My lips are tinged blue and swollen from Marla’s blow, and the bridge of my nose is wider than usual. I touch it gingerly and wince.
I feel the hot blast of the car heater beginning to loosen the joints in my hands and feet, my trembling slowly starting to subside. This will have to do for now, I can’t stay here any longer and run the risk of attracting attention. I can only pray that I haven’t done so already.
I fish the car keys from the tight confines of my jean pocket and start the engine.
* * *
—
Everything feels like a dream as I drive. The car slips anonymously onto the 101 south, joining all the other nighttime traffic flowing toward Downtown LA. The strange lights and billboards of Hollywood add to the surreal nature of this odd journey. I try not to think about what just happened, but imagined images of Marla’s broken pale body flash through my mind as I drive.
I left her.
I may not have meant to but I did.
Somehow, I don’t know how, I made it to the bottom of that ladder. I jumped the final six-foot drop onto the hard dust of the hillside. Ankle twisted, wrists jarred, and body shaking like a leaf, I sat in the dirt and stared unseeingly into the darkness, shock sweeping through me. After a while I stood up and started to the car, the walk longer and darker on the way back.
In my lap, as I drive, my phone nestles unused. Somewhere back in the darkness Marla remains.
I come off the 101 and tap a waypoint destination into the car’s GPS. I need to do one more thing.
After five minutes of sailing through nighttime streets the warm lights of my destination loom ahead, glowing out into the night, as I carefully turn off the main road and follow the little lane that loops around the building to a small hatch. I lower my window and order some food.
Parked in the car park, I perfunctorily eat until the food is gone then carefully place my bloodstained sweater inside the brown McDonald’s bag, covering it with my used wrappers and rolling down the brown bag’s top. I grab my baseball cap from the glove box, put it on, and hop from the car, just a girl grabbing a late-night snack and disposing of her litter.
* * *
—
Back on the road, five minutes from the apartment building, I pull off my hat and look up at my reflection in the mirror once more, the streetlights here stronger. My face is a mess. There’s no hiding it: something clearly happened to me tonight. Something very bad. There won’t be any other way to explain it. Unless there is another way to explain it.
I know I’m not thinking straight because when the idea comes, I know it’s crazy but I also know I’m going to do it anyway. There’s only a tinge of fear at the thought of executing this brand-new plan where I’m pretty sure there should be a tsunami.
Regardless, I decide it’s happening. I scan the two lanes ahead for a suitable vehicle and catch sight of a garbage truck. I make sure my seatbelt is fastened, switch lanes, and let my foot floor the accelerator.
The impact into the back of the garbage truck fires me forward sharply, my already tender face buffeting into the instantly deployed front and side airbags. Then, rebounding, my skull whiplashes back into the headrest behind me, knocking the air from my lungs, my horn blaring the whole time. Winded, I sit in the ringing muffle of the car and wait for someone to come and check on me.
The garbagemen are beyond kind. They move my car to the curbside and sit me down, checking I’m okay. An ambulance is called. I explain the car had problems with its relay yesterday, I don’t know how it happened, I tell them, the brakes just didn’t seem to work.
Aside from me, no one is hurt—I couldn’t have hit the stationary truck at more than twenty miles an hour, but that was enough. My whole body aches. I pop my jacket collar up, hiding the bruises already blossoming around my neck from Marla’s hands, and when the paramedics arrive I’m careful to only let them touch my face, explaining away my wet hair as a late-night swim. Of course, I am Breathalyzed—I don’t blame them, the shuddering state I’m in I’d expect no less—but the alcohol reading is negative. My glass of wine at Nick’s house was over five hours ago now. I exchange insurance details with the city sanitation workers and once everyone is convinced that I’m safe to drive, I slowly crawl the car back the final two streets to the Ellis Building.
An overwrought Miguel sits me down and fetches me a sweet tea as I tell him all about the accident. When my story is clear and settled and the state of my face explained away, I finally take my leave.
Upstairs in the apartment, I fish out my phone, which is still recording. I stare at the numbers still flying forward. I recorded everything. Everything she said, everything that happened tonight, all time-and location-stamped. I press stop on the recording. I press delete. I empty the trash. And it is gone. I hastily barricade the front door in case, somehow, that broken body rises in North Hollywood and comes to find me. I strip off my clothes, shower, and collapse into bed.
* * *
—
I’m woken by my mobile phone ringing from the pile of discarded clothes in the bathroom. I haven’t moved an inch in my sleep and it seems like only a moment has passed since I let my eyes droop shut.
I shift in the bedsheets, my whole body aching as if I’ve been in a car crash, which makes sense because I have. I bat my eyes open. Sunlight streams in through the edges of the bedroom blind, and everything that happened last night floods back into my mind.
I lurch up into the empty room, nausea crashing through me. She tried to kill me. Marla tried to kill me like the girl who leapt from the sign. She tried to get rid of me using my own Google history, and fevered imagination, as a weapon. My hand flies to my burnt-out throat as I launch into a cataclysm of excruciating coughs.
Images of Marla’s white-knuckled hands and her face as she fell back disappearing from sight. I repress the urge to retch—the pain too intense for my battered throat. I stumble out of bed, lumbering my way out to the pile of clothes and the ringing phone.
Leandra at Audi. Oh, fuck, the car.
I decline the call.
They already know I destroyed their beautiful car. I wonder, vaguely, how they found out so quickly but then assume Miguel must have called them again after last night. He was pretty angry about the Audi mechanic giving me back a “faulty” vehicle. But then it’s just as likely that the garbagemen have informed their insurance company of the accident.
I notice the time and bolt upright. It’s four-fifteen in the afternoon on Tuesday. I’ve been unconscious for twelve hours. I only meant to rest my eyes.
Marla’s body has been up on that hillside for over twelve hours. Another wave of nausea overtakes me and my head swims as I let it pass.
My thirst, already extreme last night, is now uncontrollable and I scramble to my feet heading to the kitchen and gulping greedily from the tap. Next I open the fridge and sit cross-legged on the cool kitchen tiles as I gorge myself on cheese, cold cuts, and whatever else I can reach. I haven’t eaten in over seventeen hours and those seventeen hours have been the most traumatic of my life. I let snapshots from last night flash through my mind as I stuff cold olives and leftover salad into my mouth.
The cold breeze at the top of the sign, the smell of Marla’s cigarettes, the shimmering surface of Lake Hollywood in the darkness. And then the blood, my blood, dripping down onto the gray marl of my sweater, the uncontrollable shuddering inside me. Marla’s face inches from mine, her eyes, the warmth of her breath on my cheek before she disappeared into the void. The sound of her soft body hitting the earth forty-five feet below and tumbling, twisting down, down, down into the dusty valley, unable to stop, unable to save herself. I pause, a chunk of Brie halfway to my mouth. Could she have survived it? Should I have gone back? Should I go now?