The worst moments of my life have always managed to creep up on me when everything is quiet. I’ll be watching TV or trying to read and then bam, my brain is all Hahaha bitch, here’s that painful memory you’d sell your soul to forget. Most involve my mother.
I know that the way the detective and Sheriff Moser looked at me is going to be one of those moments. I was an animal that needed to be tranquilized. I wasn’t me: I was the beast inside me that breaks free when I’m cornered. The thing that makes me freak out.
Black out.
I was twelve the first time I threw something at my mother with the intent to hit her. I don’t even know if I succeeded; the second the glass left my hand, her boyfriend had me pinned down on the floor.
One of his arms was as big as my entire body. It hardly seemed fair, how easily he kept me down, like I was a rag doll. The more I fought to get away, the worse he pushed.
I remember the feel of the scratchy carpet on my chin. How I’d howled like a wild animal.
“You need to calm down,” he’d said, in his deep baritone. “Y’all can’t fight like this anymore.”
The following week, he moved out.
My phone buzzes from the pocket of my jacket, where I left it before getting into the shower. Texts have filled up the screen—some from numbers I don’t recognize.
Unknown: hey it’s sully true they found bay’s body??
Andrew: what is going on?? There’s a cop car outside.
Jade: fucking call me back.
I grip my phone. Feel myself coil up. Leave me alone, get off me—
When it vibrates again, I hurl it at the wall.
“Shit.” I leap out of bed, run over to where the phone has clattered to the floor. Thunderous footsteps down the hall.
“Kacey?” My father. “What was that banging? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I fell.” I run a finger along the spidery crack at the corner of my phone’s screen. It’ll be hard to hide that, but thankfully, the phone still works.
My doorknob jangles. “Why is the door locked?”
I sit back on my heels, fully aware of my own nakedness, and there’s a hole in the drywall where my phone hit it. I’m going to have to find something to cover that up.
“I’m fine. Please leave me alone.”
More jangling. I curl onto my side, paralyzed by shame at what I’ve done to the wall and the screen of my phone. Damaging something just because I was angry—it’s not who I am.
It’s exactly who I can’t be, now that everyone seems to be watching me.
I am still under my covers, wrapped in the towel from the shower, when I hear Ashley’s SUV rumble into the driveway. The pillow is wet beneath me from my soaked hair. I can’t bring myself to get dressed, or to do anything else, really.
A knock at the door. Ashley jangles the knob; the clicking sound of a key inserting into the lock. She has a master key for all of our bedrooms, in case of major tantrums. Or in my case, a complete meltdown.
Ashley silently comes to my side holding a mug of tea. Unfolds her other hand and reveals a half moon of a white pill. “It’ll help you sleep,” she says.
I swallow it with a sip of the chamomile tea she hands me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, stroking a lock of hair from my forehead.
I shake my head. I just want the nothingness that the pill will bring me. By the time I’m falling into a cloudy sleep, I finally remember that the vigil is tonight.
—
When I wake up, it’s almost seven and I realize that no one woke me up to get dressed. At some point, they must have decided to leave me at home, to go to the vigil without me. They haven’t left yet—I hear Lauren’s footsteps overhead, thunderous when Ashley calls for her to put her coat on.
I can’t go. Jade will never forgive me, but the thought barely registers as a blip on my conscience. I can’t look all of those people in the eyes—people with their candles and purple ribbons pinned to their coats and their prayers of hope.
Because I think I get it now: what that psychic in Pleasant Plains meant when she said that deep down, I know what happened to Bailey.
She’s dead. What other answer is there?
That deputy said they found bloody clothes. I saw the blood in the barn for myself.
When I shut my eyes, I’m there all over again. The image triggers dread in my gut, but I try to think about the blood logically.
There was a smear of it on the wall, but nowhere else in the barn, except for a few droplets on the hay. I’ve lost more blood from a bloody nose than what was on the wall. Which means—I swallow the thought like a pill—that no one was killed in the barn.
Pictures of Bailey emerge in my mind. Bailey, bloodied and injured, running in the woods from her attacker. Bailey, hiding out in the barn. Leaning against the wall for support, and leaving that blood smear herself.
Bailey, running into the night, too hurt to press on. Bailey, curling up on the ground, the snow covering her body by the next day.
I feel sick. I don’t even know that the blood in the barn was Bailey’s, or that it was real at all. Someone who knows about the Leeds crime scene photos could have made the blood smear as a cruel prank.
But who would do something like that—especially with a girl missing?
Unless someone saw us in the barn.
Impossible. Jade and I went outside and looked for human footprints—there weren’t any.
Thinking about that night in the barn makes me feel the cold in my bones. I’m suddenly uneasy with the fact that my family has left me here alone. No doubt Ashley called Mrs. Lao, who never leaves her house, and told her to keep an eye on things. But still. I feel the emptiness of the house in every corner of my body.
I see the blood in the barn whenever I close my eyes.
I wish we had a fucking dog.
My phone buzzes on my nightstand, startling me. There’s a text from Jade: you here yet? can’t find you.
Moments later, another: I see your family.
Hand to my stomach, I force a breath in, and out. A full five minutes go by before Jade texts again: what the actual FUCK, kacey??
There’s pressure behind my eyes. Jade’s going to find out, if she hasn’t already, that I was there with all the cop cars and flashing lights on Sparrow Hill today. She won’t forgive me for not telling her what I saw; missing the vigil is just something else to add to my list of crimes.
I climb out of bed and slip into my flannel pajamas, some of the fog from my brain lifting. It’s past seven-thirty now; the vigil will be starting any minute. The local news will probably be streaming it live; I force myself off my bed and head for the living room.
I pause in the hallway. Music—the delicate strumming of a guitar. It sends gooseflesh rippling down my arms.
I am hearing things now. The sedative made me trippy and I’m hearing things.
I stand still, one finger pressed against my pulse beating in my neck. The music comes to a crescendo. It’s above me.
I follow the sound upstairs, my knees unsteady.
The music is coming from Lauren’s room.