“You better not have. You better not ever, ever write about me. I don’t want your words.” She walked to the deck rail, ripped out pages, and threw them into the yard. She tore out more and wadded them up, chucking them into the darkness. She flung the cover after them like a Frisbee.
She stood there panting and choking out sobs, her clothes and hair soaked, as she stared at the crumpled paper scattered across the grass. The wall of ice was gone, melted, leaving her with this terrible crying, this unbridled, bare-knuckled rage.
Jess said, “I know you don’t believe me. I know you can’t forgive me.”
Dani turned and looked at her. “How do you know what I can or can’t do? You don’t know what I’ll do.” She clenched and unclenched her fists. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
In that moment, she didn’t know what she was capable of. She looked down and saw Jess’s umbrella lying on the table. She picked it up, tested its weight. Compact. Leaden with rain. Blunt.
“Dani,” Jess said.
Dani stepped toward her, wielding the umbrella in both hands like a short bat.
Jess stumbled past her to the deck stairs. On the bottom step, she tripped and fell, landing face-first on the ground. Dani heard the air go out of her, even through the drumbeat of rain.
Dani followed her down the stairs.
Jess scrambled to her feet and started to run again. She seemed to tilt to the right. She slipped and fell again, this time landing on her hands and knees.
Dani hit the ground and chased after her, almost slipping herself on the muddy, slick grass. She reached Jess before she could get up.
On her knees, Jess looked up at Dani. Her mascara streamed black down her cheeks. She sat on her heels and lifted her chin, her eyes wide open. Seeing her posture, Dani thought of the Greeks, of supplication. She thought of her father, on his knees, too. Begging. Please, Dani. She waited for Jess to say the same.
Instead, Jess said, “Go ahead.” She said, “If you’re going to do it, do it.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Dani lifted the umbrella over her head with both hands. She stared down at Jess’s face, blurry now. “How could you? Why would you do this to me?”
“I didn’t,” Jess said.
“He loves you!” Dani said, and she raised her arms high.
“Dani!” her mother called. “Where are you?”
Dani and Jess stared at each other.
“Here, Mom,” she said. She dropped her arms. She dropped the umbrella at her feet. She stepped away, her eyes on Jess.
Jess rose to her feet. The knees of her jeans were torn, her clothes smeared with mud. This time, she walked fast, taking long steps along the grass. She slipped once but caught herself, throwing her arms out for balance.
Dani ran up the deck stairs, where her mother stood in the doorway.
“You’re soaked,” she said. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I saw deer,” Dani said. “Five of them. They ran off.”
Her mom reached out and wiped water from Dani’s cheek. “Come on. Strip down, and I’ll get you a towel and your robe.”
Later, after her mother had gone to bed, Dani went to get her clothes and towel from the dryer. The garage door was ajar. Dani opened it and flipped on the single light. A string with a rubber ball hung from the roof and dangled over the spot where her father had once parked the Squareback to work on it. Oil drippings stained the concrete. She stared at the brown-black stains until she began to see shapes in them: a ship with a mast, a seismograph reading, cytoplasm, a face in silhouette. She blinked up at the bulb, unsure of how much time had passed. On her father’s workbench, she spotted a flashlight and a box of trash bags.
Bag in hand, she quietly slid open the glass door. The rain had become mist. She scouted the yard, her bare feet squishing in the soaked grass. She scooped up the sodden paper, wadded it, and threw it in the bag. She found the umbrella and put it in, too, its metal tip stretching the black plastic. The notebook cover was all the way against the fence, under the dripping branch of a juniper. She added it to the rest, spun the neck of the bag closed, and once inside stuffed the bag under the spare twin bed.
Dani never told anyone Jess had come that night. Never the police in all those interviews. Never her mother. Never Paul. What she told was the essential truth: the last time Dani had seen Jess Winters, she was alive. No, she hadn’t harmed her. Never. She swore it. She didn’t know anything else. She didn’t know where she went or if she was with anyone. She buried the image of Jess—kneeling in the rain with her face upturned—deep inside the ice.
Over the days, and then weeks, and then months, and then years, Dani had imagined scenarios for what had happened that night: No, Jess was fine. Jess ran, warming herself as she splashed through the waterlogged streets. The rain plastered her clothes to her skin, and she lowered herself to a large puddle and washed her scraped knees and palms. Then she hitched a ride to Phoenix, drenching the car seat with rainwater. She stole a car, she rode a bus, she hopped a train—never mind there was no bus station, no train depot within fifty miles. Dani never had believed her father or anyone else was involved. Jess left on her own two feet, and she found her way out of this place—what she had always wanted. Or, at least, once had wanted. Dani retreated behind her ice wall, and she shut the rest of it out.
For the second time in her life, Dani went to the garage for a shovel. She ran her fingers around the curve of the metal spade, brushed at the flecks of dried dirt. Was this Hugh’s, or her father’s? Was it the same one? She began to dig. She dug next to the place she had dug almost twenty years ago, next to the secret she had buried to protect herself.
She panted, struggling with the spade in the hard, dry earth, and then she began to tremble so hard she had to sit down on the grass. Her teeth chattered, and she pressed her face to her knees and held on to her calves. She pressed her eyes, stifling the burn. No, she told herself, as she had told herself when she looked away from Maud. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and then she could see her teenage self, calm, her mind at a clinical distance, focused on what she needed to do: dig, dump ruined notebook and umbrella from bag and into hole, shovel dirt, tamp down. The ground soft because of the rain, mud sticking to the spade. She saw the yellow pencil at her father’s ear. She saw those serpentine clumps of cells through a microscope. She heard her own voice as it sounded now when she swabbed the soft, tender flesh of an inner elbow and raised the needle: Hold still. This is going to sting. She always looked away from their fearful, pleading faces, kept her eyes on the task under her hands.