by Sarah Lyu
“Please.”
“Ma’am, can you give us a location? Where are you right now? Are you in any danger?”
“I’m at the Pink Mansion. Please hurry.”
“An ambulance is on the way.”
“Please, please, please,” my voice begs. “Stay with me, stay with me.” I remember the way his eyes looked, flickering wildly with no sign of recognition.
The recording ends but some time passes before I can stop shaking. Vera was right. This was a terrible idea and I am an idiot for thinking it would help. Even Detective Ward seems surprised by the intensity of my reaction. It takes everything for me to stay in the chair and in that room. The floor calls to me and I just want to lie down and curl into myself.
Jack died before the ambulance got there, I’m almost sure of it. I still don’t remember taking my phone out and calling 9-1-1, but a few more pieces slide into place.
I was on my knees, Jack’s blood pooling around me, soaking into my jeans and espadrilles, ruining his Superman tee made of royal blue and the softest cotton. I clutched him close to me like I could make him stay if I only held on tight enough.
“Remy, I’m sorry,” Detective Ward says, and she looks genuinely apologetic. “I just have a few more—”
“I can’t do this,” I say, barely managing the words. “I can’t, I can’t. I need to get out of here. Right now.”
“Okay,” Vera says, eyes growing wide. “Okay, let’s get you out of here.”
“Please,” I say.
“Call me if you have any further questions,” Vera says to Detective Ward while ushering me out of the interrogation room. Neither of us waits for her reaction.
I was on my knees, Jack’s blood pooling around me. The life fading out of his eyes. I clutched him tight, pressed our bodies close for the last time.
I was on my knees, Jack’s blood pooling around me. I begged and begged for him to stay. But he couldn’t hear me anymore. Sirens wailed in the distance.
I was on my knees, Jack’s blood pooling around me. Elise put a hand on my shoulder, said, “Everything ’s going to be okay, Remy. Everything ’s going to be okay now.”
59.
The ride home is silent, tense, the four of us ignoring one another. Christian is flying out to Providence tomorrow but none of us are in the proper send-off mood. At home, my parents begin to bicker almost immediately. I go straight to my room upstairs, try to shut them out. But at the same time, their angry voices bring me a strange kind of comfort not unlike the steady drip of a leaky faucet, irritating but dependable. They argue, and it’s about the only constant I can rely on in my life. This I can handle.
I can’t make out every word they’re saying but I have a general idea what they’re fighting about. Jack’s funeral is on Sunday. Mom wants us to make a quick appearance at the service, then leave, but Dad says I should be allowed to go to all of it—the memorial, the viewing, the service and reception after.
They start there but quickly move on to the usual haunts, petty squabbles about time spent at the office or hospital, about who is the worst parent. Even now, after everything that’s happened, they’re still focused on themselves.
Something Elise said about her father comes to me now: It had nothing to do with me. It never did. It didn’t matter if I was the perfect daughter or not, because nothing was ever going to be enough for him. When I got older, I saw the pattern. If he was having a bad day, he’d make sure I’d have one too.
My parents are not like her father, but there are some parallels. It never mattered if I was the perfect daughter or not. Christian was the perfect son, and still they screamed and fought and waged an endless war. Still they ignored us, used us when convenient. We were never people, we were things—their things.
Their voices mix and clash and distract me from thinking about Jack and Elise, about the difference between killed and murdered. About what Elise said as Jack was dying.
Their voices crest and fall. I take a deep breath, stare at the ceiling. This I can do all day long.
This I can do—until I can’t.
Their voices crest again but don’t fall. Their rage and fury climb and climb, whipping into a hurricane. I tell myself that their anger is a strange comfort. But it doesn’t help this time. Instead it feels like I’m drowning, like the weight of their words is pulling me under.
I fold my pillow, cover my ears, but I can’t block them out.
I manage to fall asleep for a few hours, and thankfully, the house is quiet when I wake.
• • •
“Hey.” Christian knocks on my door around dinnertime, catching me by surprise. “Come on, you have to eat.”
I have no appetite but he insists, so I follow him downstairs, feeling dazed and confused about what he’s doing. Sitting at the kitchen table, I watch as he makes mac and cheese from a box.
“So,” he begins awkwardly, “are you—” okay? That’s what he was about to ask. Instead he says, “I’m sorry,” and I’m so shocked I just stare at him.
“Look, I know—” He breaks off again, seems to be struggling to find the right words. I feel wary, unsure what he’s trying to do. “I’m just sorry. About everything.”
He looks contrite but I don’t buy it. “Everything,” I repeat. Does he mean Jack’s death? Does he mean what happened with Elise? Or does he mean literally everything, going all the way back to our childhood?
“Everything,” he confirms without clarifying. “I’m here if you want to talk.”
“Did Mom put you up to this?” I ask, suspicious of this uncharacteristic concern from him. “Are you going to report back to her?”
“What? No,” he says, growing defensive.
“For the record, no, I’m not okay,” I tell him. It should be obvious. I don’t know how I look but it’s probably terrible. I feel even worse.
