No One Can Know(97)

Now they pull at her, and she can’t get a breath of air. They weigh her down, and the water takes her deeper.

Before the water, she’s on the bridge. The moon is bright overhead. She sits on the rail. Kids used to jump off here until one of them drowned. A terrible accident, everyone said, he must have hit his head. But Juliette knows a girl who was there, who looked into his eyes the instant before he jumped and knew then that he wasn’t going to come back up. That he didn’t want to.

There’s blood all over her and she can’t get clean.

There’s blood all over her and she can’t go home.

She jumps. She falls. She goes under.

She’s in the water and she kicks, twists, wraps her hand around the heel of one boot and yanks. The boot is too big and it slides free, and then she gets the other one loose. It’s stuck. She yanks at the laces, her lungs burning, fighting the urge to gasp. Then at last the boot comes free and she’s kicking up toward the surface, toward the light of a swollen moon.

Before the water, before the bridge and the woods and the blood, she is in her room, curled on the floor with an empty flask in her hand and a buzz in her head like a hornet trapped under a glass. She stares at the pale yellow wallpaper, orderly stripes surrounding her. Her mother and father have stopped shouting.

The gunshot makes her jump. She scrambles to her feet and stands for a moment, panting, at first not comprehending the sound and then waiting for a scream, a flurry of activity to mark what she has heard. There is nothing.

She creeps into the hall. Down the stairs. The front door is still open, the way she left it. Her thoughts a slurry, she stumbles into the great room. It’s empty. Still. Then she looks to her right, toward the hall to the study.

She is in the water, and the gunshot is an echo in her ears, but the rush of the current bears it away from her at last; she forgets it was ever there.

But before the water she is in the hallway, and her mother is dead. The images in front of her are reduced to color: splashes of red, fragments of yellow white. The gun is on the ground. She picks it up; she forgets she picked it up. She looks down and sees it in her hand, and it’s as if it’s always been there.

She is in the water. She lets go of everything she can, every horrible memory, but shards of it lodge inside her. She will remember the yellow wallpaper, the white grip, the red hand. She will lose the pieces that could have saved her, but those will burrow into her flesh.

After the water, she is on the road when headlights spill across her. She’s in the back seat of a car, struggling into someone else’s clothes. Nina is telling her it’s going to be all right, cupping her cold hands to warm them. Then Nina is gone, and Juliette slips her hand into the pocket of the oversize shirt that isn’t hers, and finds something cool and metal there. Her thumb traces over the bee engraved on the lighter.

She is in the water, breaking the surface, taking in a breath that she wasn’t sure she wanted until it filled her lungs, but now she knows. She wants to breathe. She wants to live. And so she lets her memories sink; lets the river take them. Everything else about this moment she will forget, except for that: She wants to live. She wants to endure.

The current is gentler this time of year, sullen and slow, not the galloping rush after the rains that will gladly slam you against the rocks or pin you to the bottom, but still it’s carrying her along. She strikes out toward the shore. She is a good swimmer, and she has no fear of the water. It will not take her unless she wants it to.

After the water, when she is sitting in a cold room and answering questions, she will remember she wants to breathe; she will keep her secrets and stick to her lies and let her sister drown in her place.

But in the water she is, finally, alive. She breaks the surface. She takes a breath.





51

EMMA




Now



Emma was conscious of movement, of thunderous noise. She couldn’t find the surface. She couldn’t find air. And then there was an arm around her, hauling at her painfully. Of water surging over her face and the scrape of rocks under her. Then she was coughing, JJ’s arms around her, holding her against JJ’s chest as she murmured in her ear.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” she was saying, and Emma blinked awake under a blue sky, in the mud of the riverbank. The bridge was on her right, which seemed wrong. They’d gone into the water upriver of the bridge. Had they been swept that far?

Emma tried to speak and just coughed instead, the taste of river water filling her mouth. She managed to straighten up, pulling away from JJ, and braced herself against the ground with one hand, the other pressed to her abdomen. Her shoulder felt like it had been packed with ground glass.

“Emma?” JJ asked.

“I’m okay,” she managed, more optimism than observed reality. JJ had a nasty gash on her forehead. Her thick hair was plastered in tendrils to her cheeks, hanging soddenly around her shoulders. Emma assumed she didn’t look much better. “You?”

“I’ll live,” JJ said shakily. “Wasn’t sure you would for a minute. You let go.”

“I didn’t want to drag you down with me,” Emma said. “I might have overestimated my memory of high school swim lessons.”

JJ’s teeth chattered. “Emma—” she started.

The river almost hid the crunch of boots on the rocks. JJ twisted, Emma struggling up to her feet as Rick Hadley emerged from the trees. His gun was in his hand, and as JJ stood, he pointed it straight at her. Emma started to put her hands up, only for sudden pain to shoot through her shoulder, lancing down to her fingertips. She let out a strangled scream, and JJ lurched toward her in alarm.