We Were Never Here, page 19
Jamie as a bonny baby, with apple cheeks and a button nose. Jamie as a toddler, holding a drippy ice-cream cone with something like reverence. Gangly school-age Jamie with a basketball tucked under her arm. The last photo centered on junior-high Jamie in a silky green basketball jersey and shorts. Her teammates held her up on their shoulders: adolescent girls cheering and smiling at her, all braces and frizzy hair and bodies in the extreme, some tiny and compact, others stretched-out and gawky. Oh, what an age: broad, sudden swings from baseline, our largest deviations from the mean right when we’d kill to be quote-unquote normal.
Kristen had been very into basketball back then, too, so I scanned the faces one by one. My heart jumped when I found her—while all the other girls were gazing up at Jamie, who’d presumably sunk the winning basket, Kristen was in the back, eyes uncertain, staring straight into the camera.
I found Jamie’s obituary: survived by her parents, Thomas and Jennifer Rusch, and a little brother, Luke. Found dead on November 24, 2001. Two weeks to the day after Kristen’s parents died.
Her best friend and both parents had died in the same month. And she’d never mentioned it.
I scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw that the address for the memorial fund was in Las Vegas, that wacky man-made oasis. I googled the elder Rusches; the mom was in marketing, the dad a realtor in Henderson. Far from their Wisconsin dwelling, the pineapple house between Kristen’s first home and Nana and Bill’s mansion. The Mojave Desert is another spot where there are hardly any shadows, sun-splashed by day and moonlit at night. The kind of place where you could bury a body but the stars, all those floodlights, wouldn’t keep it in the dark for long.
Kristen had kept this from me. I knew about her childhood pet (Green Bean the guinea pig), the time she broke her wrist showing off on a swing set, and the ridiculous Easter-themed play she’d written in fourth grade, which her classmates had dutifully performed. I should’ve heard about the loss of a close friend, and whatever bad thing led to those angry black scribbles, now hidden in a basement’s silty dark.
A thought I’d almost but not quite had when the birthday treasure hunt had reached its dramatic conclusion: Is it really a good idea to be alone in a cabin in the woods with Kristen?
A floorboard creaked above me and I flinched. Why did everyone who got close to Kristen wind up dead? The sudden house fire, a horror-movie cliché…a chill radiated across my shoulders as I started to type in any details I could remember, anything that might lead to news articles about the blaze that killed her parents. But before I could hit Enter, the Internet sputtered out—I’d burned through all five gigabytes. I closed my laptop and sat in the dark while night sounds pressed in around me.
* * *
—
We rocked in our seats as the road swerved through the trees. Kristen was taking it too fast, accelerating as we snaked around hairpin turns.
“Why is it so twisty?” I asked, clutching the handle on the door.
“They had to carve the road out around all the lakes and swamps and ridges up here,” she replied. “It’s actually hillier than you’d think. Like here, it’s a crazy drop-off if you go off the road.” She gestured my way.
“So how about slowing down?”
“I’ve driven here a million times.” She careened around another corner and the seatbelt tugged at my neck.
I took a deep breath. “Hey, so I wanted to ask you about your friend Jamie.”
She squinted through a patch of sun. “Didn’t I say I don’t want to talk about her?”
“Well, I googled her. I was curious to see if she looked like me.” A ham-fisted lie, but the best I could do. “And I saw that she…died by suicide.”
“That’s right.” Camo-like shadows rippled across her face from the sun peeking through the trees.
“I thought you said it was an accident.”
She shot me a raw, strangled look. “Because it’s painful for me. Okay?”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I know she was like a sister.”
“Yeah.” She shook her hair out of her eyes. “You know, if someone said to me, ‘Do you think a twelve-year-old could stand it if both her parents died, and then her best friend since birth killed herself a few weeks later?’ I’d be like, ‘Obviously not.’ But here I am. Here we are.” She turned to me. “It was really hard. Losing her. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
She stayed that way for a beat, watching me. Unease billowed in my torso.
