Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(55)

“I backtrack down the road. The second I see the right house, I kill my lights. The night goes pitch-black. Out this remote, there are no streetlights, not even porch lights glowing from surrounding homes. No, I’m in back-of-the-closet dark. Don’t-make-a-sound dark. One-false-move-and-the-monsters-will-get-you dark.

“But I don’t care.”

“Nicky, where are you?” Wyatt asked carefully. Nicole’s eyes were unfocused again. Staring not at him, but at things only she could see.

“Shhh,” she murmured to him. “I don’t want her to hear; I don’t want her to know. I pull over. Get out of my car. Immediately, I’m soaked. But it’s okay. I creep carefully forward toward the little house. It’s nothing fancy, but I like the color; she’s painted it yellow with white trim. I always liked that shade of yellow. I wonder if she’s happy here. It makes my chest feel funny. I want her to be happy. Right? But maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe I’m jealous. I’m almost at the side window now. Step, step, step.”

“Where are you, Nicky?”

“Vero is learning to fly.”

“Who are you trying to find?”

“Six years old. She is gone. November is the saddest month of the year.”

“Nicky, stay with me, honey. It’s Wednesday night. You’ve been drinking. You followed a woman home from the liquor store. Now you’re standing in the rain outside her home. What do you see?”

“I see the impossible. Vero. All grown up. Sitting on a couch in the family room. I see Vero, back from the dead.”





Chapter 20




WHAT IS HAPPINESS? I feel like I’ve been chasing it my entire adult life. I study it in commercials, watch it on other people’s faces. When Thomas and I first married, he took me on vacation to Mexico. We tried on fake names, invented wilder and wilder character histories. He was a runaway circus clown, I was a burned-out Vegas showgirl. We laughed hard, we drank too much. Then we woke up and did it all over again. I remember lying on a warm, sandy beach after one particularly crazy night, feeling the sun on my closed eyelids and thinking, this must be happiness. I can do this.

Except I woke up screaming, night after night after night. Regardless of the rum. Regardless of my new and improved backstory. Regardless of Thomas’s strong arms around my waist.

Happiness, it turns out, is an acquired skill, and I’ve had problems learning it.

Just be happy, the song says. I tried that, too. Especially all those mornings, waking up to find Thomas studying me so intently. Knowing I must have dreamed again, or maybe shouted out, or hit him. He learned quickly not to touch me once the thrashing started. That in fact, I’m stronger than I look.

Meditation, yoga, juice fasts. It’s amazing how many tricks are out there. I took up painting. Art therapy, because Thomas and I both knew talking to someone was not an option. Those first few years, Thomas was very good about burning the canvases. The images I created, the color palette . . . These were not pictures to hang on your wall.

Fake it till you make it. So I studied photos of flowers and serene landscapes. I dissected petals and leaves and dandelion fluff. I re-created each image on canvas down to the tiniest detail because maybe if I didn’t feel happiness, I could at least copy it. Then it would be mine. I could point to it and say, I made that happiness.

Then November wouldn’t make me cry. And I wouldn’t spend my free time lying with a yellow quilt talking to the skeleton of a little girl covered in maggots.

Maybe happiness is genetic. Maybe it’s something your parents have to gift to you. That would certainly explain a lot.

Or maybe it’s contagious. You have to be exposed to it, to catch it yourself, and given my small, isolated world . . .

I want to be happy. I want to not only see my husband’s warm smile, but feel it in my chest. I want to hold up my face to a clear summer sky and not already notice the clouds on the horizon. I want to sleep, the way I imagine other people sleep, deep and uneventful, and wake up the next morning feeling refreshed.

But I am none of these things. Only a woman twice returned from the dead.


* * *



BY THE TIME I’m done talking to the detectives, I’m exhausted. They ask me more questions, but I can’t answer. My eyelids are sagging; I can barely stand without stumbling. You’d think I’d spent the evening drinking, and not just retelling my last drunken misadventure.

Vero.

The name comes and goes from me. I lost her. I found her. I killed her. I know where she lives.

These concepts are too much for me. They overwhelm my battered brain. Each possibility seems more improbable than the last. Vero is my imaginary friend; Thomas told me so. Vero and I sit together and indulge in scotch-laced tea, but only in my concussed head.

Vero is six years old. She is gone. Disappeared.

She never existed.

Except my husband had her picture hidden inside his jacket pocket.

The detectives are trying to help me up the ravine. It’s slow going. My legs don’t want to work; my feet stumble over twigs, sink deeper into the mud.

I remember this ravine, the blood on my hands, the rain on my face. Pushing myself past the pain, forcing my way through the mud and muck, because I had to save Vero. That’s the key to happiness for me, I think. Whether the girl is real or not, it’s my duty to save her. So I keep trying, again and again, because even the worst of us wants to be able to sleep at night.