Before We Were Innocent, page 8
When Evangeline drove us to town, Joni and I would open the windows and complain about how hot it was, how dusty the roads were, how uncomfortable it was when the shop owners stared at us, anything to show her that this wasn’t the trip we had planned. It felt satisfying, siding with Joni like this, as I’d always been a little intimidated by her, and it was a relief to no longer be courting approval from Evangeline, who was so firmly in her own world that she rarely doled it out. It made us both wonder why we’d tried so hard before.
FIFTEEN
2018
FOR THE FIRST TIME in years, I am unable to focus on work. I start late after picking up my car from the Ace Hotel, and my brain feels syrupy, my instincts muffled somehow. My fifth case of the day is a user with an IP address in South Carolina who has been using the photo of a sorority girl in Savannah, Georgia, to solicit male nudes. I feel strangely sorry for this person who didn’t feel like their real self was enough, whose other active account reveals him to be an older, reluctant-looking man, and I linger over the case for too long before giving him a warning. When the case disappears, I feel pissed at myself because I know it should have been a straight block.
Less than an hour later, I stand and stretch, announcing aloud that I’m going to get some lunch. My words hang in the air as I shuffle around looking for my keys, and I wonder again if I should get a cat, or maybe a rabbit, mainly to make moments like this feel less embarrassing. The idea of a pet soothes me somewhat, until I remember that the coyotes would inevitably get to it.
* * *
—
Ryan is behind the counter at the gas station, peeling price stickers off a sheet and applying them to boxes of Colgate. His phone is pressed between his ear and his shoulder, but he waves at me, watching as I circle the store.
When I get to the counter, he murmurs something into the phone and hangs up. I push the loaf of bread, mayonnaise, and a can of tuna toward him.
“Let me guess . . . duck à l’orange?” he asks, and I smile at him even though I feel mildly humiliated.
“You know, some guy came in here earlier looking for you,” he says as he checks the date on the tuna. I think first of my brother, even though of course he would come to my cabin, not here, if anything had happened to our parents.
“Really?” I ask. “Are you sure he was looking for me?”
“Yeah.” Ryan nods. “But I didn’t tell him where you lived.”
He says it proudly, as if not sharing someone’s home address with a stranger isn’t the bare minimum involved in existing, an opening clause of our shared social contract, and I feel a thrum of anger.
“I think it was a reporter,” Ryan says. “From the questions he was asking.”
“Okay,” I say, now looking pointedly at the groceries between us.
“You know, I never thought you did it,” he says then, and when I look up, I can see that his eyes are ravenous.
“I knew who you were the first time you came in,” he continues. “But trust me, I know bad people. And I knew that someone who looked like you, someone who came from where you did, couldn’t kill someone.”
As he talks, I think of all the other men too: the ones I’d tried to date in the years following Evangeline’s death, yes, but also the strangers I’d just tried to buy a fucking book from or attempted to move past in the Gelson’s dry goods aisle. Men who were always at pains to tell me that they were feminists too and allies, and that they’d read any of the hundreds of op-eds written about us at the time, and they weren’t scared of me because they could tell I had good intentions and a gentle soul, as if that were always a compliment. Men who thought they were doing me a favor every time they mentioned it before I did, as if it were a sign of their generosity, their mercy.
Ryan is still staring at me, perhaps waiting for me to thank him again, and I wonder now if he’s seen the grainy photos from my short-lived MySpace account—the ones where fifteen-year-old Joni and I swept our hair across our foreheads and posed in lacy push-up bras, lips pouting, dense false eyelashes grazing our eyebrows as we stared into the lens of her family computer; the ones where we looked like we were the type of girls who chased danger so that we’d finally have a reason to justify the deep sadness we felt, some way of escaping our bland upper-middle-class existence.
“Did he say what he wanted?” I whisper, and Ryan thinks about it for a moment.
“I don’t believe he did, no,” he says. “But I saw the other girl on the news, so I figured.”
I stand there nodding even as terror climbs through every cell in my body. And that’s when I understand that this will only end once Willa learns what I have been forced to reckon with time and time again: You can never truly disappear.
* * *
—
At home, I turn on the local news network. At the end of the hourly update, a photo of Willa fills the screen. I recognize the shot from her Instagram page—a portrait of her throwing her head back and laughing in Lake Tahoe. Underneath are the words appeal for information about missing local woman.
“Los Angeles police are appealing for any information about the whereabouts of this twenty-three-year-old woman, Willa Bailey, who has been missing for ten days. She was last seen by a neighbor on the deck of her Malibu home on May seventh, just after seven p.m. She’s five feet six inches tall with pink hair and brown eyes, and anyone with any information is asked to call the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.”
I watch as a photo of Joni flashes up next, a press shot from a keynote speaking engagement where her magnetism and vivacity ooze out of each perfectly tight pore, and I have the brief and disturbing thought that if it were me who had lost someone, a partner or family member, they would inevitably use a photo of me from that summer in Greece.
