Moving the body meant touching the body, hoisting the body, dragging the body into the woods. Cleaning the trail of blood and brain bits the body left behind. We couldn’t do that. Any of it. We would leave him there in our place; we would leave him behind.
Nikki wiped down the gun; I put it in his hand. This was Battle Creek; this was a disturbed teenager alone in the woods with his father’s gun; this was a pretty enough picture, and when Nikki added the note he’d written her the day before, after he’d unforgivably forgotten her half birthday, the note that said, in Craig’s painstaking block letters, I love you and I’m sorry, the picture was perfect.
“Now what?” Nikki said. “We just leave him here?” She swallowed. “There are animals . . .”
“They’ll come looking. They’ll find him. Eventually.”
“Eventually.”
She thought I was the heartless one. Because I kept going, because someone had to. If she was going to be the mess, then I had to be the one who cleaned up. If she was going to cling, then someone had to be clung to, and that was me. I am a rock, Dex, like the song says. I’m a fucking island. I do what I have to do, and that night, I had to hold Nikki Drummond while she cried. I had to collect our clothes, our empties, our cigarette butts, anything that would connect us to the body. I had to sit with her in the car while we sobered up and the body cooled, not so far away.
I wasn’t the one who suggested we frame it up like a suicide. We never talked about doing anything else. The truth wasn’t an acceptable option. What we did was too obvious, too easy, not to be the way.
That’s not how Nikki remembered it.
In her version, I’m Machiavelli. I murder him in cold blood, dupe her into covering it up so she’ll seem equally to blame. She’s the victim, I’m the devil, he’s the corpse.
In every story, he ends up dead.
No one made him get on his knees. And if anyone did make him, it was Nikki.
It was their fault as much as it was mine. I stand by that. I will always stand by that.
Murder requires intent; I know because I looked it up. Legally, killing someone by accident is no worse than hitting a deer with your car. Lots of blood and mess and guilt, but no one’s to blame except maybe the deer for being dumb enough to step into the road.
I couldn’t have killed him because I wasn’t trying to kill him. I didn’t want him to die.
Believe that.
If you believe anything, Dex, believe that.
But.
In the dark.
At night.
When I let myself remember.
I feel it beneath my finger.
The trigger.
And I know.
The gun in his mouth, the gun in my hands: It doesn’t matter what I wanted. It doesn’t matter why. Accident, purpose, motive, mistake, unconscious wish, muscle contraction: It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was in his mouth, and in my hands. It was my finger on the trigger. It was my finger that moved, just a little, just enough. Then he was gone.
DEX
1992
BEFORE LACEY, I WASN’T HAPPY. I wasn’t anything. Except that’s not possible, is it? I took up space; I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents’ expectations and evidence of their disappointments; I was Hannah Dexter, middling everything, on track for an uneventful life and only just sharp enough to care.
A world without Lacey: I would have spent my days doodling and chewing gum to keep from falling asleep in class until I could come home and settle in front of the TV beside my father until it got dark. There would have been a few hundred days to endure, then college, somewhere compatibly middling, High School: The Sequel, Battle Creek U. That Hannah Dexter might have gathered up enough spunk to move to Pittsburgh or Philly after graduation, make a go of it in the big city, barhop with her gaggle of young single girls until one by one each scored herself a ring and fled to the suburbs. She would have made an excellent bridesmaid, a bit of a pill at the bachelorette party but always reliable for a sober ride home. She would not have complained; she would have thought it unseemly, thought that pretending to be happy was close enough. She would have returned to Battle Creek rarely, only to endure holidays with her parents and eventually to bury them. She would, perhaps, have run into Nikki Drummond at the drugstore before leaving town, and they would have offered each other the wincing approximation of a smile, as you do when you’re too old for grudges but still seething with them. Her real smile would come later, whenever she remembered those extra thirty pounds Nikki wore around her middle and the strip of pale skin on her left ring finger; she would be smugly certain it was better to avoid love than to lose it.
Lacey told me everything. What she’d done—what they’d both done—to Craig Ellison. What they’d done with each other. The ghosts of them in that place. The body they’d left behind in the woods.