I guessed she was in desperate need of the oxycodone she was addicted to. The fentanyl would really send her flying, right on out of this world.
Finally, it was time. She was drunk enough. It was past midnight.
I caught Alan’s eye and held his gaze. A moment later, we excused ourselves. I mixed a fresh drink while Alan took the fentanyl he’d purchased out of the cabinet. He prepared the syringe the way he’d been instructed. Instead of a single dose, he loaded it up with more than enough to satisfy several junkies. The guy selling it couldn’t have cared less whether Alan had ever used it, whether he might be taking a dangerous, even deadly quantity. He’d been impatient, talking too fast as he showed Alan what to do.
I carried the drink into the living room and swapped it with the empty glass sitting in front of Crystal. She grabbed the glass and took a long swallow.
I sat beside her on the couch and moved close, as I had before. With my arm around her shoulders, I said softly, “You must be tired. Why don’t you lean back? Rest for a minute.”
She slumped against my arm. “Tired. Don’t feel good.” She lurched forward, and for a moment I thought she might vomit on the carpet. Then she collapsed, leaning against me, the weight of her head pressing against mine.
Tightening my grip on her opposite shoulder, I held out my other hand for the syringe. Alan gave it to me, and I moved it toward her leg. I positioned it carefully before I stabbed the needle into the conveniently bare flesh where her flimsy dress had ridden up to the top of her thigh.
She moved her leg violently, but I had a strong grip just above her knee. The needle moved at an angle and she cried out. I shoved my shoulder against hers, keeping her pinned to the couch.
A moment later her upper body fell forward onto her lap, heavy and clumsy. I pulled the needle out and used a tissue to wipe the spot of blood that had appeared.
I moved away from her and stood. I dropped the tissue and syringe on the coffee table, and we stood beside each other, watching her.
When it was clear her breathing had become shallow and labored, we carried her into the garage. Alan opened the trunk and we strained to lift her up and into the waiting darkness. Her back was wedged against her suitcase and the shovel Alan had stored there earlier. He tugged the tarp slightly to move her away from the latch, placing another tarp over her body.
Early in the morning, he would drive to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he’d bury her off the side of a remote road. If, or when, she was found, the quantity of fentanyl in her blood would point to an obvious overdose. He would dispose of her suitcase and purse separately. Once her grave was discovered, we’d be given more time while they tried to identify her body.
It shocked me how our intense focus on removing the threat from Crystal had made me forget about what Brittany was undergoing. I felt queasy thinking about it, disgusted with myself for not thinking about her with every single intake of breath. I tried not to think that something similar had happened to Brittany, her body shut into a trunk, buried in a place where she might never be found.
Alan and I went into the house and sat beside each other in the living room. We were exhausted, slightly numb, I think. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Finally, Alan stood and walked to the window, looking out into the darkness. “We need to start making plans.”
“We can’t. Not until they find Brittany.”
He turned. “What if they don’t find her?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Honestly, it feels like it will be luck and coincidence at this point. And I’m not sure we have much luck left.”
“I’m not going anywhere until they find her.” I started to cry.
“If Crystal doesn’t stay buried as long as we’re hoping, we can’t be absolutely sure there won’t be a connection made.”
“How on earth could that happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to think of every angle. Taylor knows about her…so there’s that. We can’t trust she’ll keep it to herself.”
“She will.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m confident,” I said. “I know her.”
“Confidence isn’t enough. We need certainty.”
I went into our bedroom and began getting ready for bed. It was a quarter to three, but we needed to get some rest. Especially Alan, facing that three-hour drive. Even a few hours of sleep would be helpful. I’d made him a sandwich and packed a canister of water and another of coffee.
I climbed into bed and waited for him to come into the room. I hadn’t taken my doxepin because I needed to wake when he did, to be sure he got out of the garage without any interference from our neighbors or, God forbid, an untimely visit from Officer Carter. I set my phone alarm and closed my eyes.
When the chime woke me just after five, I discovered he’d never come to bed.
His car was already gone from its spot in the garage. I hoped he hadn’t spent those few hours making concrete plans, looking at homes or considering new locations. I was not going anywhere. Brittany needed to know we were here, waiting for her to come home. No matter how long it took.
43
Brittany: Before
As much as I loved her, and I loved her so very much, I knew my mother wasn’t always what she should be. I was well aware that she sometimes did strange things and viewed the world differently than most. She had reclusive tendencies and was overly emotional, even though she put on a mask of always being calm and going with the flow. She took sleeping pills, and she was easily wounded. I had to be careful of her feelings.
As I got older, I saw that she worked hard to shape the world, and my place in it, to her views. I was protected from knowing so many things, but I knew this. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was a knowledge buried when I was small that remained at the core of me, just beginning to emerge.
