She pictured the pool of red all around her. Owen busting down the door. Crying out as if he were so upset about what she’d done. Tears and histrionics as though she mattered to him more than anything on earth. That was a big laugh.
She thought of Carole rushing in and pulling her from the water, because Owen wouldn’t know what to do. Or yes, yes he would: he’d stand still, making sure that she was really, really dead.
Her fingertips grazed the handle of the razor. Just the slightest touch. In doing so, she felt a surge of electricity run through her body. She touched it again, this time with more purpose. Yet she couldn’t pick it up. Not even to shave her legs. The temptation was there, but not enough to propel her to take that step. Instead, she reached for the bar of lavender soap. She wanted to die. She deserved to die. She couldn’t do it, though. She finished her bath and went to bed.
She was grateful that Owen was asleep when she slid between the sheets. He was naked, a signal that, later in the night, he’d pretend to be reaching for her in his sleep and wanting sex. It was his MO. A game. She normally played along, pretending she was sleeping too, and the two of them would make love until the sheets were knotted by their feet, and every fiber of their bodies pulsed with the ecstasy of their touch.
But that was BC.
Before Charlie.
Now Liz couldn’t imagine touching him, and she made sure that she went to bed after he did. She went so far as to put an extra pillow between the two of them as a kind of dam to keep him at bay. When he reached for her at night, she said she was having her period and was using a tampon.
He fell for it.
She knew then that her husband didn’t know her at all. She’d stopped using tampons a year ago.
And although she’d started the chain reaction of everything that had happened since the accident, she’d grown to despise Owen. She knew that he’d never admit it to anyone—it would reflect poorly on him—but he felt the same way.
It started to rain that night, and Liz lay there, eyes open, listening. If suicide wasn’t the way out, what was?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MISSING: FOUR DAYS
Liz was not asleep. She was in a foggy twilight of memory.
She had never been so cold in all her life. The cold was always the first thing she remembered when her reflections—thoughts she tried to vanquish—returned to the flash flood.
The chill gripped her as she and her brother clung to a rocky ledge and watched in horror as the waters swept away Dan and Seth Miller. The memory was still shattered glass, and she would always allow herself a way out from it by wondering if she was remembering what had happened at all, or if it had been told to her. Or if she’d pieced things together incorrectly. Had she seen Seth look at her and call out that he was going to be all right? Or had there been a flash of panic in his eyes as he realized that, by saving Liz, he’d be risking his own life?
Over time, memory played tricks against reality. Jimmy insisted that neither of them had actually seen what happened. He said they were crouched down on the rock, holding on with everything they had. The station wagon vanished.
The cold of the water—that she knew to be true.
She, her brother, and Dr. Miller were admitted to the hospital to treat their injuries and the hypothermia that came with the flood. Liz had a gash on her thigh that took eighteen stitches to close, along with a cracked rib and a broken foot that had her in a cast for the first six weeks of the school year. Jimmy had been luckier. His physical injuries were minor. His skin was bruised, but apart from some abrasions on his knees and a fingernail that had been torn off, he was fine.
Liz held memories of her parents and grandparents coming to see her at the hospital. The look in their eyes had meant to calm her, she later understood, but it sent her into a panic. Never had she seen such alarm in their eyes.
Jimmy was in the same room, a curtain separating them when the nurses came to examine her. Liz hated the sound made by the metal hooks holding up the big white curtain whenever the medical staff drew it open or closed.
“Where’s Seth?” she asked one of the nurses.
“Let me get your mother,” the nurse said, swiping the curtain open and looking at Bonnie Camden.
“She’s asking about her friend,” the nurse said.
Mrs. Camden’s blue eyes seemed almost gray. Red and gray. She’d tried to make herself presentable, but her makeup had been applied carelessly and her lipstick was a red smear. Liz would think about that from time to time. Wondering why her mother had bothered to put any makeup on at all . . . or if it was the makeup she’d had on from the day before. Liz had lost all track of time while she lay there in the hospital bed, staring, thinking.
“Honey,” her mother said, “we have some sad news about Seth.”
Her mom waited a beat so Liz could prepare herself for what she already expected after picking up the pieces of whispers from the other side of the curtain while she waited for the doctors and nurses to do whatever it was they had needed to do.
Even so, she asked, “What, Mommy? What happened to Seth?”
Her mother placed a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry, honey. Seth didn’t make it.”
Her father, a big man with dark brown llama eyes, reached from behind her mother.
“We’re lucky that you and Jimmy are alive. None of you should have been up that canyon road with the rains we had.”
Liz started to cry. She didn’t know what else to do.
Later she would revisit that salvo thrown by her father at their neighbor. There would be others. The Millers would nearly fade from their lives, only to be seen when crossing paths at the store or when Dan Miller would mow his lawn that perfect way that he always did. The Camdens would pounce at every opportunity to cast blame on the man who “could have killed our kids.” Others would agree. They’d nod or even corroborate the charge that Dan Miller had been incompetent, drunk, and generally a nefarious character.
Everything changed for everyone who’d been so happy the morning of the fishing trip to Diamond Lake. They hadn’t let the rainy forecast or the showers the night before get in the way of what they all thought was going to be an outing to remember—which it became for all the wrong reasons. And now there was nothing but a wall of pain between all of them. What had been a loving and fun relationship was now icy and cold. What had been a bond between two families living across a river from each other had been upended. When the city proposed a footbridge across the river, Liz’s father lobbied hard to get it moved a little farther north. He was careful with his words, even suggesting that the resident beavers would be disturbed by the proximity of the bridge—although anyone who lived on the river knew that beavers didn’t care one jot about the tourists who had started to pour into Bend.