A Good Marriage(99)
Xavier glanced up at me. His eyes were sad now, and ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I said reflexively.
“Yeah, well, Amanda tried to save her friend, I guess. There was a straight razor sitting right there on the sink. And that was that.” Xavier shook his head, looked down, and kicked at the doorframe. “And that was that. Fucking waste. My brother never was right, though, not even as a little kid. Not crazy, just wrong. As a grown-ass man, he was one sick son of a bitch.”
My mouth felt glued shut. I swallowed hard.
“What was Amanda’s friend’s name?” I asked, pressing my heels down. The ground felt unsteady beneath me. “Do you know?”
Xavier looked up toward the sky. “Cathy or Connie …”
“Carolyn?”
“That’s it. Carolyn,” he said with a nod. “Her and Amanda were like sisters. Or that’s what people said. I got to be honest—details were lost on me back then. I had a lot of problems. That’s why I’ve stopped drinking—that garbage will ruin your life.”
KRELL INDUSTRIES
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION
Attorney-Client Work Product
Privileged & Confidential
July 2
To: Brooklyn Country Day Board of Directors From: Krell Industries Subject: Data Breach & Cyber Incident Investigation—Progress Report Interview Summaries: A total of 56 families have come forward to be interviewed regarding hacking of their personal information. Each occurrence involved the theft of personally compromising information. In no instance did anyone comply with the demand for money. Nonetheless, in no case was the threatened retaliatory action ever taken—no potentially defamatory information has yet been made public.
Preliminary Conclusions: Evidence continues to suggest that the individual responsible:
Had some change in circumstance with respect to Brooklyn Country Day in April or May of this year.
Stands to benefit in some secondary way from the harassment, such as a reporter who would then move in to cover the alleged hacking.
It is possible a Brooklyn Country Day student is seeking to inflict discomfort or embarrassment on fellow students. We will work with the administration to isolate any such students.
Lizzie
JULY 11, SATURDAY
I drove from St. Colomb Falls straight to Weill-Cornell Hospital on the Upper East Side. Nestled behind a gate and between dozens of trees, the hospital looked, in the setting sun, more like a leafy college campus than home to Millie’s cancer ward.
When I got off the elevator on Millie’s floor, patients were shuffling about, dragging IVs behind them like stubborn dogs. I hadn’t been in a hospital since my mother’s untimely death, and I’d forgotten how instantly claustrophobic the misery could be.
But then, my lungs had felt caged ever since I’d pulled away from Xavier Lynch’s house, haunted by the thought of Amanda running for all those months from someone who wasn’t even there. Or so Xavier’s story would suggest. It wasn’t as if I planned just to take his word for it. He’d seemed credible, sure, but also definitely threatening. For all I knew, he’d made up the entire thing and really was Amanda’s dad, after all.
Xavier’s story was certainly hard to process, too: Amanda had clearly thought her dad and Carolyn were very much alive. She’d written about both of them in her most recent journal. In one entry, Amanda had even described, in great detail, Carolyn visiting her house in Park Slope. Was that just how deep her commitment to her imagined world had gone? How badly she’d needed to believe? By the time I’d pulled into the St. Colomb Falls County Clerk’s cracked, weed-filled parking lot, I felt nauseous thinking about it.
After some back-and-forth and lots of polite chitchat, the tiny old woman inside the small, brick clerk’s office—mercifully open on a Saturday—had finally confirmed that William Lynch had indeed been killed twelve years earlier, after having murdered a teenage girl named Carolyn Thompson—his daughter’s best friend. No one had gone to jail because the perpetrator—Amanda Lynch, the clerk told me in a loud stage whisper presumably meant to preserve confidentiality—was deemed to have been acting in defense of her best friend.
And so Amanda’s dad really was dead. And so was her best friend Carolyn.
Afterward, I’d sat there in the blazing sun, trying to google my way to an understanding of how Amanda might have completely erased such a traumatic episode from her memory, and what her hallucinations might mean about her mental state. One of Amanda’s older journals had talked about Carolyn always getting herself in the middle of things. Was that what had happened that awful night all those years ago? Had Carolyn put herself in harm’s way to protect Amanda and ended up dead herself?
According to the ever-unreliable internet, there were many possible causes for Amanda’s hallucinations: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychotic depression. Some illnesses were more serious than others. Some were episodic, others would have disrupted Amanda’s thinking so completely it was hard to imagine she’d have been as high-functioning as she was. But I did come upon one that seemed to click: delusional disorder. According to the Harvard Medical School website I ended up on, a person with delusional disorder “holds a false belief firmly, despite clear evidence or proof to the contrary … Unlike people with schizophrenia, they tend not to have major problems with day-to-day functioning. Other than behaviors related to delusional content, they do not appear odd.”