“I don’t know. I felt like a loser.”
“So your solution was to scheme so that I’d stay too?”
He winces like I hit him. “You make it sound so—”
“—shitty. I make it sound shitty. That was the intention, because guess what, it was shitty.”
“I didn’t know what to do! On prom night, I told Cath. I was drunk. I shouldn’t have told her. But she coaxed it out of me. Then she practically stuck her tongue down my throat—”
“Enough. Luc, Jesus, enough.” I realize I’m trembling. I want to get out of here, right now. “I’m leaving.”
“Let me at least drive you back.”
“No. Fuck it. I’d rather walk.”
“It’s like two hours to get back into town. Don’t be an idiot.”
“You’re in no position to call anyone an idiot.”
“Steph, please—”
“Luc, if you weren’t lying, if you actually care and want to make things right, then please, leave me alone right now.”
He looks utterly defeated. His shoulders stoop, and he lowers his head so that I can’t see his face for a moment. He turns on his heel and makes his way down the stairs, vanishing from my line of sight. I only hear his steps thundering angrily all the way down.
Then I hear him stop. I come close to the ramp so I can see him standing below.
“Congrats on your journalism degree,” he says over his shoulder. “Looks like it’s really serving you well.”
Then he leaves, slamming the door behind him.
I’m alone.
“Luc,” I say uselessly into the emptiness. Shit. So much for the happy reunion. Then again, what exactly did I have in mind? He may be a sleazeball, but I’m the one who accepted this “date,” when I didn’t really have to. I accepted it for the same reason I ended up necking with Luc behind the Fortiers’ house instead of getting into my car and driving the fuck away. Because I wanted to. Because I wanted to get him away from Cath, get my revenge? No, it wasn’t even that. That would have been better. That would have been normal and borderline understandable. I did it because I wanted him, period. He turned out to be right in a perverse way. In fifteen years in the city, I haven’t found anyone better than him.
He may be a loser—and God, he is a loser—but then so am I.
And now I’m alone in a creepy-ass cabin and looking at a nice two-hour walk back to civilization.
I take several more pictures. I’m already here after all. It’s just too bad that I haven’t found any connection between this place and my story, but I can always do that when I put it all together. My audience wants sordid details and creepiness, and that’s exactly what I’m going to give them.
I put my phone in my jeans pocket and make my way down the stairs to the main floor. The pine staircase creaks, and I place my weight gingerly on each foot before stepping down.
An uncanny feeling overcomes me. My head snaps up, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as some kind of primeval instinct awakens. Did the light just dim a tiny bit, did a shadow dart across the floor that shouldn’t have? My gaze roams the dust-filled open space as I hover, frozen in uncertainty, seven or eight steps above the main floor.
Finally, my gaze lands on the window.
My breath goes out of me. There’s something dark behind the cloudy glass, and that something moves as if it can sense that I’m looking. It darts away and out of sight.
“Luc?” I yell out. It’s Luc. It has to be. He wouldn’t leave me out here stranded—he came back to talk sense into me. And I’m oh-so-ready to be talked sense into. I’ve never been readier in my life. Just please, please let it be Luc.
The shadow crosses the other window, the one next to the door.
“Luc?” I yell again, my voice trembling with desperation. When no answer comes, I back away, driven by I don’t know what instinct. I go back up one step. My foot fumbles, slips, lands on the step with a sharp crack that echoes through my bones and up my spine.
The stair gives way. Splinters dig into my ankle, and I don’t even have time to cry out before the world flips upside down. Next thing I know, my ribs collide with the sharp edge of the stairs, the floor rushes toward me, and I land on my side with a sound like a gunshot.
TWENTY-ONE
1979
By the time Marly comes into view, Laura’s knuckles are smarting, as are all the other cuts and scrapes she hadn’t even noticed. Her bones are aching, and as adrenaline ebbs, fatigue creeps into her muscles, making her arms and legs feel like they’re filled with lead. For the umpteenth time, she checks her pocket, but her loot is still there, tucked away safely.
This is my way out, Laura thinks. She’s starting to tremble. She’s going to go home, get herself cleaned up, and first thing tomorrow she’ll hitchhike out of town. She’ll go as far as she can get, and there, she’ll pawn the jewelry at the first pawnshop that’ll have it. She can’t risk doing it here in Marly. That’s out of the question. Then she’ll take the money and—
—and what? In her mind, she can faintly picture herself starting a new life somewhere, but that other place is an abstraction, too blurry to make sense of. And she has no idea what the jewelry is worth—she can only hope it’s a lot and that the pawnshop won’t cheat her. She can only hope the money will last. She just needs to get out of here. It doesn’t matter how. She’ll figure out what to do later, when she’s far enough from Marly.
By the time she gets home, it’s almost dark. Everything is exactly the way she left it, she realizes with a dull shock; it’s as if she never left at all, as if the creepy cabin and the dead lamb and the frenzied chase through the woods never happened. The only reminder that it was all real are the cuts and scrapes. And the jewelry in her pocket.
She lets herself in through the back porch. Her mother is asleep on the couch. There’s no one to notice Laura’s ripped clothes and the twigs in her hair. Laura goes straight to the tiny bathroom and locks the door, which she’d never bothered to do before. Without wasting another second, she strips off her clothes, which she leaves in a heap on the floor, and gets into the shower, blasting the hot water until it’s scalding. She stands underneath it until the trembling has vanished from her limbs. Until the burning in her skin masks the sting of the scrapes on her knees. When she holds up her hands, they’re swollen and red from the heat, the veins bulging out like her mother’s. They hardly look like the same hands that picked up that rock and brought it down on Tony’s head.
“I had to do it,” she says out loud, glad that her voice is masked by the rush of water but unable to stop herself from speaking. She has to get the words out, if only for herself. “I had to do it. I had no other choice. He would have killed me.”
She rinses the last bits of soap out of her hair, gets out of the shower, and slinks straight to her room where she collapses on the bed.
Sleep creeps up on her, both feared and desired. As her adrenaline finally crashes, that last thought swirls inside her empty mind like a mantra: I had to do it. I had no choice.
She forgets all about the tangle of gold chains and rings in the pocket of her coat, which she left lying in a heap on the bathroom floor.