He pauses as the microwave beeps in the back. “I didn’t know Jack well, but he was a good guy from what I can tell.”
“Oh.” I keep forgetting that they were in the same grade before Jack had to take a year off.
“I’m sorry.” Christian leans against the kitchen counter and looks at me, really looks at me. This could be the first real interaction we’ve had since we were little. He takes the mac and cheese out and splits half into another bowl and puts it in front of me. “You have to eat.”
“I can’t.” I shake my head and push it away from me. I think about retreating to my room. It hurts, being around others when the one person I want to be with is irrevocably gone.
He takes a few bites but gives up when he sees I won’t touch it.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I ask, trying to keep my mind off Jack.
“I still live here, at least until tomorrow,” Christian says, and attempts a friendly smile.
“No, I mean why aren’t you out with your girlfriend? It’s your last night.”
He grows quiet. “Vanessa and I broke up, actually.” It’s a surprising admission from him. We’re siblings, but we’re not friends. “I don’t really want to talk about it. Anyway, where is everybody?” he says, changing the subject.
“Mom’s probably at the hospital. No idea where Dad is, not that you care.” I don’t know why he’s talking to me. We don’t hang out. We barely acknowledge each other’s existence, but now he’s acting like we do this all the time.
“I do care,” he says quietly.
“Why? You’re leaving for Brown in ten hours. You never liked Dad in the first place. You said you didn’t care if he stayed or left because you had Mom.”
“What are you talking about?” His obliviousness angers me and I hold on to it like a life raft in this ocean of grief. He’s lucky he gets to even be oblivious because he has Mom in his corner. He never has to worry about how he’ll survive our mother like I have to.
“You know what I’m talking about,” I say, my voice strained. “You have Mom. You never, ever have to worry like I do.”
“Come on, Mom’s not
that bad,” he says.
“What?” I almost laugh. “You weren’t there all the times Mom yelled at me to be more like you.”
“Yeah? Well you weren’t there all the times I watched you and Dad go off to do your own thing. He never paid any attention to me after he got home from work. He never took me on cool trips to Chicago.”
“Dad only did that stuff with me because you were already Mom’s favorite. You’ve always been Mom’s favorite. I was basically the leftovers. We were leftovers. He didn’t pick me. Mom picked you and we were left to fend for ourselves.” I thought it’d feel good, finally getting these words out, yelling at Christian, but all I feel is emptiness.
“That’s not how I remember it. Dad’s always liked you more. He never spent any time playing with me. Or took me out, just the two of us. Or taught me how to ride a bike.”
“That’s because you never needed it! You were some kind of prodigy. You didn’t need anyone to teach you anything.” I can’t believe this. Christian, flagship child, complaining about how he was treated.
“Bull.”
“Mom says it all the time. All the time. ‘Remy, why aren’t you smart like Christian? Remy, why aren’t you more like Christian? Remy, why can’t you just be Christian?’ ”
He looks momentarily chastised.
“You know exactly what it’s been like for me.” Staring down at the mac and cheese, I lose what little appetite I had.
“It’s not exactly been easy for me!” he says, and I scoff. “It hasn’t. You don’t know what it’s like, having the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Right, the weight of the world. What would we do without you?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “The whole world would just implode.”
“That’s what it feels like sometimes,” he admits, surprising me. “You don’t know how many times I wished I were you. You don’t know how many times I wished Mom would stop treating me like I was her greatest accomplishment and leave me alone. You weren’t there when I had to tell her I didn’t get into Princeton. She acted like going to Brown was the same as going to a state school.”
“No, she talks about it all the time, how she’s so proud of you, how you’re carrying on the family’s Ivy tradition, because it sure as hell won’t be me.”
“Well, of course she acts like she’s proud of me. She’s not going to go around telling people how Brown’s barely an Ivy.”
“Did she really say that?” I ask, a little stunned.
“Only when I was applying. She didn’t even want me to apply, said I’d almost certainly get into Princeton. Said she knew all the alums in the area and would get me a good interviewer,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, whatever.”
It never seemed weird to me before, that we were always on opposing teams. It never seemed odd that we had teams. But now I realize we were all supposed to be on one team together.
Maybe this is what he thinks too. Maybe this is why he knocked on my door. I end up scooping all of the pasta he made into the trash, but I take a leap of faith and ask him something.
“What happened between you and Elise?”
His eyes widen. “What’d she tell you?”
“She said you told her you were breaking up with Vanessa and that you’d kissed her one night.”
For a moment, he just stares at me, speechless. “First of all, she kissed me. And I didn’t tell her we were breaking up! I just told her we were having a hard time deciding what to do when we went to college.”
Something had always seemed off about the night she came back from her anti-anti-prom party and I could never quite figure it out until now.
“What happened the night of prom?” I don’t want any more half-truths, only the whole truth now. “She said you showed up to her party.”
“I didn’t even know that was her party,” he says. “I just heard from a few of Vanessa’s friends that there was an after-party on the football field. We ended up going because we didn’t have anything else to do.” He sighed, frustrated. “What did she say I did?”
