I SWUNG MY ARMS, trying to get back to my car as quickly as possible. I knew I was blacking out—that was the point—but how could my unconscious self build such a wall from my conscious self? Was I insane? Was I on the verge of a mental breakdown, or was I just a raging addict? I didn’t feel like an addict. I didn’t crave alcohol or drugs. My Saturday-night drinking binge was more of a ritual. If I was out with friends, no one would bat an eyelash. Being alone in my apartment was giving it a stigma. Whatever the reason, I could never do it again, just like all the other things I told myself I would never do again.
I opened the outgoing call log on my cell phone, scrolling and scrolling. I didn’t see his number anywhere. Was he lying? Did he make it up to mess with my mind? Why would he do that? Then it clicked. I wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone in high school. I had Mark’s number memorized. That fucking landline in my apartment. Sometimes I knocked it off the table, and sometimes, I guess, I picked it up.
I felt nauseous. All these years, I’d thought I was doing the right thing. No contact with Mark. That’s what every book, every website, said to do. Was it possible these phone calls that I wasn’t even conscious of making were setbacks? Every Saturday resetting the clock? Was that why I was still dressing up on every birthday? Was that why after eight years I was still alone, still pining, still afraid to go to sleep without the TV on? So stupid. So weak. I was disgusted. This was not who I wanted to be, but wanting just wasn’t enough.
ONCE I WAS safely back in my car, I called Brandon. I needed a distraction. Brandon was my distraction. Solving my dead sister’s murder was my distraction.
“Hey,” he answered. “Are you OK? What was that about?”
“Nothing.”
“I made some calls. Gil’s in the wind. Hasn’t been to work in weeks. Mail was overflowing. It’s a dead end.”
“I wouldn’t call it a dead end. I would say it’s pretty suspicious, no?” I barked at him, at a breaking point and worried he was relapsing back into his myopic crime-solving self.
“I didn’t mean a dead end—that was the wrong expression. I just mean, sending cops to the apartment was a dead end.”
I relaxed. Stay with me, Brandon.
“So, what now?” Police work was slow. I wanted to start kicking down doors.
“Well, we have a few problems.” His use of “we” wasn’t lost on me. “People like Benjy, I mean as ‘the guy.’ It was easy. It makes sense. This poking around I’m doing is drawing attention. My superiors aren’t exactly thrilled that I’m making noise on a closed case.”
“Don’t tell me these are excuses, tell me this is setup for a big but.”
“But . . . I can’t just turn my back on this. You would never forgive me.”
“And you would never be able to live with yourself?”
“That too,” he said with a stifled laugh. “I took tomorrow off. Told the guys I needed a little rest and relaxation. I was thinking about taking a trip to New York City.”
Finally, my annoying, lazy, by-the-book detective was becoming the renegade I was looking for, but I had to remain calm if I wanted to stay in the we.
“I hear the city is lovely this time of year,” I said.
“You could join me. We could do dinner or a show or something.”
“Just to be clear, we’re going there to follow up on Gil, right?”
He broke into a laugh. “Yes, Virginia.”
I smiled and for almost four full seconds forgot about my interaction with Mark.
I GOT BACK to my apartment after running every errand I could possibly think of. I didn’t want to be home. I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I set my bag down by the door. That spot on the floor seemed as good as any other. The loneliness gathering in the pit of my stomach was confusing. I had been a loner for years, but was it all a lie? Deep down, did I know I still had Mark? Is that what was getting me through the days?
That was gone now. It was my choice. I tried to find power in that. It didn’t work. I didn’t have friends. When I was with Mark, I didn’t need friends. In hindsight, a huge mistake. I thought about calling Brandon again. Was he my friend? No. People who have romantic feelings for you aren’t your friends. Like everyone else, they just want something from you. I would see him in the morning anyway. I just needed a distraction until then.
Then I remembered Linda. I’d promised my father I would check on that mess, make sure she wasn’t lying in the bathtub with her wrists slit because her favorite toy was dead and her husband didn’t like her enough to spend more than two days a week in her presence.
I COULDN’T REMEMBER the last time I’d gone to the house on a day other than Sunday. Even the day they found Jenny was a Sunday. It was like church, a place you go to feel horribly judged out of forced ritualistic obligation.
I flipped on the light, revealing the kitchen in shambles. There were dishes in the sink, mostly glasses, very few plates. The stools against the kitchen island were pulled out and askew. Any other house and I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but this was Linda’s kitchen. She always kept it immaculate. Was that all an act for my father, or was this evidence of her unraveling because of Jenny’s death?
