I make the mistake of trying to crawl. The first ounce of pressure on my left wrist and I face-plant into the carpet, howling. I roll onto my right, still kicking the carpet like I’m swimming to the door, and I see Meredith rise. She looks unsteady. She looks insane.
I must have broken some of her teeth or maybe she bit her tongue because when she pants, blood sprays out like a mist. Unlike my blood, which is pouring out like an oil spill, making everything around me wet and slick. I haven’t made it very far by the time Meredith gets to the counter and picks up the knife.
That’s a big knife. She won’t have to be very close to me to get that into me. She won’t have to cut me very much, either, since I’m probably mostly done bleeding to death. I won’t let myself say that I’ve reached the end of the line at this point but I have to admit I can see it from here. It looks ugly. It looks bloody and I really wouldn’t mind sleeping through it.
I roll onto my back, my arms splayed wide. My injured arm lands on a dirty plate and something scratches me, adding a fresh jolt to the pain. It’s insult to injury. My filthy habits conspire against me. Then the fingers of my right hand find another wine bottle.
Man, I drink a lot.
Meredith makes her way toward me, circling the coffee table. She pauses to check on Jeannie and then she smiles at me.
“You bitch,” I try to say, but my lips don’t work that well.
“I think I’m going to take care of your cousin first.” She keeps smiling. “She gets to die, too. Professor Fitzhugh-Conroy—so important, so smart, but she’ll bleed to death just like you. Unless she asphyxiates first. Maybe you’ll be conscious long enough to watch. Yeah, I’m going to kill her first. That way, just in case someone does a really thorough autopsy, they’ll know that she died first. You fought, she got a few good licks in, but you triumphed. You’re a killer and you finally decided you couldn’t live with it anymore.”
I want to scream. I want to stop her but I can’t move. I can’t get my feet under me so I use the only weapon I have left. I focus everything I have on my right arm and I whip that wine bottle toward her head as hard as I can.
Of course, it misses her. It doesn’t strike her in the eye or knock her out. Life doesn’t work like that.
But sometimes it works like this.
Meredith sees the bottle. She dodges it easily, laughing, seeing it coming from a mile away. What she doesn’t see is the hand lying on the floor in the plastic bag. I don’t think she ever sees it. She steps on it. Her heel lands in the palm, her feet fly out from beneath her, and her skull smashes against the heavy wooden arm of the sofa.
She doesn’t bounce. She just sort of crumples.
Blue flowers blossom in front of my eyes.
I hope she landed on her knife.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Gilead, West Virginia
February 22, 2015
Anna Shuler Ray, 29 years old
Jeannie settles back in the tub with a sigh. My bathroom smells like jasmine and the bubbles make tiny music as they pop. God, even her baths are better than mine.
The Days Inn only had shower stalls, so we’re back at my place. I sit on the mat beside the tub, my back against the wall, my feet stretched out toward her head. This means I have to stretch out my injured left hand along the edge of the porcelain to reach Jeannie’s, but I don’t mind. She made sure to lay a towel underneath the bandages so it wouldn’t get wet.
She looks like hell. The right side of her face is swollen and purple. Both eyes are black and she has to breathe through her mouth, but seeing her in front of me, seeing her alive, she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I think about how close I came to losing her and it makes it hard for me to breathe. I don’t think about my own injuries. All I can think about is what I would have lost if I’d lost Jeannie. How close I came. How we both owe our lives to a clipboard.
One of Hinton’s patrolmen had left his clipboard on my counter. A three-dollar piece of plastic and a cheap ballpoint pen. I don’t know what paperwork was on that clipboard but it was important enough for the cop to come all the way back up Everly Road to get it. Fortunately he thought it important enough to open the door even when nobody answered his knock. None of us could get to the door. All three of us were busy dying.
All three of us survived. They kept us in the hospital overnight. Jeannie’s concussion wasn’t as bad as they feared. My stitches took a while and I needed quite a bit of blood but I’ll be okay. Meredith is still unconscious. I hope she’s dreaming about me. I hope she’s screaming in her sleep.
“That crazy bitch.” Jeannie reads my mind. “I never could stand that bitch.”
“I liked her,” I say. I did.
“You’ve always been a terrible judge of character.”
I laugh. “Maybe I just like bad people.”
She grips my hand, careful not to squeeze hard enough to hurt. “How did she know about you? I still don’t understand that.”