“Just said that you were cold to her, that you wouldn’t even talk to her after what’d happened between you guys.”
He looks down, like he feels bad. “I guess I didn’t handle that very well. I was afraid she’d say something to Vanessa, and at that point, I was still hoping maybe we’d stay together.” Then he shakes his head roughly as if to clear it. “You should get some rest. You must be exhausted.”
It was so strange seeing Christian like this. Knocking on my door, asking how I was. Trying to make me dinner, criticizing Mom. Telling me the truth, admitting he was fallible.
“Have a safe flight,” I tell him when we’re upstairs. We’ve talked more in the last half hour than we have in the last five years. There’s still a distance between us, but for the first time I can remember, I’m not sure if it’ll always be there or if we can close it someday, together.
TUESDAY // AUGUST 29 // DAY 354
60.
Without my phone and laptop, I’m completely isolated. Mom’s forcing me to take the rest of the week off, and I have the whole house to myself for the better part of each day. I don’t think she knows what to do with me. No one does, me included. I can’t imagine going back to school now without Jack, without Elise.
Every day I half expect Elise to show up, and I don’t know what I’d say to her. I don’t know how I’d even feel about seeing her again.
For some inexplicable reason, I rewatch the Kill Bill movies by myself even though I’ve seen them a million times with Elise already. I have no idea what I’m looking for, but I can’t shake the feeling that I might find it in the Bride’s story.
Five hours later, I’m a sobbing mess on the couch. It’s been there the whole time, staring at me in the face, but I didn’t want to see it.
On the surface, the movies are about revenge. It’s even in the opening epigraph—revenge is a dish best served cold. But it’s not a story about revenge. It’s a story about love.
And abuse.
Every act of love is corrupted with it. And it’s not just the relationship between Bill and the Bride, Beatrix, whose real name is only revealed near the end. Even when Beatrix goes to train under Pai Mei, his respect is only earned through her ability to withstand his abuse.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
We have been sold a lie. Our parents thought nothing of hurting us in the name of love. What a thing, to learn as a child, that pain is love. That love is bruises on our bodies and scars in our minds.
Elise’s father told her it hurt him more than it hurt her when he hit her, that he hit her only because he loved her. Tell your daughter enough times and maybe she’ll believe it—believe it so deep down in her soul that she thinks it’s only love if it hurts.
That it’s not love if it doesn’t.
We believed our tragedies were romantic. We believed what didn’t kill us made us stronger. We believed our wounds made us special, because in a strange and awful way, maybe they were proof that we were loved.
Trauma has a gravity of its own, but so does love—an invisible force, an unseen tether. How easy it is, then, to feel the pull of one and confuse it with the other.
61.
Vera comes by in the afternoon with an update. She opens with, “I have some news.” She’s spoken with a friend in the DA’s office. “It appears unlikely they’ll pursue any charges related to Jack’s death.”
“What?” I say, breathless with shock. “How? Why?”
“It’s not official,” she cautions. “And even if they decline to press charges now, they could still bring them years down the line if something changes. But unofficially, they’re probably not going to press any charges right now.”
I’m too stunned to speak.
“Prosecutors don’t like to try cases they might lose. And in this instance, the law is on Elise’s side. He was near the doorway. It was dark. It was her house. He didn’t tell her he’d be there.” Vera goes on for a w
hile, explaining the technical details of the case. Apparently, Elise would make an extremely sympathetic defendant. “No jury’s going to see those pictures of her beaten up and convict.” She keeps going but my mind is spinning.
I did it, I think. I protected her. Collapsing to the ground, I begin to sob. Vera kneels to comfort me with an arm around my shoulders. She thinks these are tears of joy, of relief. But I don’t feel any relief. I just feel like I’m drowning.
This was what I’d hoped for. This means we’re free. Only I don’t feel free at all.
THURSDAY // AUGUST 31 // DAY 356
62.
I need to see her.
It’s been four days since she killed Jack, four days without my phone, without any contact with her. My car keys have been confiscated. There’s talk of switching schools or homeschooling, and I’m basically under house arrest until they figure it out.
But still. I have to see her. She’s the only one who has all the answers, who knows what really happened that night. So when my mom comes home late on Thursday, I wait until she’s in the shower before I snatch her keys and make my getaway.
“Remy?” It’s Elise, as if appearing out of thin air before I even have a chance to unlock the car door. It’s surreal seeing her here on my driveway.
“How are you here right now?” I whisper, my throat still scratchy and raw. I want to run into her arms as much as I want to run in the opposite direction. I love her, but I am horrified by her.
“Oh, thank God,” she says, clearly relieved and oblivious to my growing distress. “I’ve been basically camped out here hoping to catch you.”
“What?” I look all around us in confusion. “Where’s your car?”
“I had to park it on the other side of the neighborhood so your parents wouldn’t see me. Come on.” She pauses when she sees I haven’t followed. “I just want to talk,” she says. “Let’s go for a drive.” When I remain unmoving, she shoots me a halting smile. “Remy?”