“Willa’s partner, famed podcaster and personality Joni Le Bon, acquitted of any involvement in the death of Evangeline Daphne Aetos in Greece nearly ten years ago, is yet to make a statement on her disappearance. We will update the story as it unfolds.”
* * *
—
I open a beer and try to quell the panic rising inside me. When I see the same car drive past three times, slowing as it passes my house, I close the blinds and turn out the lights. Moments later, the porch creaks and I leap behind the sofa, gripped by a sickening panic. I think of my family and what it would do to them to have our lives ripped back apart along the same badly restitched seams all because somehow, after all these years, Joni has exposed me again.
Only that’s not quite right . . .
I’m the one who exposed myself.
When the afternoon shadows start climbing the walls around me and I can’t bear to be alone any longer, I call the only person in the world who could understand.
* * *
—
The car Joni sends is black and sleek, with tinted windows and blue LED lights in the footwell. I run my fingers across the cool leather, and it takes me a moment to remember when I was last in a car like this.
It was winding up the hills of Greece, just before Evangeline died.
SIXTEEN
2008
A FTER FIVE WEEKS IN the Tinos house, halfway through our stay, Joni and I were at breaking point. Evangeline had become more stubborn than ever, complaining that she wasn’t getting enough sleep because Joni and I stayed up too late, turning up in the doorway of whichever room we were in, sleep mask pushed up on her head as she whined about the acoustics in the house. She’d wake up at six a.m. and bang around until we were forced to emerge too, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived as she talked brightly about what she had planned for the day, and it had begun to feel like she was trying to control which hours we were conscious, as well as everything else. By this point, even Joni and I were barely talking to each other after Joni accused me of hogging the computer on one of our rare trips into town, but when the front door flung open at nine one Sunday night (during our 675,882nd game of Scrabble), it was my hand she reached for.
“Please don’t get up,” Theo said, grinning as he surveyed the scene in front of him. “This is a charming portrait.”
We sat frozen on the floor as what felt like an indeterminate number of college-age guys piled into the stone room, and it felt like the world had opened up again, even though none of us would ever give them the satisfaction of knowing that. After a moment, Evangeline jumped up and threw herself into her brother’s arms. Theo hugged her back for a long time, and I wondered if even Ev wasn’t having as much fun as she let on. It didn’t matter, because from the moment the four of them arrived, Ev, Joni, and I instinctively transformed into heightened versions of ourselves. Or perhaps we just remembered who we were—three smart, college-bound young women who were entirely self-sufficient thank you very much and having the time of our lives in paradise, because how could we not?
As Ev and Theo caught up in the kitchen, preparing the food that the guys had picked up on their drive over (frozen pizzas—how unbelievably boyish and American of them), Joni and I showed the others around the house, staking claim to all the things we’d once despised, to make us sound brave and rugged—“The rats are actually kind of cute. It’s the snakes you need to worry about.”
We ate dinner outside, and the first mouthful of pizza felt miraculous, the cheese oily and familiar. Evangeline had insisted on us eating local and fresh, and Joni and I would take turns naming restaurants we missed at night (“Katsu-ya. The original one. Your turn.”), but I hadn’t realized how much I’d been yearning for a carb coma to remind me of home.
Theo and his friends from Brown, Zack, Bardo, and Robbie, seemed as thrilled to see us as we were them, and we all stayed up until four a.m. that night, cracking into Stavros’s wine collection—dusting off bottles of red that Evangeline didn’t even complain nobody was letting breathe for long enough. The atmosphere crackled with jokes and self-admiration and hope, and I caught Theo staring at me no less than seven times. The first time I caught him he looked away instantly, the second time he shrugged blithely, and from then on we just smiled at each other across the table. Evangeline fell asleep sitting up with her chin resting in her hand, and Joni was the one who finally called it.
When we stood up to leave, Theo touched my waist lightly, his fingers landing on the bare skin between my jean shorts and cropped T-shirt for less than a second.
“Wait here,” he said. “I actually got you something in London.”
I held my breath even as I told myself not to expect too much.
When Theo came back, he was grinning. He pressed a balled-up garment into my hands and, when I held it up, I saw that Theo had bought me a red soccer jersey with the name ronaldo on the back. I felt stunned that he’d thought of me even when he was nowhere near me.
“Shit,” I said, unable to reach anything else for a moment. “Thank you.”
“I saw it and thought of you,” Theo said, and then he made a whooshing noise and arched his hand through the air, as if he were following the trajectory of the ball I’d kicked that day on the beach.
“It was a lucky kick,” I said, even though I knew that hadn’t been it at all. It was because Theo made people better than they were.
As I lay in bed later, the dawn chorus already warming up, I felt as if my entire body was alight. And if I had to relive one moment for the rest of my life, it would still be that night: the sense of hope, of infinite possibility, of tomorrow promising to be even better than today.
