But if she did that, she’d reveal she’d only pretended to swallow the pill. That she’d lied.
It was only that she didn’t want to lose control. She didn’t want to have no sense of what was real or unreal, to think everything was wonderful when it actually wasn’t wonderful, which was what Tim had told everyone who hadn’t done it before to expect after the chemical seeped into their bloodstreams.
Everything Tim had described was the last thing Natalie would have ever wanted, especially knowing she wasn’t among friends.
To lose control?
To not know what was real?
That would be too much like looking down at her hands and seeing they’d become her mother’s hands. Like looking into the mirror, as Natalie did every single day since the two consecutive life sentences were decided, and gazing into the eyes of a woman who could plunge a knife into a man’s stomach forty-seven times and then bag him up with his gym socks and his tennis racket and leave him at his wife’s door to be discovered when she went out to get the newspaper Sunday morning.
Natalie didn’t, couldn’t be sure, what she was capable of, having this woman for a mother, and so she could never let go the way the others could. She’d never get so inebriated she’d climb atop the bar in a basement rec room and pitch herself face-first into the arms of whoever would catch her, like Lila had before the orange-juice run.
And yet somehow, sober, Natalie had gotten herself talked into going for a ride in Paul’s Mustang. And she was sober when Jeannette turned to her in the backseat of the moving car and said, as if she’d only just noticed her, “Natalie Montesano? Natalie, is that you?”
Jeannette’s pupils had grown to two black nickels, gargantuan against the shrinking sea of her irises. She wasn’t slurring; she was talking as if she didn’t know how to make full use of her mouth.
“Wait.” She seemed confused. “Wait.
Why don’t we like you?”
And that was all it took. The fine feeling, the open mind, the sense of adventure in agreeing to go on the drive in the snowy night, it all left Natalie.
And good riddance. In its place came disdain. Pulsed through with rage.
Woven with hate.
Maybe there was a piece of her mother inside her after all. It wouldn’t cause her to grab a sharpened object and plunge it into the closest chest—three hearts to choose from in this car. It had always been subtler, inside Natalie. It made her not care. Not about herself, and not about anyone else.
She didn’t care if they all died on this road tonight.
When she did it, it was without thinking, and it was also as if she’d been premeditating it for years: She reached her arm forward into the front seat and she said, “Watch out for that car!”
There was no other car. There was only the car they were in, which shuddered when the brakes were jammed, and then slid. Soon the old Mustang was careening across the ice, not going straight and not going sideways, and there was the railing at the road’s edge, and there was the space ahead of it, filled only with air and emptied of trees.
There was this moment before the car made impact, so of course she remembered
it,
where
she
saw
everything that was happening and was about to happen and understood it in a way she didn’t know life could be understood.
Then she saw the guardrail come for them—and beyond that, the gaping edge of the mountain—and this was when she screamed. She screamed the way the man’s wife did when she found the bag with the body, the way a madwoman would scream when she tore open the guts of a lying, two-timing man. She screamed, and then the car jolted to a stop.
She showed me how she screamed, and my ears rang for days.