“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” He stops, and I can tell he feels uncomfortable. Like he was just caught snooping through my bathroom cabinet, reading my prescriptions. Witnessing something that was meant to be private. “You were just sitting there, staring. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, pushing my hair out of my face, trying to smile. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I just zoned out for a second.”
I excuse myself and make my way into the bathroom, locking the door behind me. Then I walk over to the sink and turn on the faucet, letting the water run, and stare at my reflection in the mirror. I look awful; worse than usual. My makeup from last night is caked into my creases, my eyes their usual angry red, but there’s something else in my face that looks different, haunted. A paleness to my skin that seems unnatural, like someone siphoned my blood in the night.
I lift my hands to my cheeks, touching them gently, then snake my fingers back to my neck, behind my ear, feeling that smooth patch of skin beneath my jaw. It’s starting to come together now, like the slow orientation after waking up somewhere new—although suddenly, I’m not sure I want it to anymore.
I think of all those feelings that have been flaring up over the last twelve months; feelings of inexplicable guilt, of knowing something that I just can’t retain. All those little moments with Mason—those dark, shameful moments that I refused to acknowledge in the morning—and the way I saw myself on that laptop screen, standing above his crib in the dark.
The similarities between then and now that suddenly seem so obvious.
I think of his stuffed dinosaur found on the banks of the marsh; the familiar smell of pluff mud in the morning and the icy silence from my parents that never seems to melt. The wary way Detective Dozier looks at me every time we’re together, and how Ben fell away from me so fast, almost like I did something. Something unforgivable.
Almost like he knows something that I don’t.
“You need to get it together,” I whisper, closing my eyes.
Then I take a few deep breaths and splash the cold water over my face, trying to shock myself back to life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
We decide to go downtown after breakfast and walk off our budding hangover. Waylon hasn’t mentioned this morning: the way he found me sitting there, staring. When I emerged from the bathroom, hair wet and makeup slathered beneath my eyes, he was whistling in the kitchen, scrambling eggs.
“That must have been tough for you,” he says now as we weave our way through the city, cardboard cups of coffee in hand. “Seeing that video.”
“Yeah,” I say. He’s talking about the one we watched together, the one where nothing really happened, but all I can think about is the way I looked on the screen in the one I watched after he left for bed: my body, upright and rigid; my eyes glowing like two hot coals. I’m glad he wasn’t there for that. I’m not sure how I would have explained it. “It was a little unusual, watching it all back. Kind of nice, though. Getting to remember.”
“I bet,” he says, looking down at his shoes.
I wish I had videos like that of Margaret: bird’s-eye accounts of her going about her days. Just something to help me recollect the little things that are, by now, long forgotten: the exact shade of her hair, somewhere between blond and brown with hints of honey when the sun hit it just right; the smell of her skin, and the way even her sweat had a subtle sweetness to it. That infectious giggle that always erupted from somewhere deep in her chest. Mason is fading from me now, too, and I know there’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to let it happen, let my memory betray me, turning them both into shades of their former selves. It’s getting harder and harder to remember it all: his scent, his laugh. His details. Every day, my memory of him grows fainter, like a stain disappearing slowly under the pressure of running water, my thumb massaging the fabric.
Soon, he’ll be gone completely. Like he never even existed at all.
“Hey,” Waylon says suddenly, tapping my arm. “Isn’t that Ben?”
I look up in the direction of Waylon’s gaze and see that he’s right: Ben is a few feet in front of us, holding the door open for an elderly couple as they shuffle out of a breakfast diner. Sometimes I forget that he lives downtown now; he bought a fancy new condo near The Grit’s office right after we separated.
I try not to think about it, really. I don’t want to know what he does in there; who he entertains.
“Yeah,” I say, my eyes on the side of his face. He’s turning left, in the direction we’re going, so I think we’re safe. He shouldn’t see us.