The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  It’s Eric they call at the hospital. Eric, who is still listed as the emergency contact in my medical records. I don’t even know they’ve done it until he’s there. So quickly, he probably blew every red light he encountered on the way. A trench coat thrown over the running clothes he sleeps in most nights. He comes through the curtains that hang around my gurney, and for a second, I forget that he’s not my husband anymore. In that moment he’s the boy I knew in college, the one who wanted to do nothing but comfort me.

  I cry into his shirt, though my eye is almost swollen shut, and the pain is excruciating. He smooths down my hair, his other hand gentle on my back, and I know he’s afraid he’ll hurt me if he does any more than that. He probably will, though what does it matter? One pain crowds out another, all competing for primacy. The worst is the part of me that misses him, springing to life again. It’s the part I’ve tamped down with my guilt and my obsession with these dead girls, the part of me that knows I hurt myself too, perhaps irreparably, when I hurt Eric.

  “What happened?” he asks, and I can see his face is wet too when he pulls back to look at me. A good man, I think. He has always been such a good man, even when he couldn’t be what I needed. Even when he could not forgive me.

  “He went crazy. Attacked me,” I say, though my voice is hoarse and the inside of my cheek is swelling. I can feel the deep gouges of teeth marks with my tongue, and I sound like I’ve had Novocain, just a little slurred on the damaged side. The muscles in my throat ache when I talk. “I had a knife. I think I might have . . . I think I might have killed him.”

  “Shh,” Eric says, running a hand down the good side of my face, wiping away the tears there. But I see it, when he makes eye contact with the nurse beside me, who is starting an IV, looking for confirmation. I can see that he wasn’t told anything upon his arrival.

  I want to ask him why he’s so surprised. I want to ask him how he, of all people, would not know that I’m capable of this. I woke from my nightmares, night after night, for years with him beside me. I told him, again and again, what I’d done in those dreams. I know now what it was. I know that I was preparing for the moment when I would take hold of a knife and have to use it. To save myself. Always, even in my nightmares, I’m always saving myself.

  “What can I do?” he asks. Always wanting to make it better. Always wanting me to be okay.

  “Call Andrea,” I say, feeling my eyes fill again. The pain overcomes even the steeliest of my principles and all my pettiness. “And maybe call my mom.”

  * * *

  * * *

  MY MOTHER ARRIVES before Andrea. She starts crying as soon as she sees me, though she tries her best to stanch the tears as soon as they start. Still, it’s something, after so many years of being bulletproof. She presses a palm to my good cheek, and it is like waking up after having my tonsils out as a child and feeling my mother’s cool hand against my face in the dark of the recovery room.

  Eric leaves when my mother arrives, kissing me tenderly on the crown of the head before he departs. It’s in that moment, when I catch the brief scent of perfume on his T-shirt, that I realize. There’s someone waiting for him, back there. Back in the bedroom we used to share. He left someone to come here. I give his hand a squeeze as he pulls away.

  My mother sits with me as we wait for the portable X-ray for my ribs, and the CT scan for my head, and the doctor to pronounce me mildly concussed, with three fractured ribs and some relatively minor soft tissue damage. They decide to keep me overnight for observation, though I’m sure my mother has bribed whoever needed to be bribed to get me an overnight stay in a private room.

  Olsen and Hardy show up just as they’re getting ready to transfer me. Olsen has the good sense to look grim when he enters. Hardy, on the other hand, looks almost impressed. I can’t tell if it’s the shape I’m in or if it’s because she’s heard what I’ve done to Colin.

  “We’re just here to take a quick statement,” Olsen says.

  “Is he alive?” I ask, before he can ask any of his own questions. Olsen and Hardy exchange a look. “Colin. Is he alive?” I repeat. Olsen is the one who finally answers.

  “He’s in a coma,” he says. “They think . . . they think his brain might have been starved of oxygen for too long. He lost a lot of blood at the scene. They don’t know if he’s going to wake up.”

