“She was on the ground. Why was she on the ground?” Eric said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Of course it was your fault,” Darren said. “Whose fault is it if it isn’t your fault?”
Eric lunged at him, but Darren sprung from his crouch and drove his shoulder hard into Eric’s rib cage, his legs driving Eric backward and slamming him onto his back. Darren balled his fist, poised to unleash a vicious punch. He wanted to. He wanted to hit him. He wanted to beat the shit out of him, but Hastey and Archie grabbed his arm before he could take Eric’s head off, pulling him off and dragging him away.
“You killed her, man,” Darren said, tears streaming down his face. “You killed her.”
Eric, breathing hard, got to his feet, white bursts escaping his mouth and nostrils. He had his hands entwined in his hair, as if he were trying to pull it out.
“What are we going to do, Eric?” Hastey said, sounding scared, his face a mask of blood from the cut on his forehead. “What are we going to do?”
“We need to get out of here,” Eric said.
“What?” Darren said.
“We need to get out of here. Now. Right now.” Eric paced. Though it was dark, he looked pale and his eyes were black pinpoints.
“We can’t just leave her here, Eric,” Darren said.
“What are we going to do then, huh, Darren? What are we going to do?”
“We should find a phone and call someone.”
“She’s dead, Darren. Who are we going to call? The police? What are we going to tell them? That we ran her over?”
“I didn’t run her over. You did.”
“You were in the car. We were all in the car. We all ran her over.”
“No,” Darren said. “No way, Eric.”
“I’m supposed to go in the Army,” Archie stammered. “I’m supposed to go in the Army when I graduate.”
“Listen to me,” Eric said. “They’ll go after all of us because we were all in the car. They’ll test our blood, and they’ll know we were drinking and smoking. We’ll all go to jail, and not just for the night or a week. Shit, this is murder. You get the chair for murder. They kill you.”
“I can’t go to jail,” Hastey said. “I can’t go to jail.”
“We need to leave,” Eric said again. “Now.”
“We can’t just leave her, Eric,” Darren said.
“Nobody knows we’re out here. Nobody. We have the game tomorrow. Everyone is going to think we were at home, in bed, getting ready. Our parents don’t know we snuck out, so they’ll say we were home in bed.”
“We can’t leave her,” Darren said again.
“I don’t want to, Darren. Goddamn it, I don’t want to. But we have to. Don’t you understand? We have to.”
Darren couldn’t stop crying.
“I’ll drive you home,” Eric said. “I’ll drive you home and then I’ll use the pay phone at the gas station and call it in anonymous, okay?”
“What about my head?” Hastey said. “What am I going to tell them happened to my head?”
“I got a first-aid kit in the truck. My dad keeps it there for when he goes hunting. We’ll clean you up and put a bandage on your head. Tomorrow you wear a ball cap. The cut is high enough that no one will see it. At the game you’ll have a helmet on. You can say you cut your head during the game.” Eric rubbed his forehead as if fighting a massive headache. Then he wiped away tears. “Nobody will know.” He looked at all of them, speaking quickly. “Nobody needs to know, okay? Nothing needs to change. Tomorrow we win a championship and we go on with our lives, just like we planned. We go on with our lives. Archie, you’ll go in the Army, and Darren and I will go to UW. And Hastey, you’ll go to community college and get your grades up, then you can come join us. We can’t help Kimi now. She’s dead. It was an accident, but she’s dead. If we say anything, then we might as well all be dead too, because then our lives will be over.”
Darren heard the words, but now they sounded as if they were coming from some far-off place, as if they weren’t real, as if none of this were real. White stars continued to flicker in front of his eyes, concussion stars that he’d played through so many times. That’s what this was—a concussion. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was imagining this. He had to be imagining this. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real.
None of this was real.
Tracy set down the last page of the counselor’s report. From the rest of the file, she’d gleaned that Darren had initially gone to the clinic for anxiety, though he didn’t know the cause. He’d told his counselor that he’d awake early in the morning, his mind racing, unable to get back to sleep. He said that soon thereafter he became anxious at night, and he’d started having trouble falling asleep. The lack of sleep was making him a zombie at work, so he started taking sleeping pills and washing them down with Scotch. He told his counselor he had nightmares. In them he saw a teenage girl, her body broken and battered. He said the nightmare started when Rebecca turned fifteen, and soon thereafter the girl in his dreams began to haunt him every night, no matter how many pills he took or how much Scotch he drank. She always came.
In his nightmare he stood over her, thinking her dead, but then she’d open her eyes and look up at him from the ground and whisper, “Help me. Please, help me.”
The counselor thought the girl was Rebecca, and that Darren was suffering an irrational fear of losing his daughter. It had been a lengthy two-year process before Darren was able to identify the girl and recall what had happened to Kimi Kanasket. In her final report in the file, after Darren had recounted the incident in great detail, the counselor wrote that Darren had “a major breakthrough” and acknowledged that his dream was not a dream—it was recollection. He remembered that night as vividly as if it were yesterday. She wrote that when he left the office that afternoon, Darren had expressed relief and said he felt lighter than he had in years, unburdened.
Then he drove home and shot himself.
Tracy closed the file and stood, but she didn’t leave right away. After a long moment, she picked up her pen and her notepad. She hadn’t taken a single note.
On the drive back to Tiffany Martin’s house, she thought about what she’d say, ultimately deciding she’d keep it simple. She felt anxious as she climbed the porch steps, and her heart raced when she knocked on the front door. Tiffany opened it, Rachel and Rebecca standing behind her, the three looking worn-out.
“Your husband,” Tracy said to Tiffany, then looking to Rachel and Rebecca, “and your father, was a very good man. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was a very good, decent man.”
The three women started to weep, tears streaming from the corners of their eyes, hands covering their sobs. They turned to one another and grasped hold in a fierce embrace.
CHAPTER 31