All Good People Here(60)

For Krissy, the years passed in a blur of Valium and sleeping pills. She continued to dress in the right clothes for church and put on makeup when she left the house, but her mind was perpetually blank, numbness her only relief from the grief of losing her daughter and the torture of living with the boy who’d killed her and a man who’d never been what she’d needed.

And then, in 2004, ten years after losing January, something happened that made the days tolerable again. For the first time in her life, Krissy fell in love.

It all started on a Thursday afternoon in autumn. Krissy had spent the day running errands as usual, mindlessly checking off the menial tasks that made up her life, and when she pulled up to the farmhouse around five, she found she couldn’t get out of the car. She sat, blank and unmoving, as the minutes ticked by. The idea of unbuckling her seatbelt, opening her door, and walking into the home she shared with Jace and Billy struck her as physically impossible. Without thinking about what she was doing or where she was going, she turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway.

Half an hour later, Krissy found herself in South Bend, pulling into the parking lot of the first bar she found. When she walked through the front door, for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel the heat on her face as everyone turned their eyes to her, didn’t hear the familiar murmur of whispers in her wake. The place was a dive, with dim lighting and a jukebox on the far wall. The only real attempt at decoration was the ceiling, which was covered with toothpicks, their ends wrapped in colorful plastic. Krissy loved it.

She slid into one of the booths, the red plastic sticky against her jeans, ordered a pinot grigio from the waitress, and basked in the unfamiliar relief of being unrecognized. Though the feeling didn’t last long—she was on her second glass of wine when she heard her name.

“Krissy?” a voice said from beside her. “Krissy Jacobs?”

Heart dropping, Krissy looked up. She just wanted one night free from the judgmental, probing gaze of others, one night where she could breathe. She assumed being recognized in South Bend meant whoever this was had seen her on the news, and strangers could be even worse than people in Wakarusa. But when she saw the face in front her, Krissy was surprised to see it didn’t belong to a stranger after all. “Oh,” she said. “Hi.”

“Jodie.” The woman touched her hand to her chest. “From Northlake High? My last name’s Palmer now, but I was Jodie Dienner back then.”

“No, yeah. I remember you.”

Jodie opened her mouth to say something and Krissy steeled herself for the inevitable. You look so good, people had told her in the months following that infamous TV interview, their tones bright and full of condemnation. If I’d been through what you did, I’d never be able to get out of bed again, let alone put makeup on. Or when she’d turn her back, she’d hear them whisper, I can’t believe she’s got the nerve to show her face.

But when Jodie spoke, all she said was, “My god, you look exactly the same.”

Krissy searched Jodie’s face, but it looked guileless and open. “You don’t,” she said. “You look…amazing.” Krissy remembered Jodie as a wallflower. She’d always been tall and thin, but the way she’d carried herself, with a slight slump of her shoulders, had made people look right over her. She’d had dishwater blond hair that had hung limply around her face and she’d never worn any makeup or clothes that could ever be construed as trying to attract attention. The woman standing in front of Krissy now looked transformed. She was wearing a cream silk button-down tucked into form-fitting blue jeans, and though her face was still bare save for a swipe of mascara, with her hair tucked behind her ears, she no longer seemed to be hiding from the world. “I didn’t mean you looked bad in high school,” Krissy rushed to say. “Sorry.”

But Jodie just laughed. “No, no. I know what you meant.” She opened her mouth, then closed it. “Hey, would you mind…” She nodded at the empty seat across from Krissy.

“Oh, no. Please.” It made Krissy anxious to accept company, but she’d learned long ago that being widely perceived as a child killer meant her manners had to be impeccable.

Jodie placed the beer she’d been holding onto the table, then slid into the seat. “So, are you in South Bend these days?”

“No. I just had some errands up here. We’re still in Wakarusa.”

Jodie raised her eyebrows. “Really? Wow. I just assumed with everything that happened…” Again, Krissy waited for some snide remark, but it never came.

“We thought about moving,” she said with a shrug. “But Wakarusa’s home.” She forced a smile to go with the well-worn lie. The truth was she’d begged Billy to let them leave. Moving hadn’t appealed to her as much as divorce, but she hadn’t known how to survive on her own. She’d never held a single job, save her summer position at the grain elevator all those years ago. And she hadn’t known what she’d do with Jace if she and Billy split. She hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of leaving her son, nor had she wanted to live alone with him. So, she’d asked to move instead. She craved a life in the city, somewhere big and anonymous, but Billy had refused. That was exactly what they’d do if they were guilty, he’d said. If they were innocent—which they were—they’d stay in Wakarusa, heads held high.