42 JJ

Now

Vic was fond of reminding JJ that whatever she had done, she couldn’t change the past. But she could be drawn back into it, and as she pushed through the door into a bar she’d never stepped foot in, she was somehow back there, dragged through the years by the simple knowledge of who she was about to see.

He ought to have been a footnote to her history. A distraction she used for a time to endure her last few years at home. Instead, what had happened meant their dysfunctional courtship was trapped in amber along with everything else from those final days.

There was something perverse about finding Logan here, in dingy unremarkable environs with no signs of success or suffering hovering obviously about him, proof that the world had lurched along without apparent regard for the importance of their tragedy. Logan looked like any other middle-aged man you might find in a bar like this, and whatever image she’d built up in her head of him crumbled immediately as he caught her eye.

There was another employee inside, a woman with slate-gray hair and a thick neck. She caught JJ’s eye as she entered, but JJ walked deliberately toward Logan.

“Juliette,” Logan said. “Of all the gin joints, et cetera.” He smiled but it had no warmth to it. JJ made herself walk forward, take a seat at the bar. She was breathing too quick, prickles of sweat at the base of her neck.

“He said he never saw you after the Saracen house, but he was lying, I could tell,” Emma had said.

His eyes tracked the curl of a vine up her arm.

“Logan. It’s been a while,” she said.

“That’s an understatement,” he said. He cocked his head. “You’re not here for a drink.”

“No,” she answered, though, God, she wanted one. She had a rule with Vic. No drinking alone, no drinking before five o’clock, never more than one drink. She’d broken them just about every night since she got back to this godforsaken town.

Logan took a survey of the bar. JJ had hardly noticed the other patrons when she entered—a couple having burgers and beers in the corner, a woman in a pink T-shirt and work boots. “If you’re not going to drink, I’m going to take my smoke break,” he said. “You can join me, if you like.”

A dip of her chin in a nod, and she was following him toward the back door. Behind the bar was nothing but an empty lot. The air stank with indistinct sour smells from the dumpster nearby, but Logan didn’t seem to notice. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one unhurriedly.

JJ reached out. She’d quit years ago, at Vic’s insistence, but she still snuck one now and then. Logan offered a light, and she leaned in. His fingertips were calloused and stained. He met her eye as he held the trembling flame up to the tip of the cigarette, his own dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“Long time,” he said again, like it was the only thing to say.

She leaned back, weight on her back foot. She took the cigarette from her lips and let the smoke spill from her mouth slowly, savoring the familiar flavor and sting of it. It wasn’t a thing she’d ever liked, exactly. It was more like a ritual or a talisman, a way to mark in the moment who she was. Who she wasn’t.

“Miss me?” she asked, the trace of a smirk in the corner of her mouth as she remembered who she meant to be.

“Now and then,” Logan allowed with a half smile of his own, relaxing a fraction. He gave her a look that encompassed her scuffed-up boots, her skintight jeans, the loose blouse that did nothing to conceal the bright purple bra she had on underneath, the tattoos she’d accumulated over the years. “You look good. You look—I dunno. I would say you’ve changed, but I feel like this is what you were always supposed to look like,” he said.

“Thanks, I guess,” JJ replied. “You haven’t. Changed.”

“Never got around to it,” Logan said. “I’ve stopped trying to be more of an asshole than I already am, at least.”

“That’s something,” she offered, and it did feel like she was giving something to him, a gift as real as the cigarette she lifted to her lips again. It was strange looking at him and seeing in his aged face the face of the boy she had tried so desperately to want. By the time she’d gotten into his car that first day, she’d started to be worried about the fact that the boys in the back seats and teenage bedrooms held no attraction to her, to panic about the way her heart thudded when she caught a glimpse of Sara Williams applying a careful layer of lip gloss to her ample lower lip.

So she’d tried for a while to want Logan. She’d gotten as far as liking him, despite him being an asshole, despite him being, at best, a loser and a drug dealer and a sleaze. She thought she might still like him, maybe even like him more, without the pressure of anything more.

