I hang around for a while, walk around the back and look deep inside the garage, hoping he’ll return, but he doesn’t. And I can’t imagine him at your mother’s, I can’t hear him at the shooting range and I can’t imagine him anywhere else. Where is he?
I slip the rock out of my backpack. I wonder if I could get a handwriting sample, to compare. Before I can stop to question my ethics, I try the front door. It’s unlocked.
“Jed?” I say again, and then I push the door open. The house is open-plan, so I step into the kitchen and the living room and the dining room all at once. It looks like he has just moved in, bare but for the odd pile: an expensive-looking rodeo saddle on a rack, a seven-foot safe where I assume he keeps his guns. The kitchen is unfinished; there are no doors on the cupboards, and they are filled with prairie-patterned dinnerware and the liquor cabinet is crammed. There is an enormous cross on the wall. A fan swings lazily up above, clicking with every rotation. I don’t know where I will find a handwriting sample—do people use pens anymore? Instead I find myself drifting through the rooms.
Grace must have left in a hurry, because her clothes are still here. Everything is clean but oddly frozen, and I wonder, Did Grace have a car? Why didn’t she take her shoes, or her toothbrush, or the dresses in their closet?
But it doesn’t make sense. If something happened to her, if Jed knew, if Jed did it, wouldn’t he have gotten rid of her stuff? Or was this a strategy, a way to make him look innocent? Why would he keep everything?
I need to confirm that Grace went back to Texas, but I am not sure how to do that. Jed told me she did. Your parents said she left. I could check social media but the only Internet access is inside your parents’ house and your mother doesn’t want me to use it.
In the bedroom, I find my handwriting sample. There is a letter on the nightstand, tucked into Grace’s Bible, and I read,
I’m so sorry about the other night. That’s not me. That’s not who I am. It’s like there’s the real me and then there’s this thing, this monster I can’t control. Whatever happens, I hope you can still have it in your heart to pray for me. I understand you wanting to leave. Sometimes I wish you would. Just save yourself the trouble and know that I love you more than anything in this world. I love you. But the truth is, I guess I hate myself more.
My fingers feel numb, strange, like he has confessed my own secret. I set the note on the bed and force myself to take a picture on my phone, even though the words on the rock are written in block letters and I don’t see an immediate similarity.
I catch my breath and I scan the room around me, wondering if I should be looking for more evidence, but evidence of what? It’s not a crime to hate yourself.
* * *
—
When I open the door to the staff cabin, I am hit with a chemical smell. The windows are open, so the space is cold, but the floors are clean, the sheets have been washed, the furnace is polished. At first, I suspect your mother. Instead I find Jed standing over the kitchen sink, ringing out rags.
I startle, feel surprise pulse through me. “What are you doing here?” I think how I just came from searching his house for evidence, while he was here cleaning mine.
He cocks his head. “I’m sorry.”
I think of the note, and I feel it like shame and stimulation through me, like I am Grace. Like I am the one he is in love with.
He sets the rag down. “You okay?”
“. . . I’m embarrassed,” I answer honestly. “I was going to clean it. I—”
“It’s okay.” He reaches up and presses his thumb into my chin. Did he kill his wife? Did he kill you? “I just wanted you to know I . . . I think it’s good, what you came here to do. I—I think you’re a good person.” He thought Grace was a good person too. “Maybe I just want to believe that Rachel got away, that nothing bad happened. But I do believe it.”
I cross my arms over my goose bumps. “Maybe I didn’t just come here for Rachel. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I came for me too.”
He steps closer to me, invading my space. I don’t step back.
His words are written on the back of my skull, gleaming and bright: It’s like there’s the real me and then there’s this thing, this monster I can’t control. What if he killed her? What if he . . .
“Can I?” He lifts his hand, and I feel this tremendous pressure, dead fear, on either side of my skull, and when he touches me, when his fingers brush my cheek, it tightens. Only it tightens so fast that it’s like a high. And he curls his fingers behind my neck.
What if this is the end? What if this is the vanishing point and I embrace it, fearlessly? What if I dared the world to swallow me, not slowly, over time, but all at once?
He kisses me, careful at first, like we are trying to find a spark and then it catches and he deepens the kiss.
“I need something,” he gushes, and I let him push me against the counter.
When I was younger, I used to dream that I would wake up one morning to find that all the people in the world had disappeared, except for me and the one boy that I wanted, like I couldn’t imagine any other way to get him. And once we realized we were alone in the world, only then could we fall truly and deeply in love, because we needed someone and we had only each other. One gorgeous boy and me, alone in the world. This is exactly what I dreamed about, almost.
* * *
—
The sun goes down and the pitch black is the perfect setting. The fear serves just to heighten everything. We have to be quiet. We have to be fast. Every moment is stolen. Every thrill is ours only.
We do it in the kitchen first, up against the counter. Then we do it on the living room floor. Then we do it in the shower. My body rises to a crescendo, that stuck-on-the-ceiling, taffy-pulling feeling, and I am afraid I won’t come down, afraid he will leave me trapped. So I beg him to get me where I’m going, to release me, and he does, and I come again and again.
I haven’t had sex in a long time. I think I was afraid to. Afraid of this feeling, of being at someone else’s mercy, of being exposed and vulnerable and trapped. My body is like frayed wires strung too tight. And if you play them there is always a chance that they will break, and that threat radiates through the whole instrument, brings the night to life. Damaged people have the best sex.
When it gets too late to keep pretending that the sun will never come up, he kisses me and speaks into my neck. “I don’t wanna leave.”
I kiss his collarbone. “You better.”
He kisses me again. And I watch him through the windows, watch him fade into the night. And I’m all mixed up. I don’t know who I am or where I’m going. And I wish I could follow him into the dark.