I drank four cups of coffee and got to page one hundred and sixty before I realized it was after six. I checked my phone. Nothing. That wasn’t unlike her, in those final weeks. I texted Greg, and he picked me up a little while later, gave me a ride home. We both figured Marlena had found Bolt, something else to do.
Who can recognize the ending as it’s happening? What we live, it seems to me, is pretty much always a surprise.
*
I lied to the police when they questioned me about what Marlena and I did that day. They asked why we split up, where Marlena was going, and I told them I didn’t know. It was all I could do in that tiny, sinister room, identical to the ones I’d seen on TV, in front of those two cops with their beards. I don’t know, I said, I don’t know. They asked me about the Oxy in her bag and I faked surprise. So you weren’t aware of her plan to meet up with your older brother, they said, and I started to cry. Later Jimmy asked me why I’d lied, if I really thought he could’ve had anything to do with what happened to Marlena. I had no idea what to tell him. Sitting there, facing down question after question, I felt, more than anything, guilty. I killed her, I almost said.
I requested a copy of Marlena’s autopsy report a couple of years into college, after taking an elective in forensic science. Because there’d never been a criminal investigation, it was easy to get clearance, especially after I told the records officer my name, what I was studying, that I’d gone to the same high school as his daughter Laura. Although positive test results indicated that Marlena had used heroin at some point within the days preceding her death, Marlena’s official cause of death was asphyxia due to aspiration of fluid, caused by submersion, and consistent with drowning. In the report summary, the coroner noted that because Marlena had fallen and struck her head, she was likely unconscious when her nose and mouth were submerged for a “sufficient” period of time. I was struck by the comment, “consistent with drowning,” thinking that perhaps it might mean that the findings were inconclusive, that Bolt or someone else could be implicated, that there was more to the story than what I’d gotten. But when I asked my professor, she explained that in many drowning cases, especially ones like Marlena’s, where the postmortem is conducted more than twenty-four hours after death, immediate evidence of drowning can be obscured by other decompositional factors. I found the language comforting. It was easier to think of Marlena asphyxiating than to imagine her unconscious, breathing in brackish river water, silt collecting in the back of her throat. I also knew that autopsies, back then, were notoriously unreliable when it came to prescription drug abuse—a fact that had contributed to a kind of delayed awareness of the danger of Oxy and the insidious spread of black tar heroin, which was, for so many users, the next step.
The report, of course, does not mention why she went into the woods that day, the thing I’d give pretty much anything to know, what she was looking for, whether anyone besides me and Jimmy saw her that afternoon and evening, how much the drugs in her system might have impaired her motor skills, when taking into consideration the extent of her habit. I have imagined it so many times it’s like a memory of something I did myself—the sun welling over the lake, Marlena passing Mulvie’s, me inside with my book, and heading for the woods. At first she follows the path between the trees, lichen spotted and evergreen, but after a few minutes she veers from the trail. She would have wanted to follow the river; that part sounds like her. Sometimes, I let myself believe it was Bolt, that something happened, that he pushed her, that he held her face underwater with his hands, that he opened her mouth, her veins, and forced her to take whatever she took. I want someone to blame. But maybe she was just taking a walk. Maybe she just slipped. Maybe she’d always intended to turn around, to come back for me. Maybe, maybe, maybe—none of them satisfying enough to lend what happened any sense.
The article about the discovery of the body is peppered with sensational descriptions and very little fact—several details, including Sal’s name and age, are simply incorrect. And though the Oxy was in an unlabeled prescription bottle, I couldn’t find evidence of any structured attempt by the authorities to find out where an eighteen-year-old girl had gotten so many pills. “Consistent with drowning” was replaced, in the headline, with “Local Girl Drowns.”
*
Jimmy doesn’t talk about that hour he spent with Marlena, forty-five minutes of it wasted away in the parking lot behind the Sam Goody, where they shared a joint. I can’t get in there, no matter how badly I want to. He shuts me out. He wants to keep it so it’s just the two of them in the Subaru, he wants to have that last bit of her to himself. I hated him for it then, but now I think I understand—if he tells, he’ll change it, he’ll wear the memory out.
For a while, he fixated on the time, 5:12 p.m., as if in that minute, he could have done something to make a difference. He told me she picked up a pen from his cup holder, drew a cat in blue ballpoint on the thigh of her jeans. But was she acting weird, checking her phone a lot, didn’t he notice that? Was she high, higher than normal, did he get a look at her arms? He never said. But last time I asked, maybe five or so years ago now, after a long time quiet, he told me that she kept singing the opening lines of “Santeria,” little snatches under her breath. The same lines, as if she couldn’t remember the rest. He remembered thinking she must have listened to that song at some point that morning, or maybe the night before. It was the first time I’d heard that detail, and it frightened me. The farther we get from what happened the harder it is to talk to him about it—What is there to say? he asks, or, voice clipped, he just tells me to stop.
Sam Goody’s security cameras show them parked in the lot; another witness saw her leave his car near the park at around five, which means that she walked right by Mulvie’s the way we’d planned, but, for some reason, decided not to come get me. If I’d been outside, waiting. If I’d stayed with her that day. If I’d never told Greg to post that video; if I’d stopped Ryder from going to the police. If I’d taken the pills myself. If I’d told. If no me and her at all.
“Is it our fault?” I asked Jimmy at some point that winter, the barn next door lightless and cold, a time capsule for no one, except maybe Sal. “No,” he said, staring into the fridge. “Whatever she did, she did it to herself.”