  “She’s not saying anything,” my mother cuts in, her chin pointed upward at Olsen’s face. Her distrust of cops is palpable, though this is the first time she’s ever been on this side of the exchange. More often, she spent her time browbeating the members of the Chicago Police Department for not doing their jobs to her satisfaction.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I say, my voice little more than a whisper, wanting nothing but to have this over with. “It was self-defense.”

  I know what I’m going to say. I’ve been thinking about it since my last visit with Ted, since he told me he would take the plea deal. Since I made the decision that I could not simply let Colin live out his life after what he’d done. Not when he was likely to do it again.

  “Will you just listen to me, for once in your life?” my mother says. “You’re not going to talk to anyone until our attorney is present.”

  “Mrs. Reese,” Hardy says, her head tilted in a way that might be slightly deferential, or perhaps only inquisitive. “We just want to hear what happened. We can see your daughter has been through a terrible ordeal, and all we want is to speak with her briefly so we can get all the facts straight as quickly as possible.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, though my voice is so hoarse it comes out as little more than a croak. Hardy doesn’t wait for confirmation from my mother before she begins.

  “Can you take me through what happened tonight?” she asks, flipping open a narrow steno pad.

  “I was out at a bar. Mathilde’s,” I reply, and Hardy and Olsen both crowd in closer, as I can do little more than whisper. “I drank too much. Called Ava Vreeland to see if she could pick me up, but she was at work.”

  “Why not take a cab? Or an Uber?” Hardy asks.

  “I was drunk. I guess I was really hoping Ava would come meet me. I didn’t want to go home yet.”

  “So how did Colin end up in the mix?” Now it’s Olsen asking the questions.

  “I guess Ava called him. Told him to come get me,” I reply. It was a stroke of luck, really, thinking back on it. I never really expected that I knew Ava well enough to be able to anticipate what she’d do in that situation. I had contingencies. I would try again, under different circumstances, to end up in a room alone with Colin. But that it was so easy, and that it came together on my first try, was both thrilling and unsettling. I almost didn’t trust it, thought my eyes were playing tricks, when Colin arrived.

  “So he took you home?” Hardy asked. I nodded, though the movement made me slightly dizzy.

  “And I got this idea that I’d record him.”

  “Record him?” Hardy asks, glancing at Olsen.

  “To see if he’d admit he was involved with . . .” I pause, swallowing hard, blades in my throat. I have to be careful here. I don’t know if explaining all of it—how much I really know of what Colin and Ava have done—will put me in danger. With Ava still out there. With Colin in a coma, the near-fatal wound in his arm from my pocketknife.

  The more I admit of the truth, the more danger I’m in. From the police, who might see the call to Ava, the concealed weapon, the invitation for Colin to come back to my apartment, as premeditation. And from Ava, who might still see me as a threat to her own safety.

  “. . . if he was involved with Sarah Ketchum’s murder. To see if he and Ted were working together.” I swallow again, hard, motion for the plastic cup of water on the tray next to the bed. Olsen hands it to me, and I take a long drink.

  “He found the recorder and smashed it.
We scuffled. And I was able to get the knife from my purse,” I say, pressing my hand to my torn-up mouth. Tears come easily, burning their way out of my damaged eye.

  “So you had the knife on you, at the bar?” Hardy asks.

  “I carry it with me,” I reply, my voice choked with tears and strain. “My sister . . .” I trail off, motioning to my mother.

  “Her sister was kidnapped when she was just a child,” my mother says, picking up where I leave off.

  “We’re aware of the case,” Hardy replies in a solemn, folksy way. “I am so sorry that happened to your family. And now this.”

  But now Olsen seems guarded, his eyes on me.

  “How long have you carried a knife?” he asks.

  “On and off, I guess, for years,” I reply, drinking more water, trying to clear the rasp from my voice.

  “And when exactly did you get it from your bag?” he asks.

