by Jen Nadol
“How did we even start to suspect him in the first place?” she interrupted.
“Richie Milosevich said he was up there.”
“Said it to who?” Sarah prodded.
I hesitated, thinking, and she continued.
“Who encouraged us to go back to the trailer to map? Where we just happened to find Moose’s lighter?” she continued. “And who was the first one to tell us Nat’s dad had been killed? Who heard it on the scanner?”
The answer to all of it was the same.
“Trip.” His name dropped from my lips like a lead ball, her point chillingly clear. “You think he’s been lying?” I said. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” she asked.
I thought about that a second, the answer obvious. “To protect someone,” I said. “Like Natalie. Or Galen.”
“Or himself.”
CHAPTER 28
WE DECIDED TO TALK TO Trip together. He was supposed to go to Sarah’s after football practice. He’d just find me waiting there also.
I’d tossed the situation around after talking to Sarah, and the next day too, looking for explanations and alternatives, but Sarah was right. Every angle could be drawn back to him. “But he was the one pressing us to investigate,” I’d argued. “Why would he do that if he were involved?”
“Was he really, Ri?” she’d asked. “Think about it. Were we investigating, or just following up on things he was feeding us?”
“It was just you and me mapping the crime scene. He didn’t even want to go.”
“Maybe he’d already been up there,” she’d said. “Left the lighter, moved things around. Who knows?”
“Why would he kill Natalie’s dad?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah had paused and I’d listened to her soft breathing through the phone, pictured her in her living room, frowning, trying to figure it out. “Self-defense? To protect Natalie? Anger?”
None of those reasons really added up. Like lots of things in this puzzle. So we decided to ask Trip point-blank. Just the three of us.
I was there at seven on the dot, like we’d agreed. Plenty of time for Trip to finish practice and get there. Sarah opened the door and ushered me into the living room, warm and brightly lit. There was a tray of drinks on the coffee table.
“Did Martha Stewart move in?” I asked.
Sarah attempted a smile. “I was trying to keep busy.” She took a shaky breath. “God, Riley, I’m nervous.”
I nodded. “Me too.” I checked my watch. 7:05. “What time was he coming?”
“Seven,” she said.
We perched uneasily on the sofas. I looked around the room, realizing the bookshelves were bare. The walls too. “Where did everything go?”
“My dad.” She shook her head. “He’s ‘decorating.’”
Silence fell again. “So . . . ,” I said after a minute. “I guess I’ll start when he comes in?”
“Okay.” Her voice was strained, and when she looked at me, I saw her eyes were filled with tears.
“Hey,” I said, moving closer, catching her hands in mine. “Listen, whatever it is, it’ll be okay.”
She nodded, drawing a deep breath. “I know. I’m just so worried. And confused.”
“I’m sure if Trip had anything to do with it, there was a very good reason.”
“Then why wouldn’t he just have come forward?”
That was the part I couldn’t figure out either. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But the three of us will talk it out. And help each other.” Whatever that means, I thought.
She smiled tenderly. “Thank you, Riley,” she said. “You always know how to say the right things.”
I smiled back, still holding her hand, and impulsively gave her a quick kiss on the forehead.
Just as the front door opened.
Trip, late as usual, stared at us, whatever greeting he’d started, strangled in his throat.
I jumped up. “Hey, Trip.”
He looked from me to Sarah, then back at me, glaring. “What the fuck?”
“What?” I asked innocently, my throat so tight I could barely speak.
Trip sneered. “What?” he mimicked. “I know you think I’m stupid, but do you think I’m blind, too?” He turned to Sarah. “What’s he even doing here?”
“Trip,” Sarah said, soothing. “We just wanted to talk to you. Relax. It’s nothing.”
“Really? It didn’t look like nothing. It looked like you and Riley snuggled up on the couch and him kissing you.” He looked from her to me. “Which part of that do I have wrong?”
“It’s my fault, Trip,” I said. “Sarah was upset, and I was trying to help.” I took a breath. Time to man up. “I shouldn’t have done that.” God, what had I been thinking? “I’m sorry. I way overstepped.”
“You can say that again.” Trip was staring at me with such intensity I felt like I was shriveling up, especially because I could see he knew. How I felt about Sarah. And that I’d acted on it. I didn’t know how—maybe just because he could read me so well—but he knew. He shook his head, his voice low. “That’s just so wrong, man.”
I was too ashamed to answer.
Sarah stepped hesitantly closer to him. “Trip,” she said softly. “We need to talk about Nat’s dad.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. “But I think we better talk about this first.” He waved his hands at me and Sarah. “I thought I was imagining things, being paranoid. I figured there was no way my best friend and girlfriend could be hooking up.” I’d never seen him so mad. And he had every right to be.
“Trip—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I mean, what kind of people would do that?” he shouted. “Huh?” Sarah stood there silently, tears running down her face. Trip’s jaw was clenched, his eyes blazing as he looked from her to me. I felt awful, like the smallest, most worthless piece of crap. “I guess I know the answer.”
He turned around, yanked open the door, and slammed it behind him, without looking back.
We stood there, stunned.
