“Okay, well, Dad, that’s connected to what I have to tell you. It’s very upsetting, but it’s about me, and, well, the summer after Jill died.”
“Okay.” Her father frowned with sympathy. “I know, you got so sad that summer. I could see it. You used to be happier, lighter, but after your mom went to the hospital, you changed.”
“No, Dad, it wasn’t Mom’s illness that changed me. It was something I did that summer. Julian was involved in it, too, but it’s about me.”
“I didn’t know you knew Julian Browne. How did you know him?”
“I didn’t, but I met him because of this thing that happened.” Her father blinked behind his glasses. “It’s a secret, and I kept it from you, Larry, and everybody. But it’s about to come out, and I want you to know about it from me. It happened in the woods by Connemara Road.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Dad—” Allie began, then hesitated. There was no going back if she told him, but she had to. “I did a terrible thing, and it changed the way I am. It changed who I am.”
“You would never do anything terrible. I never worried about you, not for a minute. You were a good girl.”
“I was until then.” Allie cringed. “See, there was a boy our age named Kyle Gallagher, and he was new. The police thought he committed suicide in the woods, alone. But I was there, and so were my friends, and we told him it was a game. Russian Roulette. We gave him a gun we found, and we didn’t think it was loaded—”
“Russian Roulette?” Her father’s hooded eyes flared with alarm. “You played Russian Roulette? You, Allie?”
“No, I didn’t, but he did, Kyle did. We told him we’d played it but we hadn’t, and I didn’t know the gun was loaded.” Allie collected herself. “Dad, just let me tell the story, and listen, okay?”
“Okay.” Her father nodded gravely, linking his fingers on the table, and Allie began at the beginning, like she had the other two times, but it felt harder now because she was telling it to her father, whose opinion mattered so much. She told him everything, how they’d been drinking, how they’d lied to Kyle about playing Russian Roulette, then how the gun had gone off and Kyle was dead.
Allie watched his face contort with anguish, and tears filled his eyes behind his bifocals. She couldn’t stop telling the story because she knew he had to hear it, once and for all. She poured her heart out about her nightmares and flashbacks, about how she couldn’t stop the instant replays, visualizing the gun being loaded and fired. She told him how she had kept it secret until David’s suicide, when she finally couldn’t take it anymore, then about meeting with Julian and Sasha after the funeral, the Pine Barrens and Larry, and she ended with her visit to Kyle’s mother.
When Allie finished, she was shaking. “Dad, I’m so, so sorry, about all of this. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t.”
“I know, I understand.” Her father’s expression was etched with agonized lines. His knobby shoulders sagged in his plaid shirt. “But you could have told me, you should have told me.”
“I was worried you wouldn’t love me anymore,” Allie blurted out, her voice sounding childish even to herself, and her father reached over with a deep moan, hugged her close, and didn’t let go. She could feel him frail in her embrace, and they clung to each other.
“Oh, honey, I’ll always love you,” her father whispered in her ear. “But there’s something I have to tell you, too.”
CHAPTER 105
Dr. Mark Garvey
Mark inhaled, his chest tight. It hurt him to see the bruises on Allie’s face. Her broken wrist. The bruising at her throat. He should have spoken up. He should have told her. She could have been killed last night. His beloved daughter could have been murdered because of him. Allie had risked her life to find out something he had already known.
Mark met the glistening eyes of his daughter, and Allie looked like she had back then, that awful summer, the worst one of their lives. He didn’t know how to tell her what he had to tell her. He never imagined he would have to, but he hadn’t known she’d been there with Kyle Gallagher. Mark had made so many mistakes that summer.
“Dad, what is it?” Allie asked, teary and mystified.
“Honey, that was such a bad summer, you remember.”
“Right, I know.”
“I was really hoping the 5K would work out, but it was a disaster. Remember? No one came.”
“I remember.” Allie nodded.
“We had that big fight at the house later, remember? Fran called me out, and she was right about that, she really was. I failed your mother. I tried to turn it around, but it was too late.”
“You tried your best, Dad.” Allie patted his hand, and it struck Mark as such a sweet gesture, so like her.
