All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  “I’m not going to jail!”

  “Yes, you are.” Neily reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a tape recorder.

  Cass’s face twisted with rage and his finger tightened on the trigger.

  “Get down!” Someone yelled.

  I grabbed Neily’s arm and yanked him to the ground. Two shots rang out and three police officers stormed into the room. I looked up and watched Cass fall backward onto the bed. The gun tumbled from his hand and onto the carpet.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  “Is he dead?” Neily asked the officer who was hunched over Cass’s body, feeling for a pulse. “Officer Bryson?”

  The officer exhaled. “Lopez, get the paramedics in here.”

  “Oh my God,” I repeated, trembling. I pressed my face into Neily’s shoulder and he put his arms around me.

  “Get them out of here,” Bryson barked to another officer, who took the gun out of Neily’s hand, tugged at his arm, and led us out of the room. I glanced back once at Cass, then looked away. Neily and I held on to each other as we went down the stairs and walked out of the house. The officer packed us into a patrol car and drove us down to the station. It rained the whole way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Cass died that night from complications relating to a gunshot wound to the chest. The police claimed that Cass turned his gun on them, leaving Officer Bryson no choice but to shoot to kill. I had to hand over everything to them—the letters, the ring, the diary—but tucked in between the end pages and the cover of Carly’s journal there was a letter addressed to Neily. I shouldn’t have read it, but I did. I gave everything else to the police, but this I kept. It belonged to no one but him.

  Dear Neily,

  Things have gotten so out of control. I’ve made some terrible decisions, hurt people I never could have imagined hurting. A few months before she died, my mother gave me a book called An Unknown Woman, by Alice Koller. I never read it, not until last week, when I devoured it in one night. The author wrote something that made me cry. She wrote, “I’ve arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I’ve been doing.” I knew then that I had to do what was right to fix the mistakes I’ve made and turn away from the terrible person I’m becoming. I have the inclination and the desire to be good, but I haven’t been acting like it. Long before this horrible mess, you became the first casualty of my personality revolution. You’ll want to know why. Here it is: I broke up with you because I wanted to realign myself with the world, to distract myself from the fact that I was falling apart by creating a whole new facade to hide behind. I didn’t realize that you were the only thing holding me together, that the fact that you cared about me, that you knew me and understood me, was all I needed to rediscover who I was. My mother’s death—it wasn’t something I wanted to think about, much less talk about. All I wanted was escape—mindless, overwhelming, indulgent escape, and I found it in Adam. Maybe I thought that once I got over my loss I could come back to you, but of course that’s ridiculous—you could never forgive me. Still … when I’ve done what I need to do I’m going to go to you—I don’t know what I’ll say to convince you to take me back, in any way that you can; labels mean nothing when it comes to you and me. I know you still care about me—if you didn’t, you wouldn’t work so hard to hate me. I miss you so much. I wish you knew how much.

  I have a lot to answer for. You’ll want to know why I did what I did the way I did it—why I found it necessary to corner you, then humiliate you, in front of a million people you can hardly tolerate. The truth is that I was born with a mean streak. I believed I was doing the right thing by pushing you away, but believing it is different than feeling it. At that moment, all I felt was anger and the anticipation of loss, and I wanted to hurt you as much as I was hurting—not to punish you, but to make you feel my pain. It sounds crazy, it sounds cruel, but it’s a little bit of who I am—it always has been. I know you’ll understand this, because unlike most people in my life, you’re capable of loving all of me, even the rotten bits. That’s what made you so special to me, but it’s also what made you a liability. Please don’t misunderstand me—I don’t plan on repeating this mistake again. If you let me back into your life, I promise to be better in the future—perfect, or as close as I can get.

  Love, Carly

  They kept Neily and me at the police station for hours that night, questioning us about our investigation until I practically fell asleep sitting at the interrogation-room table. Grandma Louise wouldn’t let me leave the house for days after that, not even to go to school—she was terrified somebody might kidnap me in retaliation. Finally, after a week of confining me to the house for my own protection, she granted me temporary leave to go see Neily.

  When I went to his house, his mom told me that he had gone to St. Raymond’s cemetery to visit Carly’s grave. I found him sitting in front of her headstone, his legs pulled up against his chest, oblivious to the fact that the ground was soaked and muddy.

  “Hey,” I said, shoving my hands inside the pockets of my raincoat.

  “Hey,” he said, not looking at me.

  I glanced around; the place was empty except for us. “How long have you been here?”

  He shrugged. “Few hours.”

  “A few hours?” I crouched down next to him.

  Neily nodded. “I needed someplace quiet to think.”

  “Are you okay, Neily?”

  He turned his head to look at me with a blank look. “Are you okay?”

  I shook my head. My throat felt like a clogged drain. “Definitely not.”

  He turned back to the headstone, gesturing to it. “I like that quote.”

  I bent forward, wiping the rain from the smooth stone and tracing the etched letters with my thumb. “‘To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores,’” I read aloud. “What’s it from?”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” he said. “From The Winter’s Tale.”