“Oh my God, Riley. Should we go after him?” Sarah’s face was pale, and I could see her hands shaking. “Riley?”
I had no idea. “No,” I finally answered. I mean, what could we say to make it better? He was so angry, he wouldn’t hear us anyway.
But there was a nagging worry about whether letting him stew was really the best idea.
I wish I’d had the sense to listen to it. To call him back in, tell him why we’d asked him there. Even own up to things, if that was what it took. I wish I’d told Trip whatever he needed to hear to stay.
Because after he left Sarah’s, tires squealing as he zoomed away, I never saw him again.
CHAPTER 29
MY MOM WAS STANDING IN my room when I woke up. It was dark, her thin shoulders silhouetted against the light from the hall.
“Mom?” I mumbled.
I heard a sniff, saw the shadow of her chest heave slightly. She was crying.
“Mom?” I sat up, all sleepiness gone. “What’s wrong?” I thought she was sick again, needed to go to the hospital. But then she wouldn’t have been standing here, wouldn’t have been able to get out of bed.
“It’s Trip.”
***
We drove to the hospital together, my mom still crying, me numb as if my body had turned to stone or ice. Dr. Williams had called her, knowing our families were close, or had been. A car accident. Single vehicle. On old Ohoyo Road, not too far from Natalie’s trailer.
My head was empty. Or maybe too full. But none of the stuff in there made sense. Sarah. That was all I could pick out, and then I immediately pushed it back, into the dark, deafening roar. Had she called him? Tried to explain? Had he gone back and gotten her? It wasn’t until we were there, robotically stepping off the elevator, that I knew she was safe. S
he stood in the garish light with Natalie, and Tannis and her brothers, their parents, a cluster of pale faces and puffy, red, unseeing eyes. Trip’s mom was huddled in a corner, his dad beside her.
I went to the girls. “What happened?”
Sarah looked at me, looked through me, her eyes unreadable, but not like they usually were. There was just nothing there. Hollow. Then she turned away.
“No one’s sure yet,” Tannis said. “It looks like he ran off the road, into a tree.”
“God,” I whispered. I didn’t want to ask the next question. I could read the answer in the people in that cold, hard, bright hallway. “How bad?”
A doctor pushed through the door then, tugged at his mask. I remember every bit of detail from that moment—the clipboard in his hand, the streaks of blood on his shirt, his unshaven face like he slept there night after night. His eyes swept the room tiredly, then fixed on that corner and he walked slowly toward Trip’s parents.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”
Trip’s mom looked up at him, and I saw her eyes meet his. Saw his head shake slightly. She screamed. And screamed and screamed. The sound of it piercing, shattering the brittle frame of me, over and over. They wheeled her away soon, but that sound lingered in the hallway like it would never, ever leave.
CHAPTER 30
THEY BURIED TRIP IN THE same cemetery as my dad. If I squinted, I could see my dad’s marker across the field from where I stood, feeling wooden among other wooden figures. I wondered if the cigar was still there and whether we’d add Trip to our annual visits, dropping off a Bud Light or a new football when we came.
Lots of people were there. I knew almost everyone in the first row and second and third. The four of stood near the front, side-by-side—me, Nat, Tannis, and Sarah. I held Natalie’s hand during the prayer, with Lu standing protectively behind her. I wanted to talk to Sarah, just her and me. I wanted her to look at me so I could find some spark of life in those deep, dark eyes. But her gaze skated vacantly past.
When the priest finished talking, my mom and I offered condolences to Trip’s parents. His mom was unresponsive, his dad mechanical, but affable as always.
Afterward, classmates whispered about what’d happened, the same as they’d whispered about Nat and her dad. I didn’t ask for any of it but let their gossip seep in, piling into the empty, ugly hollow of my gut.
I should have told him, I thought. Over and over and over. I couldn’t follow the train of thought long enough to figure out what I should have told him or when I could have made a difference. I knew only that I’d done something horribly, unspeakably wrong.
CHAPTER 31
TRIP’S DAD CAME BY THE house a couple of days later. Maybe it was a couple of weeks. Time did a funny thing after, some days slipping away without notice while others stretched on endlessly. He stood on the front step, twisting his gloves in his hands like he was trying to wring the life out of them. It looked like someone had done the same to him. His face was so pale and sad that I couldn’t muster even a trace of the anger I usually felt when I saw him.
He looked around the living room after I’d ushered him in, like he’d never been there. I waited, but he just kept sweeping his eyes around the room.
“My mom’s out,” I told him finally. “She’s at work.”
He started like I’d woken him, then shook his head. “I came to see you,” he said.
I waited, wondering after the silence continued if I’d have to restart him again, but finally he said slowly, “I knew your dad way back.” He looked past me, toward the back door and yard, where he used to laugh and drink with my dad about a million years ago. “Of course, you already know that.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to hear him reminisce about how it had been before it had all split apart.
Mr. Jones took a deep breath. Then his shoulders fell heavily as he exhaled. “He was a good guy. A better friend to me than I ever was to him.”
I shifted my weight subtly. “Mr. Jones, maybe we should—”
He held up a hand. “Hear me out, Riley. Please. I feel like I have to tell you. I owe it to him.” He paused. “I feel like there’s karma at work here. Payback. And I have to stop it now.”
