Last Girl Ghosted(92)

Your chest rises and falls. I liked it, that feeling of rage. It was better than fear. Fear cowers and begs. Rage raises her sword and stands her ground.

“I thought—”

“What?”

“I thought I killed him. He was so still. One minute he was all power, and the next he was as soft and quiet as a sleeping child.”

“And then what did you do?”

What might I have done? Called for help, reported his assault, waited for the police. It was a clear case of self-defense. My shirt was ripped; already his grip on my arms was marked by bruising.

“I gathered my things and I left him there to die.”

The memory has come back vividly—the dark of the room, lit only by the streetlamp outside, the stale smell of alcohol coming off his skin, his breath, a black skein of blood on the side of his head. The green glow of his digital clock. It’s a time and place I rarely visit because of what it says about men, boys who take what they want, what it says about me. How remorselessly I left him there, not caring if he lived or died. When the rage dissipated, there was only apathy, a kind of kill or be killed resolve.

“But he was fine,” you say. You’ve done your homework, I guess.

“He left school, went back home, I heard. I hurt him, a fairly serious head injury. He recovered though, yes. He’s married now. We follow each other on Facebook.”

“I noticed that. Wouldn’t that be awkward? He tried to rape you. You tried to kill him. Not exactly the stuff of a lasting friendship.”

No, not the stuff of friendship. Jackson is an accountant now, apparently happily married—but you never know. Social media is such a lie. He coaches his son’s lacrosse team, takes his wife to Cabo for their anniversary. That night between us, so primal and bloody, is stitched somewhere into the underlay of our lives, there but mostly untouched.

“You know how it is. He either doesn’t remember what happened, or doesn’t want to. I don’t really want to remember it either. Loose tie connections, right? It’s all very distant, almost a fiction, isn’t it?”

“All modern relationships are a kind of fiction. A story we tell ourselves in curated, filtered posts on a screen. The truth, real relationships, are gritty and messy and complicated.”

They’re all here; their specters hover. Over the last few days, I have come to know well the stories of Mia, Bonnie, and Melissa—I know their faces, their favorite books and smoothies, their chosen Instagram color palates. Brightening Claredon for Mia, dramatic Ludwig for Bonnie. Melissa favored the calming Lark. I could feel Mia’s desperate search for the light in her earnest blog, her gaggle of friends on Facebook, her pastel colored, inspirational memes. Bonnie clung to childhood—unicorns, bubbles, adult coloring books. She was a loner, lots of nature shots and quotes about solitude. There were no girls’ night out posts, no cheerful selfies, no boyfriend shots, romantic dates for Bonnie, plenty of sweet images though of other people’s children. Melissa was online far less than the other two. It seemed that she couldn’t find her voice in social, wasn’t as adept as the other two in creating her avatar.

All of them were flesh and bone. And now gone.

“What happened to them, Adam?”

Is that your name? I don’t even know. I don’t want to know you, what you’re capable of. Not really. Part of me could stay here with you like this forever, in this limbo of not knowing. In the fiction of us.

“I offered this to them. This safe space, away from the modern world. It’s so ugly out there, so fake. Here, this place, it’s freedom.”

“And what happened?”

“They didn’t want it.”

Your voice has gotten tight, the first sign of your anger. Robin wanted to know if I had seen your darkness. I think I did. I think I saw it first—in that grainy image, in your Rilke quotes. Worse still, I think it’s what drew me to you.

“So what did you do?” I keep my voice light.

The air expands. I have a mental model of the room. The gun on the table, the bullets on the floor, the keys still in the pocket of your pants that are in a heap at the foot of the bed. Will the car still run with the airbag deployed? I have no idea. That’s a thing I’d instantly Google—but my phone is a junk pile.

My head is still on your chest, the way it was the night I shared myself with you. I know if I were looking into your eyes that they would reveal nothing. “I let them go.”

“You let them go.”

“That’s right.” You lift your palms, then drop your hands back to where they’d rested on my hip, on my shoulder. “What else? Love lets go, Wren. It doesn’t hold on.”

But the brand of love I know from men is one that holds on tight. It strangles. Of course, I don’t believe you.

“They’re all gone though,” I venture. “No one ever heard from them again.”

“I never heard from them either,” you say. “They left me. They didn’t want this life. They thought they did, at first. But eventually the world, their ties to it, pulled them back. Not everyone can walk away. You know that.”

“So you let them all leave,” I say.

“You can’t make someone stay where they don’t want to be. You can try, but they’ll just hate you for it. Didn’t your mother hate your father at the end?”