A Lesson in Vengeance(30)

She must have hit her head too hard when she fell; she would have lost consciousness immediately. There was no dramatic struggle to stay afloat, no flailing limbs or splashing water. Just terrible silence. I dove under again and again, eyes straining against the black water, searching. I dragged my fingers through the silt at the lake bottom. I cut my hands on the rocky edge of that cliff, clinging there and gasping for breath as I realized it was too late.

Alex was gone. The lake had swallowed her up and carried her far, far away. She was never coming back.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ellis says.

“You don’t know that,” I say, and I laugh. I know how I sound—wild and unhinged. The same crazy girl they all think I am.

This is just what Ellis wants to believe. It’s what I want to believe, and that’s precisely why Alex won’t let me go. She haunts me because she knows, as I know, that if things had been different…if I’d climbed down after her faster, if we hadn’t argued in the first place, if Alex hadn’t been drinking…

Ellis’s mouth puckers, but she doesn’t pull away. Instead she reaches for my wrist, fingers curling light around my bones and holding there. “How did she fall?”

Ellis says it so gently, and I want to trust her. I want to trust her more than anything. I want there to be someone in this terrible and twisted world I can trust.

“She slipped,” I whisper. “She’d had…We’d both had a lot to drink. We’d been at the Boleyn end-of-semester party, you know? And we…”

Alex in her black beaded dress, pearls in her hair. Her fingertips smelled like cigarette smoke. Her lipstick was smudged.

“We fought. I’d run out of the party. I just wanted to be away from her for a little while. To calm down. But she followed me up onto the cliffs. She kept yelling at me. And I—”

I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t.

But I have to. Ellis is right; Dr. Ortega is right. I have to face this. I close my eyes and see Alex’s lips parting in that O of surprise, her hair catching on the rings on my fingers. Too late. Regret always comes too late.

“She was, you know…gesturing a lot. She did that when she talked. Especially when she was angry. And I guess she…lost balance. And she…stumbled. She…”

“None of that is your fault. You didn’t force her to drink; that was her choice. You didn’t make her fall.”

I laugh, a strangled, bitter sound. “I don’t know why you can’t…why you don’t understand—you’re a writer, aren’t you? You know nothing’s ever that simple.”

“What, because you argued first? People argue, Felicity. People get angry. It’s tragic that she died while you were fighting, but she didn’t die because of it. Alex’s death was an accident.” Ellis’s hand slips into my hair; her thumb strokes my cheek.

God. I wish I were just a little bit less broken, a little less humiliatingly weak.

My mother would be so ashamed.

It’s that thought, more than anything, that makes me suck in an unsteady breath and lift my head. I scrub the tears from my cheeks with the heels of both hands and stand, moving away from Ellis’s touch and forcing a trembling smile onto my lips.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “Sorry. I don’t know what…I’m not usually like this.”

The words ring false; the version of me that was in the hospital, that lay curled up in a thin bed for weeks, drunk off grief and medication, knows the truth.

I’ve always been like this.

And Ellis knows it now, because she saw me break down in the middle of this antiques shop. She—god—she knows I made up a different story about how Alex died. And she knows that I believed it.

“I don’t know why I said that thing about the mountain,” I tell her, letting my gaze drift away from Ellis’s face to fixate on the gloves on my hands instead. The leather has worn at the fingertips, a relic of someone else’s hands, someone else’s life.

Only that isn’t true, either. Now that I’m here, now that I’m thinking about it, I remember. This was something Dr. Ortega had come up with. An exercise, trying to convince me that Alex’s death hadn’t been my fault.

Write me a story, the doctor had said. Write Alex’s death as it might have happened in another universe, without the fight.

I’d written about mountains and snow and autumn storms, about a rope and a knife. Dr. Ortega had read it at her desk while I sat in the chair across from her, my hands folded primly in my lap, awaiting her verdict.

And how did writing this story make you feel?

“One of the articles I read about Alex said that she’d had a fight with another professional climber,” Ellis says, pulling me back. “She’d gotten violent and broke the other girl’s nose. She got kicked off the Youth Olympics team.”

That’s right. That’s right, she did. Alex had called me in tears that summer night, crying so hard I could barely understand her over the phone. I’d shut myself away in my bedroom where my mother couldn’t overhear and begged her to explain how this had happened. Only she couldn’t.

There’s no excuse, Alex told me. I messed up, I fucked up, I’m so…And between sobs I pieced together a story of relentless bullying, hazing, sabotage.