Final Girls(3)

“Still waiting,” I say.

“It’ll happen.”

“And what about you?” I ask, only half-teasing. “Have you finally found a girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

I arch a brow. “A boyfriend?”

“This visit is about you, Quincy,” Coop says, not even cracking a smile.

“Of course. You ask. I answer.”

That’s how things go between us when we meet once, twice, maybe three times a year.

More often than not, the visits resemble therapy sessions, with me never getting a chance to ask Coop questions of my own. I’m only privy to the basics of his life. He’s forty-one, spent time in the Marines before becoming a cop, and had barely shed his rookie status before finding me screaming among the trees. And while I know he still patrols the same town where all those horrible things at Pine Cottage happened, I have no idea if he’s happy. Or satisfied. Or lonely. I never hear from him on holidays. Never once got a Christmas card. Nine years earlier, at my father’s funeral, he sat in the back row and slipped out of the church before I could even thank him for coming. The closest he gets to showing affection is on my birthday, when he sends the same text. Another year you almost didn’t get. Live it.

“Jeff will come around,” Coop says, again bending the conversation to his will. “It’ll happen at Christmas, I bet. Guys like to propose then.”

He takes a gulp of coffee. I sip my tea and blink, keeping my eyes shut an extra beat, hoping the darkness will allow me to feel the Xanax taking hold. Instead, I’m more anxious than when I walked in.

I open my eyes to see a well-dressed woman entering the cafe with a chubby, equally well-dressed toddler. She’s an au pair, probably. Most women under thirty in this neighborhood are. On warm, sunny days they jam the sidewalks—a parade of interchangeable girls fresh out of college, armed with lit degrees and student loans. The only reason this one catches my attention is because we look alike. Fresh-faced and well-scrubbed. Blonde hair reined in by a ponytail. Neither too thin nor too plump. The product of hearty, milk-fed Midwestern stock.

That could have been me in a different life. One without Pine Cottage and blood and a dress that changed colors like in some horrible dream.

That’s something else I think about every time Coop and I meet—he thought my dress was red. He’d whispered it to the dispatcher when he called for backup. It’s on both the police transcript, which I’ve read multiple times, and the dispatch recording, which I managed to listen to only once.

Someone’s running through the trees. Caucasian female. Young. She’s wearing a red dress. And she’s screaming.

I was running through the trees. Galloping, really. Kicking up leaves, numb to the pain coursing through my entire body. And although all I could hear was my heartbeat in my ears, I was indeed screaming.

The only thing Coop got wrong was the color of my dress. It had, until an hour earlier, been white.

Some of the blood was mine. The rest belonged to the others. Janelle, mostly, from when I cradled her moments before I got hurt.

I’ll never forget the look on Coop’s face when he realized his mistake. That slight widening of the eyes. The oblong shape of his mouth as he tried to keep it from dropping open. The startled huffing sound he made. Two parts shock, one part pity.

It’s one of the few things I actually can remember.

My experience at Pine Cottage is broken into two distinct halves. There’s the beginning, fraught with fear and confusion, in which Janelle lurched out of the woods, not yet dead but well on her way. Then there’s the end, in which Coop found me in my red-not-red dress.

Everything between those two points remains a blank in my memory. An hour, more or less, entirely wiped clean.

Dissociative amnesia is the official diagnosis. More commonly known as repressed memory syndrome. Basically, what I witnessed was too horrific for my fragile mind to hold onto. So I mentally cut it out. A self-performed lobotomy.

That didn’t stop people from begging me to remember what happened. Well-meaning family. Misguided friends. Psychiatrists with visions of published case studies dancing in their heads. Think, they all told me. Really think about what happened. As if that would make any difference. As if my being able to recall every blood-specked detail could somehow bring the rest of my friends back to life.

Still, I tried. Hypnosis. Therapy. Even a ridiculous sense memory game in which a frizzy-haired specialist held scented paper strips to my blindfolded face, asking how each one made me feel. Nothing worked. In my mind, that hour is a blackboard completely erased. There’s nothing left but dust.

I understand that urge for more information, that longing for details. But in this case, I’m fine without them. I know what happened at Pine Cottage. I don’t need to remember exactly how it happened. Because here’s the thing about details—they can also be a distraction. Add too many and it obscures the brutal truth about a situation. They become the gaudy necklace that hides the tracheotomy scar.

I make no attempts to disguise my scars. I just pretend they don’t exist.

The pretending continues in the cafe. As if my acting like Coop isn’t about to lob a bad-news grenade into my lap will actually keep it from happening.

“Are you in the city on business?” I ask. “If you’re staying long, Jeff and I would love to take you to dinner. All three of us seemed to like that Italian place we went to last year.”