Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  He’d been angry at first, relieved that she was safe, but angry about her silence while she was away. But as the story unfolded, his anger dissipated. He wasn’t even mad about the money. Kat had been worried that, in giving it away, she was violating some aspect of her agreement with Hunter’s father. She wasn’t worried about it a week before—when she’d thought they were to be found out for Kyle’s death and it was all going to end terribly. But with the case closed, she no longer felt the same kamikaze urge that had hurled her into the risky and righteous plan she’d just completed. She wanted to live again and protect her relationships.

  Hunter wasn’t mad about any of it. He was astonished by the stupidity, luck and craftiness of it all. But he wasn’t mad. Just as Kat was no longer offended to sell her silence, Hunter wasn’t offended when she laundered the payment for her own purposes. The world was too complicated for such prudishness.

  She’d told him everything the night before and he understood it all.

  And now, they were finally alone, weightless without their secrets.

  “Do you still feel bad about it?” Hunter asked.

  Kat knew what he meant. “No. Not anymore. I was defending myself. We both were. Do you still feel bad?”

  “No.”

  She couldn’t be sure, but Kat had the distinct feeling that it was the last they would ever say about Kyle Billings.

  Hunter pulled her in closer.

  “We don’t have to do anything today,” he said into her hair, taking a long breath in. “We can get started tomorrow.”

  It was her hair that smelled of lemons. After she’d explained the story to Hunter and answered all his dumbfounded questions, she’d finished her sandwich and taken a shower. The shower at Hunter’s house was quite possibly the best shower Kat had ever experienced. It wasn’t only her desperation after so many unwashed days in Florida. It was the deep claw-foot tub and dueling showerheads, the imported French toiletries and the blanket-sized towels to dry off in. In the old days, Kat wouldn’t have allowed herself to enjoy such temporary luxuries from someone else’s unattainable lifestyle. Nothing good came from such pleasure. But last night, she’d felt no hesitation. While she was there, standing under the gentle pressure of that water, it was hers.

  “I have to do a few things today,” she said. “Just a few.”

  Hunter kissed her ear, her neck. He moved down her naked body to her breasts and stomach. She’d never gotten dressed after that shower. She didn’t have anything to wear.

  Hunter’s lips moved along her thighs. His hands wrapped around her waist.

  When she’d finally finished her story the night before, she’d asked Hunter if he thought they were safe now. And he’d laughed. Don’t you know, he’d said. Ashley is gone.

  Apparently, in the time Kat had been away, Hunter had been busy. He’d sold the boat. (Thank God he’d sold the boat.) And he’d tried to make things right with Ashley. His plan was to beg for her compassion, or convince her that she was certifiably nuts. He was armed with both strategies when he’d gone to see her. But before he had a chance to administer either of them, she told him that she was leaving Martha’s Vineyard. She’d been offered a job on a new commission for coastal erosion. It was her dream job, she’d said, and she would be working with the best people, on a world-class team. Those were the words she kept using. She wasn’t even mad at Hunter. He said she hadn’t seemed mad at any of them.

  Hunter came back up and rested his head on Kat’s bare chest. She liked the weight of him there, pressing her firmly in place. She was so close to being comfortably still. Ashley was gone, and the case was closed, and she was almost still. Hunter wanted nothing more from her than her presence, which was all she had left. They were there together—just as they were, not as they should be. That’s probably all Ashley ever wanted too.

  The crazy thing about Ashley—the part Kat still couldn’t quite believe—was that Ashley would have ruined their lives if she had the chance. And it was all because she’d been rejected. Her feelings had been hurt. Ashley didn’t want to be a vigilante; she wanted to be a part of something. She wanted it so badly that she would have ruined them for it. This was never about Kyle for her. She wanted to do something big and be seen. So if she couldn’t have Hunter, or Sean, she wanted to be known for having ruined them completely. It was fucking nuts, but it made sense too. If what she wanted was to prove her existence, to beat invisibility, well then being in love was about the same as taking revenge. She got seen either way. She left a mark and something to be remembered for. It was only dumb luck—hers and theirs—that she was offered this job. The job allowed her to be and do something big in the world. There was no logic to that luck, but Kat was grateful for it.

  Kat ran her fingers through Hunter’s hair and felt his breath on her breasts. “I have to do a few things,” she said.

  “I know.” Hunter kissed her and rolled over into the cloud of covers. “Take the car.”

  Kat went to the bathroom to splash water on her face and brush her teeth. That house had every amenity one could hope for, replenished regularly by an invisible army of house cleaners. She opened and closed cabinets until she found a hairbrush, then a roll of floss, and it occurred to her that all the secrets of the island were being kept by that invisible army moving among all the enormous summer homes. The help. It was impossible to know what they knew about her secrets, but it didn’t worry her. She was the help too. Most of her life, she’d been the help. The help didn’t need new trouble.

  Kat opened dresser drawers in various bedrooms before finding some forgotten yoga clothes of Hunter’s stepmother. She put on the strange clothes, followed by Hunter’s big coat. She laced her old sneakers. Her ankle still hurt a little from the night before, but the swelling was going down.