“I can’t even imagine. What…what happened?”
She shrugged. “No one knew how much she was hurting. Not even me.”
“Was she depressed?”
“Guess so, yeah.”
“God, she was just so…young. For someone that age to…”
“It’s more common than you’d think.” She swallowed. “Remember how we both used to love The Virgin Suicides? ‘Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’ ”
We burst out of the woods and onto a country road, with a bar on one side and a dingy gas station on the other. At the last second, Kristen took a sharp turn and pulled up to a pump. “It’ll be cheaper up here,” she said, before snatching up her purse and slamming the door.
My brain was like minnows in a pail: Thoughts crisscrossed and swarmed and bumped into one another. Was Kristen being weird about Jamie, or was I the one seeing menace in the wholly explicable, as Kristen kept insisting? Was Jamie’s death really a suicide, or had Kristen had, well, something to do with it…and was I an awful friend for thinking that? Then there was the next stepping-stone in logic, something I’d never allowed myself to face head-on: Could all this death mean that…that the night with Paolo—?
Kristen opened the car door before I could finish the thought. She jabbed a button on the dash and the radio bellowed on. As we pushed back into the forest, I replayed our conversation in my head. All Kristen’s talk of losing Jamie, how she couldn’t go through that again…what was that?
Presents rattled in the back seat: the stone elephant for Priya, nifty beer glasses made from old bottles for Aaron. A nice Merlot blend and a card thanking Nana and Bill for letting me celebrate my birthday at their cabin. I’d sent Nana a polite reply to her email, thanking her for her well wishes and asking what she meant by the line about Kristen acting “a bit strange lately.” She hadn’t replied. It was odd—in her email, she came across as more concerned about me than her own granddaughter.
We soared past open fields with machines creeping across them like giant metal insects. Anxiety mounted as we approached the freeway and then thundered down I-43. Closer to Milwaukee, to civilization, to real life. Here the mystery surrounding Paolo’s death felt even truer—here it was a news point, not just a distant, passing item that blipped over the transom and meandered away like a satellite traversing the northern sky. I pictured Los Angeles cops waiting at my front door, the neighbors watching like dull-eyed cows.
That night, back in my own bed, I dreamed of beestings and bat bites, tiny pricks in my smooth, tender bark, setting off a cascade of pain. I woke up sweating and began unwrapping the elastic encircling my leg. I pictured it as the bandage uncoiled: a bloated white ankle, the skin of a corpse, plus a slash of squid-ink black streaking down one side of my Achilles tendon. But when I peeled off the final inches, the ankle looked the same as always.
CHAPTER 26
“I feel…scared.” My fingers were moving of their own accord again, the thumbnail scraping the skin below each tip. “Like, this intense fear that flares up when I least expect it.”
Adrienne nodded gravely. “What does that fear feel like?”
I raked at a notch in my pinkie nail. She hadn’t asked the question I dreaded most, because I’d need to lie: Scared of what? Of the L.A. police uncovering something we’d left behind. Blood on the hotel floor, a nugget in the pile of ashes we’d abandoned in the fireplace. Fingerprints on shovels. DNA in the trunk.
Or, take your pick—I had plenty of options, plenty of bad memories like bogeymen to keep me awake at night. Like that awful night in Phnom Penh. Kristen’s eyes flashing as she swung the lamp and took Sebastian down. Stop. Stop. Stop.
“I feel it in my chest,” I said, “like the beginning of an asthma attack.”
The clutch in my ribs had plagued me throughout dinner the night before. Aaron and I had had our belated birthday meal; he’d wanted to cook everything for me, but I’d insisted on making it a co-celebration, since he’d just picked up a coveted design project. I told him about the cabin, about roasting marshmallows and watching satellites skate across the sky. I turned the tale of how I’d twisted my ankle and yelled to a silent, unlistening night into a slapstick comedy, dorky and cute.