“Well, they ran my background check when I was hired, and she knew I was your cousin. Right about then, her son got arrested for heroin possession down in Nashville. She blamed you and Ellis for flunking her kid out of school, so she probably started digging into all three of us, looking for whatever she could use. Then when he OD’d over Christmas, she really went sideways, and started planning. She was right, I never should have underestimated her ability to find shit out.” I lay my head back against the wall and close my eyes. “I guess when you hear my backstory, bloody thoughts come to mind.”
She squeezes my hand hard enough to hurt, hard enough to stop my train of thought. I finally told Jeannie everything, all the things I told Ronnie, all the things I remembered—the gasoline, the wires on my wrists, the puddles of blood draining in my mother’s studio. Like Ronnie, she didn’t pull away. I’m hopeful that, unlike Ronnie, she won’t use it against me.
“Why didn’t your mom just call the police?” Jeannie asks. “He tried to kill you. It was totally justified. I mean, who would blame her for killing him? She saved you.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it. I tried a couple of times. I tried to be normal and find a place to put all that. I asked her once if we could call the police and tell them what happened. Do you know what she said? That a murder/suicide was just too pedestrian.”
She stares at me for a moment. “Only our mothers,” she says, “would have a social classification scale for violent deaths.” Then we’re both laughing.
In a heartbeat, my giggle becomes a sob. My throat catches and I hang on to my cousin’s hand, ignoring the stitches pulling at my wrist. “She just didn’t want me to be weird. She didn’t know any better. She didn’t want to saddle me with being the girl whose father couldn’t love her enough to let her live.”
“He loved you,” Jeannie says quickly.
“He loved me badly. But yeah, he loved me. And so did my mom. She thought she was sparing me something. Instead she saddled me with being the face of the Plastic Bag Murder. And the worst part? It’s not that everybody thinks I killed him.” I sigh. “It’s not even that everybody thinks he was hurting me, that he was molesting me or something. He wasn’t. He didn’t. He did love me, Jeannie. And I loved him.” I’m losing my voice to my tears.
“Jeannie, the worst part is that sometimes I wish he’d finished it. I wish he’d gotten that lighter—”
“Don’t say that!” Jeannie splashes water on me when she sits up in the tub and scoots toward me. She yanks my head back by my ponytail and shakes me. “Don’t you ever say that. Ever again. Do you remember what I told you when you came to live with us? All of this, everything that’s happened is just something that happened to you. It’s not you. You are not these events. Do you hear me?” I nod as much as I can, which isn’t much since she’s got a serious grip on my hair. She lets me go and settles back in the tub.
“You
are my cousin, Anna,” she says. “If you need a title, if you need a role, that’s it. Got it?”
I nod and she closes her eyes.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“Starving.”
I slip out of the bathroom and head to the kitchen. My apartment is a disaster. I didn’t think it was possible for the space to be any dirtier but the crime scene unit took the filth to new heights. Fingerprint dust is everywhere. Sections of the carpet have been cut out and two of the couch cushions were taken into evidence for blood stains.
Fortunately Meredith never got near the refrigerator and the pan of leftover enchiladas is just where I left them.
Jeannie yells from the bathroom. “Are you reheating the enchiladas?”
“Yes.”
“Turn the oven on to three-fifty. You can put them in while the oven heats up.”
“Okay.”
“And keep the foil over them until they’re heated through.”
“Okay.”
“There’s extra cheese in the blue bowl in the back and sauce in a jar but don’t add them until you take the foil off. They’ll burn—”
“Shut up, Jeannie!” I yell. “You’re not the boss of me!”
“Yes, I am!” she yells back. I hear her say more softly, “I am too the boss of you.”
I laugh. She’s right. She probably always will be the boss of me and I’m okay with that. I do as she says with the enchiladas. There’s nowhere to sit but on one of the stools at the counter. I look at the couch and I think about Ronnie. Before he went off his medication, when we were still happy, he always said the same thing when something bad happened. He’d always say, “Something good will come out of this.” I think he really believed that.
There are twelve bottles of wine still in the box at the end of the counter. I would dearly love to open one but the doctors said Jeannie can’t have any alcohol for seventy-two hours after the concussion and I don’t doubt the violence she would bring on me if I tried to drink without her. I don’t know how much longer we have to stay sober but Jeannie does. She set the timer on her phone. There’s no point in pretending we’re anyone we’re not.
I’ll have to clean up the apartment. I’ll have to pick up the envelopes. The police will eventually return the box where Meredith stashed the hand. Of all the gruesome things I’ve seen, of all the violence and the violations, the thought of her opening that closet door to plant the thing in there unnerves me the most. She must have had Ellis’s hand with her that whole day at work. Maybe she kept it in one of her refrigerators in our office. She must have had it in her bag when she drove me home. I had clementines; she had a human hand.
