by Kara Thomas
“End it with that boy, Katherine.”
My feet fused themselves to the carpet. Marian watched me, impassive, as if she’d told me to go get the taillight on my car fixed. Finally, I forced out a response. “No.”
She crossed her legs and cocked her head at me. “No, what?”
“I’m not breaking up with Jesse.”
“You are, or I’m calling Boston College and rescinding your acceptance.”
It reminded me so much of my father. If you don’t pick up your toys, I’m giving them to someone else. Emma and I had fought over something once. A Barbie RV. To settle the dispute, he had flung it into the wall.
“It’s too late for me to go somewhere else,” I said, truly scared for the first time. “You’d make me stay at home?”
“I’m not making you do anything,” she said. “I’m giving you the choice.”
That word—choice—made me snap like a twig. I had never been afforded an ounce of control over my own life, had never been given something without strings attached. Enjoy all of these nice things and keep your mouth shut about what this family is really like.
“You’re just like my father!” I shouted. “You’re evil. There’s no way you don’t know how he treats us. I cannot spend another minute—”
My voice broke off as her stare turned to ice. “Then I suggest you end that relationship as soon as possible.”
* * *
—
“You have to go,” Jesse said when I met him where he’d been waiting in the marina parking lot. “You have to get away from him, Kat, even if it means doing what she says.”
“That’s exactly why I’ll never get away.” I was crying so hard Jesse held my head to his chest. His heart thumped wildly under my ear. “She’ll make me go home every summer and holidays, and the thought makes me want to kill myself—”
Jesse sat up so abruptly my brain rattled in my skull. “Kat. Don’t ever say shit like that.”
Jesse held me tight as I sobbed into his shoulder, soaking his T-shirt. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to that house. I’m done. BC isn’t worth it. I don’t even want to go there.”
My body trembled from the effort it took to keep breathing, but a sense of calm was returning to me. I’d said it. I didn’t want to go to Boston College. I didn’t want to be a lawyer; I didn’t want to owe my grandmother for the rest of my life; I didn’t want to be a Marcotte at all.
The feeling was back, the desperation to just end it, to cease to be. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t do that to Jesse.
“Do you trust me?” he whispered by my ear.
When I didn’t respond, he lifted my chin to meet his gaze. His voice was more urgent this time: “Kat? Do you trust me?”
I nodded, head heavy, my body weak from the adrenaline crash.
“Run away with me,” he said, taking my face in his hands. “There’s nothing for me here except you.”
“But your aunt—” I swallowed. “You have your job. You have Claire.”
“They’ll all survive without me. I can survive without them.” He tilted his forehead to mine. “You are the only thing that matters to me.”
I pretended it was actually an option. Running away with Jesse. Where would we go? Was there anywhere that my family couldn’t find us?
“I’m not eighteen until November,” I said. “My family—they’d say you kidnapped me or something. You’d get in a ton of trouble.”
“So we won’t get caught. I have enough money saved to get us out of the state.” Jesse’s voice was growing more urgent, as if it wasn’t the first time he’d entertained the idea.
I couldn’t command my brain to form the words. We’d get caught. He’d kill us both if we got caught.
“Please.” Jesse moved his hands from my face to my lap. He took my hands in his, brought them to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “Just say yes. We’ll figure it out together. Nothing matters as long as we’re together.”
He pulled me closer to him, heart thumping wildly, but his body loosening around mine. As if he already knew what my answer would be. I would follow him anywhere, as long as it was far away.
* * *
—
I knew, even when I said yes, that nowhere would be far enough. No distance would be safe. Italy had proven that.
The thing that made my father snap was eggs. My mother had gone to the market in Aviano and brought home a dozen eggs, and when my father discovered one of them was cracked, I knew what the look in his eyes meant. I locked Emma in our bedroom and returned to the kitchen to make sure my mother was okay.
I was afraid he’d hurt her—I was always afraid he’d hurt her, even though he purposely missed whenever he threw things. Not because he didn’t want to hurt us but because he couldn’t control what would happen if he left proof.
He was still screaming about the eggs when I got back to her. He didn’t see me rushing to my mother’s side when he threw the plate at the wall, and a shard ricocheted and hit me right over the eye.
She booked our plane tickets home two days later. I thought maybe it meant she was done lying for him, that for once, she was doing what she needed to do to keep us safe.
And then, the week before we were due to leave, someone from family services at the air base stopped by the house. There had been concerns raised. Even though he wasn’t home, my mother sat at the table, a small smile on her face, and denied that my father had a temper, denied that she felt unsafe, denied that the cut over my eye that needed four stitches was anything but a freak accident involving a dropped dinner plate.
We are a very loving family, she said, and I knew then that she was moving us home to protect him, not my sister and me.
Before we said goodbye, my father sat Emma and me down, pinned us with those steel-gray eyes that have haunted my dreams ever since.
“Everything I do is for you two,” he’d said. “Everything I do is for my family.”