I omitted a few things: My dreamlike, phoneless showdown across the kitchen table with Kristen. The mutilated rabbit that appeared in the dark. Digging in the basement in the middle of the night, angry scribbles where Jamie’s face should be. Like the news broadcast in an airport—edit the feed to limit hysteria. It was exhausting, keeping a lid on the fear. It threatened to crumple my lungs and give me away.
“What do you think is triggering it?” Adrienne asked.
There it was. A sliver of ivory nail pulled free.
“I’m still…uneasy with Kristen being back here.” I couldn’t tell her why, but deep down I knew the answer: I was beginning to question if I could really trust her. Which felt surprising and strange and wrong—historically, Kristen was synonymous with safety in my mind.
“Why do you think that is?”
I shrugged. “She’s still acting like everything’s fine. Which is one way to deal with something scary, but I worry it’s an act. Like, she’s keeping it all inside where it could go off like a bomb.”
Adrienne nodded. “And what makes you think she’s keeping it in?”
For starters, she refuses to even acknowledge the wealthy developer teaming up with the LAPD to find us. Her behavior when we’d found the CNN article had been so bizarre that a part of me kept whispering, Was that insincere?
“She just seems…off. Normally she’s a joy to be around—she’s intoxicating, you know? But since she came back, things between us seem strained. And Lord knows I wasn’t myself after I was attacked, so I’m not judging her for it. But it’s like she’s aggressively happy or something—fake.”
Adrienne tilted her head. “It’s notable, how much time we spend talking about Kristen’s emotions. Do you think you might be prioritizing them over your own?”
“It’s not that,” I spit out. But then I sighed. “I know she cares about me. And I…it’s not wrong to be worried about my best friend.”
“Of course not,” Adrienne replied, and my defensiveness slackened. She crinkled her brow, gathering her thoughts. “So, Kristen acting ‘aggressively happy’ puts you on edge. It makes you feel more worried about her and focused on how she’s doing.” She waited until I nodded. “And you’ve said she’s super smart. And in tune with your emotions, right?” I nodded again. “So, I wonder if maybe she…she knows she’s having this effect on you. I’m not even saying it’s intentional, but maybe it’s a way to sort of maintain the power balance in the relationship. Remember when we talked about how when a friendship changes, someone usually pushes back?”
Nausea in my belly, like a bud unfurling into a fat, prickly leaf. I wanted to tell Adrienne she was wrong, but combined with all the alarms boinging around my head since the weekend, well…
“I always told myself Kristen was all I needed,” I admitted as a tear trickled past my nose. “And I do love her, I do. But now that I have other people in my life—now that I have Aaron…” I snatched up a Kleenex. “I feel so guilty saying this. Like it’s a betrayal.”
“It’s okay, Emily. Anything you say here is between you and me.”
A loud, slow exhalation. “I think she wants me all to herself.” I didn’t know it until it was out of my mouth, and then it was true: “Like, she planned this birthday trip even though I told her I already had plans with Aaron. Just informed him she was taking over and he’d have to wait.”
“Did you let Kristen know that that bothered you?”
“Of course not. She was just trying to do something nice for me.”
Her eyebrows flashed. “Some people would say that hijacking your birthday plans is not respecting your boundaries.”
Tears brimmed again as the truth lapped at my mind. Unavoidable. Irrefutable. Kristen’s love looks a lot like control.
“What happens when you think about talking to Kristen about this stuff head-on?”
It felt…unfathomable. “I just hate confrontation,” I said.
“That’s fair—conflict is uncomfortable. But sometimes bringing things into the light can actually help, right?” I stared at her miserably, so she continued. “Let’s step back. When you were a kid, what happened if you tried talking to your parents about something they did that upset you?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t. Period.”
“Well, I learned not to at a young age.” I stared at my hands. “Because if I spoke up, I got in trouble. They were in the because-I-said-so school of parenting.”