I wanted to tell him that whatever it was, it was okay. If there was a debt, it was paid back. With interest. I wanted to plug my ears, the way you do when you’re four and your daddy is telling you he expects you to clean up the mess you made in the kitchen before he paddles your butt. But I wasn’t four anymore, and I knew that if there were something karmic at work, my part of the bargain was to listen. So I did.
“I was supposed to be hunting with him the day he died.” He saw the shock on my face and passed a hand over his forehead, trying to wipe away whatever he was feeling. “We had a fight. Had a bunch of them back then . . .” His voice caught. After a minute he continued, “Instead of being a man and hashing it out or calling him up to say I couldn’t go, I stood him up. Just didn’t show up at the lot when I was supposed to. I figured that’d show him . . .” He trailed off like he’d lost his train of thought.
“It’s okay,” I said mechanically.
That woke him up. “No! No, it’s not, Riley.” He was fighting for composure. “It’s not okay. Never okay. When Trip was doing that same thing to you, I made him fix it. You don’t just throw away your friends.”
Made Trip fix it? What did that mean? Had he sent Trip over to my house that June day before junior year? Forced him to be friends with me again? I didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t notice.
“Your dad thought there was something between me and your mom.”
I cringed, and he kept going.
“There wasn’t,” Mr. Jones said quickly. “I always thought she was gorgeous. Your mom was so . . . alive. Back then,” he added as an afterthought. “I told him that, but your dad was suspicious, always watching me—”
I had to interrupt. “Please.” I held up my hand. “These are my parents you’re talking about.” I couldn’t stand another minute of it—him and her and my dad. Trip and Sarah and me.
Mr. Jones rubbed at his forehead. “Right. I’m sorry.” I saw him glance around the room, focus on the spot by the stairs where the carpet was worn down to the flecked padding underneath. It made me want to push a chair or box or lay a sheet on top to cover it up. He looked down, realizing he was holding something. The reason he was here.
“Your dad isn’t here to provide for you,” he said, fingering the thing in his hand, a wrinkled envelope. “At least part of that is my fault. I owe him,” he continued. “And I don’t have a son to provide for anymore.” He said it dully, the words wooden, without real meaning, because if they’d had more form and life, both of us would have crumbled. He stuck the envelope out toward me. “Take it. Please.”
He had to shake it once, insisting, before I finally, reluctantly took it.
“Open it,” he said when it was obvious I didn’t plan to.
I turned it over, saw that the back was unsealed, and glanced inside, feeling my throat constrict as I read the numbers on the cashier’s check.
“I can’t take this—” I shoved it back at him. I couldn’t imagine what crazy idea made him think I’d let him hand me that kind of money.
“You have to,” he interrupted. “It’s earmarked for school. For—” His voice broke, edged to desperation when he continued. “What am I going to do with it? Pay bills? Remodel my house? For what? What does any of that mean? Take it. You’re a smart kid. Use it to get yourself out of here. Do something good, something that’ll mean something—”
“Stop.” It was rude, but I couldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t hear the things I knew were coming. For Trip. So he’ll be remembered, valued. In his memory. I kept the envelope. It felt like a deal with the devil.
I laid it on the table by the door, the envelope suddenly feeling too heavy to hold, lad
en with the responsibility of memorializing Trip. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could say no to, even though everything in me told me I should. I was taking Trip’s life. His college savings. His girlfriend. None of it had been my fault or on purpose, but it still felt very, very wrong. I had wanted Sarah and I’d wanted to leave here, but ohmygod, I didn’t want either of them this way.
CHAPTER 32
OF COURSE, I REALIZED IT was the final pieces.
Why Trip had never seen anything in the binoculars. No future.
How I’d pay for college.
It took Tannis a few days longer, but one day at lunch she said it. “We have to get rid of them. It’s all coming true.”
I looked at Natalie and Sarah, their eyes deeply vacant, something I’d come to accept as our general state of being. We were in a vacuum of meaning. We were statues, sitting together but none of us really there. Nothing mattered. Nothing seemed possible.
I would take the SATs the following weekend. I was leaving Buford. I’d go to college next year.
I didn’t give a damn about any of it.
“You guys do it,” Natalie said. “I’m not touching them. I don’t even want to see them again. Ever.” Her voice was high, hysterical. Not that Tannis was much better.
I nodded. Thinking was so hard. Just do it. Go with it. “Okay. They’re at my house. We’ll go after school.”
“I can’t,” Sarah said. “I have an appointment.” She smiled mirthlessly. “My dad’s making me see a shrink.”
It would have been funny. But it wasn’t. Sarah was the worst of all of us. I wanted to talk to her, tell her the things I wished I could believe about how it wasn’t our fault and there was nothing we could have done. But she wouldn’t even get near me alone. I hated it, and I was worried about her—it was the only real feeling I had these days—but I understood.
“So, just you and me,” I said to Tannis. “You okay to go?”
“Well, my back hurts all the fucking time, I have to puke every morning, and I’m exhausted,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again until I know they’ve been mashed, bashed, burned, or destroyed. So, yeah, I’m good to go.”