The Girls of No Return (43 page)

“It was my fault.”

Margaret was very still. “I know you feel that way.”

“I handed Gia the knife.”

She was quiet, and then she said, “I know.”

“How could I do that?” I was speaking more to myself than to Margaret. “After everything . . . What's wrong with me?” I stared emptily at the nurses' station.

Margaret answered slowly, as though weighing each word against another before she spoke. “Lida, listen to me. Alice Marshall isn't a place where people ‘get cured.' What ailed you when you came to the school wasn't an illness; it was a sadness that was rooted so deep that you didn't know how to address it.” She paused, started again. “I'm not excusing your part in this. You'll have to answer for your role in what happened last night. If Boone decides to press charges, you'll have to deal with the police.” Margaret's eyes plainly said,
And maybe she should.

But then her expression softened and she added, “But I want you to hear me. I think a greater tragedy would be for you to forget how far you've come.”

I almost laughed, the idea was so ridiculous.
Greater tragedy?
Hadn't she seen Boone?

She must have seen the look on my face, because she smiled sadly. “Your life will be shaped by this, Lida. Absolutely. But you'll have to decide
how
it's shaped. One of those ways is by not forgetting the good things that happened at the school. And Lida —” She grabbed my hand. “Good things
did
happen.” She let go and leaned back in her chair, studying me. “None of us are superheroes,” she said. “These sadnesses that we have never fully go away. And sometimes they rear up, and if we're not careful, if we don't find ways to remind ourselves of what we know — who we know we can be — they make us forget what we've learned, and take us back to the dark place where we started. The place where every decision is a wrong one.” She nodded at me. “We can end up repeating these patterns of unhappiness and hurt forever.”

“But Boone —”

“What happened to Boone
is
a tragedy,” Margaret interrupted. “But it would be a tragedy as well for you to go back to that dark place again and again. You will have to work hard — very hard — not to let that happen.” She looked at me steadily, and then said, “Boone lost something. But, terrible as it is, it's something she can live without. She didn't lose herself.”

I wanted to tell her that she was full of shit, that nothing I could ever do or not do would make up for what had happened. But I could hear just the faintest peal of truth threading throughout each word. “What if I'm not strong enough?” My voice quavered.

Margaret shook her head. “You are, Lida.” She paused. “But strength doesn't have to define you,” she said. “It can be a decision. It can just be what you choose to do, day after day.”

The word
choose
bobbed between us, and I thought again of the girl in the boating accident, the one who was left in the lake after her friends were both gone. I thought about how she held on to the cooler in the freezing water, floating, as she let the water carry her far from the wreckage. How she waited for death to take her. I knew what Margaret was saying. That girl didn't have to float. At any point, she could have let go and start swimming, could have reached out one arm and then another, pulling herself through the water. She still might not have made it, might only have gotten a few yards before her muscles seized and she dropped soundlessly through the depths, but she could have tried.

“Your parents are here,” Margaret said, nodding to the emergency room entrance. I could see my dad and Terri walking swiftly across the ambulance parking lane toward the doors. “Why don't I go out and talk to them first?” She stood. “Then you can tell them the rest.”

“The truth?” I whispered.

“The truth.” Margaret headed toward the doors, which slid open. I watched as she stopped my dad and Terri outside, making comforting gestures with her hands as she began talking.

A man walked through the entrance, carrying two babies, one in the crook of each arm. Before the doors hissed shut behind him, I could hear my dad's voice. “. . . worried, so worried,” he was saying. Beside him, Terri was crying.

I stood very still for a moment, watching them through the glass. They hadn't seen me yet, and I paused, waiting, my breath tight in my throat. I let the sounds of the hospital wash over me: lives beginning and ending, accidents and intentions, a wrong step, a swift response, a tragedy realized or avoided. If you're lucky, a second chance.

I walked toward the doors and stepped outside.

 

 

I couldn't tell you who called out to me first, when I was watching Gia and Boone fight by the fire. I'll never know the answer to that question. I only know how still it was in that moment when I put the knife in her hand, how the forest pulsed once around us and was silent, and that I knew even then that this was what I would remember: that stalled drumbeat, that pierced skin.

And Boone was right. If I weren't careful, I would start to believe myself as I changed the story over time, piece by piece. I would do it so slowly that, by the time I had to tell myself the story again, the way that we do when our lives contain essential memories that are nonetheless unaccountable, I wouldn't even know what was or was not true. And I might remember that it was Boone with the knife in her hand, Boone raising it high above her head, not Gia with her arm slicing the firelight like a scythe, not Gia with a look in her eye like she was counting the strokes. One. Two. Three.

 

“You own it,” she said, “and then you leave it behind.”

This is mine.

It's the truth.

Take it.

 

 

The Hindman Diner looks exactly the same. What did I expect? That the rickety wooden tables would be replaced by glass and steel? That they'd have any new songs on the jukebox? Nope. Same old Hank Williams. Same old Patsy Cline. And is it a freak coincidence that my dad, Terri, and I are seated at the same table where we argued and I threw a glass on the floor over two years ago?

Feels like decades.

