CHAPTER 22

The first time we’d made love, I marked the time that passed afterward by counting James’s heartbeats. I listened to the thudding in his chest and thought that his heart must be closer to the world than most people’s; he was so thin, so wiry, that I could feel it fluttering against his breastplate as easily as if it had been encased in linen. Then, in the aftermath of the first time—my first time, and his, and ours—I lay my head against his chest to feel the beats slow from a furious gallop to a light patter.

“Are you okay?” he’d said.

I sat up, feeling awkward and suddenly, exceptionally naked. I registered dim gratitude that my hair, falling in a cavewoman tangle over my shoulders, was long enough to cover my nipples. You can’t talk to someone, I thought, if they can look down midsentence and just see your nipples. Nipples are a conversation stopper.

The look on his face was deepening from care to concern.

“Becca—”

“I’m fine. I’m fine . . . Better than fine,” I added, smiling in a way that I hoped was self-assured.

“Your face?”

I had to laugh. He had elbowed me in the eye at the very beginning, when it had seemed like there was no place for all of our arms and legs to go—no possible way that two people with all these limbs could lie down together, holding each other hip to hip and lip to lip, and actually arrange them in such a way that nobody would get hurt.

Later, when the awkwardness had passed, he had gathered me back into his arms and pulled me up to his chest, up to the place where the hollow rhythm of his heart seemed to knock, knock, knock its insistent desire to be set free. I laid my head against his chest and listened again to that sound, the hollow drumbeat that told me he was still here, still alive, still with me.

With James, I’d never been unsure. Never anxious over what was to come. Never afraid.

I was afraid now.

I was waiting when the truck pulled in, slipping out of the shadows, wide-eyed and paranoid at the possibility of being seen. I had been sitting in the shadows behind the gas station for what seemed like hours, slapping at the mosquitoes that whined in my ears and tried to drain the blood from my neck, watching the road and willing each car to be his. There had been little traffic. Fifteen minutes before, a police car with its lights strobing had sped past, its driver holding the radio to his mouth, the slumped shapes of two silent men sitting in the shadow of the backseat.

I had called him, praying as I punched the pay phone’s keys that I was remembering the number right, praying that he would finally pick up, nearly crying with relief at the sound of his voice in the receiver. He was just getting into town, he told me, and what was going on, and I struggled to keep my voice level as I asked him to pick me up.

He had asked where, and asked nothing else.

Alone in the dark, with nothing to do but wait, my mind had begun to race. Back to the night when everything had changed. I wondered whether she had fought back, at the end, when she realized what was happening. When she realized that she would never get out of this town.

I knew how she felt.

James leaned back in his seat, one hand on the wheel, as I slipped through the passenger door and shut it with a thunk. My heart began to thud in my chest, leaping higher, in my throat now. I thought I might choke on it.

“How long have you been back?” I asked, touching the worn handle of the door. It felt cool. At last, cool. Nothing had felt cool this summer. He didn’t answer; I didn’t wait for him to.

“We have to talk,” I said, looking at him and then losing my nerve, looking down at my lap instead. “Something’s happened, James. Something bad.”

“Tell me now.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to do this here. I need to get away from here, right now, before somebody sees me.”

James looked at me for a long time.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

* * *

We drove without direction, grit kicking under the tires as the canopy of trees closed overhead and the lightning grew brighter. The sky was beginning to spit, raindrops falling in twos and threes until they covered enough space for James to turn on the wipers and flick them away. As we had pulled out of the parking lot, I had reached into the glove compartment, jittery and desperate for cigarettes, when his hand slammed the compartment closed.

“Dammit! Don’t do that!”

“You need to talk to me,” he said.

“I need to smoke,” I said, hearing the whine in my voice and not caring. My hands had begun to shake.

“Becca, if you don’t tell me what’s going on right now, you may not get a chance to.”

I stared at him.

“What do you mean?” I said, my voice growing loud. James looked uncomfortable. More drops plunked against the windshield. In the silence, over the whir of the tires, they sounded like music. In the silence, I knew I had to speak.

“Craig knew something, James. He knew who killed that girl, or . . . or he did it himself.” I took a deep breath. “He was there.”

We were speeding now, careening around curves, the wheels of the truck fishtailing dangerously close to the slick grass at the roadside and the deep ditch beyond. James was hitting the wheel with the palms of his hands, swearing, demanding that I tell and then retell what had happened at the restaurant.

“Oh God,” he kept saying, “Oh God. Why? Why would you do that?” and then, “It’s not possible,” and then—angrily, now—“How do you know any of this?!”

