Matt barely slept at all that night, just tossed and turned in the thin cotton sheets of the rental cabin, and when the cops came to pick him up they mentioned how tired he looked. How the bags under his eyes were so dark and the lines in his face were so deep. It hadn’t been grief for Marie that’d kept him up all night, although that’s what the cops thought, or even guilt. No, it was the anticipation. He’d felt the same way he did before a big presentation at work, or just before heading into a dentist’s appointment. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant feeling, this buildup to the big moment, but a person could live without it.
The car ride into the park was a silent one. Too early for conversation, Matt supposed, or the cops were just being kind. Leaving him alone with his grief. Or maybe he was reading them wrong, and they were suspicious of him. They were letting the quiet drag out so his guilty conscience would catch up to him and he’d start babbling like an idiot.
His hand twitched at that idea, sloshing coffee over the side of the paper cup one of the cops had given him when he’d climbed inside. It splashed onto the leather seat and he mopped it up with his sleeve. The cop in the passenger seat looked around to see what was happening, then turned away when Matt gave him a nod. Did the cop turn just to look, because that was a normal thing to do, or because he thought Matt had shoved his wife off that cliff? Stupid, paranoid thoughts. You could see guilt anywhere if you looked hard enough, and Matt had thought he’d be fine this time, that this would be easier to deal with since he’d been through it before. Same shit, different day. But that wasn’t the case, not at all. It turns out guilt has a way of feeling fresh every damn time.
He hadn’t actually seen Marie fall—he’d closed his eyes when it happened, but it wasn’t as if he could close his ears. She’d screamed, shrieked, and then the sound had stopped so suddenly it might’ve been cut with a knife, and he’d guessed that’s when she’d hit the river. Or a rock. He could imagine her plunging under the surface, her mouth still wide open in a scream, sucking in the water and choking, unable to claw her way to the surface, her blood smoking up the water. Or maybe she was already dead before she went in, her skull fractured or her neck broken. But he had to be sure. He’d crept to the edge of the cliff after her scream, dropping to his hands and knees and crawling for the last foot or so because he didn’t like heights, never had. One good gust of wind could send him right off the edge himself, and where would that leave him? Nowhere except a hundred feet down, drowning in the churning river, as good as dead.
Like Marie?
He didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to see anything once he managed to poke his head over the edge, except for the black river rushing underneath. He’d told the cops that, and it was true. It was too dark by then to see much, especially from so high up, although it was easy to hear the rushing water, the lapping wet sounds it made as it roared underneath. Matt even thought he could feel the spray of it on his cheeks, but once he sat up and passed a hand over his face he realized it was sweat, cold and sickening. He was scared, sitting at the spot where his wife had gone over—the fear he felt then wasn’t caused by the height of the cliff; or the way the sky had gone the murky bluish-black of dusk except for the orange-red splash of color at the horizon; or even the thought of living the rest of his life without Marie. No, this fear was something he’d felt before, it was familiar in a way he didn’t like. It was a fear that crept up his throat, thick and choking, that made him short of breath and dizzy. He’d last felt this fear when he’d stumbled away from the house where he’d lived with Janice, the baking heat of the fire on his back.
What am I going to do now? That’d been his thought back then, and it was the same thing that came into his head as he sat on the cliff. He’d planned this, he’d prepared, and he’d put so much thought into it, but it didn’t matter. What the fuck am I going to do now? He’d lived his whole life that way, it seemed. Always looking over his shoulder, worrying that his stupid decisions would come back to bite him in the ass, and here he was again. Full circle, back to where he’d started.
“We’re here,” one of the cops said as they pulled over, the nose of the car crowding into a copse of trees. They were at the parking lot at the bottom of the trail, the same spot they’d left the night before. Around and around, his life was full of circles. His stepfather used to say that all the time, and it’d stuck with him. Same shit, different day. His car was still there, locked up tight near the back of the lot, one of the rear tires dipping into a rut in the packed dirt. “We’ll start here and hike down to the cliff base.”
There were others already waiting for them. Another cop, and a few park rangers. Each of them looked at Matt and gave him a tight, quick smile or a nod and then walked on, starting the hike down to the bottom of the cliff. They kept Matt in the center of them as they walked.