“I’m here for you, missy.” Her finger stabs into my chest and a prickling jolt of electricity runs through me. “Is James here?” She cranes her neck past me. “I’ve got a bag in the car he can help me with. Drove all the way out with just two potty stops! My mother-in-law is watching the kids. I can’t wait to tell you all about that battleax. It’s been so long I can hardly wait to catch up.” Her rust-colored lips spread into that signature overgrown grimace I had grown to hate.
“You can’t be here, and you certainly can’t stay here. I’m sorry.” I try to slam the door on this new nightmare that’s entered my life, but her shoe wedges between us making it an impossible effort.
“Have you tried to call the baby’s father?”
The air around me stills. Can’t breathe. A small crowd of reporters camping at the foot of the lawn have halted their conversation to look this way. I don’t think they heard, but everything in me knows Heather will do her damn best to correct that.
Shit. I scratch at the sofa table, snatching up the keys before pulling her down to that beat-up minivan she rode in on.
“Follow me. I’m taking you to a hotel.” My heart pulsates a good three feet in front of my body. “You can’t stay here.”
If it’s one thing I’ve learned about Heather, after all these years, is that you cannot get rid of her. She is the cockroach in my nuclear detonated world. The sole survivor long after my beating heart has been ripped out of me. An incurable case of head lice. This is penance for what I had done. I lied to James—was still lying to James, and now I would have to pay the ironic price. Reagan is gone. It would have been a feasible explanation, a kidnapping by the disgruntled birth father. God knows Heather would have happily spilled the genetic beans from the beginning, but fate intervened and stopped her from doing so.
Heather follows me out to the distal end of town, a flea-infested Motel 7 where I make her a stale cup of coffee as we sit at the wobbly dinette built for two. In the past, the quickest way to get what I wanted from Hysterical Heather was to sacrifice a bit of my time. It’s her fuel. It’s true. My presence feeds her. Somewhere in that twisted mind of hers, I am the panacea to all of her troubles, a warped extension of her. I’m none of those things, but she’s too damaged to see it. Heather sees life through the broken mirror of her mind—her sanity shattered long before she ambled into my personal space. I felt sorry for her in the beginning, but by the time I realized what was happening it was too late.
“How is Allison?” It feels strange saying my own name, almost foreign.
“Fifteen and dangerous!” She lets out a whoop, exposing a brown-layered ridge over the tops of her teeth. It shouldn’t surprise me at all that her teeth are rotting right out of her skull. They match her rotting soul. “Damn brat got knocked up. Kid came last spring—boy. He’s dead now.” She glowers at the green carpet. “What’s new with you?” She toasts me with her mug, and for a minute I envision taking my scalding cup and tossing it in her face. I could blind her. Gouge her eyes out for even thinking this was a good idea.
“My child is missing.” The words string out like a morbid poem.
“I bet she’s okay.” She gives an odd wink, her fingers flicking through the air as if I had uttered something outlandish. “Things always have a way of working out for you. Golden child.” She pokes my arm with her finger. That was the nickname she gave me back in high school. She had half the school believing we were sisters and that I was the favorite of the family. I played along with it at first until the revisionist history turned dark like so many things are prone to do with Heather.
“I don’t know if she’s okay.” It takes everything in me to keep my voice even. “Do you know if she’s okay?”
Those dark eyes of hers flit to the corner of the room. “Hell, I don’t know. But what I do know is you are one lucky gal. Did you see that GoFundMe? Holy shee-it! You are one rich woman, Allison Greer.” She gives another quick wink as if it were a tick. “You’ll always be Allison Greer to me.” She sobers quickly as if the fact I had become Mrs. Price was a personal betrayal.
“Why are you here?” My voice trembles because, honest to God, with Heather, I have never had a clue what makes her twisted mind tick.
“To help out while we wait for Reagan to come home.” Her eyes grow wild. Heather’s eyes have always had a personality of their own as if they were afraid to be attached to the rest of her and were unsuccessfully trying to plot an escape. “Now tell me that you told the cops all about her real father—because keeping something like that a secret is going to hurt you a helluva lot more than it’s going to help.”
“He’s dead.” I take a punishing gulp of the scalding coffee and burn layers of nerve endings off my tongue. Finally, I can feel something. I might just scald myself tonight for the hell of it just to feel human again.
“Dead?” She inches back in her chair as if I had slapped her and I wish to God I would have. The option is still on the table. “What in the hell happened?” Her lips quiver in an exaggerated O. Heather has always made reality feel a bit cartoonish with her overdone theatrics. “That was one hot man. I couldn’t get him out of my head for years. Never seen a man so beautiful. Not even my own husband. Swear to God.” She swipes an X across her chest like a bull’s-eye I’d love to plunge a knife in. “With the exception of James, of course—but you deserve the best, Ally. I’ve always felt that way and you know it.” That last line comes out curt, demanding like a threat, and the room suddenly feels too hot, too unsafe to be in.
Yes, Heather has always testified to my husband’s hotness. She’s also testified to the comely good looks that Reagan’s biological father, Len, possessed as well. This is true. Never was there a bigger cheerleader in my life than Heather. Never a bigger menace, but never a bigger cheerleader. Len and Heather were worlds apart, but Heather happened to track me down at school the weekend Len and I decided to take off for Hidden Falls. It was a three-day getaway, and as usual Heather had interjected herself in the middle of it. I entered into an alcohol fueled rage and told her exactly how batshit I thought she was and told her to stay the hell out of my life. When I got back, I found my mattress knifed opened and the word cunt scrawled across my mirror in red lipstick. Her signature shade of autumn rust. The exact shade of human plasma she’s sporting now. That’s when I begged Jane to step in, and after that Heather was seemingly history—until she entered my present nightmare, and God knows it wouldn’t be a proper nightmare without Heather Fucking Evans in it.
“He died at a gas station.” My body heats as if begging to burst into flames. “Freak accident. He was waiting for his car to fill up and some drunk pulled in behind him, pinning him against the fuel tower. There was a fire.”
“Oh shit!” Her fingers tap over her lips as if mocking his Native American heritage.
“And that’s what happened.” I fold my hands together as if to exemplify the fact it’s the end of the story. How I wish it were just that—a story.
“It sounds like he was cursed.”
I avert my eyes a moment. He was a curiosity more than he was cursed. Every other thing that man did was blessed and beautiful. Len Lewis made the news that night, online and on television, as millions of Americans winced at his painful, unfortunate demise. I had just learned I was expecting, already dating James again. Len and I hadn’t spoken in weeks over some silly argument that I don’t even remember anymore.
“Well, I guess he’s off the suspect list, isn’t he?” Her eyes stay wide and round, her face freckled and pale as a grouper’s. Heather always did remind me a little of a fish. I asked my dad about it once, if he saw it too, and he simply said grouper. It’s not a coincidence I can’t stand fish.
“Yes, he is. And so that’s the end of it. Please do not mention him again. Not to me—not to the media for God’s sake. Let’s respect the dead.”