Summer's Edge, page 23
“That never happened,” Kennedy says with a practiced calm.
But at the exact same time, Chase blurts, “It was an accident.”
And Mila says, “Kennedy did it.”
I refill Kennedy’s cup with the decanter, a low buzz beginning to hum in my ear. We face one another, a circle of players—a killer, a liar, an accomplice, and half a twin.
She takes a nervous gulp. “That’s bullshit. You weren’t even there, Mila. You were belowdeck.”
“How else?” Mila’s voice shakes. “How else did he just disappear? He didn’t randomly go for a swim fully clothed. Chase, you know it’s true. Why do we keep lying to protect her?”
“Because it’s impossible! Kennedy is not a killer.” He looks at me. “Emily, you know that. We’re not monsters. People don’t just kill their friends.”
Mila looks at him sharply. “But we did. Own up to it. Every one of us was an accessory when we covered it up, because we knew what happened. She did it. And we went along with it because there are no consequences for people like Kennedy or you, and that made it feel like if we didn’t say it, it didn’t happen. But that’s your world, not ours. Chelsea isn’t okay. I’m not okay. You should not be okay with this.”
“I’m not,” he shouts.
I stare at him, taken aback for a moment. Kennedy sits silently, her lips pressed tightly together. She looks like she’s holding in a scream. A long, high-pitched, endless scream. I can hear it in my head, a mourning, keening wail. I need to hear it. I need to know that she cares about what she did. That she mourns Ryan, that every day the knowledge of what she did to him is a howl in her throat begging to be released. That she regrets killing him.
But she says nothing. Nothing.
“Pushing someone into the lake isn’t necessarily intending to kill them,” I say, my voice blending with the hum. “We used to do it all the time. Accidents happen.” I look at Kennedy, her pale, frozen expression. “Did you push him?”
She shakes her head jerkily. “I didn’t mean to. I don’t know. I was startled. Why does it matter? We all know he ended up in the lake. We all tried to pull him out. We tried everything.”
Lies. Always more lies.
“The only thing you tried to do was cover your tracks. You made us believe he ran away. My parents are convinced—I half believed—he’s going to walk through the door any minute. They’re torn in half, believing he’s alive and dead at the same time. It’s destroyed them.”
“It wasn’t malice,” Chase says. “We were trying to protect you.” And right there it hits me. That thing between us. That I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s not guilt after all. It’s a lie. And it’s not to protect me.
“You were trying to protect yourselves.” I fill his glass from the decanter. Because I no longer believe that Ryan was killed with a mere push. In a hit and run, it isn’t the hit that’s the crime. It’s the run. The crucial moment when people—bad, twisted people—choose not to do the right thing. Choose to preserve the convenience of their lives over the hope of saving someone they were supposed to care about. Ryan wasn’t killed by a little shove. He was killed by abandonment. Betrayal. Lies. Because the push wasn’t the end of the story. There was a world of potential paths that branched out from the push. The path where Chase dove in after Ryan right away, and he was saved. The one where Kennedy radioed in for help. The one where Chelsea held me while I cried because there was a terrible accident and we didn’t know what was going to happen, but I wasn’t alone in this. She wasn’t going to let me go through it alone. None of them were going to abandon me to go through this alone. But that’s not what happened. None of it is. And Ryan wasn’t the only victim. All of my friends are equally guilty, because they all watched Ryan die, then looked me in the eye and lied to me. And whatever happened that night, it’s clear that they all made a conscious choice to go all in on it together. All of them vs. Ryan and me. No, I don’t believe I care who did the pushing anymore at all. They’re all guilty as hell.
Chase downs his glass all in one long gulp, and I refill it.
“We were scared,” Mila says. “We didn’t see what happened, we wanted to believe, and yes, we wanted to protect ourselves. There was no time to think. And then Kennedy told us what to say, and it was that or dive headfirst into a nightmare, and we didn’t know. At least, I told myself I didn’t know. But every second that passed, I was more sure that Kennedy pushed Ryan into the water.”
