And here, Matt and I moved to the country because we thought it would be safe.
I get out of my car quickly, running down the trail as fast as I can with the heavy spade in my hands, breathing hard, sweat pouring down my back, the cold air making my chest ache. Unicorn River is less than a mile in—a sweet, lazy hike for six-year-old Emily and me. But an exhausting obstacle course when I’m panicked and alone. By the time I get there, I’m feeling the cold and the strain of the run in my muscles, the stitch in my side a relentless, stabbing pain. I kneel next to the frozen stream and brace myself against the cold ground, breathing hard to ease the feeling, deep inhales and exhales, condensation billowing out of my mouth like smoke from a Belgian cigarette.
I bring the spade up, then plunge the sharp end of it into the icy earth. It barely makes a dent, and so I do it again and again, and it’s as though I’m back in that dream—that same doomed, awful feeling, the ground just about to bleed.
Once I finally make a dent, I settle into the rhythm of digging, growing warmer with the effort, the exercise calming me down.
At some point, I find myself thinking of Carl Osterberg again, how insane I must have seemed to him, insisting that his wife was alive. Yet still he let me into his house and gave me a glass of water and patiently explained the facts until I understood. He listened to the series of half-truths I told him, about this strange woman I’d met on a Bachelor Reddit who had stolen his wife’s name and life story and used it as her own. “She was probably someone who knew Wendy,” he had told me. “I think she was talking to some strange people online.”
If you only knew, I’d wanted to say. But I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want him to become another Edward Duval. I did tell him, though, that I lost a child five years ago, and that, for a long time, I thought about ending my life every day.
“What stopped you?” Carl had said.
I think it was the first time anyone had ever asked me that question, and I tried to answer him as honestly as I could. Therapy, I had said. Pills. And then I’d thought of Luke—how, after my arrest, he’d not only picked me up at the police station no questions asked but had the couch all made up for me and how, from the moment I called him from the station—as late as I did—I’d never doubted for a second he’d do either of those things. Because I would have done the same for him. Early on in his relationship with Nora, they got into a big fight over something stupid and she ran off to a friend’s place in rural Pennsylvania. Luke didn’t know how to drive at the time, and so I hopped in my car, picked him up in Brooklyn, then chauffeured him another three and a half hours to the friend’s house—all so that this sweet, theatrical soul could beg his girlfriend to take him back by re-creating the boom box scene from Say Anything. It worked. Plus, it was one of the best road trips I’ve ever taken. A year later I taught him how to drive, and believe it or not, that had been fun too.
“The love of a good friend,” I had told Carl. “That’s what’s helped me most.”
The tip of the shovel clinks into something metal. I put it aside and crouch down to lift it out of the hole, the dirty garbage bag, and inside, the shotgun, all the memories it comes with . . . I check the chamber to see if it’s still loaded, and it is. Protect me.
I didn’t really know how to shoot a gun when I bought this one, but I watched a YouTube tutorial and it seemed easy enough. It was. I pump the action, release the safety, aim it at a tree, and pull the trigger, the force nearly knocking me off my feet.
It is.
If those bitches come after me—and I know they will, soon—I’m going to defend myself.
Hopefully. I shoot again. I feel steadier now, but strange, as though I’ve lived this moment before and it isn’t good . . .
I’m so deep into these thoughts that I don’t hear footsteps. I don’t feel her gaze on me. I feel alone. Until I’m not.
“Psst.”