  “Oh.” Tired of squatting, I slid my legs out from under me and sat down in the mud beside Neily. “It’s not your fault,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “If I hadn’t—”

  “You don’t know that. You can’t know how things would’ve worked out.”

  “Are you saying you don’t feel guilty? That some part of you isn’t screaming that you should’ve known all along?”

  I swallowed hard. “Of course it is. But it’s all over now. We’ve done all we could.”

  “I really miss her,” he said, struggling against tears.

  “Me too.” I left off struggling; they were running fast and hot down my face now. I pulled a stack of papers out of my inside jacket pocket. “I brought this for you.”

  “What is it?”

  “A copy I made of Carly’s journal. I don’t think we’ll be getting the original back from the police for a while, so this is the best I can do.” I put the letter on top of it. “This letter was in the journal. It’s addressed to you. You should read it.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I can.”

  I pressed it into his palm. “You can.” I pointed toward a bench under a nearby tree. “Can I have a minute? I have a few things I’d like to say in private.”

  “Okay.” He hoisted himself to his feet and trudged to the bench. I saw him start reading, then I turned back to face the gravestone, inching closer until the toes of my shoes were pressed right up against it.

  “I feel a little stupid, talking to a grave,” I said. “But I believe you can hear me—I believe you’re listening. I thought a lot about what I would say to you here, but I could never bring myself to come, to give you bad news. But we found your killer, Carly, I’m sure you know that. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry Cass hurt you like that. It’s my fault you even knew him at all and I’m so—you can’t understand how sorry I am. But I’m so angry at you that it’s sometimes hard to feel sorry. Why did you take it all upon yourself a
nd put yourself in danger like that? We would have helped you, Neily and I, if you had just told us the truth. You kept so many secrets. I had no idea you were still in love with Neily, all that time.”

  I hadn’t shown Neily all those tearstained passages where Carly told the truth about who she was—her guilt, her pain, her desire to be better, her weaknesses, her impulses to be worse. I was afraid it would damage him more, knowing that the whole time he was licking his wounds and tearing out his stitches over his love and hate for her, she was secretly pining for him. I was afraid he would never forgive her. But now I could show him. One more thing I could stop feeling guilty about.

  “I don’t know what else to say,” I continued. “Except that I miss you so much. You were my best friend, and even when we were fighting you got me more than any other person in the world. I leaned on you for everything—I just wish you would’ve leaned back a little more.”

  I got up off the ground and walked over to the bench. Neily was sitting with the journal in his lap, staring out over the lawn. “Did you read it?”

  He nodded. “I had no idea she still felt—”

  “Me neither.” I sat down beside him.

  “I wish she had told me,” he said. The anguish in his voice was unmistakable, but there was strength in it. He would be okay. We both would.

  “I know you do,” I said.

  Neily broke down, clutching the pages so hard that his knuckles turned white. He pressed his face into my shoulder. Unable to stop myself from sobbing, I rested my cheek against the top of his head and put an arm around his back. We cried ourselves dry, and when we were finished, Neily pushed the pages into my hands.

  “No, you should keep it.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll just use it to torture myself with what-ifs. It’s better if you have it.”

  I took the diary and the letter from him. I would keep them safe. He would want them back someday.

  A sharp chill ran through my bones; winter had come, and with it, the cold, insistent rains that would make everything that had died over the hot summer grow. The rain would green the hills and wash the roads and muddy up the Brighton athletic fields. As Neily and I walked away from Carly’s grave together, the sky split and the rain came, soaking us to the skin.

  At the end of the following summer, Harvey and I packed up a U-Haul truck and took the I-5 down to San Diego, where he was starting at the University of California. Somewhere outside of Harris Ranch we heard on the radio that Adam Murray, who was charged with distributing cocaine and other narcotics, had plea-bargained his way into seven years of jail time, three and a half with good behavior. We didn’t listen to the pundits discuss the case further; as soon as the announcement was made, Harvey changed the station.

  “At least that’s finished now,” he said over some mind-numbing hip-hop as I stared out the window at the cars streaking past.

  Harvey was right; things finally felt over. Audrey and I had spent our last semester of high school with a private tutor, safely out of reach of reporters. We couldn’t go back to Brighton, nor did we want to. Finch tried his best to convince us that everything would normalize, that Brighton was our home, but neither one of us believed that. The last time I ever saw him was on television, assuring the good people of the Bay Area that what had happened was a tragedy, yes, but an anomaly, and that he would do everything in his power to make the school safe for their children. Finch was no fool. He knew it was impossible to stamp out darkness, that Cass and Adam left a space that would be filled again someday. But you can’t tell people that. What would be the point?

  Other than leaving Empire Valley, I didn’t have any concrete plans of my own. Find an apartment, get a job, those were the first things on my list, but I did end up enrolling at San Diego State. Audrey went, as we all expected, to USC. We talked on the phone a few times, exchanged a few e-mails, but soon our correspondence dropped off as we carved out new lives a little more than a hundred sleek California-freeway miles apart.

