But I don’t.
I’m in the stay-alert, don’t-get-drunk, don’t-lose-control, don’t-die track.
I’m on the numb, not-feeling-much-of-anything side. A good thing, because I’m in an isolated part of a forest I don’t know how to find my way out of. Although aiming the car downhill would probably work.
I’m with the guy who was supposed to throw me off a cliff.
60
Jack
I’m in the driver’s seat, the gun at the base of my skull. My head feels as if a grenade just burst between my ears.
“The only reason you’re not closed in the trunk is I’m afraid you’d figure out how to trip the latch. But I could change my mind,” she says.
I hope she realizes that, on a road like this, if I die driving, she dies.
I start the car and shift into gear.
She pounds on the back of my seat. “That’s too jerky!”
“Sorry, there’s a gun pointed at my head.”
“Whose idea was it to bring a freaking .45 on our big romantic getaway?” Christ, she knows the caliber of it. She probably knows how to disassemble it blindfolded. “If you hadn’t been such a jerk all the way up here, I would have thought this was your big romantic move. Ha!”
I say, “My big romantic move was going to be to save your life.”
A minivan comes barreling around a curve, straddling the center line. I swerve onto the narrow shoulder between the road and the sheer drop and hear Nicolette bump against the inside of the rear door. She yells, “Don’t do that!”
“Did you want a head-on?”
“Do you want to live?”
I’m trying to control my breathing, the thin line between hyperventilation and uncontrollable shaking. “I was going to fake your death—that was the plan. I was going to tell my slime brother it was done and take him a trophy, and you were going to do a better job of hiding. Or maybe”—the embarrassing component of all this, but what the hell—“if you wanted, I was going to go with you.”
Nicolette’s ability to remain withering under stress is stellar. “Tell me why I believe this again?”
“Because if I wanted to kill you, why aren’t you killed?”
She doesn’t even pause to think. “Because you’re incompetent? Have you ever even shot a moving target? And you didn’t want to get caught.”
“Right. I spend all this time hanging out with you, shed cells all over your apartment, and make a bunch of phone calls from California. I wrote the textbook on how not to get caught.”
More silence.
I say, “Why are you running?”
“I thought you already knew why. Because I stuck a knife in someone.”
“That someone was buried a quarter of a mile from your house. Her name was Connie.”
This is when she starts to cry again. She’s crying so hard, I want to pull over and hold her. But more than that, I want her finger off the trigger of Don’s gun.
61
Nicolette
I tell him how it was sunset, and then it was dark.
Voices and then nothing.
I tell him how I was supposed to stay in my room, but Gertie wasn’t there.
I whistle for her, but she doesn’t come.
The screen door is banging in the wind.
Downstairs, the lights are out, Steve’s office dark.
I call Steve’s name. Nothing.
We live in a house on the edge of the woods, the yard running down to Green Lake on one side, merging with forest on the other. Coyotes could eat Gertie if she got outside by herself. An owl could.
I whistle for her again, but there’s still nothing. Just wind and the slap of branches against the roof, creaking under their own weight, shedding pine needles like raindrops.
It’s already the worst day ever. I’m stuck in my room. I’m not losing my dog.
I tell him how I headed down toward the lake, toward the shed where Gertie likes to go poking around, but she’s not there.
Behind the shed, I see a beam of light by the trail that winds past the edge of our property to the lake. I trot toward it along the lakeshore and between the trees. Like a moth so stupid that her whole species is about to be wiped out by survival of the fittest.
The moth that spreads her white wings against the porch light and fries.
The girl who follows a beam of light into the woods.
There is a body in the woods, wrapped in a yellow blanket. The arm, the hand, the chipped blue nail polish. Two men dragging her along, Steve illuminating their way with a flashlight.
Disbelief.
All the eight-by-twelve glossies of father-daughter dances, the years of posing with the fireplace stockings for Christmas cards, the scrapbooks that jump from holiday to holiday, are sucked through a shredder.
The shovel is raised higher when they see me. Steve’s shouting. I’m frozen. The blow to the head. My fingers pressed around the handle of the knife they toss into the grave.
My fingerprints buried with the dead blue fingernails.
Darkness. The wind. The sound of water lapping at the edge of Green Lake.
“We have to get rid of her.”