“You heard him, Ryan,” she says. “Parole Board Chief Valerio Pantano cannot say that the parole board or the police did all they could to ensure public safety. We’ll keep following this story as it develops. Live in Shiverton, I’m Paula Papademetriou. Back to you.”
I whistle. “Damn, girl,” I murmur.
My last thought before I fall asleep is of a severed pinky finger in a box.
*
I wake in the predawn dim with an anger hangover. The memories come at night now, more vivid than the daymares. So real that I’m lying here thoroughly pissed, because I remember the days after the woods, in the hospital, like it just happened. I’d been ready to cry with Liv, looked forward to a good, long, cleansing cry, one that included survivor high fives and hugs. Instead, she had observed me with an alien lack of empathy, refusing to acknowledge my busted ankle, my terror, or the fact that I took her place in hell.
Everything had looked creamy from the morphine drip, lit from within, with glowing trails coming off the nurses’ fingers as they tended to my IV and adjusted the traction ropes that held my foot. The blue fluorescent bar above my head made Liv look angelic.
“You went to heaven,” I’d said, all dopey.
“I went where?” Liv asked.
“Never mind. It’s the drugs. You came. How’d you get out?”
“I sprinkled a ground-up Ambien in Deborah’s pinot noir and begged a ride from Boseman.”
Liv’s cousin Boseman was a party hanger-on who stunk of cloves and always looked me up and down with skittery eyes. He was at least twenty-four and made beer runs for the whole school, taking too much money and skimming off the top.
“I’m glad you came,” I said.
“Of course I came.” Liv stared at the IV taped to my hand.
“Where’s my mom?”
Mom hadn’t left my side. She slept in a vinyl chair under a blanket and ate leftover Jell-O off my tray. I figured Erik had finally dragged her to get something real to eat. Later, I found out she’d been in the parking lot arguing with a reporter doing a stand-up, which is when they plop themselves at the scene of the action, like town hall or a burning house. And that Liv had bumped into her on the way in.
“I have no idea,” Liv said. I don’t know why she lied.
“So she doesn’t know you’re here,” I said, sulking. Even half-sedated, I wanted Mom to see what a good friend Liv was, checking up on me.
“Did you really think I was dead?” Liv asked.
“No. I get confused. Like I said, it’s the pain medicine.” I held up the round end of my morphine pump. It had a button in the middle that I pushed every hour. The other end was tipped with a cannula that delivered the drug into my spine. Every part of me hurt, but mostly my ankle, the one Donald Jessup snapped. Ropes and pulleys forced my body to form new bone to repair the break: an impressive contraption that you might mention if you were seeing it for the first time.
“I bet the morphine confuses things. Makes your memories unreliable. But all things considered, that’s probably best. Forgetting, in order to move on,” Liv said.
“There are gaps. But I remembered his face enough to ID him. And the things he said.”
Liv’s smile went stiff, as though she caught it before it slipped away. “Things?”
I shimmied down into my blanket a touch. Jessup’s voice was still in my head: the jangly shouts and the sharp orders. The stammering when he was jonesing. The spooky calmness when he arrived at an idea. “He talked a lot.”
“Did you tell the police what he said?”
Her question confused me. “They weren’t interested in what he said to me. They were interested in what he did to me.”
“You weren’t raped. They told me you weren’t raped,” Liv said quickly.
There are other violations. Like forcing someone to see something in a pit that will haunt them forever.
“I wasn’t raped.” I said it wearily.
“See? We’re both fine now.” She reached for my hand, but I left it there, tethered to its needle.
“Why are you downplaying it?” I said.
She grabbed my other hand and patted it enthusiastically. “I’m simply trying to say we’re okay.”
“We’re okay now.” I sounded sour. For a second, I had wished I was her, unblemished and upbeat. Already looking ahead. Maybe I could act normal too, if I could get the fractals of my memory and how Liv was acting right then to make sense. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Yes?” Liv said.
“What did you do after you got away?”
Liv asked if I was chilly and didn’t wait for my answer. She pulled the sheet to my chin and perched on the bed, speaking mechanically, with measured beats and pauses. “I ran back down the trail. I had no cell—you had yours, remember?—so I had to drive all the way home before I could call the police. They went and looked for you, exactly where I told them, where the Hill crests, to the exact spot where I—”
“Left me.”
She sighed like I was a child.
“Were you with them? The searchers?” I asked.
“Everyone was there. The whole town came out, it was over the top”—Did she roll her eyes?—“you’d just vanished.”