I’d whisper it back—hi, y’all—and imagine myself in all the places she’d been. A big stone town house in the city, with white marble countertops and a pool underground; a broad porch somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, sipping sweet tea in the shade of a grand live oak strung with lacy Spanish moss. I’d imagine holding out my hand to admire my beautifully manicured fingers, my soft skin. I’d imagine sleeping in her bed, eating her food, petting her cat.
I’d imagine living her life.
That’s why, in my dreams, Adrienne was never dead. She couldn’t be. I needed her to show me how to live, how to be. I needed her to step lightly ahead of me, leaving pretty little footprints that I could match with my own. She was the architect of my fantasy—and the fantasy never included killing her. I want you to know that. I want you to believe me. I didn’t know I would, didn’t know I could.
I didn’t know, until the gun was in my hands.
I didn’t know until I pulled the trigger.
And I never would have done it if there had been another way.
Of course, I know now that the beautiful life Adrienne seemed to live, those pretty little footsteps I fantasized about following in, was nothing but smoke and mirrors. I had to literally spend a day walking around in her shoes—shoes that, ironically, are half a size too small for my feet—to understand what a vampire she was. A succubus. A black hole that sucked in attention, energy, love, and spat it back out as a filtered, hashtagged advertisement for a life she didn’t even appreciate. Imagine having all that, having so much, and doing so little with it. Imagine having all that, and still taking, taking, taking. Even when the thing you wanted belonged to someone else. Imagine being so sure that what you wanted was all that mattered, that the rules didn’t apply to you. Imagine getting away with it for your whole entire life. That day at the lake, she threatened to take everything from me.
Imagine how surprised she was when a redneck bitch like me took her entire fucking head off.
You want honesty? Here it is: now that it’s done, and there’s no going back, I’m not exactly sorry.
I told you that Lizzie Ouellette was dead, and she is. I ended her. She’s gone, in every sense of the word that matters. And she’s not the only one. Four lives ended that day at the lake, in one way or another.
But there was one survivor. A woman with two names, or no name, depending on how you look at it. I’m still figuring out who she is. So this is her story. My story. A true story.
And it’s not finished. Not even close.
Chapter 20
Lizzie
The Lake
All I knew at first was that my husband was screaming. I could hear it from the moment I picked up the phone, not angry shouting but a sobbing, moaning, stream-of-consciousness babbling—Lizzieareyouthereohfuckohfuckyouneedtocomerightnowpleasefuckfuckingfuck—that made every hair on my body stand on end, even though I could only pick out my name and one other word. It was the “please” that did it. It wasn’t a word Dwayne used, especially not with me, and especially not like that. The last time I’d heard it, he was screaming in the background, his foot crushed to a pulp, while one of his work buddies yelled into the receiver that I needed to meet them at the hospital.
The “please” is what I remember. It scared the shit out of me.
Maybe that’s why I grabbed the gun.
Sometimes, it felt like my purpose in life was to build little castles, plant little gardens, just so that Dwayne could come clomping through and knock it all down. Not even on purpose or out of meanness; it was just how he was, a clumsy, selfish, idiot animal who couldn’t understand that every action had consequences. Who never considered how one little act of cruelty or kindness could reverberate down the line, bigger, louder, until it broke everything apart. But who am I to judge? I never understood, either. Not until it was much too late. Dwayne didn’t play ball at State because he stayed in Copper Falls and married me. He lost half his foot at that logging job, the job he took because he had a pregnant wife and bills to pay and no college degree. He got hooked on the pills because of the accident. He turned to dope when the pills ran out.
And Adrienne—that rich, entitled, privileged bitch who was so desperate that she’d do anything, even heroin, to escape the terrible boredom of being herself—she knew Dwayne was a guy who could get dope for her, because I told her all about it. I sat there with her, drinking chardonnay, and I blabbed my stupid face off. Everything that happened, the endless saga of deferred dreams, ruined bodies, pills and needles and pain, was like a little mechanical theater, just clicking along. And if you pulled back the curtain, there I was. Every time. All of the times. All the way back, to the very first moment where everything began to go wrong.