“I didn’t—” Kennedy protests.
“I think you did,” Mila says. “Chase and Kennedy tried to go after him. Even Chelsea tried to swim all the way from the dock.” I wonder if I’ve been too hard on Chelsea. But she played her part too. It’s too late to take any of it back. “I was the one who wanted to take the boat out. I’ve been blaming myself for a year. But there’s nothing we can do about any of it now. That’s the truth. Do what you want with it.”
I fill her glass from the decanter.
She takes it and heads back toward the house. “I need a cigarette.”
Kennedy’s face flushes crimson. No. Blood red. “Chase is the one who hid the body.”
The silence is stunning. Chase turns to her, his lips twitching, stuck between laughing and crying, perfectly cubist. Mila freezes, her bare shoulders tense, like all the world has turned to ice.
“You did.” Kennedy’s voice is steady, but her glass shudders in her hand. “You went back on the lifeboat that night. I saw you.”
“So?” Chase whispers.
“So if you had nothing to hide, why didn’t you tell us?” Tears glisten in Kennedy’s eyes, and I want to smash her into the earth. How dare she cry.
Chase looks at me helplessly, and his silence says everything.
I run after Mila, leaving the others behind. “Is all of that true?”
“Of course it is. My part anyway.”
I try to block the door into the house. “Stay. We can talk some more. It’s not your fault. Accidents do happen. You couldn’t have foreseen any of it. Don’t worry.”
She shakes her head. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Go in a bush.”
Mila looks at me out of the side of her eye. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing.” I shrug, but it’s unconvincing; I can hear the rising panic in my voice.
I have to let go. They say letting go is hard. That it will come with time. That forgiveness is key. Forgiving the others for surviving, and most of all, forgiving myself. For remaining. But I don’t buy it.
Because the others didn’t just survive. Survival is passive. It implies clean hands and a clear conscience. It implies innocence. It assumes that survival is something they earned, or were destined for, or just happened upon. That they deserved life more.
And that would be a lie.
Survival is something they stole.
Because Chelsea and Kennedy and the others created the tragedy they survived. They’re killers. And I can’t wait any longer.
She opens the door into the house and I hold my breath and walk in behind her, leaning back against the door and locking it behind me. Please, Chelsea, be quiet. I realize, though, with a sinking feeling, that Chelsea has to come down sooner or later. I haven’t thought any of this through. I’ve just poisoned four people with a drug I know nothing about. My eyes go to the cellar door.
Mila follows my gaze curiously. “What’s down there?”
“Paintings. I made portraits of everyone.” It slips out on its own. “It was a surprise.”
She hesitates. “That’s so nice. It’s too nice.”
“It was before.” I pause. “Maybe you should carry them up. It’s the least you can do.”
She draws closer, reluctantly. “Now?”
“No. A year ago, before you slept with my boyfriend and watched my brother drown.” I watch her bite back a sharp response. He was never your boyfriend. No. He sure as hell wasn’t.
She approaches the door cautiously. “I just want you to know, Emily. None of this is who I am.” The living room is lit up with candles, and the effect is dazzling. It’s like Christmas in summertime.
“But it is. You did it.”
“We had no choice.” Mila places a hand on the lock. Slowly her fingers twist the metal. A soft click. A draw of the doorknob.
I stare down into the darkness, remembering. This is where we found the rabbit. I had nightmares for months afterward. It was the first time death forced its way into my life, and Ryan was the one to make me look away. I would have stared for hours. I was helpless not to. It was like the whole world stopped. It stuck in my head during sleepless nights, during summer swims, over breakfasts and during class. It never really went away. It’s never left me. I had some hope that Ryan was still out there, some hope that death was not all that there was. But it’s never left my side. And now I don’t think I’m going to fight it anymore.
“You had a choice.” I go to Mila slowly. Breathe in and out. Imagine Ryan by my side. But he isn’t here to hold my hand, to make me look away.
