There. Open!
But wait. Did she? Are they? She tries pinching her eyelids shut. And then—open. Nothing happens.
“Look,” says the third familiar voice, low and throaty. “She’s waking up.”
“Oh good. I’ll leave you to it. This will give me a chance to go find something to eat real quick.” Doug again. She even recognizes the sound of his footsteps as he leaves what must be a hospital room, leading her to believe that she’s been awake before, in this room. He doesn’t seem surprised, relieved mainly. And now that she thinks about it, this all does feel vaguely familiar. Like if someone told her about a dream she had when she was a child.
It’s strange. Very, very strange.
“Mary Beth?” The first thing she senses about Darby Morton is the smell of her floral hand cream. She scoots Mary Beth’s legs over and sits on the bed alongside her—yep, that’s her. “It’s me, Darby. And Rhea’s here, too. We were so worried about you.”
She blinks. The faintest hint of silhouettes form in the darkness as if she’s looking at her friends underwater at night. Where are they? Where is she? Why hasn’t anyone turned on the lights?
She thinks about what she should say, how she should ask it. “Dead?” She could have sworn she meant to say more words than that, but dead is what comes out, so dead it is.
“Ben?” Darby says. “Ben Sarpezze? No, unfortunately not.”
Okay, she thinks. That’s something to process. Mary Beth meant herself. She is supposed to be the one who’s dead. Though no one’s crying and, not to brag, but Mary Beth has always believed that if she dies—no, when, obviously—there will be a lot of people crying. She thinks about this sometimes when she brings over one of her casseroles. It’s a nice bonus. Here’s a casserole and now you’ll cry at my funeral.
But Darby said stroke. Old people suffer strokes. Her grandmother died after one several years earlier. Mary Beth isn’t old. Not that old anyway.
“What—what happened?” Her words come out slurred, like she’s had two too many glasses of wine. Better this attempt than last, though. And will somebody please turn on the freaking lights? She’s getting frustrated.
She feels Rhea hovering nearby, a nice calming force to counterbalance Darby, who can frankly be a bit stressful.
“I—” Darby stutters as though she’s the one who suffered the stroke.
“She might not remember anything,” says Rhea.
“Not sure we should be the ones delivering the news,” Darby replies.
Mary Beth, alarmed that she may be kept in the proverbial dark and not just the actual dark until Doug returns （whenever that may be） manages to walk her fingers over to Darby and squeeze her wrist. Softly is all she can manage, but it’s enough. Darby clasps her hand, hot against her own ice-cold fingers. “Okay, well, uh, Ben tried to kill you. We think. But then you had a stroke. Those headaches you were having, they were apparently not caused by stress or whatever, but were due to your birth control. That vaginal ring thing you use? Yeah, that one. It was causing blood clots and one was traveling up through your brain and eventually you had a stroke and passed out. I’m pretty sure Doug mentioned all of this? Anyway, I think Ben thought he killed you very quickly. He started to strangle you and I guess your brain went haywire and that was the final straw: You had a stroke. The thing is, I saw him go in and had a bad feeling—had no idea you were already there or else I would have—” Darby stops talking abruptly. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, Mary Beth. I promised I wouldn’t get weepy—I thought you were dead, too. Then Ben was already running and—”
“Why?” Mary Beth doesn’t know if it’s the aftermath of the stroke or if Darby truly is being confusing. A cloudy memory of Pastor Ben in Miss Ollie’s old classroom bubbles to the surface. She was frightened. Wasn’t she? Uncomfortable. Something was off and she didn’t quite understand why or what was happening, and then—
“Because he murdered Miss Ollie.” Darby sounds like a true-crime podcaster.
But no, Mary Beth thinks. Not right. That’s not right. That day—the day that Miss Ollie died—her head was wreaking havoc. Every step was agony. She was in constant danger of dry heaving. “There was some kind of struggle, and he stabbed her. You must have figured it out at the same time I did and once he realized you knew, then he thought he had to get rid of you, too,” Darby concludes.
Mary Beth shakes her head, her mouth working at words that won’t quite come. Ben killed Miss Ollie? No. But Mary Beth already knows that’s not true. Does he believe it is? Just as he believed he killed Mary Beth herself? Tears drip from her eyes.
Mistakes were made.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” Darby soothes. “He’s in police custody. I called the cops and that handsome officer—Princep—he ran Ben down while he was trying to escape. He thought he was going to be on the hook for murdering you, too, caught red-handed.”
“He confessed, Mary Beth,” Rhea adds softly. “In exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.”
“Why?” Mary Beth croaks, and she hopes they can all chalk it up to her traumatic brush with death. She wants to see her friends’ faces, to make sure this is all real.
“He was embezzling the money from the youth center and using it to fund a pretty lavish lifestyle. For a pastor, anyway. Miss Ollie’s family had a history with him. Erin had it out for him and was blackmailing him, maybe to help her parents, who live in Alaska now—did you know that?—with the legal fees he cost them,” Darby explains. “Sorry, that’s a lot of information.”
“No.” Mary Beth uses every ounce of remaining kinetic energy at her disposal. “Why … is it … dark?”
FORTY-FOUR
Rhea makes a promise to herself: Her last lie will be a small one.
“I forgot Mary Beth’s things in my car,” she tells Darby. “I’m going to go grab them and run back up.”
“Want me to come with you?” Darby offers outside Mary Beth’s hospital room. She’s been overly deferent and cautious around Rhea since their reunion and, frankly, it’s freaking Rhea out.
“No, no, you go ahead. You have to get Jack.”
The two women hug. It’s been three days since Darby texted the terrible news to Rhea from the back of an ambulance, asking her to pick up Mary Beth’s personal effects. Hours after that, Rhea was finally escorted into the classroom and allowed to collect Mary Beth’s things. The shreds of a white T-shirt lay like a chalk outline on the scratchy carpeting of their children’s former classroom; the paramedics cut it off. It seemed like an entire trip around the sun since she had crawled across to pull Bodhi from Zeke’s teeth. All the things she didn’t know then, she couldn’t even count them.
The world was different. The space rang with an impermeable silence, the kind of silence that felt blasphemous to break. Rhea breathed deep, in and out, in and out. She tilted her palms away from her body and she made a slow, deliberate rotation. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but whatever it was, she needed to do it. This room, this school, this chapter of her life during which she didn’t recognize her own main character—her.