I walked the entire tiny house, looking for any sign of where she could be. Stopped at the entrance of her room and peered inside. I crossed the barren wooden floor and ran my fingers across the hand-sewn comforter tucked up to the pillow. Then I pulled it back and slipped into her sheets, in case she came in. If I slept in her bed, she’d shake me awake and ask me why I was here and what was the matter. She’d pull down the bottle from the top of the fridge and pour us some vodka, and we’d face the demons.
I rolled onto my stomach, faintly smelling her shampoo. Pictured a dark swath of hair cut to her collar, bangs swooped to the side. Her eyelashes lighter than expected up close, her mouth slightly open as she slept.
I conjured her into being as I drifted asleep.
CHAPTER 6
The phone rang, and I jolted awake in her bed, alone. Grabbed my cell, but it was the house line, echoing from the kitchen. I stumbled out of bed, hit the hall light, my eyes trying to focus on the clock, and grabbed the phone off the cradle mid-ring.
“Hello?” I said. I cleared my throat of sleep, saw the darkness through the windows, my reflection staring back.
Nobody answered. The line was dead air, but it wasn’t a hang-up. At first I thought, Davis Cobb—before I remembered he was in custody and he never called the house line. I could hear something. Something faint. Just the passing of air. Hair shifting over the receiver, a hand moving. A shallow breath.
“Hello?” I said again.
The line was still open. I caught sight of my reflection again in the glass doors. Knew this was what anyone outside could see. Me, in sweatpants and a thin T-shirt, holding a corded phone to my ear, speaking to no one. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I hit the lights before hanging up the phone, trailing my fingers along the wall, back to Emmy’s bed.
She could still come home. She could.
I closed my eyes, picturing the last time I’d seen her: It had been morning, and she’d been sitting in our yard, which was mostly dirt and rock and weeds. I’d seen her from behind, cross-legged, back slightly hunched, perfectly still, except for the breeze moving through her hair. The light had crested the mountains in the distance, and I couldn’t tell whether she had just gotten home or just woken up.
“Morning,” I’d called, but she hadn’t moved.
I’d already had my car keys out, and I circled around so she could see me coming. “Emmy? You okay?”
Her hair hung forward, and for a moment I thought she was sleeping. But then she stood and stepped toward the woods—and it was this that actually worried me. She wasn’t in shoes. Sleepwalking, I thought.
“Shh,” she said, but I didn’t know whom she was talking to. Her hand went to the chain she always wore around her neck, the black oval pendant in her grip as she slid it back and forth.
“Em,” I whispered. High. She’s fucking high. I flashed to late nights with dim lights and hazy air, Emmy’s eyes glazed over, the lazy smile, a thing I had then attributed to our age, the moment, the slow and unwelcome transition to adulthood she seemed to be pushing back against.
But then the moment was broken and she turned to face me, her movements typical and curious.
“Heading to work?” she asked.
I stepped closer. “What are you doing?”
She broke into a laugh as the wind blew a piece of hair across her face. “Don’t do this,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Worry. I see it in your face. It’s your default state.”
It was the same thing she’d said to me the day she was leaving for the Peace Corps, for two years by herself in an African country I’d barely heard of. It was the same thing she’d said even before that, any time she went out at night with a half-baked plan or none at all.
But it was impossible not to worry about Emmy. I always saw her as the start of a story—an adventure that could turn tragic. It was the way she moved on impulse, but also the way she’d go completely motionless out of nowhere.
I still maintain that I was right to worry back when we lived in that basement apartment. That something had happened to Emmy, as something had happened to me. The reason we were even here. And we circled around it, sometimes brushing up against it, but never facing it head-on.
“What were you looking at?” I’d asked.
“Owls. There’s a whole family of them,” she’d said. And I’d been in a rush, so I’d left it. I should’ve asked again.
I was in the habit of asking Emmy questions twice, to be sure I was getting the truth. Twice before I believed her.
Where were you? I’d ask the summer we were roommates in Boston. She’d stumble in as I was leaving for work, not unlike the setup now.
The Commons, near the pond, we lit firecrackers and hijacked a swan boat—you should’ve come.
Emmy, I’d say, stepping closer. And her face would fall, as if I’d caught her, cornered her, forced it from her. Where were you?
John Hickelman’s piece-of-shit apartment. He had mirrors on the ceiling. Kill me now, while I’m still drunk. Before I sober up and remember everything.
I used to think this was a sign: that I was destined for my job. The way I could step seamlessly into someone else’s world, into their head, with boundaries that didn’t quite exist—a blurring of what was acceptable and what was not. The edge that had gotten me the stories. The slip that had landed me here.
But back then I’d believed that people wanted to tell me the truth, that I had perfected the look and timing and word choice, that I would be a great success.
Ask them twice, and they were mine.
* * *
I WAS GOOD AT getting people to talk, so if a story involved teenagers, it was mine. I was a twenty-nine-year-old who looked twenty-two, who could slide into conversation, overhear without being side-eyed.
It was meant to be a piece on the lacking mental health services on a college campus. The angle of the story was supposed to be on the academic and social pressures, the things we had not prepared our children for, the dark corners we all might find ourselves in, from which there appeared to be no way out.
It was to be a personal-interest story as well. A tribute, in fact. Bringing these women to light, and to life, while showcasing the ways the system had failed them—hoping that it would not happen again. That was the change I was set to bring about.
I knew all the details before I arrived on campus—Kristy and Alecia, both the year prior, in the weeks before and after spring break, respectively; Camilla and Bridget following the next March, the tipping point. I had already worked out the setup, knew what readers wanted to hear, and saw how to frame it: There will typically be a rash of killings in a summer heat wave, the world feverish, no air-conditioning, and we lie stripped down in our apartments, sticking our heads in the refrigerator, dripping cold water onto our bare stomachs, the backs of our necks.
The things you do in that sort of heat.
Violent crime rises with the heat, but the winter is worse on the psyche.
The endless gray that never breaks, and the way you have to bundle yourself in layers and layers, eventually forgetting who you are underneath. It’s another person living inside another skin. You feel too big or too small.
But suicide season is the spring.