* * *
—
I woke up at around ten a.m. with a clawing headache and a dry mouth, unable to sleep longer for fear of missing anything. What if everyone had been up for hours before me? Bardo and Joni had been talking about going down to the beach for sunrise—what if they’d all just waited until I’d fallen asleep, and then snuck down? What if being together in the water at sunrise was so brilliant, so perfect, that it was all any of them would talk about for the remainder of their stay? I felt sick at the thought of all the ways I might have already missed out, but when I got downstairs all I found was Bardo and Robbie sleeping in threadbare boxer shorts, snoring on opposite ends of the L-shaped sofa. Nearly breathless with relief, I sailed past them and into the kitchen, where I found Evangeline slicing lemons.
“Morning,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied, without looking at me.
I sat down at the kitchen table, waiting for her to comment on the beautiful weather; or how she’d dreamed about Mr. Maxim, our cuteish algebra teacher; or any of the things she’d usually say to fill a silence like this.
“God, I’m tired,” I said. “Do you need any help?”
“Cutting lemons?” she said. “I think I’m good.”
I paused, unsure of how to proceed. Theo’s arrival obviously meant that it was more important than ever that Ev was on my side, however unreasonable I thought she’d been over the past month. I didn’t think he’d necessarily ask for either her opinion or her approval explicitly, but they were close, and I knew that negative feedback wasn’t exactly going to make things any easier.
“Umm, well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry if things got a little tense for a while,” I said stiffly. I’d apologized after fights with Steven and my parents in the past, but I’d never had to do it to a friend before. I had thought we were all in a race to prove who cared the least, and I felt irritable that Evangeline was milking it like this now that she had backup. It seemed unsporting, and not in the current spirit of things at all. Still, I took a deep breath and continued: “This has been such a great trip, Ev, like, so great, and I’m grateful for—”
“You’re so transparent,” Evangeline said, her back still turned to me. “Do you know that about yourself? So, so embarrassingly transparent.”
It was the meanest thing she’d ever said to me. Perhaps the meanest thing anyone had ever said to me, given how smart I thought I was and how true it could have been. I understood then how cruel Joni and I must have been to her, in that insidious, incremental way that is almost worse because she couldn’t have confronted us about it without seeming petty or babyish. I had brought Ev down to my level, forced her to be unkind, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it, so instead I just watched as she carried on slicing lemons before placing them into oil on a baking tray. She walked over to the fridge and pulled out a large raw chicken, which she slathered in olive oil with her hands. I swallowed hard, the sight of the jiggling, dimpled skin instantly bringing out the depths of my hangover. When I couldn’t bear it anymore, I pushed my chair back and ran to the bathroom to vomit.
* * *
—
Once everyone else had woken up to the smell of lemon-and-garlic-roasted chicken wafting up the stairs, I returned to the fold, stretching and pretending I’d woken up with them too. I watched Evangeline closely, noting how she had pulled her hair back into a perfect messy bun, a few loose strands tucked behind her ears; how she insisted we all sit for lunch exactly where we’d happened to sit the previous night (me on the opposite end of the table from Theo, naturally); how she kept on the frilly yellow apron even while we ate; and how she grabbed her digital camera and insisted on taking a group photo in which we all sat around the table with glasses of wine and plates of chicken and salad, a bunch of children pretending to be adults. As she monopolized her brother’s attention, I felt a sort of bitterness toward her that was different from how I’d felt even a few hours earlier, as if she was trying harder than ever to be perceived as selfless and helpful to make me feel worse, even though I knew that this was just how she was, how she had always been. I deliberately ignored Theo to show her just how untransparent, how stunningly opaque, I could be when I wanted.
Later, as we were all walking down to the beach, I would pull Joni aside and try to tell her about what had happened in the kitchen.
“Can you believe she’d say something like that?” I said, and by this point I was furious. “What did she even mean?”
“She probably just didn’t want things to be weird,” Joni said, shrugging me off. “Lighten up, Bess. Not everything’s always about you.”
Joni skipped ahead to catch up with Bardo, who she’d clearly decided was the fun one and the person she might be able to convince to ditch the other guys to go island-hopping with her, because I’d never shown any signs that I was actually serious about it, but I knew he was only fun because Joni had chosen him. She had coaxed the wildness out of him, and I wondered if she knew the effect she had on all of us. As I struggled to be included—smiling and laughing as Joni’s and Bardo’s dares for each other grew more outlandish and they swam so far out that we could no longer even spot their bobbing heads; pretending not to notice when Theo hugged Evangeline after she went pale and covered her face with her hands—I realized how fragile these alliances were, how adding just one extra element could make the whole thing collapse in front of your eyes.
SEVENTEEN
2018
JONI’S HOUSE IS SPECTACULAR. An architectural touchstone—a mid-century crested-wave-inspired gem, built from glass and copper and perched over a strip of Malibu coastline that is destined to be devoured by the ocean in our lifetime; the kind of home that implies the owner might even be deserving of their wealth because they have a healthy attitude toward losing it. Either that or the surveyor fucked up.