Mila flicks the light on and peers down. There’s nothing down there, and she hesitates. “I don’t see any paintings.”
“They’re there.”
She turns to me, a deeply unsettled look on her face. “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me,” she says.
I pause at her side. “Trust me, I know the feeling.”
I take a deep breath and shove her down the stairs.
She lies motionless at the bottom. I don’t look away. There’s no going back now. If it weren’t for her, Ryan would still be alive.
And as I stare down at the broken body at the bottom of the stairs, my heart pounding, I have a moment of clarity. This house. The house is poisoning me. The house has to go. And everyone in it.
47
Here are my rules:
1. You may run.
2. You may hide.
3. You may apologize.
Oh, who are we kidding? None of you think you’ve done anything wrong.
4. You may attempt to escape.
5. But you will not.
I run down the cellar stairs and grasp the railing with numb fingers. Mila lies like a broken doll in the eerie beam of light spilling down from the top of the staircase, a dark halo pooling around her head. For a moment, I’m stuck in time, struck by her terrible beauty, and then the reality of what I’ve done begins to prick at me. Little cuts all over. An overwhelming wave of panic numbs me again, and I tear the cover off the circuit breaker and flip every switch, my hands shaking. The gasoline can is heavy, but I lug it up two flights of stairs, and then another can, along with a large bottle of paint thinner. I coat the solid oak floors of the guest room and master bedroom with one can and close the doors, then hide the other in the upstairs closet with the paint thinner. I rescue my beautiful tarot cards, tucking them gently into my shirt pocket, next to my heart. Then I run back down the stairs and fling open the back door.
“Kennedy! Chelsea’s locked in the attic!” I wait in the downstairs bathroom, saturated in darkness, but I know every inch of it. I know the family portraits that cover the walls, and the precise location of the group photo of our family, the five of us in the Summer of Swallows, arranged on the dock. Chelsea and Ryan deep in conversation, Chase attempting to lift Kennedy over his head, Mila laughing. Me in the background, a smile plastered on my face, staring straight at the camera. Camera smiles are always fake. I pull the photo off the wall and smash it against the toilet, then turn to the sink and grab a bar of soap. Even after scrubbing my hands with lavender-scented soap, though, I smell too much like gasoline to go near her. It’s almost absurd, the delicate guest towels and handcrafted soaps, and my hands all filthy and coated with accelerant.
I hear the back door open and footsteps slowly walking up the stairs. “Something smells!” Kennedy shouts from the loft.
“Yeah, I don’t know!” I yell back. I open the back door again and wave to Chase. Chase, who buried a body. Who buried my brother’s body. And lied, and lied, and lied to me, with me, beside me. No more, Chase. No more Chase. “Hey, can you help me with something?”
He jogs inside and looks me up and down, scrunching his nose. “What did you do?”
I shrug and try to grin helplessly. “I spilled a bunch of crap from the cellar all over myself.”
He crosses the living room toward the cellar, and I bolt the back door shut and seal it with one of the combination locks the Hartfords use during the off-season. I don’t know the combination, and neither does Chase. Nobody but Kennedy does.
Chase whips around and stares at me. “What did you do? Where’s Mila?”
I back against the door, out of breath.
His eyes fall to the floor, slick with gasoline, and rise to the flickering candles, the masses and masses of candles, filling the room with a gorgeous, brilliant glow. Heaven on earth, the sky fallen down on us. I hear music in the chaos, the thumping of footsteps above, Kennedy screaming, Chase saying my name over and over, making no sense, no sense at all. He grabs my wrists.
“What did you do to her?”
Laughter spills out. I can’t help it. The question is nonsense. A year of lying and hiding what they did to Ryan, and he expects me to tell him about Mila after five fucking seconds?
“It’s much too early for answers,” I tell him. “Don’t you think? What’s the statute of secrets? One year. In one year, you’ll find out. You made the rules, not me.”
He stares at me in horror. “Emily.”
