“I’m saying it. I’m offering.” It was the only thing that would make this all better, in part because maybe it was an overreaction, and what could people want beyond an overreaction? “If things get worse, I mean. Or if they don’t get better.”
“It’ll die down,” he said. The air was so wet and so cold, and I still wanted to run after Yahav. I wanted to cry on someone, albeit tearlessly, and he was the only one I wanted to cry on.
I said, “But what happens next is they go through everything I ever said on the show. Then they pick apart everything I say next time, and the next time.”
A chipmunk scuttled past me on the bridge rail, darted straight down the post and out of sight. A manifestation of my own racing, fleeing heart.
“Let me see how bad the rest of my inbox is first,” he said. “Let’s get a sense of the damage.”
39
I was down in the ravine, its slopes all mud and ice. I had been there a long time—hours?—trying to cry but letting myself laugh, every few minutes, at how bad it all was.
My pants were soaked, my boots were soaked, my socks were freezing to my ankles. I was sitting on the bank of the creek, on a patch of ice-mud.
If I could freeze myself to the core, I could find some equilibrium between my inner and outer states. Like homeopathy, like hair of the dog, like poison as the antidote to poison.
It was not any one thing stealing my breath; it was everything at once. The sudden atomization of Yahav and Jerome and Lance. Maybe the podcast, too, gone in a puff of smoke. The slow melting of any certainty I’d had about Thalia’s death, a melting I’d been terrified to acknowledge but could no longer ignore. The realization that you, one of the best things about Granby, might have been not only a fraud, not only a predator, but—it was possible, I was finally letting it creep into view—a more violent kind of monster.
I sucked in air, but it was just empty space, no oxygen.
The news story had been getting to me, too, clawing at the edges of my dreams. The way no one would listen to her testimony. The way they mocked her victim impact statement. The way they read her diary aloud.
Somewhere down here lay the rock I’d once thrown. Somewhere down here was the hula hoop circle we’d observed, a quarter century of changes within its circumference.
It was in the other woods, the ones at the bottom of campus—connected to these but drier, flatter, denser—that we’d built the Kurt shrine. Those were the same woods where Barbara Crocker’s body was found in 1975, just outside the Granby property line. Those were the woods where, in the middle of the night, late senior year, I brought my backpack with the half bottle of Absolut Kurant I’d stolen from the Hoffnungs’ liquor cabinet, and I sat under the tree where the magazine photos and notes and flowers had faded to scraps, and I drank straight from the bottle, daring myself to swallow more before the first wave hit me, and then more. And when it did all hit me, it was with the force of a ferocious undertow pulling me far, far out to black waters.
That next morning, I woke up vomiting—my back and neck and head throbbing, my fingers numb. I foggily remembered having fished Tylenol out of my backpack’s side pocket and swallowing the seven that were in the bottle. If there had been more in the bottle, I would have swallowed those, too. I would have. I remembered having drunkenly whispered into the night air, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” It was a kind of rebuke—to the woods, the school, myself. I’d come here to live deliberately, and I’d failed. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but every day was worse. Each morning I woke to heavier air, heavier bones, heavier eyelids, even as my body grew so thin that I was always cold. I had fought with my mother the day before, but that was only one little thing. I’d been coming unraveled for weeks. But what was I going to do, run to the counselor and take a spot away from one of Thalia’s grieving friends?
Now, in the ravine, I felt that time was porous, that the girl from 1995 could somehow reach through, exchange her breath for mine. She had woken up back then by stealing my breath, my heartbeat, from this present moment. In exchange, she’d handed me her asphyxiation, her organ failure, her descending oblivion. Here they came.
The Tigerwhip would be about three feet deep here, plus the ice on top, plus the sludge on top of the ice that made it impossible to tell how solid the ice was. Rabbit tracks crossed it. The rabbits hadn’t fallen through.
I stepped onto it to see if it would hold me, certain it wouldn’t. I waited for everything to crack, waited to fall in, waist-deep. Everything shifted under my feet, the edges of the creek groaned metallically, but I didn’t fall. Maybe there was a lesson in that. I knew I should take my good fortune and leap to safety, but I didn’t move.
Here is what I want to say to you:
When I was still raw and unformed, everyone failed me. No one was permanent. Back home there were people with good parts to them, but on the whole, they couldn’t be relied on. By fourteen, my bitter understanding was that I could rely on myself and only myself. So here I was in a place that looked nothing like home, and I was an island. You were one of the only people who saw me as that—as an island—and made me feel good about it.
We’re meant to reject the selves we were at fourteen, meant to grow and learn. That college therapist worked so hard to convince me to trust, to find people I could rely on, to believe they wouldn’t vanish on me.
So every year after Granby I tried harder and harder to lean on other people, and to defend them in turn. Partners and Jerome and my friends and my colleagues. And the problem was, I had. I’d leaned on them with all my weight. I’d sworn my loyalty. I’d always known, deep down, that it was a mistake.
I had been in the ravine so long that the sun was setting.
What I know now is that while I was in the ravine, Omar was found unconscious in his bed with a temperature of 105 degrees. They transported him to Concord Hospital for the scans he should have received from the start, and found a seven-centimeter sickle-shaped sliver of glass lodged in his liver, where it had caused ongoing internal bleeding. The fact that the external wound was infected—and the resultant fever—had likely saved his life by getting him there: The glass had lacerated a major blood vessel in his liver, and he required immediate surgery.
While Omar’s body burned, I was made of ice. I could freeze myself to the creek, I could become part of it, a snow child who’d haunt these woods forever. As my eyes stopped watering, as my face went numb, I settled, with a singular fury, on you.
You were the older man giving her trouble. You had keys to everything. You had the protection of being preppy and white and respected.
Who the fuck moves to Bulgaria?
I didn’t know how it was possible, when Omar’s was the DNA on her, when Omar was the one who’d confessed; but I knew you’d hidden things. I knew you did something or knew something or made something happen. I knew it was you.
Fran was right: My loyalty was a fierce thing. It was a dangerous thing. But you no longer had it. I owed more to Thalia than to you.
This was what pulled me off the ice, what sent me scrambling for tree roots to pull myself up the slope.
I took a huge gulp of air, and it hit my lungs, cold and full.
It was dark. I needed to shower, I needed to change, I needed dry clothes. I had to get ready for, of all things, a séance.
40
What if I said that when I took the kids to Gage House, Thalia’s ghost told us all about you? What if she spelled your name on the Ouija board?