We Were Never Here, page 28
Another glance flickered between them. I searched their faces: alarm, horror, disgust, check, check, check. Noticeably absent: surprise.
Why would she try to kill you—that’s the question I expected next, that I was bracing for, my mind running a million miles an hour. It didn’t come.
It was now or never. “She followed me here. It was nuts. I was trying to get away from her, but Aaron—my boyfriend—posted a photo with a location tag, and she flew out here like it was nothing. And then she made it sound like I was the one who wanted her here, like it’d been my idea. She’s…I think she’s unhinged.” I shook my head and smeared at my tears. “I’m sorry—I heard you say she’s your goddaughter. I know how weird it sounds, but it’s the truth.”
They were silent, stone-faced. A doctor appeared, a stethoscope slung around her neck, and asked for Mr. Meuleman’s family. I darted over and met her skeptical “You’re family?” with a blank nod. I knew from the front desk that someone had contacted Aaron’s parents, at least.
“I won’t beat around the bush—the surgery was a success,” she announced, and I melted with relief. “That said, it’s going to be a long journey to recovery. He has a broken nose and multiple facial-bone fractures, two broken ribs, hemothorax—that’s a pocket of blood between the chest wall and the lung—and a shattered patella.”
“But he’ll be okay?” My voice was hoarse.
She nodded. “It’ll take some time and some physical therapy, but we expect him to make a full recovery.”
“Can I see him?” I asked.
“Right now he needs to rest. We’ll let you know when he can have visitors—I’d guess two, three hours at most.”
I thanked her and she bowed her head before striding away, onto the next emergency, the next accident, the next mangled body clinging to life by a caterpillar’s gossamer thread. One flick of a twig and we’d lose ’em, snap. I sat back down by the Rusches, abruptly exhausted.
Still, questions fluttered. This was my chance—the universe making the intro I’d been too chicken to send when I found that memorial website.
“Can I ask you a little more about Jamie?”
Tom cracked his eyes open while Jenny squeezed hers shut.
“I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s painful to talk about. But…there’s some stuff I’ve been trying to piece together. About Kristen. And I bet you could help.”
“I don’t think this is the time,” Tom said, so loudly Jenny jumped. “We should stay focused on waiting for news about Kristen.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” I blushed all the way down to my toes.
They got out their phones, froze me out with their swiping and tapping. Jenny approached the front desk again, then returned and announced they wouldn’t know anything for another few hours at least. I shifted around, trying to get comfortable in the stiff-backed seat. I’d abandoned my backpack on the road, so I had no money, no ID, nothing.
“Do you need a phone?” Jenny frowned at me. “Do you want to call your parents?”
I shook my head. “I—I don’t even know their current numbers. And I lost my bag in the accident.” Panic whooshed through me and I blinked back tears.
“Aw, it’s okay!” Jenny leaned forward. “Look, where’s your hotel? I can give you a lift—you should probably pick up some stuff for when your boyfriend wakes up, anyway, right?”
I nodded at Jenny gratefully, and she swatted her husband’s arm. “Give me the keys.”
“You’re leaving?”
“It’s Hotel Rosita,” I blubbered, and she entered it into her phone.
“That’s only fifteen minutes away. We’ll be right back, Tom.”
I followed her out, feeling Tom’s eyes on our backs the entire walk to the door.
CHAPTER 43
“You know, I get why Tom doesn’t want to talk to you.” We’d been driving for a few minutes when Jenny abruptly turned off the radio. NPR, something about police brutality in India.
I gazed straight ahead. “I truly don’t know what Kristen is doing here. Like I said, I was trying to get away from her. Because she scares me.”
She sighed. “When I look at you, I just see Jamie. You even look a tiny bit alike.”
“So I hear.”
She glanced at me, then back out the windshield. The sun beat onto her face in a golden rectangle, but she didn’t flip down the visor. “Tom can’t understand why I kept in touch with Kristen either. He’s only here because he didn’t trust me to drive the four and a half hours in my emotional state. But I care about Kristen. I can’t help it. Even if she is bad news.”