God, I know some crazy people.
She must have been in so much pain. Losing her son, first to drugs, then to the overdose. She must have felt so helpless, so angry. So alone.
I never gave my phone number to the students because I believed I was setting clear boundaries. Do I set them with everyone? Did I set them with Meredith? Was I just walling out her pain? Had she ever shown it to me? Or had she already set her plan in motion? If she had shown me, would I have let it in?
I put my forehead down on the counter. My wrist throbs from moving around so much. The doctor gave me pain pills but I’ve decided to stick with Tylenol. I’ve had enough drugs. The enchiladas smell delicious as they warm up and I’m drifting off to sleep. I shift my good hand and feel something sharp jab my wrist.
A white number ten envelope. Neat lettering slanted to the right. Red stamp from the Jefferson City Correctional Center.
I have fifteen years’ worth of unopened letters in those boxes. I remember when I stopped reading them, when I stopped taking my mother’s calls. It was when Jeannie went away to college. Aunt Gretchen never forced me to open the envelopes or ever pick up the phone. She thought I was trying to adjust, but that wasn’t it. Not really.
I couldn’t do it without Jeannie. I couldn’t read my mother’s words or listen to her voice without Jeannie there holding on to me. I was too young, too small, to bear the weight of all that worry, to withstand the force of my mother’s intensity when it was funneled through an ink pen or a phone speaker. She poured herself into every message, and every time I was blasted back into that tub, stinking of gasoline, tasting vomit and blood from her fingers scraping my throat. Every “I love you” awakened the memory of that wire cutting into my wrists; every “Oh, Anna” sounded like the clattering of the hacksaw dropping onto that blood-soaked floor.
Without Jeannie there to hold on to me, every message from my mother blew my world to pieces. So, when Jeannie left, I stopped reading them. I put them in boxes; I kept my answering machine on. I started building a wall of my own.
But what am I keeping back there? What am I walling in? It’s not protecting me or anyone I’ve ever cared about—not Jeannie, Ronnie, Karmen. Not even Meredith. Crazy Meredith, pushed over the edge by outrage for her wronged son.
I’m not eleven anymore. Surely to god I’ve seen enough horror for a lifetime and I’m still standing. Besides, Jeannie’s here, too. She’s singing in the bathtub, probably making sure no stray demons try to swoop in on me.
My mother’s handwriting hasn’t changed in fifteen years. I wonder if she still worries about me. I still worry about her. Pain shoots up my arm as I grip the envelope with my bandaged hand. I hear Jeannie whistling as I slip my finger under the paper flap.
The envelope opens with a whisper.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is a solitary endeavor. Getting a book out into the world takes the help of many talented people.
To my development editor, David Downing: I’m running out of original ways to sing your praises. It is much easier to write bravely knowing I have you to keep me from looking stupid. Now if I could only find a way to parlay your abilities into my everyday life.
Hannah Buehler had her capable hands full with copyedits on this beast. You are a trooper!
The team at Thomas & Mercer keeps impressing me with their professionalism, generosity, and enthusiasm. Many thanks to JoVon Sotak, Anh Schleup, Alan Turkus, Gracie Doyle, Tiffany Porkony, and a special holler to Jacque Ben-Zekry who has the unfortunate task of being my designated adult. I don’t envy you.
Thanks to my agent and friend, Christine Witthohn, for putting up with all my shit.
Sergeant Kendra Beckett of the Huntington Police Department did all she could to keep me from looking like an idiot when it came to the police stuff. All mistakes are my own. Seriously, she did all she could.
My sister, Monica Rimer, has long since given up expecting any normal questions from me. Thanks for being a font of gruesome information.
Huge thanks to my cousin, Meredith Michener, who just gamely offered up her good name to my book of mayhem. You are an optimist, my dear.
Deborah Reed, Helen Smith, Nancy Rommelmann: I will never be able to thank you enough for your eleventh-hour support. Dream Balls, indeed.
I wouldn’t be able to do this without the friendship and support of The Hitches—Debra Burge, Angela Jackson, Tenna Rusk, and especially Christy Smith, who let me assault her with some of the most insane ramblings I’ve ever uttered. You all are the best.
And finally, much love to friends and family, near and far, who keep me human.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2015 Toril Lavender
A fifteen-year veteran of morning radio, an avid traveler, and a so-so gardener, S.G. Redling currently lives in West Virginia.
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