  “I don’t really remember,” I reply. I know what he’s thinking. That it’s difficult to take a beating like this and have the wherewithal to retrieve a weapon from a bag. Odds are, Colin wouldn’t have let me get to it. It’s why I had it on me. It’s why the knife was open, tucked into the back of my jeans. Still, I feign confusion. “Maybe after he hit me. After I was on the floor.”

  “So you’re able to get the knife,” Hardy says. “And you’re on the floor. When do you use it? Was he on top of you?”

  I know what she’s doing. Blood-spatter analysis will show exactly how we were standing when I stabbed him. I’ve seen enough TV to know that. She’s hoping to catch me in a lie, something they can disprove.

  “No,” I say. “He pulled me up by the hair, had me by the neck, when I . . . used the knife.” I show them the bruises on my neck.

  “And he didn’t see that you had the knife?” Hardy asks. “You were able to get it from your purse, without him realizing it.”

  “I guess,” I whisper. My head is starting to hollow, fill with air, like a stretching helium balloon. The knife. A mistake. I probably should have used something else, something that would not look so deliberate.

  “I don’t know,” I say, but the question is slipping away. I remember the sharp glass edges of my podcast award. Such a poetic weapon; what a missed opportunity. When the thought strikes me, it’s so funny that I burst into a fit of giggles. Painful, agonizing giggles, my ribs crackling with pain as I realize I can’t stop. Olsen and Hardy glance first at each other and then at my mother. All appear mystified, and a bit unnerved, by my outburst. I clap a hand to my ruined mouth, trying to stop looking like such a fucking maniac. Like I’ve lost my grip. Fat tears roll down my face. My mother stands, both of her hands up, as if ready to fend off the two detectives, riot-cop style.

  “Okay,” she says. “I think that’s enough for now. I think she’s had enough tonight, don’t you?”

  Hardy nods, considering me like I’ve spontaneously started speaking in tongues, but she hands me her card.

  “If you think of anything else.”

  I take the card, still choking back laughter. Olsen doesn’t look at me as the two detectives leave.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHEN I SLEEP, I dream of Ava. She comes in the night, slipping by my mother, who sleeps on the nearby love seat, propped up with pillows and covered with a hospital blanket. Ava hovers over me, backlit by the fluorescence spilling through the door to the hallway. I can’t see her face in the fuzz of darkness and the pain medicine seeping through my IV, but I know it’s her.

  “What did you do?” she whispers, her voice almost a moan. “Marti. What have you done?”

  I try to speak through my thickened mouth, swollen with blood and sealed with the numbing chill of narcotics. I try to tell her that I only did what she’s already done. Pressed my thumb against the scales. Played god, for a moment.

  I try to ask her if she’s here to kill me.

  She sits at the edge of my bed, reaching out and tracing her fingertips, featherlight, over the rawness of my face. My swollen eye, my split lip, down to the bruises on my neck. Her brother’s fingerprints left in dark blood under my skin. Her eyes suddenly bright with tears. Angelic, I think, as I reach a tingling hand to her, as she enfolds my fingers in hers. We have both done terrible things; we are joined in that. I wonder where I fall, in her scales of justice, in her ideas of vengeance. I wonder, too, if she is afraid of me.

  “Do you know how many lives I’ve saved?” she asks, a whisper. “How could God begrudge me a single one, for the hundreds I’ve kept safe for him?” Her hand is soft and dry against mine. She could kill me now. She probably knows a thousand ways to do it.

  This is the test of Ted’s belief in her restraint. Because if she were going to take another life, it would certainly be mine. It would certainly be now. I, who have taken her most beloved from her. Taken from her the person she would kill for.

  “How many have you saved?” she asks, a challenge.

  I can’t tell her how many. Because I don’t know. All the lives Colin would have taken, had he been allowed back out in the world. My own, at the very least. But I think she knows this already. I think she understands, as she brushes at the shining trails on her cheeks. After all, she brought me into this. She used me as a tool for her own ends. My sister’s story. That email address. She used me to set the trap that took Dylan Jacobs’s life. She should have known that I would not be able to stand it, if I found out the truth.

