Ellis touches my elbow. I startle. I hadn’t realized she’d approached, and now she was right there, close enough I could have counted her eyelashes. The pince-nez have vanished again.
“She was screaming,” I whisper. “The whole time. She was screaming for me to pull her back up.”
The confession drops into the space between us like a lit fuse. And there it is: the nasty truth.
“Alex begged me not to, and I cut the rope anyway.”
Ellis takes in a shallow audible breath. Her hand is still on my arm, at least—she hasn’t recoiled in disgust.
“I don’t understand,” she says. And neither do I. Neither do I. My breath shudders in my chest, and I turn away so she won’t see my tears.
Ellis’s hand tightens on my arm, and she moves back into my line of sight until I have no choice but to look at her.
“I don’t understand,” she says again. “Alex didn’t die on a mountain. She died here, at school. She drowned.”
Ellis’s words land heavy in my mind, and I rock back on my heels, away from her touch.
She drowned.
I can still see Alex in my memory, her lips tinged blue and her hand shaking where she gripped her ice pick. I still feel the frigid wind tearing at my hair, the snow wet against my cheek. It feels as if that reality has pressed itself up against this one, like I could reach into the dusty air and tear it apart and find myself back on the mountaintop. We were there. We—
“I read it in the paper,” Ellis is saying; I barely hear her, barely see her. “She fell off a ledge by the lake. That’s what you told the police, anyway. You said she couldn’t swim.”
No.
That isn’t what happened. I cut the rope. It was thick, almost impossible to saw through—my hand was numb by the end of it. She screamed the whole way down.
“That isn’t what happened,” I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “I was there. I…No—”
“Felicity,” Ellis says. She’s being careful—careful like the hospital doctors were careful, careful like I’m insane. “What did you use to cut the rope? A knife? Where did you get it?”
I hesitate, mouth half-open, lungs full of dead air.
Ellis releases my arm; my skin is cold where she once touched me. Alex’s skin was cold up on that cliff, slippery with tears, her flesh translucent like polished quartz.
No.
That’s not right. I never touched her. She fell.
She fell.
“You were there,” Ellis is still saying, slow and so perfectly concerned. “Remember? You said she lost her balance. You came back to campus, dripping wet, and said she’d fallen into the lake.”
I remember. I remember standing in the foyer of Godwin House, the cold night at my back and muddy dress clinging to my legs. Ice water pooled on the floor. I remember MacDonald calling the police. I remember them picking Alex’s red hair from where it had caught, tangled, around my fingers.
Oh god.
It was an accident. I had just kept saying that, over and over, a litany.
Where is Alex, Felicity?
What happened to Alex?
I can’t stand anymore; my legs feel fragile as flower stems, and I sink to the ground. I’m shaking, and Ellis leans over me, touching hesitant fingers between my shoulder blades.
“They never found her,” I whisper. I know that now. Ellis is right. I remember, I—
Ellis shakes her head. “Divers searched the whole lake and half the Hudson shoreline. Eventually the police said her body had probably floated out to sea.”
Why did I think she’d died climbing? That wasn’t true. I’d never even gone climbing with Alex—I don’t even know how.
Was that story easier than the truth?
Why was it easier?
Maybe I just wanted to believe Alex had died doing something she loved. I didn’t want it to be up there on that ledge, the two of us fighting about, about—
And then she fell.
I tip forward, pressing my brow against my knees.
I can’t escape the memories rising in me like a briny tide.
Alex, her cheeks pink with anger.
Alex, shouting.
“I tried to save her,” I sob. I don’t know when I started crying. It chokes me, the tears salty when they catch on my lips, soak my tongue. “I tried. I tried. I swam out after her, but she…she already…”
She must have hit her head too hard when she fell; she would have lost consciousness immediately. There was no dramatic struggle to stay afloat, no flailing limbs or splashing water. Just terrible silence. I dove under again and again, eyes straining against the black water, searching. I dragged my fingers through the silt at the lake bottom. I cut my hands on the rocky edge of that cliff, clinging there and gasping for breath as I realized it was too late.