“Didn’t you see me downstairs?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I admitted, not able to keep it up anymore, not now that the visions were multiplying, now that there were three girls.
“So you’re avoiding me?”
I shrugged. I felt my shoulders make the motion, and I didn’t do a thing to stop them.
“What’s gotten into you?” he said, just coming out with it. “Are you into someone else? Is that it? Who is it?”
“It’s no one. It’s not that.”
“So what is it then?” I now realized we were having “the talk,” and that I wasn’t going to get away with avoiding it today.
He’d retreated back to lean against the sinks. His arms were crossed over his narrow chest and his thick, dark hair was curling down over one of his eyes. He didn’t reach up to move it away.
I didn’t want to let myself keep looking at him—like I’d given up that right—so I dropped my gaze and thought and thought of what to say. There was a drain in the middle of the tiled floor that I hadn’t noticed before and my eyes caught on it. Was that how Natalie had entered the room? And was that the exit she’d taken to leave? Could the girls travel through the pipes of the school? Were they anywhere, and everywhere, able to find me wherever I went, no matter if I wanted them to or not?
“Lauren,” Jamie said. “You owe me this. You know you do. Just say it. I can take it.”
He was right: I did owe him an explanation. It was more than just that we’d gotten physical together and that made all of this so much more serious. And with seriousness comes the lowering of the walls, and with the lowering of the walls comes the nakedness, and with the nakedness comes the connection and the fear. Both of us had done things we’d never done with anyone else before—at least that’s what he said; I know I was telling the truth—not to mention the talking and all the secrets spilled after, like when we’d lie in bed together, under the covers, at his house or my house, when no one else was home.
He told me how his dad used to hit him until one day, when he was thirteen, he hit him back and got lucky with his aim and bloodied his lip. I told him how my dad disappeared when I was three and a few years ago we thought he was in a homeless shelter down in Texas, but when we called to talk to him he wouldn’t come to the phone. Jamie told me how he used to think of suicide sometimes, when he was reading a lot of Camus. I told him how I never once thought of suicide, but I knew my mom had, before I was born, and knowing I was the one keeping her alive and happy made me more afraid to die than anything ever could. Jamie and I simply told each other a lot of things. And I guess that once you’ve gone that far with someone, once you’ve let him in, in all the ways a person can be let in, you should say why you don’t want to see him anymore. You should know why, yourself.
I didn’t, but I tried to explain.
“It’s me. It’s me and it’s not me. There’s more of me than you know. There’s more, and I can’t tell you, I can’t say. There are things . . . There are people.” I got the distinct feeling I was saying too much. It’s true that Jamie knew a lot about me, but he didn’t know everything. I’d never told him about Fiona Burke running away all those years ago. And, right then, I was relieved I hadn’t. She wouldn’t want him to know.
“Wait, so you’re saying I don’t know you? Are you serious?” He’d heard only part of what I’d said.
“You used to. You don’t anymore.”
“You’re not making sense.”
I agreed. It felt like we were having two separate conversations, that he was hearing things my mouth wasn’t saying, and I was saying things his ears couldn’t hear.
Then I remembered the phone call he’d taken when we were at the Lady-of-the-Pines Summer Camp that night. He was acting like all of this was my fault, but was it? Who was the guilty one here?
“Maybe I should ask you if there’s someone else?” I said. “If there was, would you tell me?”
“No,” he said, and hearing that answer felt like a slap. Then he clarified. “There’s no one else.” He added this last bit without looking at me: “But it sounds like you want me to get with someone else.”
I couldn’t blame him if he did. I wasn’t fit for consumption. I was defective. I was about to melt down that drain and share the pipes with the only people who understood me. The girls.
I don’t know what I wanted him to do: pull me into his arms, maybe, and say it didn’t matter. Sense there was someone in the stall and not be scared away by it.
He did none of those things. You see, Jamie Rossi was great. He was kind. He was really, really into me, or at least he used to be. But he was also a pretty typical 17-year-old boy, and you can’t expect so much from them.
“Whatever you want,” he said, his eyes hardening. “I guess we’re broken up then.” He turned for the door, and I thought he was about to leave; then he turned back.
“That’s mine. That hoodie you’re wearing. Take it off.”
“You’re kidding.”
He waited, and the expression on his face said it all. It was more a lack of expression, an iron door behind which he’d packed all his emotions; I’d never get close to them again since I wasn’t strong enough to lift that door. He absolutely was not kidding.
“C’mon,” he said. “You made me late to class already. Just give it so I can go.”
I unzipped the red hoodie, then pulled it off, arm by arm. Underneath I wore only a T-shirt of the thinnest cotton, and it was January, and my nipples turned to pebbles and the gooseflesh on my arms popped up, and surely he’d see this and let me hang on to the hoodie for the rest of the day.
Nope.
I held it out to him, dangling it in the open space between us. He closed the gap, tore it out of my hand, and left.
Natalie, upon hearing the door slam, dropped her feet down off the toilet and came out of the stall. She made me cough, and she made my eyes tear up, and I couldn’t look at her, not even in the mirror, and there was a lump in my throat so I couldn’t speak.