“But my best wasn’t good enough. It really wasn’t. That weekend, it all came to a head.” Mark bit his lip, which trembled. He didn’t want to cry in front of his daughter, even now. A feeling of deepest despair washed over him, taking him right back to that day. “Remember, I had spent months on the 5K, and I think it was my way of coping with Jill’s death. Setting up the meetings, the waivers, the organizing. It was a way of avoiding my grief.”
“I knew that, Dad.” Allie’s tone was gentle.
“I coped badly, and what I did only made it worse for your mother and you. It isolated her, and you got lost in the shuffle. I told her I was looking out for you, but I wasn’t. I was trying to, but I didn’t do a good enough job. I let you down, too, and I realized it that weekend.”
“You didn’t let me down—”
“No, I did, you have to let me say this to you.” Mark twisted his wedding ring, which he still wore. “You were so upset that morning, Sunday morning, that your mom had to stay in the hospital, you were scared of losing her like you lost Jill. I knew you would be, I could see it. I knew it was my fault, I’d let her go downhill, like Fran said. I failed you, and I didn’t save your mom, and I hurt you so badly, which cut me to the quick—”
“Dad, really—”
“No, listen to me.” Mark remembered that day like it was happening right in front of him, and he entered his own personal nightmare. His past. “So remember, your mother didn’t come home from the hospital, and you got so upset that she would have electroshock, that you were losing her, that she would die, and you ran up to your room and closed the door. As a father, a man, I felt so ashamed, so ashamed. Me, the one everybody relies on and looks up to. The breadwinner. The dad. I was in pain, Allie. So much pain. I had been, for so long.”
Allie squeezed his hand, but didn’t interrupt.
“So I went out, I left the house, I went to the woods. I hurt so much, and I wanted to make it stop. I knew the gun was there, in the woods off Connemara Road. It wasn’t my gun, it was your mother’s. She bought it, and I buried it there.”
“What?” Allie’s mouth dropped open, in utter shock.
“Your mother bought it one day, after Jill died. She bought it in a gun store, with bullets, too, and I found the bag and realized she was really thinking about killing herself. She would say so from time to time, but I thought she was being dramatic. But when she bought the gun, it scared me, really scared me, and I thought, I have to get rid of this gun. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t throw it away, but I didn’t want it in the house anymore, or the car, or anywhere Mom could get it.”
Allie gasped, her eyes widening. “You mean the gun that Julian found was yours? Mom’s?”
“Yes. So I wrapped it in an old newspaper and buried it in the woods by the bent tree. I scratched off the registration number so nobody could trace it back to her. I buried it without the bullets so nobody would hurt themselves if they dug it up. I even checked on it sometimes, at night, to make sure no one took it. I thought I was being so responsible, but I was wrong about that, too. Mom got mad that I took it, but I thought I was saving her life.”
Mark felt a wave of shame. He’d kept the secret for twenty years,
just like Allie had. She was her father’s daughter, in the end. Her hands flew to her face, and she began to cry, but Mark couldn’t stop now.
“So I went out there on Sunday, and I dug up the gun, unwrapped it, and I loaded it with a bullet. I put it to my head.” Mark’s throat thickened with emotion, but he stayed in control. Back then, that day, he’d been crying on his knees, holding the gun to his temple. “But the thought of you stopped me, Allie. You saved my life. I told you I was your life preserver, but you were mine.”
Tears ran freely down Allie’s cheeks, and Mark touched Allie’s good arm to comfort her.
“I couldn’t leave you alone, all by yourself. Not with your mother so sick in the hospital. Not with Jill gone. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to you. I couldn’t imagine that you would survive that. I knew I had to stay alive, for you.”
Mark squeezed Allie’s arm, to steady her. He had to finish the story. Then he realized his daughter already knew the ending. She had lived the ending, not him.
