No One Tells Everything (24 page)

You feel so light, weightless, and amazed by what is happening that for an instant you think you might already be dead. Her hand, small and soft, is on yours. It pulses. She seems a little out of it, a different kind of Sarah, but right now, you don’t give a shit. You want to take in every detail. The lock of hair that has slipped from behind her ear, the bitten-down cuticles, the yellow shadow of a bruise on her slender forearm. Your life has led to this moment and you want to slow it down, wrap it around you, feel its soft underbelly.

“You are so beautiful,” you say.

She half-laughs and shakes her head.

“Don’t,” she says, with a dryness you don’t expect.

“Sarah,” you say, your voice trembling.

She pets your arm.

“Shh,” she says.

She takes off her shirt, just like that, and straddles you, and there is her lovely warm skin inches from your face. She grabs the bottle and drinks, then kisses you, her lips warm and boozy.

It lasts no more than a few minutes, Sarah rushing you forward, you trying to hold it in, awkwardness you might have feared bulldozed over by your want and incredulity. There is something mechanical in Sarah’s actions, something listless in her eyes that you ignore, knowing it is a projection of your nerves.

When you are inside, you lose your breath. You let yourself believe that you have found the person who can solder all these parts of yourself into a whole. That song she likes floods your head in full stereo, “Sarah, oh Sarah, loving you is the one thing I will never regret.” You grin like a mad hyena, and let go.

You are afloat in the afterglow, so happy you want to burst.

“I love you,” you say, opening your eyes and turning to her.

Sarah sits up and pulls on her shirt. She rubs her face, then her nose. Her hand shakes.

“So the money?” she asks quietly.

“What?” you ask, propping yourself up on your elbows, your smile fading as the words form their meaning.

Your paunch is white and puckered. You are turning back into yourself.

“Please, Charles. Don’t make it harder than it already is. I don’t know who else to turn to.”

Your mind races and skips, lost in thorny branches. You feel your fragile porcelain heart start to crack and fall away, until there is nothing left but rage, black and shiny-smooth like obsidian.

“You got what you wanted,” she says, trying to smile to make it seem less brutal, but that only makes it worse.

She pulls on her underwear.

You reach for her but she scoots away to the edge of the bed.

“Sarah,” you say. She doesn’t answer. “I thought…” but you can’t finish because it is such a tired refrain: once again, you are the fool.

You sit up. Your penis lolls to one side, deflated and pink.

And there it is, that cool glint of metal from the bedside table, answering a question you haven’t yet asked. The knife is in your hand then and you press the blade into your neck.

“I’ll do it,” you say, through clenched teeth.

She looks at you and through drugged, half-closed eyes says, “Come on, Charles, don’t be so dramatic. I just need the money.”

You are crying now, furious, devastated.

You lunge at her and take her to the floor with your bloated girth. She slaps at you with her free hand, a frenzied, helpless animal, but she doesn’t call out or scream, not quite believing the danger that pushes through your every cell.

“You fucking lunatic,” she spits from underneath you. “Get the fuck off me.”

The knife is still in your hand and you bring it down to stop it all. Everything pours from you into the violence of the knife in your hand. The blade goes in with little resistance, right between her ribs. Sarah’s expression is shock and confusion, there is no time for fear. You know you hit her heart. She grunts, gasps, her flailing feet hitting the bed frame. You smell her blood before you even see it. Her eyes stay open; they are tunnels of vacancy. Her escaping breath, a sibilant hiss. You bring the knife down again, halfheartedly, losing will on the way down, redundantly, because she is already dead.

It is quiet. And you are alone. You lay your heavy head on the dead girl’s still and bloody chest.

In the fluorescent light, the blood on your hands looks purple. You have blood on your face, in your ear. The knife is on the floor, but you don’t have the guts to kill yourself, even now.

You have split in two.

You wash your arms, your face, your hair, your chest, the knife, with the little tan bar of soap, bathing the shower in pink and red. You scald yourself with the hottest water possible but it is not hot enough to burn you clean. You dry yourself and find your clothes, discarded with such abandon so little time ago.