She didn’t touch me, because I don’t think a ghost can touch a person. But she stood very, very close to me so her whisper teased at the lobe of my ear:
You don’t need him, she said, and I knew just what she’d say next. You have us.
— 24 —
NATALIE wondered what else she’d inherited from her mother, beyond the physical characteristics most kids inherit through the curse of DNA: eye color, hair texture, bumps on the nose, extra weight around the hips. Did she carry something else of her mom’s, that raging flare buried and faintly glowing somewhere in her, the one that made her mother sneak the blade from the kitchen and plunge it, without warning, into the snoring chest of that man in her bed?
Maybe this kind of calculated rage was genetic. It could be that Natalie had this trait just as she had anything else.
You have your mother’s eyes.
You have your mother’s skill with a carving knife.
Natalie feared it could snap on at any moment. It could come crashing down on her like the ice storm that was her fate. Coating her eyes and her tongue and crusting deep beneath her fingernails. Turning her a color she’d never been before. Making her do terrible things.
But I didn’t sense that in her—and I’m sure I would have, traveling through her wants and thoughts and aches and regrets and wonderings as I did, once she let me in. I slid on her consciousness like trying on a borrowed dress. There was nothing wrong with that dress, even if it didn’t fit me exactly.
I didn’t think she’d come to hurt me. I knew all she wanted was to talk.
To tell me.
She told me everything up until the moment she disappeared.
The before, I could see and experience and mull over. And the during—the accident, the car sliding circles on the ice and crashing sideways into the guardrail, that slice of fast-moving time that came so suddenly—that, I could play back in slow motion. Pause and hover over. Investigate. It was only the after that I couldn’t gues
s at, couldn’t pierce a hole through.
Probably because she had a hard time seeing it, too.
She told me about Lila, who was hosting the party in her father’s finished basement. She told me how none of this would have happened if not for Lila’s party, one Natalie wasn’t even technically invited to, seeing as she and Lila weren’t what could be called friends. She’d tagged along to the party anyway because of some boy. If she hadn’t met that boy when she’d served him a burger and fries at Murray’s, where she waited tables two days a week, if he hadn’t grabbed ahold of her wrist when she’d walked by his booth and slipped the napkin onto her tray, the one where he’d written, in sloppy boy-handwriting—Babe you are hot. when you get off work want to go to party later? let me know—and signed with his name (Paul), then she wouldn’t be haunting me in bathrooms and whispering her story in my ears. She’d be back home, alive, and I wouldn’t know her.
She wanted me to get a sense of how it was, up where she lived. How little there was to do up there. How boring it was, especially in winter, if you couldn’t afford to ski. So she may have despised Lila—in the locker room after phys ed she’d heard the girl call her a psychopath like her psychopath mother, and in the hallway out of sight of the teachers, Lila had let Natalie know how she felt about psychopaths with psychopath mothers. The girl had claws.
But she’d go to her party. Where else was there to go?
The drive up the mountain was uneventful. When they’d started the climb up the mountain pass, it hadn’t even begun snowing yet. But by the time they were crawling to the top, searching out the marker for Lila’s parents’ driveway, the sky ahead was shrouded in a thick white sheet.
Since the guy who’d invited her was driving—this was his old ’65 Mustang coupe, oily and black in the night—she’d sat in the front and could ignore the looks from his friends. They were townies like her, and they’d all heard the stories of her mother.
But Paul, who was driving, wasn’t from around there, so he had no idea.
There wasn’t a reason for a party, except that Lila’s father was letting them use his finished basement. That’s why everyone drove up to the highest heights of Plateau Road when a snowstorm was expected. Lila’s house was at the tiptop of the mountain, down a squirrelly dirt driveway that fractured from the main road, so that cars had to be parked out on the road itself, making those who came in sneakers have to ice-skate their way to the front door. But her father had a fully stocked bar and a billiards table in the carpeted lower level of the house. And the soundproof door at the top of the stairs locked from the inside, so her parents couldn’t check the booze supply till morning.
It was Tim, the hippie, who brought the pills. And it was Tim the hippie who insisted on the orange juice, saying you could enhance the roll on vitamin C. It was Jeannette who said there was a store close by, halfway down the road. It was Paul who volunteered to drive.
And that’s how Paul and Tim and Jeannette and Natalie had all gone back out for the car. And this was also how Natalie slipped on the ice that was now falling from the sky and grabbed for the first solid object, the hood of the car, and that’s how the zipper of her coat caused a nick in the paint.
Paul let her in the car, but he made her sit in back this time.
They were on the road when the drug kicked in, on a narrow lane skirting the edge of the mountain, blinded by shooting snow. The white battering the hood was the same white flitting into the sky and the same white slapping the windshield. All was white.
You can’t know how long it’ll take to trickle into your system, Tim had told them, but it’s not instantaneous, and they probably had a good half hour, so it’ll be a smooth ride in, so gentle you won’t know until—
Jeannette smiled and said she felt it right now. Shit, man—she felt it.
