The Girls I've Been

by Tess Sharpe

  It’s why I sent Iris away, isn’t it?

  But my finger doesn’t move toward the trigger. I hear sirens in the distance. Any minute now.

  His smile widens despite the burn. “You’re gonna let them take me in,” he breathes. He gloats it out like a banshee cackle and I hate that he’s right. “Stupid kid. Lucky me.”

  “You’re not worth the bullet.” It’s weakness and truth wrapped together. I’m choosing something I’m not ready to name over what I know is the surest survival route.

  The sirens get louder.

  “You hid good,” he says. “But you won’t be able to hide anymore. I know it all. What you look like, where you live, who you care about. He’ll know, too.” His grin stretches the lace-melted burn, ghastly wide and gaping. “He’s going to find you.”

  He says it like it’s a revelation instead of the guiding truth of my life, and then I’m the one laughing.

  “He was always going to find me,” I say. “But today was the day I learned I was ready for anything. Even him. So thanks. I’ve been feeling kind of insecure. But now I know: It wasn’t just luck last time. I’m good.” I smile, one of those sharp almost-snarl smiles I know creeps him out. “I’m great.”

  “You’re dead,” he says, but there’s a thread of defeat as sirens wail and the spray of gravel kicks up against the barn wall, brakes squealing to a halt.

  I shake my head. “No. I’m just getting started.” They come bursting in then. Jessie and Lee, who has the kind of wild eyes I haven’t seen in five years.

  Safe.

  The relief sucks all the fight out of me, and I’ve got to dig my heels into the ground to fight the undertow. More deputies arrive and it’s a blur of noise and action, my ears fading in and out, blood trickling down my side from the road rash. I hand the gun to Jessie as the sheriff snaps handcuffs onto Duane and then Lee is blotting out my view.

  “Where’s Wes?” I demand.

  “He’s okay,” she says. “He helped get everyone out. They’re all okay.”

  My eyes almost roll back in my head in relief. I sag against her, my knees liquid for a second before I’m straightening again, searching for Iris. I don’t see her.

  Duane’s still laughing as they lead him away, the sound floating up to hook around the barn beams like cracked horseshoes, the worst kind of luck.

  Lee’s arms wrap around me so tight I yelp because it hurts. And then she’s yelling for paramedics and snapping her fingers at people with one hand while the other keeps hold of me and shakes so minutely I can’t see it, but I can feel it.

  “Iris,” I say, but I get flanked by Jessie and Lee, half supported, half walked out of the barn. The ambulance lights are flashing in the distance, and I come to a total stop when I see the stretcher the EMTs are wheeling toward us.

  “No way,” I say.

  “No arguing,” Lee says back, and she pushes me on the stretcher and I go, even though I was planning on protesting more. I fall back like I need to, and who knew my legs were that numb? I didn’t.

  The world swoops and fades a little, but I can hear Lee the whole time, so I know it’s safe. I close my eyes. Just for a second. Then I’ll sit up and pay attention.

  But I don’t sit up. I fade out completely, because I know Lee will be there. And Iris. And Wes. Everyone’s safe.

  I know that when the world sharpens again, I’ll have to face the truth I’ve been running from: that I was never safe.

  That I’ll never be safe.

  Not until I tilt the ground back to me . . . for good this time.

  Part Four

  . . . it’s just another thing to lose.

  (August 8–30)

  — 62 —

  1:20 p.m. (38 minutes free)

  2 safe-deposit keys (hidden in jeans pocket)

  I come back to earth fast when the nurses at the hospital start cleaning out the road rash. Even with the lidocaine, it stings and throbs. They dig bits of gravel and dirt and debris out of my shoulders and side, and Lee keeps trying to hold my hand while I keep telling her to go check on Iris and Wes: Go find them, go check on them, please, Lee, please. I need to know where they are.

  “Please,” I beg, but she shakes her head, just as stubborn.