I watched strip malls scroll past the window. “I’ve been learning that. That Kristen’s bad news. I’ve been trying to put the pieces together and…and figure out what was really going on with her, with our friendship.” I glanced at Jenny. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Jamie for a while now. Would you be willing to tell me?”
“Jamie died by suicide.” Her voice cracked, but then she regained her composure. “But before that, Kristen had her wrapped around her pinkie.”
She took an off-ramp, trundled onto a frontage road.
“They were best friends practically since birth. When we moved into the neighborhood, Jamie was only a few months old and Anne was pregnant with Kristen, so we grew close right away.” She reached out to turn the air-conditioning down, and I saw her fingers shake. “At first, I was thrilled that the girls got along so well. But as soon as they hit third or fourth grade, I started to worry. Kristen was always pushing Jamie to misbehave: ‘Come on, don’t be a baby, steal this candy from the cupboard or pocket this lipstick from the drugstore.’ Whoa.” She braked and tapped her horn at a BMW suddenly gunning around her. “The weirdest thing was, Kristen was always doing naughty things and then trying to convince Jamie she’d done them. Once I heard crying and rushed into the playroom, and Jamie was sitting there with her beloved American Girl doll in one hand and its head in the other. Kristen claimed that Jamie had ripped it off, but when I asked why, Jamie said she didn’t know.” Her knuckles were strangling the steering wheel, tighter and tighter. “Even after I’d sent Kristen home, Jamie stuck to her story. But when I checked the nanny cam, Kristen had decapitated the doll, not Jamie. Weird, childish stuff. But I wondered what was making her act out.”
The revelation swept through me. Kristen had been gaslighting people since she was young. Jenny figured it was just a little-kid quirk of Kristen’s, but I knew the truth; I knew Kristen was still at it, decades later. Scrambling my memories, accusing me of acts she herself had committed. Don’t play dumb—I watched you kill him. How easily she’d convinced me.
At least I was certain now: Kristen had killed Sebastian. My shouts had been the drumbeat, a desperate plea as she kicked the life out of him: Stop. Stop. Stop.
“And was…was the bullying the reason Jamie…?” I couldn’t finish the thought.
Jenny shook her head as we bumped into the hotel’s parking lot. She pulled into a spot and turned off the car, then leaned her brow against the steering wheel and sobbed.
I touched her shoulder gingerly. “Do you want to go inside, or…?”
She shook her head again. “I need to finish saying this or I’ll never get it all out.”
The car was already heating like a pot of water on the stove. “Um, is there any way we could turn the AC back on?”
“We have OnStar. When the car’s running, it records everything.”
It was so like Kristen—practical yet paranoid, sensible yet absurd. I nodded and unbuckled my seatbelt.
“Jamie was being abused,” Jenny said, fighting to keep her voice under control, “by her basketball coach. Kristen’s father. She didn’t tell anyone, but she wrote about it in her diary, which I found afterward.”
My stomach lurched. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Kristen’s asshole father—he wasn’t just an asshole, he was a predator, a child molester. Had he abused his daughter too? She’d said she hated being alone with him. I’d spent so much time wondering what lay beneath her dark compulsions; I’d questioned whether Kristen was a run-of-the-mill sociopath or maybe a vulnerable child cracked open by her parents’ death or her grandfather’s casual tyranny. But if her own father had modeled a cycle she couldn’t help but reproduce—bullying, gaslighting, violence—well, it didn’t justify anything, but it might help explain it.
“I’m so sorry, Jenny. I don’t know what else to say.” My heart seemed to be folding in half like a soggy paper plate. Poor Kristen, poor Jamie, poor anyone else who got in that awful man’s way. It was no wonder Kristen hadn’t had any serious romantic relationships in all the years I’d known her.
“Thanks.” Jenny battled the tears for a few seconds, then went on. “Her diary said something else too. She’d…she thought the only way to stop the abuse was to kill him. She was so young—she just wanted it to end. She—she thought it would be okay because he was a Christian, and that meant he’d automatically end up in heaven.”