Paul, the one driving, slowed to a crawl. He spoke over his shoulder to Natalie, who was in the backseat behind him, forgetting that she’d nicked the paint job on his car now, saying, “Whoa, you feel that?” like they shared the same body and were feeling the same things.
She told him she did. She told everyone in the car that she felt it. In fact, she felt other sensations instead. Like how cold it was, so cold since Paul hadn’t let the car warm up before shifting it into drive, and colder still because Paul had the window cracked. Also she felt a climbing ache in her head, probably from the overpowering scent of gasoline. Was the car’s gas tank leaking?
None of this was an effect of the drug. She was completely sober.
What no one knew was that Natalie had pocketed the pill Tim had given her. She didn’t know, and never would get to, what it felt like to “roll,” as Tim called it, on a white winter’s night while driving.
They didn’t know she was faking. The snow seemed funny to Jeannette, so Natalie pretended it was funny to her, too. Tim was mesmerized by the seat vinyl, how soft it was, how beautiful, so Natalie spent a long moment contemplating its perfectly smooth skin.
Paul kept watching her instead of the road, and she wanted to tell him to keep a lookout for other cars and for patches of ice and swift turns that would veer them off the side of the mountain.
Also, she wanted to ask, haven’t they driven far enough? Wasn’t the store supposed to be just down the road?
But if she did that, she’d reveal she’d only pretended to swallow the pill. That she’d lied.
It was only that she didn’t want to lose control. She didn’t want to have no sense of what was real or unreal, to think everything was wonderful when it actually wasn’t wonderful, which was what Tim had told everyone who hadn’t done it before to expect after the chemical seeped into their bloodstreams.
Everything Tim had described was the last thing Natalie would have ever wanted, especially knowing she wasn’t among friends.
To lose control?
To not know what was real?
That would be too much like looking down at her hands and seeing they’d become her mother’s hands. Like looking into the mirror, as Natalie did every single day since the two consecutive life sentences were decided, and gazing into the eyes of a woman who could plunge a knife into a man’s stomach forty-seven times and then bag him up with his gym socks and his tennis racket and leave him at his wife’s door to be discovered when she went out to get the newspaper Sunday morning.
Natalie didn’t, couldn’t be sure, what she was capable of, having this woman for a mother, and so she could never let go the way the others could. She’d never get so inebriated she’d climb atop the bar in a basement rec room and pitch herself face-first into the arms of whoever would catch her, like Lila had before the orange-juice run.
And yet somehow, sober, Natalie had gotten herself talked into going for a ride in Paul’s Mustang. And she was sober when Jeannette turned to her in the backseat of the moving car and said, as if she’d only just noticed her, “Natalie Montesano? Natalie, is that you?” Jeannette’s pupils had grown to two black nickels, gargantuan against the shrinking sea of her irises. She wasn’t slurring; she was talking as if she didn’t know how to make full use of her mouth. “Wait.” She seemed confused. “Wait. Why don’t we like you?”
And that was all it took. The fine feeling, the open mind, the sense of adventure in agreeing to go on the drive in the snowy night, it all left Natalie. And good riddance. In its place came disdain. Pulsed through with rage. Woven with hate.
Maybe there was a piece of her mother inside her after all. It wouldn’t cause her to grab a sharpened object and plunge it into the closest chest—three hearts to choose from in this car. It had always been subtler, inside Natalie. It made her not care. Not about herself, and not about anyone else.
She didn’t care if they all died on this road tonight.
When she did it, it was without thinking, and it was also as if she’d been premeditating it for years: She reached her arm forward into the front seat and she said, “Watch out for that car!”
There was no other car. There was only the c
ar they were in, which shuddered when the brakes were jammed, and then slid. Soon the old Mustang was careening across the ice, not going straight and not going sideways, and there was the railing at the road’s edge, and there was the space ahead of it, filled only with air and emptied of trees.
There was this moment before the car made impact, so of course she remembered it, where she saw everything that was happening and was about to happen and understood it in a way she didn’t know life could be understood.
Then she saw the guardrail come for them—and beyond that, the gaping edge of the mountain—and this was when she screamed. She screamed the way the man’s wife did when she found the bag with the body, the way a madwoman would scream when she tore open the guts of a lying, two-timing man. She screamed, and then the car jolted to a stop.
She showed me how she screamed, and my ears rang for days.
— 25 —
NATALIE’S story doesn’t end there, with the accident. There was what came after.
If anyone could have been on that mountain to see the smashed black Mustang, if they’d been peering in through the cracked windshield to where Natalie lay in the backseat, they would have wondered what might happen to her. Would any of the kids who’d been in the car come back for her, and why hadn’t anyone tried to wake her first before taking off?
There had been all that snow as the night went on, but now ice cascaded from the dark heavens in whipping, slapping sheets. Anyone would have hoped, as Natalie would have hoped had she been fully conscious, that they wouldn’t just abandon her. The girl, Jeannette, did say they’d go get help.
To stay put.
To be okay, okay?
To hang on. They’d be back.
But Paul did not come back. Tim did not come back. Jeannette did not come back, either, even though she was the one who said they would. They climbed out of the totaled car and slipped into the storm, retreating on foot to Lila’s house, where they could call for help.