“What’s that look?” he asked her.

“You don’t want to know,” she told him, with a shine of humor on it to keep the mood light. It did its job; he chuckled, ducked his head.

“Your sister came by. Asking questions about you,” Logan told her, lifting his eyes to hers.

“So you mentioned,” JJ replied, trying to sound casual, her pulse quick and loud. “What did you tell her?”

“Some of it. Not all of it,” Logan said. “She wanted to know about that night.”

She grunted. “You told her you didn’t see me after the Saracen house. She thinks you’re lying.” The arch of an eyebrow, turning it into a question, a demand, but he only let out a long smoke-wreathed breath and didn’t answer. “We never talked, you and I. After that night.”

“Seemed like the smart call,” Logan said. There was guilt there—or fear, maybe. “I figured you didn’t want people knowing what you’d gotten up to.”

“Very insightful of you,” JJ said, throat tightening. “Not at all self-interested.”

“So what if it was? No one wanted to touch that mess with a ten-foot pole,” Logan said. “It was bad enough they found those bloody clothes at the house.”

“The police talk to you?” JJ said.

“You mean my dad? Yeah,” Logan replied. “That was a lot of fun, let me tell you. He didn’t actually ask the questions, got Hadley to do it, but he was there.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What do you think? Sure, I went there sometimes. Can’t remember specifically when that night, can’t recall ever seeing any drugs or underage drinking, can’t recall, can’t recall,” Logan said. His eyes were on the pavement. He shuffled his feet.

“You said something else,” JJ said.

“Look, it was a moment of weakness. I panicked a bit,” Logan said. He looked up at her. “Hadley said it like they already knew. I thought if I lied, I’d be in deep shit.”

“Said what?” JJ pressed.

“He’s asking about the Saracen house, right? Who’s there, when, what they did, all of that. And he said he knew the Palmer girl had been there, and had I seen her, so I said yeah, maybe, I thought I remembered seeing her but I could be wrong. I kept it ambiguous. Just trying not to get in trouble.”

“Wait, he knew I was there?” JJ asked, brow furrowing, and then she played his words back in her mind. “The Palmer girl.”

“He was all ‘You’re sure you saw Emma Palmer,’ and at that point I guess I panicked. Said yes,” Logan said. “I thought I was protecting you.”

JJ stared at him. Her mouth was dry. “Why would I need protecting, Logan?” JJ asked quietly.

He fixed his gaze on her. Held the silence long enough that ash dropped from the tip of his cigarette, ghosting down to the ground to vanish against the gray concrete. “What do you remember?”

Yellow wallpaper. White grip. Red hand. Splinters of memory under her skin, no more. The rest a wide blank.

She wetted her lips. Swallowed. “Not enough,” JJ admitted.

“Maybe that’s for the best.”

“You do know something.”

“I know a lot of things, Juliette. You did a lot of things,” Logan said. “I’ve thought about that night a lot. Trying to come up with a way none of it was my fault, right? But I think it was, at least a little. I knew I gave you too much. You were done with me. I could tell. I thought maybe if there was something else you wanted from me it might last a bit longer, or if you were more relaxed, you’d actually have some fun, and then…”

He trailed off. She let him stew in the silence.

“Just tell me what happened,” she said, trying for a gentle tone. She didn’t do gentle or sweet much these days. It sounded strange, and Logan gave her a look like he could tell she was out of practice.

“You really don’t remember. I guess that’s not surprising, given how fucked-up you were when we found you,” he said.

“We?” she repeated.

“Me and Nina. When you took off, I figured you were just going to cut through the woods and go home, but she was freaked-out. Wanted to make sure you were safe. So we drove around a bit to see if we could spot you. We were out there for what—forty minutes, maybe? An hour? Nina was fucking pissed. I was just about to call it when we saw you. You don’t remember any of this?”

No point in lying to him now, though she realized she should have let him think she remembered at least part of it. Leave him uncertain what he could lie about. “It’s patchy,” she said, and she could tell he didn’t believe her.

