It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, though.
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, Jade’s telling herself.
Whether he remembers what he did or not doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
When her dad tries to twist, see her face, she tightens her arm on his throat, shoves the splintered point of the pole maybe a quarter inch in, blood spurting warm onto the web of her hand.
She’s in the shower again, which is where it happened. The water heater’s failing, so they’re doubling up. He’s washing her, his bottle of vodka up by the shampoo, he’s washing her and he’s—he’s— “What if Janet Leigh was waiting for Norman?” Jade says through her sudden tears, or tries to say, but her throat is clenching, her whole body is trembling, is cringing away from this skin-to-skin contact with him, and—and she wants to spasm her head back and forth faster and faster like Jacob’s Ladder, to shake free of this Lost Highway memory, she wants to remember things her own way, please, she wants to blur that whole year away, smear it into just a bland sixth-grade nothing, and she still isn’t stabbing this sharp pole into her dad’s back like she needs to.
“I’m really going to,” she makes herself say, like hearing it out loud might make it true.
But… she can’t?
She looks down to her hand like to clock where the betrayal is, but it’s not there. It’s in her head. Her head is what’s betraying her. Her heart.
She can’t do it. She’s not a killer.
“Jennifer?” her dad says, a sort of confident chuckle to his voice that makes her want to hurl.
“No,” a voice says from just past him, “it’s Jade,” and then Tab Daniels’s head conks over to the side fast and hard. He falls away, slumps ahead into the water, out of Jade’s arm, blood from his face coating the water.
Letha. It’s Letha.
She’s holding a board with a nail in it, but to her it’s a bat.
The nail, and the force behind it, tore Jade’s dad’s temple away from his skull. Some of him—cheek muscle, nose tissue, a whole eyebrow maybe—is still on the sharp end of that nail, even.
“He’s never going to hurt you again,” Letha says, breathing hard, which is when the world turns white and fast and stinging. Letha disappears into it and Jade falls onto her knees, shielding her face, her newly exposed scalp.
There’s a sound too, an everywhere sound, a deep dangerous whirring, like a weed whacker the size of a car, which means— Hardy’s airboat.
He’s got it revved high, all his lights shining through the mist and droplets his great blades are spitting across the water.
Until that fan cycles down, anyway.
Monstrous shadows surge through the light, and all Jade can see is Hardy teetering there now from whatever just happened, one hand still to his high captain’s chair, his stomach open to the night air, his hand already clamped to that line of pain. But his hand’s not big enough for this. At first a little blood seeps through his fingers, and then the rest, slick and bulging, glistening gray.
Jade’s breathing hard now.
She looks back around to Letha, still standing exactly where she was, the nail-board down by her leg, and… she didn’t do this to Hardy, she was right here, doing what Jade couldn’t.
And—and Theo Mondragon, Jade can see his hulking shape on the pier, one hand trying to keep his seeping nail-tears shut, the other shielding his eyes from the projector light, Brody huge on-screen behind him, lining up on that oxygen tank one last time.
“I don’t—this doesn’t—” Jade says to Letha, reaching forward not so much to pull Letha in as to just hold on to her, but… a small hand is reaching up from behind Letha, is taking her chin, and is wrenching it to the side, Letha’s own hands coming up fast to try to hold her face together but even her final girl strength isn’t enough.
Her jaw is tearing away, her head trying to go with it, her eyes blown wide because this can’t really be happening, and finally her reflexes and muscles are able to clamp her hands onto whoever’s doing this terrible thing to her, so her whole body can ride this tearing-away motion.
Still, her jaw is definitely creaking away from her face, opening her screaming mouth unnaturally wide, and crooked —a dark chasm Jade’s seen a hundred times through the tracking lines of a VHS tape, but up close and personal like this, it’s so much more intense. The top and bottom rows of teeth, they’re—they’re supposed to be parallel to each other, pretty much, but Letha’s lower teeth are angling fast away, and there’s the distinct sound of the hinge of her jaw cracking, the skin there tearing. There’s not any blood yet, this moment is being sliced too thin for the blood to be coming yet, but if the skin is parting like this, if the bones are shattering into the muscle, if the ligaments and tendons are popping like rubber bands— And then this instant catches up with itself and Letha is being flung away, her body ragdolling across the remains of Lonnie’s living room, thunking into the side of the jauntily floating but thoroughly abandoned bass boat, and… then sinking, with no ceremony.