn’t trying to pull her in.

  She peeked into the cluttered backyard.

  “What is it?” a short, round woman with fuzzy hair demanded from a plastic lawn chair.

  “I’m sorry to bother you.” Kat suddenly wished she’d prepared more for this moment. “I’m...I’m a friend of your son’s.”

  “No yer not. You gotta leave.” The woman hoisted herself out of the low chair and walked quickly to the back screen door.

  Kat was right behind her, stepping in the grassy puddles with her sneakers. “Ma’am, I don’t want anything from you. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I have something for you.”

  The woman was inside now, grimacing at Kat through the screen door. “What are you sorry about? Did you put those drugs in my son? You one of his junkie friends?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m not. I wasn’t. If I could just—”

  “I’m not talking to anyone about my son. You people have done enough. Let me be.”

  Kat didn’t know who this woman thought she was, but she was familiar with “you people.” She was assumed to be a drug dealer, a needy girlfriend, a bad influence—or worse, someone in a position of relative power like a parole officer or a debt collector. All of this struck Kat as needlessly tragic. Kyle had died, but not from drugs. And as far as she knew, he hadn’t led a troubled life bef
ore that night on the boat. How wretched for his mother to believe that he had, to have her grief magnified by this false story. This was something that Kat could give this woman. She could redeem the memory of Kyle.

  “Ms. Billings, please let me in.”

  “Go away or I’ll call the cops!”

  Kat knew she wouldn’t call the cops. They didn’t get invited to this neighborhood. But she didn’t want to torture this woman further. There was another way to do this.

  Kat sat down on the back stoop. She pulled out a notebook and pen, and began to write. She could feel the woman watching her from behind, through the screen door.

  Kat kept writing. Paragraph after paragraph, Kat put it all down. The woman watched silently from inside, and Kat kept writing.

  Four pages later, she had written the story of Kyle’s death, the version she wanted to tell.

  This version was for Tanya Billings alone. It explained that Kyle had gone out on a boat with friends. They were drinking a little, but no other substances were involved. Kyle was happy, among people who cared about him. And then a storm came and he fell into the water. They tried to find him, but the storm made it impossible. They should have called the police sooner. They should have gone back in before the storm got too bad. It was all a big accident, but they had made some mistakes. That’s why Kat was there—because she felt guilty for not speaking up at the time. She wanted to say she was sorry.

  She never mentioned Hunter by name. She left out the part about Kyle threatening her, which was surprisingly easy since she’d nearly edited it out of her own memory. Kyle may have been a rapist, but he also may not have been; both versions were untrue, so she went with the nicer one. And she implied that Kyle had been a real friend to all of them, a close friend even. None of this made it a lie. The only truth any of us had was the story of who we thought we were. We were always making it up. And Kat wanted to give this woman a story she could live with. Kat didn’t have children but she understood that the story of your children is the one you most hope will be a good one, better than your own. Tanya Billings deserved the peace of a better story for her son.

  As she got to the end of her note, Kat paused. How to sign it? The truly noble thing to do would be to use her name. A confession demanded a name. She was probably going down for this anyhow, so why not go down with nobility? But she didn’t sign her name. Kat was still free, and she was still programmed for self-preservation. Only a fool would hasten her own demise in such a way. If someone wanted to find her, they could, but she didn’t need to make it so easy. And so she concluded the letter with simply “A friend.” It was true and not true. She never really knew Kyle, but his ghost would be with her for every remaining day on this earth. She was something like a friend.

  Kat folded the paper and slid it into the pocket of the duffel bag. She ran her hands around the neat bundles inside, pulling two of them out for herself, along with the clean T-shirt that had been wrapped around them. She left the bag and five hundred thousand dollars there on the stoop. Then she knocked once more, and walked around the house.

  When she got to the street, Kat waited and listened.

  A moment later, the screen door creaked open and slammed shut again. Tanya Billings had the money. And she had the story. And she wasn’t going to call the police or chase after Kat or tell anyone the details of what had just happened. Kat was sure of it because she knew this life and its inhabitants, and they were way too smart for that. This money was a gift—a real gift, not like the way it had been given to her. It wouldn’t buy anyone’s silence. It wouldn’t even buy anyone’s forgiveness. It was just a kind and utterly insufficient thing to do.

  Kat remembered an Easter Sunday with Orla and Sean from years before when the priest sermonized about penance as a sacrament. It didn’t make much sense at the time. But now she understood the allure of penance, and she hoped for her own absolution.

  Kat walked down the broken road, light as a feather. When she came to a tree-lined curve, she pulled off the stinking shirt she’d been wearing for days and threw it into the woods, replacing it with the crisp white shirt that had been wrapped around the money. She took out her cell phone and turned it on for the first time in days.

  He picked up on the second ring.

  “Moses? This is Kat. I need a ride to the airport.”

  “I’ll be there in ten. God bless.”

