Her best friend, her boyfriend, all of us ready and waiting for her.
“I’ve been trying to make you see it,” she finishes. “I’ve been trying to get you to understand that you don’t have to feel so guilty all the time. You don’t have to keep punishing yourself. She deserved it.”
I think back to that night at Penny Lanes, Lucy’s soapbox about murder and death. The way she had looked at me and winked, spewing out justifications like she was trying to tell me it was okay.
“I would kill someone who deserves it.”
I think back to all of us around the dinner table, that fragile stem twisting between her long, skinny fingers. Every little comment a chisel to my conscience, chipping away slowly, trying to make it disappear. I always thought it was Levi she was playing with, dangling the knowledge of what I told her like a cat clutching a mouse’s tail. Pawing at him, making him squirm. Torturing him slowly just because she could. But it was never Levi—it was me she was trying to get to confess, all those little moments when she asked me questions about Eliza, her death, before sitting back and waiting patiently, quietly trying to pry it all out. She wanted me to put it together and I had tiptoed around it so many times, so eager to ease the crushing weight of it all. This burden to carry that was solely mine. So I had sprinkled in my own truths when I could, telling Lucy about an argument, an accident. The guilt I carried and all the different decisions I wished I could have made. I had been attempting to justify it, too: sitting on the porch with Mr. Jefferson, frantically searching for someone else to pin it on. For a way to channel my guilt into rage.
I chose Levi, of course, the only other person who could shoulder my blame. He had been there with her and everyone knew it. Other than me, who nobody saw, he was the last person to see her alive. And in a way, it was true: none of it would have happened if he hadn’t come into our lives that day, Eliza’s lips dipped below the water as she watched him curiously. His tan legs ambling down the dock, him handing her a cigarette. All his vices turning into hers, changing her into somebody she wasn’t. Taking her from me even before she died.
I look at Lucy now, suddenly remembering the way she stood up and followed Levi into the trees, her eyes on mine like we were sharing a secret. Like she was granting my wish, that thing I had muttered to her in the kitchen. My hatred for Levi like a festering boil.
“Why did he have to die?” I ask, realizing now that it doesn’t make sense. If Lucy was there the night Eliza fell, then she knew Levi had nothing to do with it. She knew of his innocence all along. “Why did you kill Levi?”
“I didn’t,” she says slowly, leaning forward like she’s wondering when I’ll finally fess up. “You did.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head, even though I can barely remember the end of that night. Even though Sloane said I had been looking for him, stumbling off on my own and waking up in the morning with mud on my pants. Even though I had that horrible feeling the next day, that sinking nausea, it wasn’t the same as the way I felt waking up after that last night with Eliza: the horror of realizing it wasn’t a dream. I’ll never forget that feeling: the terrible knowing that you’re the reason someone else is gone. The blood on your hands that’s always there, ever-present, no matter how hard you try to scrub it away. I understand better than anyone that something inside you changes after you’ve taken another life. Something cellular and permanent; an alteration of your very being, your very DNA. There is nothing muddy about it; in fact, it’s crystal clear.
If I killed Levi that night, I would have known it in the morning.
“I didn’t kill him,” I say, even firmer now. “I had no reason to.”
“Come on, Margot. You hated him,” she says. “You told me yourself you wished it had been him instead of Eliza.”
“Of course I wish it had been him,” I say, remembering the way Lucy had ambled up to me that morning, her voice in my ear: “It feels good, doesn’t it? To finally get what you want.” “But that doesn’t mean I killed him. You were the one who followed him out there.”
“I was trying to calm him down,” she says. “But he wouldn’t listen to me. He was a lot drunker than I realized, yelling at me that he couldn’t pretend anymore.”
“Pretend what?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“So you just left him out there?”
“Yes,” she says. “There was no reasoning with him like that. I tried for a while, but eventually I just left him alone to cool off.”