We've been here twenty minutes. Three burgers sit in front of us, untouched. Three glasses of water, two of them drained. My dad watches the door like a nervous security guard, his hand resting on his butter knife in a way that I'm sure he doesn't even recognize as being threatening. I want to tell him that he doesn't have to protect me from anything, but it wouldn't matter. He's afraid that she'll come at me, spit on me, scratch my face with unforgiving claws. Terri is looking at me. Every once in a while she reaches across the table and rests her hand on one of mine. I jerk away the first couple of times, but I eventually let her do it; it gives her comfort, I can tell.

As for me, I'm staring at the antler chandelier, which appears to have lost a bulb in one of its lights since the last time we were here. I'm pretty sure that if I tried I could memorize every grain on each of the twenty or so antlers that make up the fixture. So I try. I stare so long and so hard at the chandelier that when the door opens, I register the noise only faintly, realizing who it is by the way that Terri grips my hand with sudden pressure and then lets go.

I swing my head around, slowly, and there they are, standing just inside the door. Margaret looks the same. Her hair's a little longer, I guess, sprouting up out of her head in a slightly less manageable way. She's smiling bravely, like a general who's about to command an army to swim through a crocodile-infested swamp because there's just no other way to get across. She does a quick sweep of the room, sees us, and turns the smile onto me.

“Lida,” she says, “I'm so glad to see you.” Margaret steps forward and I stand up, and she envelops me in a hug. “Thank you for coming,” she whispers into my shoulder. Then she lets go and steps back, nods at my dad and Terri, and turns to me. “Well, ladies,” she says, “here we are.”

I know I can't put it off any longer. I have to look at the person who has followed Margaret over to our table and now stands just behind her and to the right. And when I do, she's looking at me, and she looks exactly as I've been picturing her all this time: same long hair, same chiseled jaw, same look just as sharp and as piercing as it was the last time we spoke.

“Hi,” I whisper, and she nods.

“Hey,” says Boone. She's still wearing the patch over her right eye, and she looks a little like a pirate, though not as much as you would think. She sticks her hands in the pockets of her jeans and steps from one foot to the other, as though she's standing in a cold doorway.

“Sorry we're late,” says Margaret, addressing my dad and Terri. “Bee got a flat on our way up from Boise.”

“Boise?” asks my dad.

Margaret jerks her thumb back at Boone. “That's where I picked up this one,” she says. “She's a big-city girl now.” I wonder for the first time whether Margaret might be nervous, maybe even scared. After all, she set this whole thing in motion; if everything combusts, it's on her.

“Well,” says my dad, “that's quite a drive.” And suddenly he and Margaret are off on some long-winded discussion of road conditions and weather forecasts, with Terri chiming in every once in a while with “Oh, for sure,” or “You wouldn't even believe it.”

I look at Boone, wondering if this is all it's going to be: she and I standing quietly like centerpieces as the adults talk over and around us. Then she shakes her head just as my dad says, “And the rain this spring! Torrential!” And I widen my eyes, and her mouth twists, just for a second. I quickly look down at my hands.

It's a funny thing. I haven't smoked in over a year now, but I suddenly want a cigarette more than anything. And I'm guessing Boone does too. I glance at her. She reads my expression and jerks her head toward the door.

“Hey,” I say casually, interrupting my dad's recitation of annual rainfall statistics, “we're going to walk down the street, take in the sights.” It comes out more like a question, and I watch Margaret's face dissolve into the bland expression that she wears so well around parents who are just about to get duped for the three thousandth time.

My dad laughs. “Good idea!” he booms. “Let us know what you find!”

I reach down and grab my backpack, swinging it over one shoulder. Outside, it's warm. No, not warm. Hot. Uselessly hot. Especially for early September. My armpits start sweating almost as soon as the door shuts behind us. I pull at my T-shirt, holding it away from me as though that'll help.

“Jesus,” says Boone.

“Hot.”

“Yeah.”

We start walking in the direction of the pawnshop. Boone pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket and holds it out to me. I take one, and she gets hers going first before handing me the lighter.

When I inhale, the smoke clogs my throat. I want to puke, but I don't know if it's because of the smoke or because of the nervousness that's been swirling around in my gut all week. I hold the cigarette down by my side as we walk, hoping that it'll burn itself out before Boone notices.

“So, how's shakes, Townie?” Boone takes a short drag and looks over her shoulder at the diner. I notice that she has to turn her head farther around to get a good look at it, and I wonder what else has changed, what she has to do differently in her daily life. I feel sick again.

“Good,” I say, swallowing. I glance at her. “I mean, good. You know . . .” I let my voice trail off. How do I say what I need to say?

“Looks like one big happy family.”

“Sometimes.” Then, I risk it. “How're you?”

“Free,” she says. “As of May twentieth, I'm my own agent. Government cut me loose.”

“You mean — ?”

“I outgrew the interest of the state, the missionaries, even the juvenile corrections officers. It's official, I guess. We're adults.” She kicks at the ground, sending a rock skittering ahead. “I'm starting school in a couple of weeks at Boise State. Seems like they've got a soft spot for Mill Casualties too.”