  Chapter 20

  Kat felt a tap on her shoulder and she opened her eyes. The man standing above her in a Steamship Authority hat was smiling, but impatient. It was time to get off the ferry. Instinctively, she looked around frantically. It took about three seconds to realize that she wasn’t traveling with the money anymore. She wasn’t hiding anything that put her in danger or made her every movement potentially suspicious. It was just her now, wearing the Red Sox fleece she’d purchased at Logan Airport, with her full wallet zipped into the pocket, and an open Boston Globe in front of her.

  “Time to go home, doll.”

  She blinked and stood up. “Okay, thanks.”

  Kat got in line behind a handful of people and they walked off the ferry, along the clanking metal plank, into the cold night. She pulled her hands into the soft fleece, which wasn’t enough cover for January. She was freezing, but refreshed. It had taken the entire cab ride to Tampa, the flight back to Boston and the cab to Cape Cod for her body to calm down enough to sleep. She understood intellectually that the deed had been done, the mission accomplished, but her body was incapable of believing it. Until she got to Cape Cod, Kat’s body was still on high alert, weighed down by half a million dollars in phantom bills and the memory of recent panic attacks.

  And then she boarded the ferry. Once they were out on the water, the familiar tinny sounds and salty air, the Brahman voices of vacationers and Southie-accented arguments of ferry workers, all signaled safety to her. She was as good as home once she got to the ferry, and she slept at last.

  So now, as she walked away from the port, Kat’s rested mind was thinking clearly again. She was beginning to process all that she’d just accomplished in Florida, and she was proud of it.

  But having that journey behind her also meant that Kat couldn’t ignore the present any longer. She had come back to the Vineyard, her home. Crazy Ashley was surely still trying to tie her to Kyle’s death, and local police hadn’t closed the case yet. All of these things meant that she was probably breathing borrowed air. Everything could come crashing down soon. Maybe next week. Maybe tomorrow. Soon.

  She walked alone from the parking lot of the ferry to the bus stop and considered her next move. There was no rush to return to Erika’s apartment, to reality. Why wait for twenty minutes in the cold for the bus now? She had nowhere she needed to be. So instead of waiting, Kat went one block north to a pub with a warm glowing light out front. A drink sounded right.

  A bell jingled as Kat opened the door. Two middle-aged guys at the bar gave her a nod. She took a seat at the far end, where the lighting was dimmest and the music most muted.

  “Harpoon, please.”

  The bartender grunted. He had a small, black apron wrapped around his rotund center like the twine on a Christmas ham, a detail Kat remembered from the last time she was in that bar. It was one of Sean’s haunts, which made it less than ideal for the moment, but there weren’t many options on a Sunday night in January.

  The full pint arrived moments later. “You want to start a tab?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She hadn’t planned on it, but why the fuck not? Kat had kept sixty thousand dollars for herself. It wasn’t for anything specific—just survival, she supposed. She just wanted to survive the months or weeks or days of freedom still available to her. She was stalling.

  She was stalling because Kat knew that the moment she went back to Erika’s apartment, she would have to make up a story about where she’d been. And then she’d have to see Sean and Hunter—separately
, of course—and probably tell them the real story, which they would both disapprove of for different reasons. She wasn’t ready to do any of those things.

  Kat finished her beer with gusto and ordered another.

  A group of twentysomethings came in, all thoroughly inebriated already. It was still winter vacation for college students—a concept that seemed to Kat, particularly in that moment, the most foreign and gilded of all concepts.

  They packed into a nearby booth and filled the room up with rowdy energy. Kat watched them as she finished her second beer. (It was too much beer for her; she could feel it. But too much for what? What did she have to stay sober for?) One of the young women nuzzled into the beefy arm of a broad guy. He dipped a lock of her hair into a pint glass and she shrieked. Everyone laughed. The other girl tried to inject herself into this mating ritual, but the guys didn’t seem as interested in her.

  They were all beautiful, likely from families rich enough to endow this adventure, and with futures that Kat imagined would take them around the world and then back to the wealthy enclaves of New England. At least two of these people would go home together tonight, Kat thought, maybe more than that. Beautiful, young, unburdened bodies fucking like the gods that they are.

  The skinnier of the guys looked over and caught Kat watching them. She turned her head quickly to find the old man at the other end of the bar watching them too. She was just like that old lecher, staring at the beautiful young gods of a different world. They hardly even saw her world, hers and the old man’s. They were invisible to these kids.

  Kat was drunk, too drunk. This was the sort of thinking she didn’t care to indulge. All this us-and-them business wasn’t the lens through which she wanted to see the world. Envy was for angry and self-pitying people. Kat didn’t want to be angry.

  Kat took another sip of her third pint and stood up and headed for the door.

  “Twenty-four bucks,” the bartender called.

  Shit, she’d forgotten to pay. She thought she could feel everyone in the bar watching her drunkenly fumble through the bills in her wallet. She left two of them and walked out.