“Wow, Emily.” She nodded solemnly.
Something flopped in my breast, something deep and raw and spiky. I pictured my dad’s furious eyes, the sudden shock of a spanking when I had no idea I was misbehaving. How the pain cut off my singing mid-word. “I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s okay.”
“Of course.” She waited as I blotted my cheeks. “Let’s go back to Kristen steamrolling your birthday plans with Aaron. How did he feel about that?”
“He said it was fine. But would he tell me if it wasn’t?”
“What do you think?”
A beat. “He’s just so nice. Maybe that’s making me uneasy too.”
“That’s a reason to feel scared?”
I squirmed. “I think things are going really well. And now I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the past to come back and haunt me.” For the universe to punish me for all the lies—the universe or the Los Angeles police.
“So you’re afraid that him treating you well makes it more likely that things won’t work out.”
I ducked my head away.
“Do you think that’s true?” she asked.
“It’s not rational, no.”
She dropped her notebook onto her lap. “Remember how I used to be a lawyer? My job was to get the jury to look at the evidence objectively. Cognitive behavioral therapy is kind of the same thing: You examine your thoughts like a scientist so you can challenge the ones that don’t hold up. So let’s look at this fear, this belief or, or thought pattern you’ve noticed. Just because a feeling is real doesn’t mean it’s true.”
* * *
—
That was the lesson Adrienne hoped I’d take away from the session. Because she thought my fears were irrational, that a body hadn’t been exhumed, that there wasn’t a group of armed professionals actively tracking me down. But that evening, I saw her advice in a new light: Be a scientist. Be like an attorney, build the case. I now knew Kristen was controlling, pulling the strings whether she meant to or not. And clearly something had rattled my lizard brain during my time at Lake Novak—enough to make me doubt that I could trust her.
One, two, three, four, five dead bodies. My subconscious kept counting, kept scraping at our friendship like an art restorer chiseling the grime off the truth.
The question at hand: Was Kristen a bystander with links to multiple deaths through a series of unfortunate coincidences…or was there something more at play?
My stomach clenched and bile scalded my throat. The hugeness of the accusation swooped through me and jangled my balance. I dropped into my desk chair, breathing hard.
A part of me, tucked under my consciousness, had been circling this question for weeks. I’d held back, policing my thoughts, unwilling to state it so directly. Because the implications were devastating: Kristen, my oldest and closest friend, the only one who saw the ugliest parts of me and loved me anyway, who loved me unconditionally, might be a murderer. But I couldn’t ignore the evidence sloshing against me like a pounding surf: the bodies, all those bodies. Coincidence didn’t produce that kind of pile. I felt suddenly cold, and my arms and jaw began to shake.
Focus, Emily. I breathed deeply and imagined all my feelings, heartbreak and horror and disbelief and fear, crumpled down into a little ball, like the lump in the fireplace after we burned up Paolo’s things. That’s what was at stake—arrest, murder charges, our futures ruined. I had to know if I could trust Kristen. I had to know if she was truly safe.
Had Kristen killed anybody? That was the big question: not self-defense, not accidental death, but murder. The questions below it popped up like goosebumps. What had happened to her parents? To Jamie? Was her takedown of Sebastian an isolated incident? And what really happened the night Paolo died?
Something hysterical frothed up through my throat and came out as a moan. Focus. If this were an issue at work, the next step would be coming up with action items and carrying them out, one by one.
First, I read everything I could find on the fire that killed Kristen’s parents, which wasn’t much: a few sentences in the local paper, noting only that the cause was undetermined; obituaries for both parents, Jerry and Anne, plus a plea for donations to a charity in lieu of flowers. I searched for Kristen Czarnecki and 2001. Then her grandparents, one by one. I was slightly surprised to find that Nana’s real name was Tabitha, which felt just as made-up as Nana, but otherwise, no bombshells.