I knew it wasn’t normal to get shots to help you stop having bad dreams, but she was so confident it would help, so worried about me having peaceful dreams, I didn’t ask any questions or suggest she was doing something that wasn’t quite right. The other homeschooled kids I knew were protected also, but when I told them a story here or there, they gave me strange looks. They said my parents were controlling. I never told my friends about the shots. It was too strange. I loved my mother, and I didn’t want them to think she was a freak or that she was hurting me. Besides, when my friends and I talked, there was always at least one pair of adult ears nearby.
As my teacher and my mother both, no matter what questions I asked, she provided answers. When she didn’t know the answer to one of my questions, we looked it up. I never felt she was lying to me. Of course, children don’t think in those terms. We don’t expect adults to lie at all, until we learn differently. I’d never heard my mother lie. It never even crossed my mind. The same went for my father.
She and I were close. We talked about everything. At least, I thought we did. Until the day I asked the wrong question.
That day was two days after Ashling mentioned her “monthly visitor.”
Although my mother had always looked up the answers to questions she couldn’t answer, she was very definite and authoritative with her responses to questions for which she did know the answer. For example, when I asked how babies came about, she explained in thorough and technical terms how the mother’s seed developed into a human being. Together we looked at fetal development photographs and talked about how the baby came into the world, although that part didn’t include pictures. She did not mention any other seeds, and she did not mention blood at all.
When I asked why those seeds weren’t constantly developing into babies, she suggested we plant a vegetable garden. Over time, she pointed out how not all of the seeds grew into plants. I was young enough that I accepted this. I thought I had a complete picture, and I never asked any more questions on that topic, at least not that I could recall.
Because of the way Ashling had talked about it, and the way Riley lo
oked at me, some instinct that I was only starting to recognize inside myself told me to find out more before I posed the question to my mother. The following night, with only a few words typed into the search window and only a few clicks of the mouse, I found pages of information about the monthly visitor, the crimson tide, and the explanation of why women lost blood every month for decades of their lives.
Why hadn’t she told me? When was this going to happen to me? If blood had started gushing out of my body, I would have been terrified. From what I’d read, there was no escaping it. Blood was coming into my life and would visit every month until I was nearing old age. I was fascinated and horrified. I was angry and confused.
The next day I asked her.
We were making chocolate chip cookies. She was placing parchment paper on the baking sheet while I mixed the dough. I wasn’t looking at her, and maybe I should have because she didn’t answer me, and it would have been helpful to see her expression.
“Did you hear me?”
“What’s that, sweetie?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about having a period?”
The parchment tore with a loud, harsh sound like glass cracking. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Bleeding. How girls bleed every month.”
Again there was silence. She tore another piece of parchment. All three baking sheets now had their lining and she couldn’t avoid my question. I sprinkled in the last cup of flour but didn’t turn on the mixer. I pressed my hip against the counter and waited for her to look at me.
She opened the cabinet and began rummaging inside. All of our supplies were on the counter. It was clear she wasn’t looking for anything important.
“Mommy, why won’t you answer me?”
She closed the cabinet door. She look directly into my eyes, but it felt as if she didn’t see me. “Blood makes me uncomfortable. It’s not a nice thing to talk about, and I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You have to. I would have been scared if I started bleeding and I didn’t know why.”
“You shouldn’t be thinking about that.”
“Why not?”
“Who told you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters quite a lot.”
“Why?”
“Because the reason we homeschool you is to be sure you aren’t exposed to the unsavory parts of the world. You’re a little girl and you shouldn’t have to think about things like that.”
“I’m fourteen. Most girls start their periods when they’re eleven or twelve. Is something wrong with me?”
Her voice rose. “Who told you all of this? I knew I had a bad feeling about this new group. Californians are different.”
“That’s not important.”
She slammed her palm on the counter. “I asked you a question! Who told you?”
I started to cry.
My mother had never shouted at me. She never even raised her voice or allowed herself a harsh tone. She was patient and gentle. She treated me like a fragile and precious object that she wanted to hold in her hands and admire from every angle. I didn’t want to cry. I was angry, and I didn’t like being shouted at. It scared me. It made me feel like she hated me. Of course I’d heard people shouting on TV and read about it in books, but those were stories. Things like that didn’t happen in my life.
I remembered someone shouting at me once, a long time ago, but it wasn’t her or my father. It was another woman. I’d woken her up when she wasn’t feeling well and needed her rest. I put my hands on the sides of my head, trying to think. Was that me? Or was it a movie? A book? A dream? Who was that woman shouting at me, telling me to stop being a crybaby?
My mother moved closer and wrapped me in her arms. “Don’t cry. Everything will be okay. Just tell me the truth.”
“Why are you shouting at me?” I was sobbing, hardly able to speak, my nose clogged so I couldn’t breathe, which made my chest convulse.
“I didn’t mean to shout.” She tightened her arms around me. “I’m upset that someone told you things that are not for a little girl’s ears.”