  “I’m gonna find them, then,” I threaten, but when I try to resist the nurse, she pins me to the bed, not with her body, but with a look that could have been honed only by an emergency room full of that particular Northern California flavor of people.

  “You want this to get infected?” the nurse asks me.

  “I want my friends,” I say, not to her, but to Lee.

  “She always this way?” the nurse asks Lee.

  “She’s a tough one,” Lee says, a note of pride sparkling in her voice.

  “She’s right here and doesn’t need to be talked about like she isn’t,” I say grumpily.

  “Sorry, hon,” the nurse says with a smile. “You did a great job today. Heard the deputies talking about it.”

  “Please go find Wes and Iris,” I say to Lee.

  “Drop it, Nora,” she says, and my mouth shuts with an annoyed click, because she never uses that line unless she means it. She’s stark white still, like she’s just figured out how to breathe again.

  “Are you okay? Should they check you out?” I ask, and oh, that was so the wrong thing to say. The sarcastic eyebrow arch I get back is so quelling that I almost fall into line then and there.

  “I’m going to grab some more gauze,” the nurse says, and as soon as she leaves the room, Lee’s shoulders set.

  “Do we need to go?” she asks me.

  She keeps rubbing her fingers against her thumb, skittish in a way she rarely is. One wrong word from me, and I’m going to end up across the ocean before I can talk my way out of it.

  I shake my head. “We’re good. It’s all good.”

  She sags in relief, and I should feel terrible, shouldn’t I?

  All I feel is a different kind of relief, even though adding to the pile of secrets I’ve kept from her is not ideal. She’ll catch me someday, and it’s going to be a reckoning I’ll never be ready for.

  Just as long as it’s not today. Today has been bad enough. I want to sleep for a month. I want to never wake up. And I really, really want my mouth and shoulder to stop hurting.

  “Will you go and check on Wes and Iris for me now?” I ask.

  “Nora,” she says, and it’s just my name, but then she starts crying, and it’s the most surprising thing that has happened all day. That’s when it hits me: She hasn’t been refusing to find Wes and Iris so she could stay with me. She’s been refusing because someone’s hurt. Wes. Wes is hurt, and this is when she’s going to tell me. When we’re alone and I’m already sitting down and my entire vision tunnels like there’s no light left in the world, and I’m trying to breathe, trying to steel myself to hear it for real, but she just keeps crying and not talking and I really need her to talk now.

  “Oh, God, what did you do to her?”

  I croak out his name.

  He’s standing in the doorway, and even from here, I can smell the smoke on his skin and clothes. There’s a bandage on his arm, but that’s it. I start to scramble out of the hospital bed, but I’m yanked back by the IV. I feel sick and reeling, from Wes is trapped to Wes is okay to worst-case scenario. Because it’s almost always the worst-case scenario. But not today.

  “I just got away from my mom and checked on Iris,” he says. “She’s good. They just need to do a few more tests. Um, Lee?”

  Lee is trying her hardest to sniff back the tears, and failing.

  “Nora?” he asks, needing a life raft when it comes to my crying sister because, well, it isn’t really a sight anyone has seen, in, you know, ever.

  I shake my aching head and try really hard to hold it back.

  But the tears tric
kle down my cheeks all the same, and instead of running away—which, let’s be honest, is what I would’ve done if confronted with two people in tears—Wes walks into the room. He sits down on the edge of the bed and he curls his hand around my foot like it’s the one place he’s sure I’m not hurt, and the three of us sit there, a broke-then-taped-together little unit we’ve somehow formed through love and movie nights and hikes through the woods, patched-up wounds and shared books and blackmail schemes I will never regret. A family reunited when I was sure we wouldn’t be again.

  The world outside of this is harsh, and so am I. But here, with them, it is safe to cry.

  — 63 —

  3:00 p.m. (138 minutes free)

  2 safe-deposit keys (hidden in jeans pocket)

  After they’ve cleaned all the gunk out of my shoulder and side and made sure I’m not gonna slip into a coma, they finally let me see Iris. Then they release me, and the doctor gives me the number of a dentist—I have an emergency appointment tomorrow morning with her to fix that back molar.

