I opened the door in much the same state I’d answered his call: in sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt, hair tied back in a loose braid.
“Hey,” he said as he skirted by me into the room as if avoiding detection.
“Yeah, hey.” I locked the door behind him.
“Classy,” he said, looking around, grinning with half his mouth.
I placed one hand on my hip. “This is all very illicit,” I said. It felt like part of a joke. Lines we were acting out for the benefit of someone else. Two people with a script, desperately trying to remember their next lines. Otherwise we’d have to cut the scene, figure out what the hell we were doing here—sober now, not a coincidental meeting at a bar, but premeditated and deliberate.
He fell onto my bed, over the covers, with his shoes on, lying on his back with his hands behind his head. “It occurs to me, coming here after midnight and all, that this probably seems like I called you up for a specific reason. And I just want to put it out there, in my defense, that it’s more like six P.M. for me right now. I’m just getting off work.”
“So . . . you want to get some dinner?” I asked, smiling.
He shook his head against the pillow, also smiling.
“Then your defense is shit,” I said, and I laughed as he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto the bed beside him.
I was still laughing as he cursed the crappy bed, the crappy room, as he joked that we shouldn’t waste time or we’d be charged an extra hour. But I saw myself for a moment—as both subject and object again—and I wondered if this was part of rock bottom.
There she is, Leah Stevens, a girl in a shitty motel. A call in the middle of the night. With half her clothes still on. Clinging to the idea of someone else and not wanting him to go.
Thinking, Look at yourself, Leah, look at yourself, over and over you fall, and pulling back for a moment, dragging the scene into focus. But then Kyle whispered my name, and I looked up at him instead, falling back under. Finding that thing I was searching for. How he couldn’t stop looking at me, under that shitty halo of light, as if he couldn’t believe I was here, and real.
* * *
I WAS STILL RIDING the high Monday morning. My bags were in the trunk of my car out in the faculty parking lot while I taught class. I’d vacated the motel, determined to go back home. To figure out who had sent the paper my way. To find out if there was anything real to fear or if this was just my imagination running away with me.
And so I ignored the first buzz of someone’s phone. Kept talking right over it while I faced the board. Ignored that first whisper, the trace of something in the air, as it brushed against the back of my neck.
I heard the texts vibrating halfway through first period in synchronized harmony. The furtive glances into their purses, under their desks. The heads whipping toward one another and to me.
Remembering the last time this had happened and what it had meant. All this time, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“What?” I said, my voice too high. “Someone just tell me what.”
It was Izzy Marone who told me. Her voice calm and steady. “They’re pulling a car out of the lake behind the Tavern. Right now.”
My hands dropped to my desk, and I leaned forward, caught off guard. “What kind of car,” I said, and all eyes were on me now. I raised my voice. “I said, what kind of car?”
Izzy typed a message, waited for a response. “Brown,” she said. “A station wagon. Old.”
I left. Left my class, my lesson, everything. Grabbed my bag and went out the side door straight for my car.
Later, when I was questioned, I wouldn’t remember this drive. I wouldn’t be able to pull it to mind at all. I was in my classroom, and then I was parked on the shoulder of the road beside the lot for Lakeside Tavern, now overrun with emergency vehicles. I sprinted behind the restaurant, raced down the embankment, using the scattered tree trunks for balance.
The scene opened up: The light slanting across the still surface of the lake. The gnats over the tall weeds. Dead leaves matted against the damp ground. The crowd of onlookers scattered around, phones out. The police, keeping them back. And a tow truck facing away from the lake, hooked to something rising from the surface.
The gears churned loudly as the car slowly emerged. Dirty water spilled from the top of the windows, and I moved closer. Someone spoke. Someone pointed my way. I saw Kyle in my peripheral vision. He was walking toward me, and he was saying something, his palms held out as his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him.
“That’s her car,” I said, and I said it so calmly and rationally that I almost had myself fooled. That I would not snap. But my feet were moving of their own accord, and the people faded, and the rest of the scene had gone hazy.
Kyle was trying to keep me back. His arm tightened around my waist. I could feel people looking. He was talking low, too intimately, his mouth pressed close to my ear, and everyone was watching.
The car was hers, there was no doubt. All the little details I had forgotten. The way the chrome bumper had lost its shine on the right side, the dent in the taillight, the nail missing from the license plate.
Water poured from the open windows. The seams of the doors were murky with mud.
There was a darker shadow in the front seat.
And suddenly, I am that person.
I am the person breaking the policeman’s hold, breaking through the line, demanding to see. I am the person fueled by grief and terror that makes the other people look away in embarrassment.
It took a moment for Kyle to catch me again. He had both arms firmly around my waist, and he was saying something into my ear.
But I craned my neck around the other officer in front of me—and I could see.
The form in the front seat took shape as the car continued to rise. The seat belt was holding it in place. The car angled forward, and the sunlight hit the body, and I saw: water and mud, dripping from the still form; the hair a few shades too light and too short; the shoulders too broad.
That was a man in the front seat.
That was James Finley.
CHAPTER 19
I was sitting now, sitting on the cold, damp earth, knees bent, turned away from the scene. My limbs were shaking.
“Shh, don’t look,” a woman in uniform was saying. Implying that I did not have the constitution for it. I reminded myself that they didn’t know me. Kyle had left me there, entrusting me to someone else’s watch. To them, I was a schoolteacher, a woman living alone, a girl with a missing roommate. “Take slow breaths,” she said, crouching down in front of me.