Now I was crying too. Steam from our hot breath and tears crept up the windshield, closing us in.
“She did it on a night when she thought only Jerry would be home. Just waltzed right in and did what she thought she had to do. Only, Anne was home—Kristen too.” She wiped her trembling hand beneath her nose. “But Kristen saw her. Ran after her, all the way to our house, screaming. It woke me up, but I—I thought I was dreaming.” Her sobs shook the car as fog climbed into the windshield’s center, hazing out the hot world outside.
“I don’t know how to say this,” I ventured, “but I have to ask—are you sure it was Jamie and not Kristen who started the fire? If Kristen’s MO was accusing Jamie of things she did herself—”
“No. I read her diary. Jamie came up with it all on her own.”
“But if Kristen—”
“Kristen knew that Anne was home,” she cut in, hunched over like a teenager. “Jamie didn’t, but Kristen knew her mom had decided last-minute not to go away for the weekend. And Kristen would never hurt her mom. She loved her more than anyone in the world. When she—that night, when she gave up on Jamie and ran to Tabitha and Bill’s, yelling so loud she woke me up, she was screaming one word over and over: Mommy.”
“Oh my God.” It fit, but I wasn’t sure I could accept it—could Kristen, an agent of hurt and chaos, really have been adjacent to that tragedy and not directly involved? Or maybe her parents’ death was the spark that ignited her cruelty. Perhaps she’d then guilted young Jamie into killing herself, or blackmailed Jamie by saying she saw her start the fire, or…
I glanced over at Jenny. She was curled like a question mark, silhouetted in the window, and for a flash I saw what Jamie would look like now, button-nosed and pretty. My heart sank. Could another twelve-year-old, driven to desperation, really have behaved as destructively as Kristen?
Just look how far she pushed you.
Jenny sniffled. “So Kristen screamed all the way to Tabitha and Bill’s, and they called 911 and kept her safe. But she told them—she knew she’d seen Jamie in there, and though I never asked her, I bet she had some idea why Jamie would want her father dead. Oh God. Jamie used to go up to their cottage with them on weekends—I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.”
A cry, then, so long and mournful I thought of the loon, its call echoing as if to channel all the pain of a broiling, dying Earth. I let my own tears stream over my neck, soaking into the collar of my dirty tank top.
“But we didn’t know. We had no idea!” She disgorged a few more sobs. “And when Bill didn’t demand an investigation, we thought what everyone else thought: The fire was an accident, a tragic, freak thing. But then Kristen rang my doorbell. God, I can remember it like it was yesterday. I opened the door to find her bawling. And in between sobs, she told me she’d seen Jamie leaving her house the night of the fire. She thought Jamie had started it. I didn’t believe her, of course. I told her to leave.”
She took a deep inhalation and pushed it out in a stream. Her breath was raspy, an odd accordion sound. “But then I read the diary. I couldn’t tell Tom. Tom doesn’t know—about the abuse, the arson, any of it. It would break him. Tom has no idea what that motherfucker did to our daughter. God, sometimes I wish Jerry wasn’t dead so I could burn him alive all over again.”
The fury wafted off of her like heat. Tears streamed down her face and I could see the veins banging along her throat.
I reached out and touched her hand. She jumped, then sagged a little.
“I tried to speak with Bill in private.” Her voice was furious and compressed, carbon pressed into a diamond. “He didn’t want to hear it. Any of it. He didn’t want to tarnish his memories of his son. I could have killed him then and there. He kept saying it was too late now, we’d both lost a child and accusing his son of pedophilia and my daughter of arson would only cause more pain. Plus, I’d have to tell Tom, and, and if we’d gone to the authorities to explain, the story would’ve been sensationalized in the press. The whole world would be looking at my beautiful daughter, pitying her, blaming her, calling her a victim, a murderer, looking for photos where she showed too much skin, picking her apart, tearing her to shreds. Tom and I were already at rock bottom—no way could we deal with that kind of pain. And for what? It wouldn’t bring my Jamie back. It wouldn’t undo what had been done. So we packed up and moved across the country, and…and tried to start over.”