  “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  Outside, it was bright and cold. Kat was alone on the sidewalk.

  She didn’t take the car. Instead, she started walking, knowing full well that it would take forty minutes to get to Erika’s apartment. Kat savored the fresh tonic of subfreezing air in her lungs, even with a slight limp. She was hungover, which was strange because it felt like weeks had passed since she’d been sitting alone at the pub in her dirty jeans. A lot of things had happened since then. She’d gotten her life back.

  Kat walked through downtown Addison and out onto a lonely main road. She passed a row of grand beach houses, closed up for the winter, followed by a row of gnarly, worn-out little shacks that served as year-round homes for others.

  At the last driveway on the block, Kat watched a woman in a beige uniform tug a winter coat onto a toddler. The little girl played a video game while her arms were directed into the sleeves. They fussed over seat belts and the mother issued a series of directives while scraping ice from the windshield of their sedan.

  It was easy to forget that there were kids on Martha’s Vineyard, real people growing up in vacationland just the way real people did everywhere. Rushed mornings and harried mothers, packed lunch boxes and braided hair. That was how Kat imagined such mornings, anyhow. It wasn’t the way hers had been. Kat didn’t remember her mother ever packing her lunch or fussing over her hair. She just got up each day and figured it out for herself, which never seemed especially tragic until these rare moments when Kat was looking in from the outside at other people’s lives. Flashes of other childhoods from a distance tended to have a dangerously melancholy effect on her. To imagine a stranger’s life in romantic sepia tones only served to make the memory of her own seem more deprived. And it was a lie. She didn’t know those strangers or their story. She wasn’t looking at the truth.

  The driver door closed and the pale blue Ford backed out of the driveway.

  Kat stopped and smiled at the little girl through the window, just a few feet away from her now. There was something purple staining the rim of the girl’s lips, jam perhaps.

&nb
sp; The child waved and then frowned. Something on the ground had caught her eye. Kat followed her line of sight to a pink mitten lying in the driveway. She didn’t miss a beat, running to grab it as the girl cried audibly from her seat.

  The car stopped abruptly and the mother jumped out, jogging around to retrieve the mitten from Kat’s hand.

  Her face was a surprise. She seemed about Kat’s age, which didn’t make sense because the age of motherhood felt perpetually three years ahead of Kat on some imaginary timeline.

  “Thanks,” the woman said. “It’s always a mitten, isn’t it?”

  Kat smiled, but she couldn’t think of a single word to say in response.

  The woman bounded back to her seat and they drove away quickly, the little girl fully recovered and smiling again.

  Isn’t it? The woman meant it as a gesture of camaraderie, of shared experiences. She’d assumed that they were alike in some way. But what way? Kat wasn’t a mother. But she could be. And she wasn’t living in a nine-hundred-square-foot salt-ravaged ocean bungalow. But she certainly could be. They were as alike as Kat allowed herself to believe. She was as close to the rest of humanity as she chose to be. She would have to stop looking in at it from the outside, though. That was a prerequisite for closeness. And something about having her life back made her want to try it.

  Kat walked for another twenty minutes until she was once again walking along narrow village streets in a neighborhood less tony than her own.

  The windows of Erika’s second-floor apartment glowed invitingly as Kat slid her key into the storm door. She walked up the stairs and heard the artificial sounds of TV chatter.

  “Hey,” she said weakly into the room.

  “Jesus Christ!” Erika jumped up from the couch where she had one set of painted toenails elevated and another set still in the process. She ran to Kat and threw her arms around her. “Where the hell have you been? You scared the shit out of me!”

  “Sorry, I had to clear my head.” Kat collapsed into a chair.

  “What? Clear your head? Where have you been?”

  “I’m so sorry, Erika.”

  “Okay, fine. Tell me or don’t tell me where you were. Whatever. I’m just glad you’re safe.” Erika sat back down, the little nail polish wand still in her hand. “Do you know that I’ve been trying to talk everyone down these past few days? Sean called me about it. I’ve been trying to keep Hunter from going crazy with worry.”

  Kat smiled. “I’ve seen Hunter. It’s okay.”

  “You know that he loves you, right?”

  “Yeah.” Kat looked out the window at the swaying trees. You wouldn’t even know they were on an island from this part of town. “I know it.”

  “Well?” Erika wanted something, some explanation for where her friend had been and some validation for all her heartache. She deserved that.

  “I went to Florida.”

  “Ooh la la.”

  “Yeah, I just kind of roamed around in the sun. I had to clear my head after everything that had happened with Sean and the house and everything.”

  “Okay... It’s kinda nuts, but okay.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t a great story, but Kat figured that if she couldn’t tell Erika the truth, then she needed to adhere as closely to it as possible. This felt the least deceitful.

  “I’m just glad you’re back. Do you have any more spontaneous trips planned that I should know about? Is this, like, a thing you do now?”

  “No more surprises. But there is another trip I’m planning.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you all about it when I figure it out myself. But I won’t disappear this time. I promise.”

