Panic(70)

At the police station, Bishop denied the fire had anything to do with Panic. A prank, he said.

Upside down and inside out. Sign of the messed-up times we’re living in.

That night, Kirk Finnegan came outside when his dogs began to go crazy. He was carrying a rifle, suspecting drunk kids or maybe his piece-of-shit neighbor, who’d recently started parking on Kirk’s property and couldn’t be convinced that it wasn’t his right.

Instead he saw a tiger.

A f*cking tiger, right there in his yard, with its enormous mouth around one of Kirk’s cocker spaniels.

He thought he was dreaming, hallucinating, drunk. He was so scared he peed in his boxer shorts and didn’t notice until later. He acted without thinking, swung the rifle up, fired four shots straight into the tiger’s flank, kept firing, even after it collapsed, even after by some grace-of-God miracle its jaws went slack and his spaniel got to his feet and started barking again—kept firing, because those eyes kept staring at him, dark as an accusation or a lie.





TUESDAY, AUGUST 16





heather

HEATHER HAD SUCCESSFULLY MANAGED TO AVOID talking to Anne for a whole day. After her fight with Bishop, she had walked two miles to the gully and spent the afternoon cursing and throwing rocks at random things (street signs, when there were any; fences; and abandoned cars).

His words played on endless repeat in her head. You want everything to be shitty . . . so you’ll have an excuse to fail.

Unfair, she wanted to scream.

But a second, smaller voice in her head said, True. Those two words—unfair and true—pinged back and forth in her head, like her mind was a giant Ping-Pong table.

By the time she returned from the gully it was evening, and both Anne and Lily were gone. She was seized with a sudden and irrational fear that Anne had taken Lily back to Fresh Pines. Then she saw a note on the kitchen table.

Grocery store, it said simply.

It was only seven thirty, but Heather curled up in bed, under the covers, despite the stifling heat, and waited for sleep to put a stop to the Ping-Pong game in her mind.

But when she woke up—early, when the sun was still making its first, tentative entry into the room, poking like an exploratory animal through the blinds—she knew there was no avoiding it anymore. Overnight, the Ping-Pong game had been resolved. And the word true had emerged victorious.

What Bishop had said was true.

Already, she could hear Anne noises from downstairs: the clink-clink-clink of dishes coming out of the dishwasher, the squeak of the old wooden floorboards. When waking up in Fresh Pines to the usual explosion of sounds—cars backfiring, people yelling, doors banging and dogs barking and loud music—she had dreamed of just this kind of home, where mornings were quiet and mothers did dishes and got up early and then yelled at you to get up.

Funny how in such a short time, Anne’s house had become more like home than Fresh Pines had ever been.

And she had ruined it. Another truth.

By the time she came downstairs, Anne was on the porch. She called Heather out to her immediately, and Heather knew: this was it.

Heather was shocked to see a squad car parked a little ways down the drive, half pulled off into the underbrush. The cop was outside, leaning his butt against the hood of the car, drinking a coffee and smoking.

“What’s he doing here?” Heather said, forgetting for a moment to be scared.

Anne was sitting on the porch swing without swinging. Her knuckles around her mug of tea were very white. “They think the other one might come back.” She looked down. “The ASPCA would at least use a stun gun. . . .”

“The other one?” Heather said.

“You didn’t hear?” Anne said. And she told her: about Kirk Finnegan and his dog and the gunshots, twelve in total. By the time she was done, Heather’s mouth was as dry as sand. She wanted to hug Anne, but she was paralyzed, unable to move.

Anne shook her head. She kept her eyes on the mug of tea; she hadn’t yet taken a sip. “I know it was irresponsible, keeping them here.” When she finally looked up, Heather saw she was trying not to cry. “I just wanted to help. It was Larry’s dream, you know. Those poor cats. Did you know there are only thirty-two hundred tigers left in the wild? And I don’t even know which one was killed.”

“Anne.” Heather finally found her voice. Even though she was standing, she felt like she was shrinking from the inside out until she was little-kid-sized. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

Anne shook her head. “You shouldn’t be playing Panic,” she said, and her voice momentarily held an edge. “I’ve heard too much about that game. People have died. But I don’t blame you,” she added. Her voice softened again. “You’re not very happy, are you?”

Heather shook her head. She wanted to tell Anne everything: about how she’d been dumped by Matt just when she was ready to say I love you; about how she realized now she hadn’t really loved him at all, because she had always been in love with Bishop; about her fears that she would never get out of Carp and it would eat her up, swallow her as it had her mom, turn her into one of those brittle, bitter women who is old and drug-eaten and done at twenty-nine. But she couldn’t speak. There was a thick knot in her throat.

“Come here.” Anne patted the swing next to her. And then, when Heather sat down, she was shocked: Anne put her arms around her. And all of a sudden Heather was crying into her shoulder, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”