“Linda?” I yelled out into the sleeping house and waited for her obnoxious voice to call back.
“Linda?” I said again as I entered the living room, letting her name bounce off the walls. I pulled the chain on one of her colorful Tiffany lamps, illuminating the room. It was in an equal state of disarray. Two blankets were bunched up on the couch, an empty glass without a coaster on the table. Anarchy. Still no sign of Linda, and I was starting to worry what I might find.
I grabbed the banister and hoisted myself up the first few steps, repeating the action until I reached the top and spotted the first evidence of life. A small glow came from the crack under the upstairs bathroom door.
“Linda?” I put my ear against the door and listened. Nothing. I knocked gently without removing my ear. A barely audible moan came from inside. It didn’t sound healthy. Was it too late to leave? Could I resist the temptation of what was behind mystery door number one? Never.
I twisted the knob and pushed the door open to collect my prize.
Linda was sprawled across the bathroom floor in just her underwear, more than I ever wanted to see of my stepmother. A strong stench of vomit slapped me in the face. It was on the toilet seat, it was ground into the rug, it was congealed to her hair. She didn’t turn to look at me, keeping her face toward the base of the toilet, but she moaned again to prove she was alive.
“Jesus, Linda.” I suspected she had helped herself to a bottle of Drano, but as my nose adjusted to the strength of the smell, the stench of alcohol presented itself. I knew the fusion of hard alcohol and vomit all too well.
I turned the shower on full blast and lifted her into the tub, not caring much about the temperature. She let out a weak scream when the cold water hit her body, but I didn’t care. She wouldn’t remember. I squirted bodywash on top of her, anything to mask the smell as I waited for the vomit to wash away.
Once she was clean, I turned the shower off and patted her down with a towel. I left her in the tub. The chances of her puking again were high, and I wanted to save myself the effort later. She slumped to the side, eyes closed, and started breathing heavily. She was out for now.
AFTER WATCHING SITCOM reruns for a couple of hours and eating about six granola bars since Linda’s last in-tub puke, I felt confident enough to put her to bed and head home.
I turned left onto Main Street without coming anywhere close to a complete stop at the sign. Ten o’clock was late for a small town and I was more than alone on the road.
The only business between Linda’s house and my apartment was the town pub, and as I passed it, I caught a glimpse of something I couldn’t ignore. It was obstructed by the dumpster in the back of the small parking lot where it escaped nearly all of the moonlight. I don’t know why I was even looking, but I was and I saw it. A navy Accord was in the parking lot, Hunter Willoughby’s navy Accord.
The pub was devoid of any charm, not a place you would expect to find anyone short of a full-blown alcoholic. The best thing the pub had going for it was that it seemed immune to town gossip. Gossip craved scandal, people looking for cracks in their friends and neighbors to tear them down with. A bunch of drunks living in a constant state of rock bottom wasn’t interesting to anyone. It made the building invisible.
Fueled by the possibility of Hunter having a fraction of the damage I saddled myself with, my car full-on Herbie-the-Love-Bugged into the parking lot. It couldn’t have been me. Clearly going into that pub to talk to Hunter Willoughby was not something I wanted to do.
When I stepped through the rotting wooden door frame, the lights were so weak, I thought the place might be closed. This was possibly a watering hole for raccoons, there was so little light. The bar was directly in line with the entrance, and behind it was Monty, the man in his late sixties who owned the place. He wore a beautiful stained gray T-shirt and was filling a beer from one of two taps. There were four men at the bar, all with comparable portly body types and blotchy red faces. The only one I knew for sure was Boomer, the famed town drunk. I wondered if the other drunks were jealous of his notoriety.
Monty looked up from the tap at the sound of the door closing behind me. “Must be ladies’ night,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t prepare anything, so first one’s on the house.”
I took the glass he slid toward me and scanned the room. There were a handful of no-frills tables along the right-side wall that must have been remnants of the year the pub tried to serve food. Hunter sat alone at one of them, peering over her bottle at me, my entrance an unavoidable distraction in the small space.
I approached her, and she watched me the entire way.
“Hey,” I said.
“Come here often?” She smiled like we were sharing a similar shame.
Was it too soon to ask what Mark had done to her? Ask if they were breaking up? Probably.
“I’m not even drinking.” She laughed and pointed at her nearly full bottle of beer. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She seemed chatty and vulnerable for someone not drinking, but she was having trouble making eye contact.
“Honestly, I saw your car in the parking lot,” I said, sliding into the chair across from her.
She looked up at me at that point, but held it for only a second.
“Why did you want to get a drink with me the other night?” I asked. After everything with Mark, I was dying to know.