“The next night I heard that a young boy, Kyle Gallagher, had committed suicide. It was in the same spot where I buried the gun. I realized what must have happened. He must have used our gun to kill himself, and I must’ve left the bullet inside it.” Mark wiped tears from his eyes, still guilt-ridden over the boy’s death. “Allie, I felt terrible, but I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t go to the police or even to his mother, like you did today. I told myself I didn’t tell because I didn’t want to go to prison, and you would be alone. But the truth was, I felt so terribly ashamed. I didn’t have the guts you had today. I’m not as brave as you, honey.”
Allie doubled over, dissolving into tears. Sobs wracked her body, and Mark felt his heart break. He put his arms around her and held her close.
“Allie, I’m so sorry, I’m so very sorry. I wish I had said something, and if I had, you wouldn’t have had to go through what you have, for the past twenty years. You could have been murdered because I kept a secret I never should’ve kept, and it caused you to keep a secret you never should’ve kept. I’m so very sorry, honey, and I love you from the bottom of my heart, as I hope you still love me.”
Allie shifted in his arms, sobbing. “I love you, Dad, I do, but I think I’m going to throw up. I have to go—”
“I’m so sorry.” Mark let her go, and Allie jumped up from the table, covered her mouth, and ran crying into the house.
CHAPTER 106
Allie Garvey
Allie raced into their powder room, closed the door behind her, and leaned over the sink, gasping. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest heaved, and she leaned forward, choking. Her throat hurt as it had last night. She gulped air, dry-heaving. She put her good hand on the sink for support.
Her body sagged between her shoulders, and without the sink, she would have fallen to her knees. She would have collapsed with what she knew. Not that her father had buried the gun, not just that. Not just that he’d loaded it. Not even that he’d wanted to commit suicide. Or that her mother had, too, that awful summer.
Allie had remembered something else while her father was talking, as he told the story. It had triggered something that she’d thought was a déjà vu, but when he’d told her how he’d gone to Connemara Road, dug up the gun, loaded it, and held it to his temple, it had begun to dawn on her with horror that she’d already known that her father had done all that. Allie had begun to remember that she had seen that, herself. Because she had been there.
Allie’s chest heaved, and she wheezed in and out, struggling to breathe as the memory surfaced from the depths of her subconscious, recovered from whatever subterranean recess it had been buried in, all this time. She’d thought she’d been visualizing a thumb loading a bullet in the gun, but it hadn’t been her imagination, it had been a memory. It had been a trauma, and her brain had hid it deep. What happened that weekend came to life in front of her eyes, right now, as if she were experiencing it in real time and it was happening to her, right this very instant.
The whole weekend was so horrible, after her mother had been so out of it at the 5K, then the fight between her father and Fran, and Sasha hearing it all from upstairs. Then Sunday was worse, with Allie so upset that her mother had been admitted to the hospital, and she fought with her father, blaming him, yelling at him, calling him out for not taking care of her mother, for making her worse. Allie ran upstairs to her bedroom and never felt so awful, so lost, so terrified for her mother. Her mother was in a mental hospital, and Allie was worried she might never come home.
She realized that she’d been terrible to her father, and that was the moment she understood he wasn’t all-powerful but a human being with faults like everyone else. She felt guilty for the way she’d treated him, and she wanted to apologize. She went downstairs, but the front door had just closed behind her father. He’d left the house. He was going somewhere on foot, and Allie didn’t understand. She felt afraid, worried for him.
She left the house and followed him at a safe distance, so he couldn’t see her. He went down the street and around the corner, then she followed him as he entered the woods off Connemara Road. She stayed behind him, hiding in the trees so he couldn’t see or hear her. He hadn’t seen her, he’d been too distraught to focus on anything but his own anguish, but she’d seen him, she knew that now.
She watched him from behind the thick trees, and he began to dig under the bent tree, to her astonishment. She didn’t know how he knew Julian’s gun was there, and if he knew, why he hadn’t yelled at her, but she watched him as he unearthed the gun, unwrapped it from the newspaper, and loaded the gun with a bullet. His thumb had pressed it into the cylinder. Allie remembered it now. She hadn’t remembered it before. The memory had been buried until today, when he told her what he’d done.