I push him away with all of my strength, and he stumbles to avoid a row of candles lining the windowsill by the front door. “You buried my brother?”
“No. Kennedy doesn’t know shit.” He begins blowing out candles. That’s fine. It’s fine. He won’t get to all of them. He couldn’t possibly. There are too many.
“What did you do, Chase?” I pick up one of the taller candles carefully and begin to relight the ones he’s blown out.
“I went looking for him. Anyone would. I couldn’t accept—you couldn’t either.” He turns to me, pleading in his eyes. “I wanted to know what happened, just not like that. I didn’t want him to be dead.”
“But he was.” Every step he takes, I follow. Every candle he extinguishes, I relight.
“There was nothing I could do about that!” He gives up on the candles and takes me by the elbows.
I would have fallen for it once, melted into him and disappeared. Instead I hold the lit candle between us, a warning. “You could have told me. You could have saved my family a year of torture.”
He shakes his head, and I feel his hands trembling against my skin. Vibrating his fear straight through me. “It would have ruined our lives,” he whispers.
“So you chose you,” I whisper back. “How did you do it? Bodies don’t bury themselves.”
“I made a phone call,” he says, his voice thick with shame. Of course he did. Boys like Chase can make phone calls. There were always whispers about his father. Entanglements with the sort of people who make problems disappear. Just like in the movies. Isn’t it glamorous? I picture him deep in the woods, all alone at the cell spot, desperate to catch a single bar of cell service, his phone glowing in his hand. He made a phone call. That’s all. With a phone call, he buried a body. One more puzzle piece. Another snapshot. Another image to immortalize. The last tarot card, and the rest writes itself.
I run back upstairs just as he’s discovering Mila. Who led my brother to his death, and kept the secret like a promise. No more. His scream is exquisite.
I wait outside Kennedy’s room, the princess tower, pink gauze and wood carvings and the memory of shattered glass. Someone should have told the Hartfords to read the Grimm brothers. Fairy tales never end without bloody revenge or haunting defeat. The mermaid dissolves. The stepsisters are savaged by birds.
The witch in the woods is burned in her own enchanted home.
Kennedy is halfway up the attic stairs to a panicked Chelsea, a mistake, but not her first. I pull her down and push the stairs back up.
She stares at me, stunned, from the floor. Untouchable Kennedy. Kennedy, who will always come out on top. Looking up at me. Even now she doesn’t look afraid. Just desperate. Searching. What to say to get out of this mess. I almost enjoy it.
“Don’t do this,” she says. Calm. Measured. “Everything will be different. We’ll go to the police. We’ll tell the truth.”
But I don’t think any of them know the whole truth anymore. They’re so tangled up in their own lies. The only thing left to do is destroy it all and start over.
“Is this what it was like?”
She shakes her head. Playing stupid. As if she didn’t know.
I grit my teeth. “When you killed him.”
A hard, cold burst of air escapes her lips. It’s not a gasp. It isn’t shocking, what she did. Not to her. She’s just cornered. Every breath she takes is stalling. “Emily. Please think. None of us would kill a friend. We had ups and downs. Sometimes small ones.” She almost shows an emotion and it disgusts me. “Sometimes bigger. But our history was bigger than that.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t like him.”
She looks at me accusingly. Me. Like I’m the bad one for saying it out loud, for seeing the ugliness in her. “People grow apart. That’s life. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t important to me or that I stopped caring about him. Or that I haven’t relived that day over and over and over in my mind, trying to figure out what any of us would have done differently if we had a second chance. You were there too. Would you have been nicer to Mila? Because if you had, maybe she wouldn’t have felt like she had to leave the house. Would you still have smashed my head with a mirror? Because if I hadn’t been stuffed full of drugs, maybe I could have saved him. And if you hadn’t held us to that unforgiving standard of loyalty, you might have been there on the boat, and maybe he wouldn’t have gone into the water. But every second of our lives led to that moment. We have always been doomed for this. There was no other way, and Emily, you played your part too. You pushed.”