“Ridiculous, right?” She smiled. “I know we weren’t exactly friends in high school.” That was an interesting way to put it. The only direct interaction I could remember offhand was when I had the misfortune of being alone in the bathroom with her. She was having some sort of embarrassing stomach issue and clearly thought she was by herself. When she realized there was a witness, she demanded to know who I was, so I lifted my feet up and hid in the stall for over an hour. Not exactly friends.
“I was hoping, maybe, you would want to talk about Jenny,” she said, looking almost ashamed to be asking.
The cartoon physicality of my reaction would have been to flip backward over my chair in shock. Like a true asshole, my brain had been 100 percent Mark since seeing him in the woods. Even the prospect of hunting Gil had been only momentary relief. Hunter was thinking about my poor dead sister while I was moping around like some kind of jilted Juliet.
“OK,” I said.
Hunter picked at the label of her beer bottle, a rumored sign of sexual frustration, but I was reaching. “It’s just really, really fucked up,” she muttered.
“Did you know her?” I asked. I knew she did from Mark, but I played dumb. I wasn’t really sure what was happening. I took a generous swig from my beer while I waited for her answer. Drinking would be fine as long as I laid off the pills, a justification I could live with.
“I did,” she said as she brushed her hair behind her ear. “I’m a guidance counselor at the school, did you know that?”
“Yes,” I said, forgetting almost immediately that I was worried about revealing I knew more about her than I should.
“I was seeing Jenny a lot. About once a week.” Hunter’s voice cracked, and I was seized with fear that she would start crying or something. She recovered. “I think maybe . . . I don’t know . . . This is hard to say . . . but I feel guilty.”
What was I supposed to say to that? It was my role to feel guilty. She was my sister, and I was the one who had fucked up when it came to her. I wanted to hate Hunter, but the prospect of someone possibly understanding the way I was feeling, and handling it just as poorly, brought color to my cheeks.
“Why would you say that?” I asked.
“It was literally my job to help her and . . . It’s just crazy. I thought she was fine; I envied how fine I thought she was. Did I miss something? Could I have prevented this? Intervened before it was too late?” She swallowed, trying to pull back from the deep.
“I think about that too.” I paused. “I was such a shitty sister.”
She shrugged. I enjoyed the space we were in where neither one of us felt it necessary to convince the other that her guilt and fears were wrong.
Hunter put her beer to her lips and committed to drinking instead of just staring at it. I did the same. The chugging gave me space to think. What was I doing? There were a thousand reasons to get the hell out of there, but I was kind of into it. I wanted to live in the dark space for a bit. I wanted company in the dark space.
“Did Jenny ever say anything . . .” I debated about confidentiality or whatever, but I wasn’t a cop. “Anything about a man named Gil?”
“Who’s Gil?”
“No one.” I shook my head. Her answer was enough to know that was a dead end. “Can I ask you something?”
“Obviously.” She laughed while motioning to the bartender for another round.
“What was she into? What did you guys talk about? Are you allowed to say?”
“Fuck it, I don’t care. I don’t know what she was into. We mostly just talked about what she wasn’t into. Pageants, cheerleading, she really hated this little brat Mallory Murphy.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck, why was Hunter Willoughby so likable? When did this happen? Or was she only unlikable in the first place because she had what I wanted? Just like Jenny.
“Do you know her?” she asked. “Mallory?”
“Not really, I know of her. I try not to get mixed up in high school drama.”
“High school drama is my life,” she joked. “Fuck . . . Fuck, I’m swearing a lot.”
“Must be the ambiance,” I said as Monty brought us two more beers.
“In high school I knew you were hooking up with Mark,” she blurted out, bringing the new beer to her mouth to steady her bottom lip, which quivered as the words unfolded. People had a habit of doing that to me, blurting things out that for most would require a preface and a bit of sugarcoating. I don’t know why. I was used to it, but I didn’t like it. Was it flattering in that it seemed like I could take it? Or did they just not care?
“What?” I asked, shocked. Was Hunter Willoughby really the type of person who could have kept that a secret? Did Mark know she knew? Could I ask that question?
“I saw him rub your butt once,” she explained.
“Rub my butt?” I couldn’t help but find humor in her words, a humor I assumed was intended to mask the weight of the confession.
“Mm-hmm. It was after school and no one was around, but I forgot a book under my desk and I went back to the classroom and looked through the little window and you were sitting there and he was leaning over you. You dropped your pencil, and when you reached down to pick it up, he put his hand on your ass. You smiled all googly-eyed like that was a very welcome and common practice.”