My heart felt like a cello, groaning a long, mournful note. Poor Jamie, poor Kristen. Poor Jenny and Tom.
“Kristen went to a mental-health center after that,” I said, “an inpatient one, for minors. I thought it was basically in place of juvie for kids who’d done something wrong.”
Jenny shook her head. “I didn’t know that. But it doesn’t surprise me that she had a mental break after all that trauma. Oh, that poor girl. I told you I didn’t like how she treated Jamie, but…Christ, nobody deserves that. I can’t imagine how that screws you up, long-term.”
I nodded. “You didn’t hear from Kristen again after that?”
“She friended me on Facebook a few years ago. After she graduated. I always wondered about her, kept her in my prayers…Jamie loved her, you know. They were best friends. In a weird way, Kristen feels like the last connection to my Jamie.” Her eyes turned steely. “My heart stopped when Tom said that Bill was calling today. I hate that Bill even has Tom’s number.”
I gave her hand a squeeze, and she looked down at it thoughtfully. We sat in silence for a while.
“I’m sure you realize you can’t tell anyone what I told you,” she said. “Not anyone.”
“I know.” Sweat prickled on my forehead and dripped down my back. It felt like my whole body was crying.
“Emily.”
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Why were you trying to get away from Kristen?”
The car was almost unbearably warm now, sun beating in through the back.
“I’m not sure I can tell you,” I replied. All the pieces were floating around now, swirling like dry leaves.
She swallowed hard, then bobbed her head. “Okay. But I doubt the Phoenix PD is going to like that answer.”
The penny dropped. Jesus Christ. I turned to her, eyes wide. “You think if Kristen doesn’t pull through, they’ll charge me with her murder?”
“No.” She clunked the car door open and the saunalike breeze mingled with our steam room inside. “I think they’ll charge your boyfriend.”
CHAPTER 44
Jenny’s husband called as we were up in my messy hotel room. I’d taken a quick shower, scrubbing dirt from my skin while Jenny waited on a stiff armchair. I was yanking out clothes for Aaron and stuffing them into a tote bag when she lifted her phone and ducked into the muggy bathroom. When she reemerged, her face was grim.
“She didn’t make it,” she said. “Kristen didn’t make it.”
My heart dropped like an ice fisher plunging through a frozen lake, down into the inescapable cold, and I slumped against the wardrobe. I flashed back to that morning in Chile, the morning after, when Kristen and I stopped at a cliff on the drive out of town and screamed into the canyon below. I felt the same strange sensation now, something huge and sweeping, erupting out of me and up into the atmosphere. A mushroom cloud of power and sorrow. Something you could see from space.
“I’m sorry.” Jenny touched my arm and I jumped.
“I’m sorry too,” I said, and meant it. I hesitated. “What do we do now?”
“We should head back there. Tom said there are cops waiting to talk to you.”
Cold adrenaline careened through me. My hand shook as I grabbed my now fully charged phone on the way out. I unlocked it while the elevator made its slow descent: texts and voicemails from Kristen, “You ok?” and “Stay strong my friend” and “I’m on my way,” each one a stab to my gut. Kristen. As late as this morning I’d still been waffling, trying to decide if she was being inappropriate or if I was being too sensitive, too suspicious.
But that was before she shoved me in front of an oncoming car.
Well, in response to me pushing her off a cliff. Because she’d convinced me, erroneously, that I had it in me. That I was like her. That I could solve my problems by taking someone else’s life.
Oh God. My stomach gurgled; my vision swam. The silver doors split apart and I took off through the lobby, sprinting past the automatic doors in time to vomit. I spat and spotted Jenny in the doorway, but she whirled around and dashed back inside. A moment later she reappeared with a cup of water, and she rubbed my back as I brought it to my lips.
“Little sips, not big gulps,” she said.
“Thanks.” I swallowed. “You’re being so nice to me.”