There are garbage bags and packing tape in your car, left over from your move out of the dorm. You retrieve them. The night is empty. You are not there. You can’t even blink your eyes. You fold Sarah’s slender, unwieldy body in on itself without looking at her face, bending her knees flat to her thighs, taping her arms around her knees, binding her into a compact form, her hair getting caught in the tape. You pull a bag over her, her body pressing against the plastic. You sheathe it with another bag and then another and another, wrapping it in more tape like a grisly Christo project. You carry the bundle through the dark parking lot to the back of your car.

In the now-empty room, there is a glistening amoeba stain of blood on the carpet. You soak it up as best as you can with the threadbare hotel towels. You make the bed. You find a drop of dried blood on the sink, which you frantically wipe off with the hem of your shirt. There’s a smear of blood on the cuff of your jeans.

When you check out you manage to make your voice even and uninteresting, pleasant enough, apologizing to the guy for staining the carpet and telling him to charge any cleaning to your card. You don’t meet his eyes, so he can’t see the wilderness beneath the surface. You drop a garbage bag with the bloody towels, her cell phone, and the rest of her clothes in a dumpster.

###

It feels like your brain has been taken out and knocked around before being returned to your skull. Your eyes ache. You ignore what you did because it couldn’t really have happened. You stare at snow on the TV for ten hours straight. You drive around for days and forget there is a body in your car, even giving Amy a ride to the train station, even commenting on how weird it is that Sarah still hasn’t turned up, and apologizing for the bad smell in the car that’s maybe from when you hit a skunk. You are scared to look at your face in the mirror, afraid of what it might reveal. Your mind has broken apart like a green tree branch, fibrous and wet. The world warbles, and you move numbly through it in a stupor, reduced to a pile of jagged rubble deep inside.

###

A week has passed. You bury Sarah in the middle of the night, quietly digging in the sparse grass and sandy soil fifteen feet from your window.

You sleep for two feverish days, and then you pick up the phone and tell them where to find you.

And now Grace knows too much. The seams she pried open for a glimpse inside have all come undone, leaving a large gaping hole. She feels heavy and used up. Now it’s the face of Sarah she sees when she closes her eyes, those brown eyes, startled, lacking any understanding that such a thing could happen to her. Those rich maple eyes like Callie’s.

There has always been something else about her sister’s death, casting an inky shadow. It was quickly deposited away, stuffed down, buried deep. Unfathomable, it became maybe not true. It was easier to believe the story that everyone else knew.

But something has irrevocably shifted in Grace and what was sealed is breaking open. She doesn’t have enough fingers to stop the leaks, springing up all over her memory. She is running to where she has been running away from. She finds her car and hurtles toward home.

She remembers the way her mother climbed the stairs after the funeral, how she gripped the banister, leaning her weight with each step, so slowly, as if overnight she’d become an arthritic old woman.

People came and went with Tupperware casseroles and condolences. They spoke hushed words of sympathy, especially to her mother, whom the ladies hijacked away to quiet corners. Grace moved around from room to room, watching, unseen.

“He’s much too old to be driving.”

“He almost hit the Millers’ dog last week.”

“A tragedy.”

“Do you want to play doubles Tuesday? Margaret can’t make it.”

“What was she doing in the street? She knew better.”

“Susan is holding it together remarkably well.”

“She tripped while the girls were playing. That cute little Callie.”

“Did you hear that Gracie saw it happen? Just awful.”

“Have you seen the monstrosity they’re building over on Pine?”

“Oh that poor woman. I just can’t imagine.”

Grace stayed home from school for a week and in that time she rarely saw her mother or her father. She ate cereal and crackers and cheese. She wandered in the woods and slept on the couch, unable to breathe next to Callie’s empty room, with the stuffed elephant she’d named Herbert, the folders of her penny collection, a ballerina jewelry box that their grandmother had sent for Callie’s sixth birthday, filled with gumball machine jewelry and three baby teeth. The smell of her pillow.