  “Are we even now, Marti?” she asks. A final question.

  Even. I understand what she’s asking. She’s asking me to give her a chance to pay her own penance. To keep to myself the things that I know, so she will do the same.

  And I know that, in a just world, she and I would both be locked away somewhere. Because people like us, who are capable of the things we have done, should not be allowed to escape punishment. But I have not believed in justice since Maggie was taken. And so I do not believe that a thing like this can be put right. It can only be endured, in the end.

  And so, like a benevolent god, I squeeze her hand in assent.

  * * *

  * * *

  ANDREA IS THERE when I wake up. Holding my hand, just as Ava did. I think she is Ava still, before I open my eyes and see that she is gone.

  “Oh, Marti,” Andrea says, looking dawn stricken, a pallor only sleeplessness brings, her eyes a bit deeper set than I remember. My mouth is gummy with dehydration and dried blood, and when I reach for the cup of water on my bedside table, she hands it to me. My face throbs as I put my lips to the straw. It hurts to breathe, like someone slipped a screwdriver between my ribs and is now prying at them, watching them grind and pop against each other. Everyone’s right, about how it’s worse the second day. I feel like I’ve been trampled.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Colin,” I whisper back, pressing my fingertips to my face. My eye socket feels raw and puffy. I want a mirror. I want to assess the damage for myself.

  “But why . . . ,” she begins, and then stops.

  She knows me, my best friend. She knows that I would not let her daughter grow up in a world in which Colin McCarty walked the streets. She knows that I will walk through fire for her, as she has walked through fire for me.

  She takes my hand and leans forward to press her lips to my knuckles. She’s seen them swollen and red a hundred times, from sparring, from battering against the heavy bag. They are not so, this morning. They are the one part of me that is perfect, unscathed. They tell her, it seems, all she needs to know.

  * * *

  * * *

  “WHAT HAPPENED LAST night?” Olsen asks as the nurse removes my IV. It’s the last thing to be done before I’m released. Andrea has brought me fresh clothes from my apartment, and I’m desperate to get out of this hospital gown. To get home and shower.

  I didn’t expect him t
o return so soon. Part of me didn’t expect him to return at all. But here he is, looking like he, too, has had a sleepless night. Looking like I felt, once. Like I knew the truth of something, and nobody else would say it out loud.

  “Right to it, huh?” I reply, walking gingerly into the little bathroom adjoining my room but leaving the door slightly ajar as I change behind it. “Are you asking in a professional capacity?”

  “Believe me, Marti, I don’t want to be asking in my professional capacity,” he replies.

  “Why is that?” I ask as I emerge from the bathroom, in a T-shirt and jeans that make me feel a lot more like myself. I’m even getting used to my reflection, though it was a tremendous shock this morning. My left cheek is swollen and purple. My eye is black, wrinkled like the skin of a rotting plum. My lip is puffy and split on one side.

  “Because I don’t want to have to ask you if you brought him back to your apartment last night with the intention of killing him. If you had that knife on you, instead of in your purse. I don’t want to ask you how Colin McCarty got the drop on you when Jimmy outweighs him by fifty pounds and I watched you dispatch him with no trouble at all.”

  “Did you find the tape recorder at my place?” I ask, dabbing some of the antibiotic ointment the doctors have prescribed me on my lip. Olsen eyes me carefully. As if I’m dangerous, the sort to set a trap for someone like him. As if I’m Ava.

  “On the floor.”

  “Were you able to get anything off it?” I ask, because I know Olsen well enough to know that he’s dogged in that way. He’ll want the answers to every question my little crime scene of an apartment provides, and a big question is what might be on the smashed tape recorder they probably found in a pool of Colin’s blood.

  “They’re working on it,” Olsen replies.