And that’s when I became scared of him in a way I’d never been before. Nothing is more terrifying than a villain who sees himself as a hero. He may have been letting my mother take us back to the States to save him from himself, but we were still his.
We were his family. He deserved us, he deserved his own happy family after the trauma of losing his father at a young age. We were his and no one would ever take us away from him.
It’s why I could never escape. If I wanted to get away from my father I had to stop being Kat Marcotte.
It’s why I—why we—had to die.
KAT
LAST YEAR
MAY
There was no way around it; if my family knew I’d run away with Jesse, they would move heaven and earth to find us and punish us. The idea of me being with Jesse was so distasteful that my grandmother had threatened to take away my education—what would she do to me if I threw my entire carefully planned future away to escape with him?
The only way to ensure that they stopped looking, eventually, was for everyone to think we were dead.
We spent the next several days planning our mysterious deaths. Obviously there would be no bodies, only the grimmest of discoveries that left little hope we’d ever be found. Jesse suggested pushing my car down an embankment, somewhere heavily wooded and far from home. Upstate New York, maybe, near my grandmother’s lake house. How many people have crashed their cars and, unable to find cell service, wandered into the woods only to succumb to the elements?
But I wasn’t comfortable hoping everyone would just forget about us, accept that Jesse and I were a pile of bones waiting to be uncovered in a few years by some backwoods morel hunter. Captain Johnathan Marcotte himself would comb every inch of every mile of the Catskill woods to find me until he brought me home to rest.
So, then, one of the only ways to truly disappear a human body: water.
My father, of all people, had given me the idea.
He’d brought my sister and me to Blackstone Quarry as children, on one of our family trips to the lake house. He’d bored us with the details about how many miles deep and wide it was. The punch line of his story? A couple of fool teenagers went cliff diving at the quarry when he was young; the water was too dark, too cold, too filled with crevices, and two of the kids drowned, their bodies lost to the quarry forever. Emma and I had better never acquire that taste for danger, lest we succumbed to a similar fate.
Kat Marcotte and her boyfriend jumping to their deaths at Blackstone Quarry would shock everyone who knew us, might even warrant a People magazine cover with why? splashed above our faces.
Marian and my father would know exactly why. They would know they were responsible for sending me to the bottom of the quarry; they would have to live with the fact that even the Marcotte money could not change that dredging Blackstone Quarry, searching every corner for our bodies, was an impossible task.
It was almost foolproof. Except for, of course, money.
Jesse and I had a combined twenty-five hundred dollars to our names. All of the cash Jesse had saved working over the years had gone to buying his piece of crap car.
I’ve had a bank account since I turned ten. All of my money—birthday checks, babysitting earnings—went right in so I could earn a pathetic interest rate and feel like a big girl.
But I wouldn’t be able to withdraw it all, or even a large chunk, without setting off alarm bells. I imagined investigators jumping to check my bank account, maybe having a chuckle that Marian Sullivan-Marcotte’s granddaughter had six hundred and sixty-seven dollars in her personal checking.
We needed money to escape. We’d need a car, for one thing, and a place to stay. We’d need enough cash in reserve to tide us over until it was safe enough to look for work as new people, in a town hundreds of miles from here.
The lack of money threatened to cripple the entire plan. And even if we had the money to buy a car off Craigslist, to find an apartment online, how could we do any of that without leaving a trail?
Maybe even more than money, we needed someone we could trust.
* * *
—
The next afternoon, a Saturday, Amos agreed to meet me outside the coffee and pastry shop in the village. Summer had arrived violently and without warning; most of the tables inside the air-conditioned café were filled. We opted for one of the patio tables out front.
I kept one eye trained on the sidewalk for any stragglers passing by who might overhear us. Amos listened to my plea, fingers steepled below his lips, ignoring the croissant and glass of iced tea in front of him.
“I could find a way to pay you back, eventually,” I said, my voice faltering at the look on his face.
“I’d give you everything I had, if I could,” Amos said. “But I’m completely broke.”
“What?” There had been murmurings, of course, about Amos’s father not sending my aunt Erin money once Amos turned eighteen. But despite her not working since Amos was born, she was still a Marcotte. “Are you serious? What about your mom?”
Amos sipped his iced tea. “The Audi is leased, her credit cards are maxed out, and Marian pays the mortgage.”
My fingers found my lips, now prickly with panic. Amos, who was wearing a $250 pair of Ray-Bans, was telling me he was broke. “What about all the money you make, you know? Dealing.”
“Kat, I’ve got a few hundred bucks under my mattress. And I owe a supplier a grand for some shit the village rent-a-cops confiscated from me when they pulled me over last month.”
We fell quiet as a woman walking two boxers passed by. One tugged at its leash, sniffed the potted geranium in the planter by our table. When she was gone, Amos said, “How serious are you about this? You know how much it would hurt your mother? Emma?”
“I can’t do it.” I pulled my gauzy cardigan around my body. “You know Grandma won’t just let me walk away from this family.”
