I wonder about them sometimes. Eddie and Bea.
Once, as I was loading groceries into my trunk, I thought I saw them.
It couldn’t have been them, of course. By then, I’d left Mountain Brook behind me. Left the whole state of Alabama. I’d used Bea’s money to buy myself a little place—nothing as crazy as what I could’ve afforded, but still—my own small, cozy cabin in the mountains of North Carolina.
Turns out I liked the South.
But there was no way the woman in the sunglasses in the big SUV that cruised past the Ingles Market parking lot could’ve been Bea, no way the figure slumped in the passenger seat was Eddie. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man, after all.
Adele had been in the car, and she’d given a short, sharp bark at the car as it passed, and I thought the person in the passenger seat had turned a little to look back, but they were too far away by then for me to be sure.
That was only a few months after the fire, though, so I’d been jumpier, primed to see ghosts everywhere.
I sometimes think I might always be looking over my shoulder.
I remind myself that when Bea opened the door to the panic room, there was a whoosh and a wall of flame. I remember the scent of burned hair, and a worse, darker scent, disturbingly like barbecue.
I remember that they found Eddie’s teeth.
But I also remember those teeth flying out of his mouth when I hit him, and so …
I wonder.
I like to think that they both survived. That they’re out there somewhere.
Maybe they’ve gone back to Hawaii. Or a more remote island, their own little beach somewhere.
I picture them on white sand, palm trees swaying overhead, just like I used to picture them when Bea was a ghost and Eddie was mine.
She sits there, smiling in the sunshine, her glossy hair pulled back from her face. Eddie is next to her. Not nearly as handsome as he once was.
I see Bea reach for his hand, see his fingers—thick with scars, raised red welts crisscrossing his skin—curl around hers.
We’re together now, she’ll say to him, that’s all that matters. Not the money, not the life they’d built, not the house that’s now just a black mark on all that green, green grass at Thornfield Estates.
And it won’t be a lie when she says that they’re better off now without all that, better off just the two of them, wherever they are.
It’ll be the truth.