Now, Allie knew who loaded the gun because she had watched him load the gun. It wasn’t Julian, it was her father. She had seen her father load the gun. She had buried the memory, only to have it recovered now. She’d watched horrified as he closed the cylinder and raised the gun to his temple, just like Kyle would do only hours later, in the exact same spot.
Her mouth had dropped open in shock at what she was seeing, at what he was doing, but she froze, paralyzed. She wanted to shout to her father to stop but no sound came from her mouth. She couldn’t utter a single word. Her father was going to kill himself. He was raising a gun to his head. He was going to fire a bullet into his brain. He was all she had left. Her mother was gone, Jill was gone, and her father was going to leave her, too. Allie would be alone. She would have nobody. No family, no nothing.
Suddenly her father lowered the gun, wrapped it back up, and put it back into the hole, and began to cover it with dirt. Allie turned and ran all the way home, not wanting to be discovered. She got home in no time, panting and crying, running upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, to cry there, to keep what she could of them. And then she’d seen her mother’s tranquilizers on the night table.
Allie was hysterical, desperate, terrified. She tore off the cap and gulped some pills down with water. She had to get numb. She had to forget what she knew. She couldn’t bear the thought that her father wanted to kill himself. She had to escape her own mind. She stayed high all day and took more pills. That night, she felt so calm from the pills, floating on a cloud when she met David at the trail. She felt relieved that Kyle wasn’t with Sasha and Julian, so Allie drank vodka, fast. She got more and more out of it. She remembered David’s kisses and Kyle being so late. Allie was totally wasted by the time Kyle came. She tried to tell him not to play the game, but it all happened so fast, Kyle played, and the gun had gone off.
Her father hadn’t unloaded the gun, and Allie knew that now. She knew that then, too, but after Kyle had shot himself, that knowledge had been swallowed up in her memory of Kyle putting the gun to his head the same way that her father had, in exactly the same spot, only this time the gun had gone off, killing Kyle.
Allie realized with dread that she had known all al
ong that the gun was loaded. All this time, in the back of her mind, her memory of what her father had done with the gun lay beneath what Kyle had done, and all of her sleepless nights, grisly instant replays, nightmares, health issues hadn’t been only about Kyle. They’d been about her father, too. Allie had been obsessed with Kyle’s death, and her father was why.
Tears flowed down her face. Her knees buckled. Her father was at the door, calling her, knocking. He’d loaded the gun that killed Kyle. Someone knew all this time.
And that someone was her.
EPILOGUE
Allie Garvey
The winter sun filtered through the window, washing the kitchen in a pale light, and Allie sipped her tea, sitting in her cozy bathrobe and flannel nightgown, while Larry sat across the table from her in his sweats. His head was buried behind the sports page but his bare feet rested on hers under the table, a habit of theirs.
We’re holding feet, she’d told him once, and they both had laughed.
The Sunday newspapers lay scattered on the tabletop, but she’d read her favorite sections. She could’ve cleared their plates, but she didn’t feel like rushing to do that, either. The TV played on low volume on the counter, showing political talking heads until noon, when the NFL programming machine came on, with its trumpets and transformers, gearing them up for the Eagles game, as if anybody in Philadelphia needed help getting excited over any team. Her father, her in-laws, one of Larry’s brothers, his wife, and their two boys were coming over, so there would be a lot to do, but Allie had already gone food shopping, and right now, she found a moment of stillness with her thoughts. She inhaled slowly, then exhaled.
Her tea had gone lukewarm, but she sipped it anyway, feeling like she was catching her breath, maybe for the first time since everything had happened. There had been tears, reporters, and the Bakerton police, who had been called by Kyle’s mother and had interviewed Allie and her father about Kyle’s death. Larry had held her hand throughout, and Barton had represented her, having advised her to tell them the whole truth and nothing but, which she had done. No charges were filed against her or her father, as Barton had predicted, and she had finally stopped worrying that they were going to change their minds or listening for the phone to ring. Julian had pleaded guilty to their attempted murders, as well as to Sasha’s murder, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. Larry had been satisfied that justice had been achieved, though Allie was less sure. The district attorney in New York had yet to charge Julian for David’s murder, and it wasn’t moot to Allie, though it may have been legally.
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