  Erika shook her head and finished the pinkie toe. She couldn’t stay mad.

  Kat looked up at the kitchen counter. “Is that coffee fresh?”

  “Yep.” Erika blew dramatically at her splayed toes.

  Kat poured two cups and added cream to each. She set one beside her friend’s feet on the coffee table, taking a long sip from her own. “Hunter and I are going away.”

  Erika considered the news for a moment. “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yes, good. That seems right to me.”

  “You never told me that before.”

  “Well, yeah, because there was Sean. And everybody loves Sean...”

  Kat’s stomach turned. She felt the warm coffee moving down her throat and into her empty insides. “Yeah, everybody loves Sean.”

  They drank in silence for another minute. Then Erika put the cap on the nail polish and exhaled loudly. “You really scared me.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  Erika rolled her eyes and smiled. She leaned forward to fan her drying toes. Things would be okay between them.

  Finally, Kat stood up. “I actually have to go. I’m not running away again like last time. I just have another stop I have to make.”

  “Can I drive you?”

  Kat really didn’t want to walk another forty minutes in the freezing cold. Even in Hunter’s giant coat, she felt like she’d never get warm again. And the thing she’d been avoiding doing suddenly felt like it needed to be done. “Can you bring me to Sean’s house?”

  “Of course.”

  The thermometer on the wall said it was twenty-four degrees outside, but Erika slid her feet into flip-flops to protect the fresh pedicure.

  They warmed up her truck and five minutes later, were driving along the same road Kat had just been walking, the hot air blasting at their bodies. Kat had a canvas grocery bag at her feet containing the few items that were still hers: the clothes she’d been wearing on the day of the landslide, an old pair of boots from Orla and the cheap drugstore cosmetics she’d purchased downtown.

  “I’m glad you’re doing this,” Erika said from the wheel. They hadn’t discussed exactly what Kat was doing, but she knew enough.

  “I’m glad you’re glad. But why?”

  “I don’t know. With Sean—and all the Murphys—it always felt like they picked you.” Erika pulled into Sean’s driveway and they sat in silence for a moment.

  It had started to snow and a light film of powder was settling onto the steps of Sean’s house.

  “I think I wanted to be picked by the Murphys.”

  “Well, you got it. Now you can want more than that.”

  Kat leaned in and kissed her friend on the cheek. “I love you.”

  “I know. I love you too.”

  She got out of the truck and waved goodbye. Erika turned her music up loud, waved and peeled out of the driveway.

  Kat walked up to the front door. She rang the doorbell once. The snow was falling harder now, dampening her hair and driving the cold deeper into her bones. No one seemed to be inside. There was one light on by the front window, but that didn’t mean anything. Sean always kept that light on. The Murphys thought it was bad luck to let a house go completely dark.

  Kat rang again and knocked. It was around ten o’clock in the morning. Sean did paperwork from home on Monday mornings. He was supposed to be there. There was a very thin possibility that he was still sleeping, of course. Maybe he’d had too much to drink the night before. Maybe he’d gotten up early to go ice fishing on the pond and crawled back into bed afterward. Those were the only scenarios Kat could imagine in which he’d still be sleeping.

  It was strange to know so many things about another person. All these little rules and habits to hang on to; they could disguise themselves as intimacy. People fell in and out of love all the time, but they didn’t forget the rules. The love is fickle; the details indestructible.

  She rang again and waited. Sean wasn’t there. He would have heard her by now.

  Kat was alone on the steps of Sean’s home, the snow piling onto the broad shoulders of Hunter’s win
ter coat. She didn’t want to come back here. She didn’t want to do this again. Most of all, she wanted to turn this page.

  Kat reached into her tote of meager belongings and pulled out the notebook and pencil that had accompanied her up and down the East Coast. And just as she had done two days before in Tanya Billings’s swampy backyard, she sat down and began to write.

  In all of her life, Kat had probably written less than a dozen letters. There had been a pen pal assignment in middle school, a few thank-yous sent after job interviews and one postcard exchange with her mother after she left Buffalo for good. Kat couldn’t remember any other times in which she’d written an actual letter. She wasn’t confident with the written word. But here she was, again, writing letters. And like last time, this wasn’t so much a letter as it was a story to hold on to, with all the power of inclusion and omission.

  She thanked Sean first. She thanked him for his kindness and generosity, for the joy and beauty he’d introduced her to, for his unbreakable commitment to family and friends. She said that all of these things had made her a better person, though she secretly believed he’d only awakened dormant qualities inside of her. But this wasn’t a letter for complete honesty. It was a story to leave him with, and in this story, he’d made her better. It was true and it wasn’t true.

  She wrote about how much she loved his family. Weeta—and his devotion to her—had opened something in her heart that she’d never known. She wished all the best for Weeta. And she wrote a lot about Orla. She wrote it knowing that Sean would share this part with his mother, and so she considered them both in the writing. What Kat really wanted to do was write a letter to Orla alone, because it may have been Orla’s influence and not Sean’s that had really changed her. But she couldn’t ever let Sean know that, so she wrote of her gratitude to them both.