In the end I just pick a spot that seems nice, a place where the dirt hasn’t quite given out to mud, and I start to dig. A small hole will do it, but I shovel until my arms ache, until my hands blister and I’m suddenly aware of the sun kissing the tree line.
The hole is absurdly large. Grave-sized. I’m not just burying the collar. I’m burying Kaycee.
I drop the collar into the dirt. And then I cover it, tamping down the earth until you would never know it had been disturbed.
I’ve only just returned to the house when I hear the distant sound of tires crunching up the studded dirt road. Brent. I have just enough time to tuck the shovel back in the shed before he comes around the side of the house, looking out of place in his work clothes, his shiny shoes covered with mud and grass.
“Abby. Thank God.” He practically runs to hug me. “I was banging on the front door. You weren’t home. No one answered. I thought—” He doesn’t have to tell me what he thought.
“I’m okay.” I mean it this time. “Just doing something I should have done a long time ago.”
“Your phone call…I can hardly think straight.” He shakes his head.
“Inside,” I tell him. He nods and follows me.
The living room is mostly empty, now stripped of everything but the furniture that was too heavy to move to the Dumpster. Brent waits while I splash water on my face. I’m surprised by my reflection. I look pale and wild, my eyes sunken from too much booze and not enough sleep.
When I return to the living room, Brent has poured two tall glasses of scotch.
“Macallan,” he says, gesturing at the bottle. “I had it in my desk. I was saving it for a special occasion…” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Well. This is an occasion.”
I don’t feel like drinking, but I take a few sips anyway.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me everything.”
So I do. I tell him about Tatum Klauss, and Sophie Nantes, and what I found out from Amy McMann. About the Optimal Stars, and the parties where they were carefully screened, and Misha taking some of the most troubled girls under her wing. I repeat the story she told me about Frank Mitchell, and the so-called hypothetical instance of a man wanting younger girls. By the time I’ve finished half my story, and half my glass, Brent is refilling his for a third time. His eyes are red, and he’s sweating through his shirt.
By the time I get to Kaycee, to how it fits, he can’t take it anymore and stands up.
“I need a minute,” he says, gasping. “Give me a minute.” He hurtles through the screen door. I hear him pacing, spitting out his nausea in the grass. I know exactly how he feels.
The night has come without my noticing; we’ve been sitting in the half dark, and when I stand I can hardly see to fumble on a light. Brent is still outside. No longer on the porch, he is standing motionless by his car, staring out into nothing.
Sudden dizziness forces me to sit again. My mouth is chalk-dry. The scotch doesn’t help. I reach for my bag, and the water bottle inside of it. When was the last time I ate anything? I can’t remember.
I shouldn’t have drank; I need to stay focused. We need to make a plan.
My hand lands on my phone, flashing with new alerts. Three missed calls from Condor. I must have silenced the ringer. He’s sent a text, too, heavy on the punctuation—for some reason it takes me a minute to tack the words down into place, to make them stop blurring together: he wants to know if I’m all right.
Just as I’m about to put the phone down, an e-mail lands. Portland again, forwarding his last message, the one whose subject is Digging. I open it half by accident, squinting at the grid of paragraphs, fighting against a growing blurriness in my brain.
I wanted to be sure you saw this. Could be important.
Below that is his original message. Words leap out at me—Kaycee. Poisoning. Symptoms.
The words circle and I have to pin them down, one by one, staring them hard into place.
I did some more thinking about what you said about Kaycee’s symptoms. You’re right. Her symptoms never corresponded to lead exposure. But they’re identical to the symptoms of mercury poisoning. Check it out.
Tremors.
Confusion.
Aphasia (short-term memory loss).
Balance problems, uncontrolled body movements.
Nausea, vomiting.
Then:
I’m not sure how she could have been exposed, or why she would have been the only one affected. I did some digging and found out that mercury was used decades ago in paint. Didn’t you say she was an artist?
I have to read that line, again and again, before it makes any sense.
Or rather—I have to read it, again and again, hoping it will stop making sense.
All at once Kaycee roars back to life, like I always half expected she would. She is everywhere, urgent and afraid, breathing in my hair, whispering to me, holding tight with sweat-damp hands to my shoulders, willing me to understand, to listen, to see.
Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.
Look, look, look.
See.
See Kaycee, working alone, thumbing paint across a canvas, dizzied by the smell.
See Kaycee, painted head-to-toe in school colors for graduation.
See Misha and Brent, the way his hand tightened on her knee, the way he spoke to her. Reassuring.
In control.
See Brent coming through the woods, his hair wet, his shirt damp, as if he’d been swimming.
See the way he reached out to kiss you.
See flashes behind your eyelids. Firefly bursts, but brighter.
Flashes. Flashlights. People on the water.
No.
Someone in the water.
We have to make sure…
The scene at the bonfire must have stirred up an old memory, the faint words, a scream, quickly stifled, all of it drifting to me dreamlike on snatches of wind…
We have to make sure she’s not breathing.
See the way you stood in front of the mirror later, tracing the places where he’d touched, trying to figure out if it was real, wondering whether he’d left a mark on you.
Wondering whether you still smelled like his fingers.
Like the beach.
Like paint.
Chapter Forty-Two
The screen door creaks when it opens. A warning, but one that arrives too late.
Brent’s footsteps are heavy. Slow. Deliberate.
“Abby?” He says my name casually, all his fake shock and anger discarded. Somehow I’ve made it into my old bedroom. I’m holding on to the door, trying to stay on my feet. But the floor isn’t a floor: it’s water, and it’s breaking up beneath me.
Run. I think the word. I think the word and I break into a sprint. I skim through the house, barrel out the door, sprout wings in open air, and fly. I’m running, I’m sure I’m running, and yet when he edges down the hall and sees me swaying there, I realize I’m still holding tight to the walls, still pinned inside the house.
“You’re still awake,” he says.
Fuck you, I try to say. But the words turn into stone; as they drop, my body collapses.
I don’t even feel it when my head cracks the floorboards. I only notice the dust stirred by my breath, and his shoes coming toward me.
“That’ll be one hell of a hangover,” he says.
He drugged my drink.
I am in a dark sea.
I am on the floor.