Reluctantly, I told him what I had seen in my house—what I had heard.

“I can’t believe this.”

I slapped the open palm of my hand against the window. “How can you not? It makes perfect sense! He wanted to brag about it, all that posturing was just cover for what he’d done.”

“He’s been obsessed, Becca, that doesn’t make him a fucking killer.”

“Evidence!” I yelled. “I told you what I heard! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No,” said James, and fell silent.

My ears were burning, rage running like fire through my veins at James’s stubbornness, his blind loyalty to someone who had never deserved it and who had done unspeakable things. I felt something made of ice uncoil in my stomach, stretching its angry neck out and opening its mouth to scream.

“Dammit, James! How can you be so blind to this?
I’m telling you I was there, I heard everything! Jesus, I confronted him! He was going to hurt me, doesn’t that matter to you?! Or maybe it doesn’t! Maybe you’re more like him than I thought, maybe you’re just another—”

“ENOUGH!” he roared, swerving right over the yellow line that snaked down the center of the road and then back, losing control, barely regaining it as I sat back in the seat. Stunned. Silent.

He was breathing hard again, gripping the steering wheel with hands laced with stress lines, a white cobweb of tension that cracked across every knuckle. We were driving too fast. The road was growing slick, growing dangerous and dark with every passing minute.

“Dammit, Becca,” he finally said, and his voice broke.

I looked at the floor. “I didn’t mean that.”

James shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” A sick smile had begun to play at the corners of his mouth.

“Of course it matters.”

James laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. “Not anymore. Not now. And this is my fault, I should have just . . . shit, and now what? He’s in the hospital? Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

Another beat passed in silence. James took another turn too fast. Outside, the starved yellow grasses blurred and waved like brittle ghosts in the glow of the headlights, bending toward the truck and then snapping back like switches. The thunder was rumbling closer, the lightning coming in short, bright bursts.

“Lindsay . . .” He trailed off.

“What?”

“This is going to wreck her.”

I thought of Lindsay’s face, her narrowed eyes, the hiss of her voice, and felt my face flush with shame and hurt. I shook my head, shook the memory away.

“It would have happened sooner or later. Their relationship . . . it’s all a lie. If he did this, he spent all summer hiding it. All summer.”

“What’s your point,” he said.

“Somebody who could do that . . .”

“People hide things for all kinds of reasons, Becca.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m telling you,” he said, gripping the wheel and staring straight ahead, “that there’s a lot you don’t know. And whatever you think of Craig, whatever his faults, he’s still someone I consider a friend.”

“That’s not what he seems to think,” I retorted, suddenly remembering his anger in the alleyway. “He said that you haven’t hung out with him all summer. He said . . .” I paused.

“What?”

“He said you’ve been ditching him to be with me,” I said, slowly. “Except—”

I stopped abruptly, and listened to the whoosh of the tires against the pavement. Listened to the thought that had risen, pulsing white and bright like a silent alarm, inside my own head.

“Except,” I said, slowly, “you’ve been lying to him, haven’t you? You haven’t been with me. I haven’t seen you since . . .”

Since the party, I thought, suddenly. Since July. No wonder I’d felt so lonely, so lost. No wonder he had seemed so far away.

“You . . . you’ve been somewhere else. And I was a convenient excuse.”

I thought of Craig, his face contorted, his voice guttural with rage. A stuck-up bitch who fucks everything up . . . just like you.

But James had been keeping secrets from me, too.

He slumped in his seat as I looked at him, his shoulders buckling, the breakneck pace of the truck finally slowing.

“James—”

“Not here,” he said. “Wait. We’re almost there.”

There was a sudden snap, and the truck was rumbling over rough road. Looking out the window, I saw trees—thick, close, branches that reached out like fingers to claw at the window. Below us, a rutted drive, carving a hidden two-track opening back away from the road. Above, a heavy canopy of trees rustled and shushed in the growing wind. The tunnel of green opened far ahead, into blackness, in what I knew was endless, open space.

A space covered with rough grass that would be crushed beneath the truck’s tires and die, fragrant and sweet, in the night air. It would clog my nostrils, a scent I would never smell again without remembering his body, his hands, his voice. Without remembering the twist of scratchy flannel on my skin. Without feeling heat, unwanted and shameful and instantaneous, between my legs.

I stared at him, and thought I could feel the first thread of something horrible unraveling between us.

The first thought that I—that all of us—had made a terrible mistake.