I pushed away from her, but she hung on. “I’m not a little girl. I’m a teenager. The bleeding could start any minute, and I had no idea it was coming!”
“It doesn’t always happen.”
“It always happens. To every girl.”
Her voice was a low whisper, deep and ominous with certainty, a voice I didn’t recognize. “It doesn’t have to. Please don’t think any more about it.” She kissed my cheek. Her lips were cool and had the consistency of wax through the tears covering my skin.
If my mother wasn’t going to tell me why she’d hidden such critical information from me, I needed to figure out on my own what I was going to do when I started bleeding. There was no real way to know in advance. My body hadn’t changed at all yet, which I’d been assured by the internet was considered normal. But it would, no matter what my mother seemed to think. Although I’d learned I was unlikely to experience blood gushing out of my body without warning, I was nervous. The whole thing was so shocking and unexpected and a little confusing.
Why didn’t she want me to know about it? Was there something wrong with her? Why did she think such a normal thing might not happen to me? My head ached.
After the cookies were baked, she said I could eat two. I told her I didn’t want any and went to my room. I didn’t speak to either of my parents during dinner. They didn’t seem to notice.
That night I went back to the internet to find out if there was something wrong with me. Maybe I had a disease. Maybe the headaches I got meant something awful was going to happen. What I found made me feel sick to my stomach.
What I discovered was a drug that delayed or completely prevented girls from becoming women. A drug that might have been a good thing for some because it was used for preschool and kindergarten girls who were already developing breasts. One of the side effects was headaches.
I went into the bathroom, closed the door softly, and opened the cabinet. Leaving the light off, I pulled out the box with the syringe for my next shot. I held it up by the night-light. The name of the drug on the prescription label was the same as the drug I’d read about online. With tears filling my eyes, I put it back in the cabinet and slipped into my room.
I felt sick to my stomach, and my hands shook as I tried to make sense out of what she’d done to me. It felt like ice was flowing through my veins. My whole body trembled. Even my skin seemed to jump around on my bones and muscles. I crawled into bed and pulled the blankets around me. Hanging out with Ashling and Luke was the last thing I felt like doing, but the moment I laid my head on the pillow, I knew I had to get out of the house. I had to talk to Ashling. And Luke, maybe. But mostly Ashling. She was the only person on the whole planet who I thought could help me, and she wasn’t even a grown-up yet.
If I stayed in this house, I was pretty sure I would turn into a permanent freak of nature. I’d never grow up and my whole body might disintegrate. That drug had been found to cause the joints in your jaw to decay, the discs in your spine to degenerate, and other awful things. It could make the enamel peel off and your teeth crack. I closed my eyes and saw my body crumbling from the inside out. Tears oozed from my eyes.
When it seemed all of me had turned to powder, I opened my eyes and got out of bed. I grabbed my athletic shoes and socks and my pink jacket. I climbed through the window, feeling as if I was running for my life.
Aside from wanting me to sleep in a little girl’s bed and have little-girl dreams and little-girl desires, I had no idea why my mother wanted to lock me up in a child’s body. I also had no idea how I would avoid the needle the next time she readied the syringe.
44
Taylor
Crystal had been sucked into a black hole. I was so used to waking to a stream of messages from her, my phone vibrating throughout the day with more stories and baby pictures and diatribes, it was shocking to return to my normal flow o
f messages. As if I missed her constant presence, I checked Facebook every fifteen or twenty minutes, wondering if the app wasn’t performing correctly.
I’d expected silence while she was in the air, but she’d landed the previous afternoon and I hadn’t heard a peep from her. I’d half-expected her to show up at my door on her way to the Cushings’.
I sipped my coffee and scrolled through the Find Brittany page. There hadn’t been any sightings reported for over a week, and the prayer requests had fallen to a handful a day. I put down my phone and took another sip of coffee. Maybe I’d become addicted to the excitement of new messages as much as I was addicted to the hot kick of caffeine in my blood every morning and midafternoon. Without the activity from Crystal, I was listless and slightly anxious.
It was possible she’d canceled her flight. According to Moira, she was in the helpless and hopeless grip of oxy. Moira doubted she could handle a five-hour flight. The thing was, Crystal hadn’t seemed incoherent or out of control. She was angry and passionate and impatient, yet all of that was within the realm of normal, given the loss of her child. As the time ticked past nine a.m., I decided it was time to get in touch with Moira. I sent a text, asking how she was doing and whether she’d heard from Crystal. I tried to make it casual, but I was pretty sure I’d failed.
Moira Cushing: Nope.
Taylor Stanwick: She was due in yesterday afternoon. I haven’t heard from her since she left Florida. I wonder what happened.
Moira Cushing: What do you think happened? She had to score, obviously.
Taylor Stanwick: Maybe.
Moira Cushing: There’s no maybe about it. She needs her fix.
The Good Neighbor Page 22