Real Bad Things(46)
“I’m not feeling well. I’ll sleep in the guest room tonight.” She paused, remembering those long weeks locked in her bedroom as a teen after Jane had confessed. “Probably a few days.” She rushed into the kitchen, scrambled through the cabinets, grabbed the thing she was looking for, and shoved it into her purse. Back in the living room, they continued to wait. Silent, at last, when she least desired it. “Please keep it down. I have a terrible headache and don’t wish to be disturbed.”
Upstairs, she gathered some clothing from her and Rusty’s bedroom, walked along the hallway to the guest bedroom, and locked the door behind her. She ran the water as hot as it would go in the guest bath.
She sank into the water, head and all, and let her skin cook. She’d thought about drowning often in the months after she’d bailed out of the boat with Warren in it and given it one last push toward the dam.
She had meant to bail earlier but got scared. She didn’t want to go through with it. She’d gone in the boat alone, without Jane, because she didn’t want her to have to fix one more problem. The problem Georgia Lee had created because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, her temper in check. She stared at the dam as it inched closer.
From the bow of the boat, where Warren’s body rested, she thought she saw him move.
Terror shot through her, and she lunged over the side without taking a full breath. She fought against the current with every kick and stroke. Her arms started to give out, the current began to take her under. She held her breath until she couldn’t anymore. This was it. The cold water would rush into her lungs. She’d be gone.
But somehow she found herself on shore. How, she couldn’t say. The same way she couldn’t recall how there had come to be a rock in her hand and then at her feet, next to blood on her shoes. Warren dead. Because of her. Even though he was terrible and had tried to hurt her, her spirit was crushed with the idea that in the span of five, ten minutes, she’d caused a heart that had been beating—even one as dark as his—to stop.
And so she’d told herself to stop. Stop thinking of the water. The rock and the blood. Because what use was it to consider something that she’d survived, something that was accepted as fact? Warren had disappeared. Jane had left town. No one had come to ask any more questions. End of story.
She’d stopped thinking. Stopped remembering. Stopped everything.
You shall not murder. Exodus 20:13. The easiest commandment to obey!
She gasped out of the bathwater, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose into a stream of toilet paper, which stuck to her wet hands. She grabbed the hand towel and screamed into it.
After a while, she bit down on the cork in the wine bottle she’d brought up with her, loosened it with her teeth, and spit it out. It landed in the bathwater and bobbed up and down, floating among the bits of soggy toilet paper she’d rinsed off her hands.
If only the recent flood hadn’t drowned the town—or hadn’t insisted on being so historic. The worst in recent memory. She might have gone the rest of her life without having to answer any questions. Without knowing or facing what she’d done. She gulped straight from the wine bottle, both hands clutching the glass, and almost threw it across the room to shatter against the wall.
She’d agonized over so many things over so many years. Little mortifying things in the moment that meant nothing in the grand scope of life. Undercooking the turkey and overcooking the sides the first and only time she hosted Rusty’s parents for Thanksgiving. Clogging the toilet at Christlyn’s house and lying that it was like that already. Going all morning one day in fifth grade with her dress pulled up into her tights. But murdering another human being and letting her girlfriend take the blame? Apparently, that was back burner material. For years, she’d simply forgotten. Until Warren’s body rose from its watery grave.
She wished her memory could be wiped again. Or that she could be like a cold, heartless TV vixen and not care. She wished Jane were dead. Then she could blame everything on her and not be crushed by the agonizing weight and guilt of what her mind had decided not to remember. If only she could wish that into existence. Maybe that was how she had forgotten everything. Maybe she could wish for all that knowledge and history to leave her brain and it would.
In bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, she closed her eyes and wished for the world to go back to what it had been like before the flood. Before Warren’s and Jane’s returns.
Before she remembered that she was a killer.
Fifteen
JANE
A chain-link fence surrounded Family Fun’s miniature golf course. Jane had once asked why Angie’s parents hadn’t renamed the arcade Phamly Fun when they took over ownership. Angie had given her a look that told her to not ask stupid questions.
Located on the other side of the trailer park, the arcade and miniature golf had been an oasis to Maud Bottoms youth, especially after their mall had flooded beyond repair. Family Fun, with its sun-faded zoo animals that lined the course and its fake waterfall, sat at the entrance of Levi Perry Park, park being a generous term. It didn’t even have a playground. Just flat patches of severely mowed grass, hardly any trees, and only three picnic benches. But they did have a statue for the park’s dead Confederate namesake. For their after-school and weekend shifts, Jane and Angie took a shortcut over Indian Mound, where kids played hide-and-seek and pretended ghosts were after them, and then trudged through the vast, barren acres of the park to get to work. At first, Jason would hang out in the arcade during their shift. Angie let him play free games and gave him free drinks. But then he stopped for some reason. Jane didn’t fight him on it or ask him why. He’d become good at making himself scarce. And he was getting older. Maybe he’d made friends of his own. She was glad to have some alone time, which was in short supply given that they shared a room.