  Lee agrees to go downstairs to get my antibiotics at the pharmacy while I sit with Iris, and Wes has to go appease his own parents, so it’s just me, hovering in her doorway.

  She’s repurposed her hospital gown as a robe over her pink rayon slip. I know the little blue flowers embroidered along the neck very well . . . or my fingers do. Getting through all Iris’s layers—metaphorical and decorative—is a slow and careful practice.

  At first, I think she’s sleeping, but the second I step into the room, her eyes fly open.

  “Nora,” she breathes.

  “Hey.” I shuffle closer. My side is throbbing, and I don’t think that’s gonna change anytime soon, so I’m trying to ignore it.

  “Are you okay? I saw Wes—”

  “Me too. I’m fine. Lee’s just getting the meds for me. Are you okay?”

  Apparently the hospital is the place for crying, because her eyes well up.

  “Please get me out of this hospital,” she says, her brown eyes getting so big and liquid and miserable, they’re bordering into Bambi-after-his-mother-was-shot territory. “Please. I hate hospitals. They said my head was fine. They gave me painkillers. They’re just not letting me go because my mom’s still in New York.”

  “Did you get ahold of her?”

  She nods and then winces, her hand flying up to touch the huge bump on her forehead. It’s a deeper purple than before. She looks awful, pale and bruised and smoke-smudged. She looks beautiful, alive and breathing and as much mine as I am hers. I want to crawl into that bed and curl around her and take every inch of her pain away.

  “She’s flying home. But she won’t get back until tomorrow morning. I don’t want to stay here. Please. I want out of here and a heating pad and a silly movie to zone out in front of. Nora. Please.”

  She grabs my hand and she squeezes almost harder than she did in the bank.

  “Okay,” I say, because the way she looks at me is tinged with the kind of bad that makes the back of my throat bitter. “I’ll get Lee to fix it.”

  “You will?”

  “Promise.”

  It takes two phone calls, an argument with the head nurse, and a hushed three-way conversation with Iris’s doctor and her mother on the phone before they release Iris into Lee’s custody. When they finally come in to unhook her and let her get dressed, the smile that blooms over her face is like sunshine across miles of snow.

  They put her in a wheelchair, too, but she doesn’t protest. “Where’s Wes?” she asks. “He was going to come back.”

  “I saw him downstairs,” Lee says.

  “We’ll get him,” I tell Iris, but Lee shoots me a look and shakes her head a little.

  “He’s with his parents, Nora,” she says, like that’s going to matter to me.

  “We’ll get him,” I say again, and I shouldn’t be mean when my sister looks as wrecked as she does, but I’m not leaving him after this horrible day that was supposed to start with donuts and hurt feelings and end with, I dunno, French fries and forgiveness and our friendship intact.

  But here I am again, changing in the span of a few minutes and choices that maybe were bad, maybe were good, and might not be survivable.

  He’s in the lobby just like Lee said he was. His parents are flanking him, as if he needs protection from the world instead of from his father.

  “Steady,” Lee says under her breath as we cross out of the elevator bay and head into the lobby.

  “Nora.” Mrs. Prentiss comes over and hugs me. It’s brief and achingly gentle, and it’s meant well. She always means well, I remind myself as I grit my teeth and let it happen. “And, Iris, honey, are you two okay?”

  “We’re good,” I say. “We’re just going home.” I look at Wes over her shoulder.

  “I’m coming,” he says immediately, and Mrs. Prentiss is right in front of me, inches away; I can see her stiffen.

  “Wes.” It’s the first time he’s spoken, but my eyes narrow at the mayor.

  “Honey, I really want you home with me,” Mrs. Prentiss says, and the pleading in her voice is real, because Wes is just months away from being eighteen and there’s not much she can do about the fact that he’s spent years dodging time under her roof.

  “Lee Ann, please.” Mrs. Prentiss lowers her voice, her cheeks tinged with the kind of humiliation a mother doesn’t ever want to feel.

