“For now. But the current’s strong, and if it shifts us, we could go deeper,” Emma said. “We’re only a few feet from shore. I can’t get my door open, the current’s holding it shut. We’re going to have to go out your window.” The driver’s-side window was still open. Through it, JJ could see the course of the river winding away from them, the water rushing past, the dark bulk of the bridge. JJ searched for headlights, sirens, any sign that someone had seen them. There was nothing.
“You still a good swimmer?” JJ asked. It wasn’t far to shore. The current was swift, but it slowed past the bridge.
“We’ll find out,” Emma said. She shifted, and a look of pain flashed across her face, her hand going to the arm that had been wrapped in the seat belt.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Let’s get out of here,” Emma said, but she said it through gritted teeth. “You first. I’ll follow you out.”
JJ hoisted herself up and out of the window, sitting on the sill a moment before swinging her legs over. There was no point trying to get her feet under her. She clung to the car to keep from being swept away and held on as Emma clambered across the seats, following her lead. Emma got her head and shoulders out, then one leg, the other foot braced against the sill.
Her weight shifted, and she let out a sharp cry. Her grip slipped, and in the next instant the current snatched her, tearing her away from the car. JJ cried out, flinging out a hand, and caught her wrist, her other hand holding tight to the car frame. JJ’s hand was numb. Her grip on the car was slipping. She couldn’t hold both of them.
JJ let go of the car in the same instant that Emma let go of her.
50
JULIETTE
Then
She is in the water. She is under it. It is rushing around her and she can’t breathe—
She is on the bridge. The night is warm but she is cold. The blood makes her palms night-dark. It pools in the creases, cracks on her knuckles when she bends her fingers. She wipes her hands against her shirt, smearing the blood across it, but her hands won’t come clean.
She remembers—yellow wallpaper—the sound of her footsteps, too loud. Dragging herself up the steps. Her parents’ voices. They’re angry. She leaves the door open behind her. She goes upstairs, to her room, knowing she shouldn’t be here, not looking like this, not feeling like this. She still has Logan’s flask, and she curls up on her floor and drinks and drinks and waits to be found. They’re going to kill her, she thinks. He’s going to kill her.
She remembers the gun—white grip—in her hand. She is a good shot. She likes to picture people when she fires off a shot, whoever she’s angry with. She doesn’t want them dead, but it keeps her aim toward center anyway. Emma. Logan, sometimes. Dad. Mom. She points the gun at the target and squeezes the trigger—bang.
She’s holding the gun, but it isn’t a paper target in front of her.
She’s on the bridge and there’s—red hand—so much blood and she doesn’t remember how it got there.
She does remember.
She can’t get it off. She has to get it off. To get away.
She’s in the water, and it’s over her head, and it’s dragging her down. She kicks, but her feet are heavy, clumsy. Her shoes are too big. She was so happy when she found them, in that thrift store. Paid too much, didn’t try them on, because Mom was going to be back at any minute and couldn’t see her with them. She buried them under blouses and skirts in the bag and sweated the whole way home. They were too big after all, but she tied the laces tight and made do.
Now they pull at her, and she can’t get a breath of air. They weigh her down, and the water takes her deeper.
Before the water, she’s on the bridge. The moon is bright overhead. She sits on the rail. Kids used to jump off here until one of them drowned. A terrible accident, everyone said, he must have hit his head. But Juliette knows a girl who was there, who looked into his eyes the instant before he jumped and knew then that he wasn’t going to come back up. That he didn’t want to.
There’s blood all over her and she can’t get clean.
There’s blood all over her and she can’t go home.
She jumps. She falls. She goes under.
She’s in the water and she kicks, twists, wraps her hand around the heel of one boot and yanks. The boot is too big and it slides free, and then she gets the other one loose. It’s stuck. She yanks at the laces, her lungs burning, fighting the urge to gasp. Then at last the boot comes free and she’s kicking up toward the surface, toward the light of a swollen moon.
Before the water, before the bridge and the woods and the blood, she is in her room, curled on the floor with an empty flask in her hand and a buzz in her head like a hornet trapped under a glass. She stares at the pale yellow wallpaper, orderly stripes surrounding her. Her mother and father have stopped shouting.
The gunshot makes her jump. She scrambles to her feet and stands for a moment, panting, at first not comprehending the sound and then waiting for a scream, a flurry of activity to mark what she has heard. There is nothing.
She creeps into the hall. Down the stairs. The front door is still open, the way she left it. Her thoughts a slurry, she stumbles into the great room. It’s empty. Still. Then she looks to her right, toward the hall to the study.
She is in the water, and the gunshot is an echo in her ears, but the rush of the current bears it away from her at last; she forgets it was ever there.
But before the water she is in the hallway, and her mother is dead. The images in front of her are reduced to color: splashes of red, fragments of yellow white. The gun is on the ground. She picks it up; she forgets she picked it up. She looks down and sees it in her hand, and it’s as if it’s always been there.
She is in the water. She lets go of everything she can, every horrible memory, but shards of it lodge inside her. She will remember the yellow wallpaper, the white grip, the red hand. She will lose the pieces that could have saved her, but those will burrow into her flesh.
After the water, she is on the road when headlights spill across her. She’s in the back seat of a car, struggling into someone else’s clothes. Nina is telling her it’s going to be all right, cupping her cold hands to warm them. Then Nina is gone, and Juliette slips her hand into the pocket of the oversize shirt that isn’t hers, and finds something cool and metal there. Her thumb traces over the bee engraved on the lighter.
She is in the water, breaking the surface, taking in a breath that she wasn’t sure she wanted until it filled her lungs, but now she knows. She wants to breathe. She wants to live. And so she lets her memories sink; lets the river take them. Everything else about this moment she will forget, except for that: She wants to live. She wants to endure.
The current is gentler this time of year, sullen and slow, not the galloping rush after the rains that will gladly slam you against the rocks or pin you to the bottom, but still it’s carrying her along. She strikes out toward the shore. She is a good swimmer, and she has no fear of the water. It will not take her unless she wants it to.
After the water, when she is sitting in a cold room and answering questions, she will remember she wants to breathe; she will keep her secrets and stick to her lies and let her sister drown in her place.
But in the water she is, finally, alive. She breaks the surface. She takes a breath.
51
EMMA
Now
Emma was conscious of movement, of thunderous noise. She couldn’t find the surface. She couldn’t find air. And then there was an arm around her, hauling at her painfully. Of water surging over her face and the scrape of rocks under her. Then she was coughing, JJ’s arms around her, holding her against JJ’s chest as she murmured in her ear.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” she was saying, and Emma blinked awake under a blue sky, in the mud of the riverbank. The bridge was on her right, which seemed wrong. They’d gone into the water upriver of the bridge. Had they been swept that far?
Emma tried to speak and just coughed instead, the taste of river water filling her mouth. She managed to straighten up, pulling away from JJ, and braced herself against the ground with one hand, the other pressed to her abdomen. Her shoulder felt like it had been packed with ground glass.