  I had begun to think we would never see each other again. This was something I was learning to come to terms with, knowing that we had shared something vital and frightening and altogether too real to keep reminding each other of, recognizing that we both needed room to process what had happened, possibly forever. But in the spring of that first year, I got an envelope in the mail. There was no note inside, no card, no expression of sentiment, only a picture of the three of us—Audrey, Carly, and me—that had been taken the summer Audrey moved to Empire Valley. I remembered posing for that picture under duress, still uneasy about the changing dynamics of my relationship with Carly as a result of Audrey’s sudden arrival, so I was surprised to see that I looked happy in the photograph, and remarkably relaxed. I went out and bought a frame and placed it in a position of honor, on the top of my television.

  That summer I got a job working with a sailing company that organized pleasure cruises up the coast to Coronado. It was hard, physical work, but I liked it—it gave me time to think. One morning, I was on the boat, cleaning the cabin in preparation for the day’s trips, when someone called out to me from the dock below.

  “Cruise starts at nine,” I shouted from inside, wiping a coat of Windex off the glass. I could see the shadow of my visitor from where I was standing, and I could tell that he or she wasn’t leaving. After waiting a moment, I went down to the deck to send the person away.

  “Hi,” Audrey said, looking up at me and shielding her eyes from the glare. “Well, aren’t you just a regular Gilligan.”

  I smiled. “And who are you supposed to be, Mary Ann?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Duh. Ginger. The movie star?”

  “Give me a second.” I climbed down the ladder onto the dock and she wrapped her arms around me.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said, stepping back. She squeezed my bicep and nodded appreciatively. “Wow. San Diego’s been good to you.”

  “It’s all this manual labor. You look great,” I told her, because she did. She had toned up, and gotten a lot of color. She was wearing a tight red tank top and a pair of white capri pants with matching sandals. Her blond hair was shorter, and in pigtails. I felt a surge of attraction, which was only natural, and had to remind myself that I sort of had a girlfriend.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I joined a sorority. We all look like this.”

  “Philistine.”

  She laughed. “I like it. It feels like being part of a family. It’s nice to have that again.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You look really great.”

  “You said that.”

  “I mean, you look like you’re sleeping well.”

  “No nightmares.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear.”

  There was a bit of an awkward pause, which I broke by asking an equally awkward, but obvious, question: “So … do you have a boyfriend?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Too soon, I think. I’m still in therapy to deal with … well, you know. But I’m working through it.”

  “That’s good.”

  “What about you?” She punched me lightly in the shoulder. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.” I smacked my forehead. “I don’t know why I said that. I do—sort of. Her name is Ellie. And we’re not technically, well, we’re not exclusive. We’re just … dating, I guess.” Friends with benefits was probably closer to the truth, but I was seriously thinking about making it official. I liked Ellie. She was fresh and interesting, and best of all, she didn’t remind me of the past, not one iota.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said, smiling.

  “So how’s your dad?”

  Audrey frowned and tugged at one of her pigtails. “Well, you know, it was hard on him. The adjustment. People staring at him in the grocery store, that sort of thing. Long story short, he started drinking again.”

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He’s in rehab now. Going on five weeks. I went to visit him last weekend, an
d he’s doing well.”

  “That’s good.”

  Audrey nodded. “I’m afraid he’ll never get better. I don’t know that he has the heart for it.”

  “He should do it for you.”

  “Yeah, he should.” She kicked at some pebbles on the ground. “I got a letter from my mom a couple of months ago. She sent it to my grandparents’ house. Apparently they’re talking again.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out she’s been living in Bakersfield for the past year or so.” Audrey gave a little uncomfortable laugh. “She has a boyfriend, and a house. And a dog, which is sort of annoying because she would never let me have one. She sent me a picture.”

  “Did you answer the letter?”

  “Nope.” She gazed at me. “Thought about it, but couldn’t. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “No way. The fact that you thought about it, that’s step one. You’ll get there when you’re ready. Or you won’t, but that still won’t make you a bad person. In my opinion, we’ve both racked up enough good karma to last a lifetime.”

  She smiled. “I’ve missed you. You should call me more.”

  “You should call me more,” I countered.

  “Fair. But I didn’t know if you wanted to talk to me, or see me.”

  “So you came down here to surprise me with an unwanted visit?” I teased.

  “I wanted to see you, and I figured that if I left it to you I never would,” she said. “I stopped by your place. Harvey told me you’d be here.”

  “I wish I had known you were coming; I would’ve taken the day off. I’d just bail, but the boss man would fire me, and I like to eat, so …”

  “Daddy’s not bankrolling the whole vagabond thing?”

  “Well, he wasn’t so thrilled about some of my choices.”

  “Speaking of, how’s San Diego State?”

  “I like it. Great place to meet chicks.”

  “Such a romantic.”

  “Plus, my roommate doesn’t walk around wearing a semper ubi sub ubi T-shirt, so I can’t complain.”