  Wes bends down and kisses his mom’s cheek. “I love you,” he says. “I’ll be at breakfast tomorrow before we all have to go to the sheriff’s station to give my statement.”

  She strokes his arm, her hand shaky. “Okay,” she says, trying to save face but losing the game. Behind her, the mayor is stony silent, the disappointment radiating off him. He probably wishes I had gotten shot or burned up. Things would be a lot easier for him then.

  Lee pushes Iris’s wheelchair out of the hospital, with Wes and me bringing up the rear like we still need to protect each other.

  The sun’s shining as we cross the lot and head toward Lee’s truck. It seems strange that it’s still bright outside, that not even a full day has passed, when everything’s changed.

  Lee gets us all carefully loaded into the truck’s back cab, bruised and raw in more ways than one. It takes a while because the pain pills the doctors gave me are starting to kick in and my seat belt is not working the way it’s supposed to.

  “Christ,” she says, batting my hands away gently and clipping me in. “You’re all drugged up. What about you two?”

  “They didn’t give me anything but oxygen and burn cream,” Wes says, and Iris just waves listlessly, which I think Lee takes as a yes.

  “You’re the designated friend, then,” she tells Wes. “Don’t let them walk into the pool or anything when we get home.”

  “I’m fine,” I protest.

  “I’m not.” Iris leans against the window. “I want to lie down.”

  “Soon,” Lee promises, getting into the front seat. Her fingers flex around the steering wheel. “Gotta hand it to you kids,” she mutters as she starts the truck. “My life’s never boring with you.”

  “You love us,” Wes says easily, like it’s easy, even though it’s never been, for me or Lee, and maybe that’s why the two of us folded him into our family like a missing ingredient.

  “Yeah,” Lee says. “I really do.”

  — 64 —

  7:25 p.m. (403 minutes free)

  2 safe-deposit keys (stashed in my room)

  The sun sets, and we are still alive.

  We lie out on the pallet lounge near the pool. It’s hot this time of year, dry to the point of danger as we head into the worst of fire season. But tonight it’s calm, sky shimmering from the orange heat as the darkness sets in.

  Iris is wearing my pajamas, Wes’s College of the Siskiyous shirt used to be Lee’s even though she never wen
t there, and I wrap up in my robe because the idea of pulling a T-shirt over my raw shoulder sounds like hell. I’ve got an ice pack against my cheek and two more on the table to break open and use later.

  Lee watches us from the house, but she doesn’t try to make us go inside to sleep. For a long time, Iris stares out at the reflection of the stars on the pool, and Wes plays a game of solitaire with a pack of cards he brought from his room. He pauses only when she finally speaks.

  “I didn’t want him to die.”

  It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Red Cap. I suppose we’ll find out his name sometime in the coming days. Does he have people? A family?

  “You didn’t kill him,” Wes says softly. “His partner did.”

  “But if I hadn’t made the Drano bomb, maybe . . .”

  “Duane was always going to kill him, Iris,” I tell her, and it’s not gentle, because you can’t be gentle with that kind of horrible truth. “He had his escape plan in his pocket the whole time. There was no way he was walking out of there. If you hadn’t made the bomb, we wouldn’t have either.”

  She shakes her head like she’s trying to shake out the guilt. Lee gave her a hot-water bottle for her stomach, and she curls up around it like one of those roly-poly bugs.

  “Don’t think about it,” I say, because that’s my motto. “Lock it away.”

  “Or talk about it if you want,” Wes says, staring hard—admonishingly—at me. It dawns on me that I’m not reacting the right way. She’s not normal. It echoes in my head. Those words, like Raymond himself, will haunt me forever.

  “What are we going to tell the sheriff tomorrow?” Iris asks.

  “The truth,” I say. “That we stayed quiet until we saw an opportunity to act when they left us alone in the bathroom. We took it, but they got the better of us. Then we got the better of him in the barn.”

  “So just the highlights. What happens if he says something?”