43
“Can we listen to music?” Jamila asked, so we did.
It seemed we were waiting for midnight. These kids were young enough that the stroke of twelve still connoted mischief, parties, ghosts, rather than work deadlines and colicky babies and red-eye flights.
I had not yet mentioned the flask, the timing. I wanted to think about it, clearheaded, in the morning. I wanted to triple-check my math.
“We should turn the lamps off,” Alder said at 11:58. “We should sit totally silent and send out welcoming vibes. And we should record again!”
Jamila said she’d fall asleep—she was already lounging on the floor—but Alder’s motion passed.
Let’s say that instead of Britt and Alder giggling uncontrollably, shushing each other, instead of Lola shrieking when Alyssa tickled their neck, instead of the hush that finally settled over us, let’s say that Thalia showed up, that her face glowed in the window. Say she had a flask in her hand.
I’d been thrown back, that week, to a mental state in which I could remember the sound of her voice. The way, for instance, she said “How random!” The way she’d get hiccups when she laughed. The way she’d sing choir music as she got dressed, the soprano part of “Wade in the Water” rising over her open closet door.
So let’s say that this night in Gage House, her face appeared and she said what she’d say if she could: Bodie. The drug theory came from you. You made it up, and they listened. Omar was on the phone. What did they know about DNA in 1995?
Let’s say she said: Who has more reason to kill a girl? The guy who tapes her elbow, or the guy she’s sleeping with?
Let’s say she said: How often have you thought of my body in the ground? How often have you thought of Omar’s body in prison? Whose body gets to be free?
Maybe she said: It was all of them. Denny Bloch and Omar Evans and Robbie Serenho and the teachers who didn’t intervene and the boys who thought it was all so funny. Dorian Culler and the cast of the play and Mrs. Ross and Rachel and Beth and my parents, who sent me away, and Khristina, who made my bras and my body a topic of conversation, and you and you and you and you and you.
But no—my eyes were closed and I was drifting off. At 12:05, Alder turned one lamp back on, and we sat there with the calm of people who’d just finished yoga class. “I felt something,” he said.
Lola said, “That’s what she said,” and they were gone again in chatter and giggles.
#5: ME
I did it myself. I don’t remember it, I don’t know how it’s possible, but I did it in a fit of jealousy and I blocked it from my mind completely, and all the subconscious tugs bringing me back to Granby, leading me to this moment, came from the molten core of guilt in my soul.
A ridiculous thought, but as I spiked a fever Sunday morning, as my body paid for those hours in the ravine, I half slept and rechewed the same dreams and occasionally became convinced that I’d followed Thalia to the pool. No, I’d led her to the pool. Or I found her in the pool, and we swam together until she looked at me and held a hand to her bleeding head.
What alibi did I have? That I shut down the lights and the soundboard, that I reset the props and locked up the theater, went back to the dorm, studied alone until the fire alarm went off.
What if my memories were as false as dreams? What if my dreams were really memories? What if we swam together in borrowed suits until the water became heavy and thick, until Omar tried to throw us the life preserver, but it only sank? There you were, throwing rocks from the observation deck, and they kept missing us, so I grabbed one and helped you, I lifted it over Thalia’s head and brought it down. Then I sank to the bottom, a rock myself; I sank there and lived there for years.
44
That afternoon, with most of my fever slept away and the rest medicated down, I FaceTimed Jerome. The kids tore around the house with the iPad, showing me the gerbil, the fish, the cat’s butt. Leo wanted to know if there was snow in New Hampshire, so I took my phone outside and showed him the unimpressive crust. He requested that I make a snowball, and I did my best.
“Mommy,” Silvie said, “I’m eating my hay.” Pieces of yellow yarn hung from her mouth.
Jerome sent them to the basement and I asked how he was holding up.
He said, “I don’t think this is going away.” He meant for himself.
I said, “So I got in some hot water defending you.”
He rolled his head back. He said, “I know. You shouldn’t have done that. I mean, you didn’t need to. You go into mama bear mode.”
He didn’t seem to know about the fallout for the podcast, and I didn’t need to lay that on him just now, nor did I want to speak it aloud.
He said, “Aren’t these the same people who believe in rehabilitation? Honestly, if I’d shot someone in a robbery fifteen years ago, they’d be fighting for everyone to forgive me. They’d say I learned from my mistakes.”
“That—Jerome. Come on.”
“Who’s that singer from Boston, no one even remembers he tried to kill someone.”
“I’m glad you didn’t shoot anyone. You wouldn’t trade this life for that.”
“But being bad at relationships, that’s worse than murder. I don’t get it. I want to stay home and never talk to people ever again.”
“Why don’t you cook with the kids? That always helps.”
He said, “You’re okay in all this, right? You’ll be okay?”
Silvie was back, crying. She said, “Mommy, Leo stepped on my tail. He won’t apologize, and my tail hurts and my mane hurts.”
45
Monday morning, an inch of fresh snow had settled on every tree branch, every railing. On the ground, it covered the old, hardened patches so your boot drifted down through soft new clouds only to hit solid ice.
I hadn’t seen snow like this since I’d left. Not in New York, where the piles turned grainy and black within hours. Not in my time in London. Obviously not in LA.
I imagined that if New Hampshire suddenly thawed, I’d find my own lost things in the melt. I’d find the calculator I lost junior year and had to use all my babysitting money to replace. I’d find the glass bead bracelet Carlotta gave me for Christmas, the one that fell off my wrist on North Bridge. I’d find, in twenty-three-year permafrost, some small, perfect object Thalia had dropped, something hugely important. Her diary, a pen with important fingerprints, a handkerchief embroidered with the initials of her killer. I’d find Yahav, I’d find my podcast, I’d find the unshattered, adult self I was just a week ago.
I crossed campus breathing the cold in deep. The sun emerged, only to glare down hard, bounce back up, blind me from beneath.
（Across the state right then, thirty-six hours after his surgery, Omar was finally getting up to walk the hospital halls—flanked by both nurses and guards. This was possible only when they’d had a chance to clear the halls of all other patients and hospital staff, which meant his walks wouldn’t be nearly frequent enough. And he’d be returned far too soon to the prison infirmary, since it was deemed too expensive for the state to keep staffing his hospital room for the full week he ought to have stayed. Still: He was healing. He was moving. He would, by sheer luck, make it through this particular injury. When he finished his stroll and returned to his room, they handcuffed his right wrist and left ankle back to the bed frame.）