“Shit. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because I wanted it to be me, and if anyone found out, they would have fired him or arrested him or something,” she tried to explain. “I don’t know. It made sense at the time. It’s less digestible now that I’m saying it out loud.”
“Well, I guess it all worked out.”
We both fell silent for a beat, imagining the fantasy that things really had worked out for the better.
“Does Mark know?” I decided to go for it.
She took a swig from her beer. “Yeah, it sounds stupid now, but that’s kind of how we got together . . . This feels weird. I should stop.”
“No, keep going. It’s all in the past,” I lied.
“I got too drunk at the faculty Christmas party last year. God, it already sounds so pathetic.” She shook her head. “He invited me back to his place, and I ended up admitting what I had seen all those years ago. Pillow talk. I thought it would be sexy to have this little secret between us. So fucked up. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me.” I smiled. “Christmas parties are pretty wild.”
She laughed hard at that, and it actually felt kind of good to make her feel better. Don’t ask me why it made her laugh and don’t ask why it made me feel good. Nothing was going as planned.
“You like to drink, don’t you?” she asked out of nowhere.
“I guess so.” I wasn’t sure if she was trying to insult me. Was this all an elaborate setup to go Jerry Springer on me for my past with Mark? Scream at me to leave her man alone? Did she know about the phone calls? Was I a complete idiot for embracing the camaraderie?
“I’ve never been good at it. I pass out or fall asleep before I get to have any fun. But let’s try, huh?” Without waiting for an answer, she motioned to the bartender for shots.
I was a good drinker, and many drinks later, I was comfortably buzzed and Hunter was hammered. As I entered the euphoria of the buzz, I was able to let go of the baggage between us. I was even able to let go of the thought that I was technically having a girls’ night, which was not something I had ever done as an adult.
“Do you know what I hate about this town?” Hunter asked, leaning across the table at me now. “I hate that I think that I like it. How lame do I have to be to want to live here? Why don’t I want to go to Europe and meet a man with a mustache or live in a bustling city where I have to hail cabs in the wind?”
“It’s not for everyone,” I offered.
“What do you want?”
I thought about what I wanted, what I would do if I weren’t crippled by a broken heart and had a passion for any part of life. “Maybe to live in an RV and drive around exchanging pleasantries with strangers, but never actually having to get to know anyone.”
Hunter leaned back in a full-body laugh at my pathetic hopes and dreams. “Maybe I’ll join you.”
“That kind of defeats the point.” I laughed, denying every thought that maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
“How do you know if there’s something better out there?” she asked. “The grass is always greener on the other side, right? But that just means stick with what you have. That can’t be right. It’s kind of a fucked-up saying. Like, if you think maybe there is something better out there for you, then you’re some asshole who will never be content. It’s like the universe has to give you an undeniable sign that there could be something more for you out there to make it OK to pursue it.”
She was talking about Mark maybe? “Are you content?” I pushed.
“Who the hell knows? Are you content?”
“No,” I admitted without reservation.
Monty appeared in my periphery for the first time without drinks in hand. “Closin’ up, ladies.”
“Boo,” Hunter protested in jest.
“It’s been great having ya. Give me a warning next time. I’ll get some curtains or something.”
“You don’t have any windows,” I reminded him as he headed back to the bar to push the drunks out with a stick.
Hunter swung her legs out from under the table and rose to her feet with the grace of a Weeble. I followed, looking much better in my own head at least. I watched her shuffle, pause, resteady herself multiple times from our table to the parking lot, and as she fumbled around in her purse for her keys, the anxiety of doing the right thing had me instantly regretting ever stopping at the pub in the first place. An entire night of enjoyment could easily be erased by one awkward moment.
“I don’t think you should drive,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
“Look, I live right down the street. See that blue building? Right there.”
She looked up and squinted to see it.
“Just come over. Have some tea or something. Sober up a little bit.”
Hunter fumbled for her keys for a few more seconds before giving up. “Fine.” She smiled and hooked her arm through mine for balance and warmth. This was SO weird.
Inside my apartment, I sat her on my tiny couch and headed to the microwave. A fresh box of tea bags sat on the mini fridge.
While the mug spun in the microwave, I watched her lift her legs onto the couch and roll to her side. This was what Mark liked to look at. Did I get it? I guess so.
I placed the mug down on the coffee table as she fought to keep her eyes open.
“You can stay,” I offered, giving her permission to stop the fight. I pulled a blanket from my bed and covered her. I didn’t even have the urge to suffocate her with a pillow.
I crawled into bed and drifted off to the sounds of Hunter fucking Willoughby’s drunk breathing. It was kind of nice.