Never Have I Ever(33)

“Okay. Well. If it it’s not about scuba lessons, why did you come by?” I got onto my knees to put all the toys back in handfuls. She was silent, staring at me in an assessing way I didn’t like. She drew herself up tall, literally looking down on me, and I felt a subtle power shift. She was calm again, and I had relaxed my defenses, talking kids and diving. Now I was on my knees. I thrust another handful of toys onto the shelf and scrambled to my feet.

“You know why,” she said, and with those words she changed. Her whole body changed. Her shoulders set. Her neck elongated. Her hands fisted and then flexed. “I came so we could finish.”

“Finish what?” I said. My heart rate quickened, because I did know.

“The game,” Roux said, the very words that I was thinking. She tilted her head again, such a quick and birdlike movement, inquisitive and foreign. “Don’t be coy, Amy Smith.”

“I have no inter—” I was halfway through the sentence before it registered that she had used my maiden name. I hadn’t been Amy Smith since I was nineteen and married James Lee for fifteen minutes. It wasn’t a name I’d ever used again. “What did you say?” The question came out involuntarily. I realized my hands were twisting together. I made them be still.

“Amy. Elizabeth. Smith,” Roux said, very slow. “Yes, I know your name. I know you. Do you know me?”

I didn’t.

I bent and began picking up toys again for Oliver, though he’d only thrown a few, staying on my feet, though. I needed to give my eyes a place to look that wasn’t her. The teething keys rattled in my shaking hands. Oliver giggled, oblivious, thinking it a game, grabbing the keys the second I set them on the shelf. I picked up another handful of toys, thrust them onto the shelf, bent to gather more.

“What do you want?” I said to Rattle Bear. Because she had to want something.

“Justice,” she said. The one word. Quiet. Strong.

I froze, my gaze pulled to her face. It was set in avid lines as she watched the word sink into me. Rattle Bear tumbled out of my hands onto the floor. I found myself straightening.

“Justice,” I repeated, and the word felt strange and heavy in my mouth. As if it were French or Spanish. Not a word I knew or owned.

“There it is,” Roux said.

“There what is?” I asked, and she spread her hands, almost apologetic.

“Your real face,” she said. “I’ve been looking for it since I got here. God, you’re hard to read. But you do know me, Amy Smith.”

I didn’t. “What do you want?”

Time stretched as she stepped toward me, once, twice, and I realized I’d stopped breathing.

She said, “The wrong kid went to prison. You were driving.”

“I don’t remember who was driving,” I said. My old lie. It came out automatically, so fast it was said before I realized that this denial was wrapped around admission. I shouldn’t have reacted at all, shouldn’t have telegraphed that I knew exactly what she was referring to. I wasn’t sure why this mattered, but I felt its truth on instinct. I tried to backtrack, but my hands had twined together again, twisting hard, and inside I could feel that fat moon rising. “I don’t know what—”

“Yes you do,” she said, so flat and sure that my denials died inside my mouth.

She knew. This was happening.

No, it had already happened. The world had already shifted.

My body flooded with an enormous, shaking feeling. It was something like relief, if relief could be so cold it burned. For the first time in years—decades, even—I was in a room with a person who saw clear through to the bad in me. I could feel that gaze, crashing through me, into me, all the way down.

“You know me,” I said.

“I do,” she answered. Coming close again, but now there was no flirting in it. It was a terrible proximity.

She was so close that all I could see was her pale face. I hadn’t realized how much work it was, to hold truth in and under, to stay silent, every day, every day. My buried past was so much larger than the space I’d sunk it in. She’d started days ago, at book club, dredging at me. Now it was rising, pouring up and out of me. It filled the room, enormous, roaring all around us.

“You were driving. You killed Dana Shipley,” she said. “I know. I saw you. I was there.”

I shook my head, a violent, physical no. Because she could not know this. The police had canvassed for witnesses, but all the people in the nearby houses had been asleep. The crash had woken some of them, but by the time they got up, grabbed robes, came to their windows or their porches, Tig and I had already left the Ambassador. We’d been all the way across the road, beside Mrs. Shipley’s car.

“I was,” she insisted. She stepped even closer, moving slow, eyes on mine. I could not look away, my unsaid words still locked tight in between us. But she knew, as certain as if I had already released them. “I saw you climbing out from behind the wheel. You let that boy go to prison.”

I could feel my head shaking, back and forth, back and forth. At my feet Oliver said nonsense to his bear. I heard him, but from very far; in this moment it was only her and me.

“No one saw,” I said, but had she? The police canvassed for witnesses, but had they talked to children? Exactly how old was she? The roads had been deserted, but there’d been windows all around us, dark and silent, each its own glass eye.