“You were walking on the side of the road. Barefoot. Soaked through. You were fucked-up, like I said. Barely making sense.”

“What did I say?” JJ asked, throat tight enough to hurt.

“I don’t remember,” he hedged, and she made a skeptical noise. “You weren’t making sense. Nothing you said meant anything, as far as I’m concerned.”

“What did I say?” JJ demanded.

“You said someone was dead. ‘They’re dead.’ And you kept apologizing,” he said. “We didn’t know what had happened. We just thought you were high. Figured we should let you sleep it off. So I took you back to my place. We stayed there awhile, and then I drove you home.”

“That part I remember,” JJ said. Waking up in his bed, musty sheets tangled around her legs. Her hair still wet—it had always been so thick, so slow to dry. Logan telling her to get up. Get moving. Get in the car. Get out of the car. Brusque in a way she hadn’t understood. She figured she’d done something. Said something. There was a weird taste in her mouth, metallic. Noises were too loud and strangely muffled, and she was gripped with the feeling that she was running from something, but she couldn’t remember what.

She’d been so exhausted, her thoughts so muddied, that she hadn’t even thought to sneak around the back of the house when Logan dropped her off. She just stumbled up the front drive and in through the door. She heard her sisters’ voices and followed them.

Then the rest. Memory snapping back into her mind. Yellow wallpaper. White grip. Red hand.

“You were with Nina? The whole time, before you found me?” she asked.

“Yeah.” It was almost a question.

“You weren’t with me.”

“No, Juliette, I wasn’t with you,” he said, angry now at having to repeat himself. “Whatever the fuck you did that night, you did it without me.”

She wrapped an arm over her ribs, took a drag from the cigarette, and tried to decide if she was disappointed. She needed the answers. She didn’t know if she wanted them. “Did you have your gun with you that night?”

“What? No,” he said. Shot her a glance that bordered on alarm. She was losing him. The momentary camaraderie between them was guttering out as he realized—remembered—the depth of the trouble she carried with her.

“Where was it?” she asked.

“Why do you want to know?” he demanded. Not angry—scared. Confused.

“You’re not stupid, Logan. You know enough of that answer to know you don’t want to hear the rest,” she said. “Tell me where the gun was and I’ll walk away right now. I won’t talk to you again and you won’t have to know anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“Fuck,” he said. “You have changed.”

“Adapt or die, right?” JJ said. She gave him a minute. Let him look off into the distance and take a drag of his cigarette and tell himself he was in control—of this situation, of his life, of some corner of the universe. It was a lie everyone had to believe at least a little to get from one moment to the next.

“I’ve been waiting to get asked about that night for a long time. You and your sister weren’t the ones I thought would be doing the asking,” he said at last. His expression was shuttered when he looked at her again. “I’ve done fine without you around, Juliette. I like fine. Fine is all I could ever hope for out of life, and I don’t want to fuck it up. You got questions, find someone else to answer them.”

“Logan—”

“We’re done here,” he said. “I’m going to finish this and go back inside. I’d rather you weren’t there when I do.”

“Got it,” she said in a rasp of sound. She let the cigarette fall from numb fingers and ground it out with her heel.

JJ stalked back inside and up to the bar. The other employee eyed her with something that didn’t quite qualify as curiosity as she approached.

“Whiskey. Don’t care which,” JJ told her. The shot arrived; JJ downed it. Let it chase the taste of tobacco smoke. She pulled out her phone and stabbed in Nina’s name. Social media images popped up. Nina on a beach in a wedding dress, leaning in to kiss her dapperly dressed bride. Nina and her wife with curly-haired, brown-eyed babies on their shoulders. Nina with a good life that didn’t need JJ disrupting it.

She drank another shot, and then a third, and then slapped a bill down on the counter and strode out before Logan could come back in.

She’d hoped Logan could fill in the gaps. Could, maybe, absolve her. But the pieces she couldn’t remember didn’t matter, in the end. She knew what had happened.

And the time was coming soon when she couldn’t keep hiding from it.