“How much do you hate her?”
“Even more than my father.”
“Then,” Amos said, squeezing the lemon perched at the rim of his iced tea glass, “I think I have an idea.”
My pulse went still as he reached into his pocket. He pulled out a cell phone; on old Motorola flip phone that Amos Fornier wouldn’t be caught dead using.
He covered the phone with his hand and pushed it toward me. “From here on, I’ll contact you through this. Hide it well. There are people in this phone you don’t ever want to be associated with.”
I swallowed, looked up at Amos.
“What’s your idea?” I asked.
Amos smiled; my heartbeat moved into my ears. I didn’t dare breathe.
He took a sip from his iced tea, tilted his head back toward the late-day sun. “Cash in on what she owes us.”
KAT
LAST YEAR
THAT WEEKEND
It had been easy to convince Claire to come with us. She didn’t want to spend prom weekend with Ben Filipoff’s friends and their friends. Girls who pretend to like the taste of Bud Light, boys who will risk snapping their necks at the bottom of the prom house pool just to get a laugh. Of course, Marian’s lake house was the more appealing option. Ben was tougher, at first, until he figured out the lake house was the only way he’d be able to have sex with Claire all weekend.
The Craigslist Camry was retrieved, stashed in a wooded area a quarter mile from Bobcat Mountain. Mike knew the area, and said no one would notice it for days, if not weeks. We only needed it to stay undetected for twenty-four hours.
There had been the hiccup with the car, of course, thanks to Ben Filipoff. (My whole life, my escape, threatened to be knocked off course by the idiot across the street!) While Claire and Ben were supposed to be at prom, Jesse and I were supposed to meet Mike Dorsey for the first time.
Amos had arranged for Mike to meet us in a Burger King parking lot down the road from Sunfish Creek Auto Body Friday afternoon. We would give Mike the money, and Mike would meet with the man selling the car later that evening.
But, thanks to Ben, we had Claire with us. And Claire could absolutely not see Mike Dorsey’s face. At no point in the plan was Claire to see his face—Amos had made it clear that Mike’s involvement was contingent upon that.
So, Jesse had to drop the money at Mike’s work when he went to pick up the pizza. Problem solved. Everything was in place.
Everything was right, but something was still wrong.
Saturday morning Claire sat quiet in the front seat on the drive to Bobcat Mountain.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked after ten minutes of silence into the fifteen-minute drive. Everything was fine when we’d gone to sleep the night before.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Just getting carsick.”
I caught Jesse’s eye in the rear mirror. He shrugged, as if to say Hell if I know what her problem is.
We parked at the edge of the lot, closest to the start of the trail. At the other corner of the lot was a pickup truck, a Confederate flag decal on the back window.
Someone else was on the mountain. I had considered the possibility, but I wasn’t worried. No one else would be camping at Devil’s Peak. That was why I’d picked it.
Claire paused by the trail map posted at the base of the mountain. “Are you sure we’re taking the red trail?”
“That’s the one that goes up to Devil’s Peak,” I said, buckling my pack straps beneath my chest.
“It says here that the green trail is for camping.” Claire pointed to the marker for Poet’s Lookout, several miles west of Devil’s Peak. “Look. Designated camping area.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’ve been here before—Devil’s Peak has a better view than Poet’s Lookout.”
And no people. There would be no other cam
pers at Devil’s Peak. No other witnesses.
“But it says we’re not supposed to camp there.” Claire tugged at her pack straps that were digging into her shoulders around her ribbed tank top.
“It’s fine,” I said. “The ranger’s office closes at four. They don’t patrol the mountains at night or care where anyone camps.”
“I don’t want to get busted over this whole weekend because you wanted a better view.” Claire yanked at her straps again, still not meeting my eyes.
My stomach turned inside out; this was not Claire. Agreeable, down-for-anything, think-about-the-consequences-later Claire. The only reason she could possibly have for resisting me, questioning the plan, was pure petulance.
I’d done something. But of course, I hadn’t done anything to her.
Which meant—
Jesse came up next to me, struggling under the weight of his pack, loaded with our tent and water, the sleeping bag attached to the bottom thwacking against his back. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I said, locking Claire’s gaze down. Daring her to challenge me. “Here, let me fix your straps.”
“I’ve got it,” she started to say, cheeks blooming pink.
“Claire. Let me fix the fucking straps.”
She stared at me, lips parted with disbelief. I rarely talked like that, especially not to her. I stepped toward her and tugged at the straps, loosening them so the weight of the pack rested on her hips.
She shrugged away from me the second my hands fell from her pack. Turned around, defiant, and started heading up the trail.
Next to me, Jesse was quiet.
“Did something happen this morning?” I said, softly enough so that ahead, Claire wouldn’t be able to hear.
Jesse shook his head. “I don’t know what her problem is.”
Well, we need to find out. I thought about snapping it at him, letting him see, for once, how I got when I felt things slipping outside my control. I needed Claire to be Claire, to act the way she always had.