###

Grace pulls into a rest stop somewhere in the leafy mountains midway through Pennsylvania and lays her head against the sun-hot steering wheel. When she looks up, she sees three barefooted, grubby children tumble out of the back of a rusty van and run to the little patch of grass in front of her car. The two older children, boys, take the feet and hands of the little girl and swing her like a hammock, higher and higher, almost all the way around. Her screams of delight quickly turn into frightened pleas for release. The boys keep going, with a quick backward glance to make sure their father is not watching, as the girl starts to cry.

“Promise you’ll do whatever we tell you to do,” the older boy says.

“And that you won’t tell, you brat,” says the other.

She relents.

They let her down roughly onto the grass and walk away, laughing, back toward the van.

They don’t give her another thought, not hearing her little feet padding across the ground, not sensing her ferocious anger, not believing that she could attack on her own. She is running with everything in her small body and she comes up behind her unsuspecting brother, the one closer to her in age, the one with whom she’s better matched in size, her elbows bent, her hands open for action, and with all her might, she shoves him, sending him skidding until he falls face-first onto the asphalt of the parking lot, his chin and cheek grated bloody by the gravel.

In the moment that Mr. Jablonski’s car appeared around the corner in front of their house, Grace bent her arms just like that little girl did, and she came at Callie, fueled by her own agency and power, somehow unable to see past the allure of the thrust to what would actually happen, to the devastating effect, and she pushed. She shoved Callie into the street, in front of the oncoming car.

Two hours later, Grace is still at the rest stop, clutching the wheel with aching fingers. Shallow-breathed and sunburned, she sits, her body pitched forward, unable to start the car, unable to focus her eyes. A loud knock on her window shakes her. At first she thinks it’s the police who’ve come to arrest her. But it’s only a park service worker.

“You all right?” he asks as she rolls down the window.

“Um, yeah,” she says, clearing her throat. “Yes.”

“I was here a couple hours ago and when I came back you were still in the same position, like you’d been frozen.”

“I needed to rest a little,” she says. “I’m going to get going now.”

She swipes her hair from her face and adjusts in the seat.

“Okay then,” he says. He steps back but then comes forward again. “You sure you’re all right? You look like you seen a ghost.”

“I’m fine,” she says, fumbling with the keys already in the ignition. “Thanks.”

“Drive safe,” he says with a little nod.

I
t’s after two a.m. when Grace turns onto Woodland. The houses are all tucked in on this still summer night, the lawns in the moonlight cropped close and watered to lushness. Crickets trill their intermittent night call. Flags are unfurled on porch eaves for the Fourth of July weekend.

When Grace reaches the driveway, it’s all she can do not to make a U-turn. But with every familiar detail—the pewter 3 of their address slightly askew on the gatepost, the patch of lawn near the base of the oak that never fills in no matter how much her father tends to it, the deep furrow in the driveway that would catch her roller skates if she hit it at the wrong angle—she knows that this is the only path she has left.

The house is dark except for the lantern flickering in front. Grace leans into her car door and presses it closed. The night is crisp with green. She takes off her shoes and steps along the cool flagstone path up to the house, trying each door. Around the back, the ground slick with dew, an animal dashes into the woods at her approach. She goes to the rarely used back door that her mother always forgets to lock and lets herself in.

She moves up the stairs toward her old room, but then she hears a cough. She goes back down. Her father is asleep in his study, his ankles crossed on the ottoman, slouched in the chair that is as much a part of him as his golf swing. The moon shines near-full through the front window, shrouding the room in dusty light. Despite the imprint of age and slackness from the stroke, he is still handsome. His white hair is a sparse halo. His slippered feet twitch in sleep.

“Dad,” Grace whispers. “Daddy.”

She goes to him and shakes his foot.

“Oh. Hi,” he says, awakening, like her appearance in his dark office is the most normal thing.

He scrunches his face and then registers whom he’s talking to.

“Grace.”

“Are you awake?” she asks.

“Uh-huh.”

“I have to tell you something.”

He straightens up a little in his seat.