The Night Before(30)

Laura: He seemed troubled to me, and I was drawn to him because of it. Like I could make it better if I just broke through. If I loved him enough.

Dr. Brody: You thought you could fix him and then he would be able to love you?

Laura: I know that sounds ridiculous. I see that now. He was never going to love me.

Dr. Brody: Does that remind you of someone else? Someone from your childhood?

Laura: I don’t think so. What are you getting at?

Dr. Brody: Sometimes we try to fix the past by fixing the present.

Laura: Well, that’s stupid.

Dr. Brody: It’s how our brains work. It’s subconscious. And it’s not stupid.

Laura: But it’s dangerous.

Dr. Brody: Yes. It can be very dangerous.





SEVENTEEN


Laura. The Night Before. Thursday, 10 p.m. Branston, CT.

I know what you did.

You should never have come back.

You will pay.



The notes came at different times and in different places. The first was folded under the windshield wiper of Rosie’s minivan when I took it to the track to run. Round and round in circles I ran, the car parked just up a small hill in the lot of the public high school of the town next door—a town that has schools with good facilities and no guards at the gate because why would they? That’s why people pay millions of dollars for a house there. I wonder what they would think if they knew their poor security let in people like me. People who may have killed someone.

I run each lap in two minutes. Whoever left that note was watching me, waiting for me to make a turn around the bend away from the lot.

The second came in a package from Amazon. It was slipped between the openings where the box hadn’t been taped. It was a box with pajamas, which I had ordered online and had shipped to Rosie’s house.

The third, I found under my pillow.

They were typed. On white paper, cut off after the words, then folded several times like origami.

Why don’t you lock your doors? I asked Rosie the day I found the third note. Aren’t you worried someone might steal something?

Rosie gave me her classic Rosie look of Are you kidding? We were in the kitchen. She swept her arms out in front of her with a great deal of drama. I wish they would! Half this stuff is crap from our old house and Joe’s old house—everything is old. Take it! Take it all—just not the wine.

Haha. I laughed with her, then went upstairs and sat on the bed in the attic, staring at the door and the window and the closet where I’d just hidden the last note. Or the latest note. That was two days ago. Maybe there were more coming. Or maybe something else.

I should be worried about the notes and not this stranger who sits beside me. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s why I haven’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since the first one arrived. Exhaustion in my bones. In my brain. The thick fog is not helping me as the stranger and I pull into the underground garage.

I’ve been talking about that night to this stranger. Jonathan Fielding. The night of the party in the woods. I don’t stop.



* * *



His name was Mitch Adler. He went to the public high school, and I’d met him at a party six months earlier.

He was not a nice boy. He was not a good boyfriend. But I told myself there were reasons, and that I was the only person who could fix him.

“You probably read that he came to the party with a girl,” I say.

Jonathan nods. He doesn’t want to cause another freak-out where he has to risk his life chasing me through a dangerous park.

Then he says, “His parents said it was the girl he’d been seeing all year, bringing her to the house for dinners. They said they thought she was his girlfriend.”

And he continues, “And they said they had never met you or heard your name until that night.”

Jonathan Fielding, you have done your homework.

I add to his research. “Her name was Britney. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Turns out she had been his real girlfriend for over a year. I had no idea. I thought I was his girlfriend. He had sex with her in his car before they went into the woods to join the party,” I say. That’s the truth. “The car was there. It was parked up the road from the others.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?”

“Why did he leave the car so far up the road?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he would get lucky again.”

Then he looks at me. “But not with that same girl? Britney—the one he’d already had sex with? But with you—two girls in one night?”

Fuck you, Jonathan Fielding. But, yes.

The car is off. We sit in the darkness of the windowless garage and, now, my mood.

“I don’t know what he was thinking.”

He says nothing more, but I know what he’s thinking. All of the facts are there for anyone to find, and I’m sure he’s found them.

I feel defensive. I’m back at the police station eleven years ago, blood on my clothes. Splinters in my hand from holding on to that bat so tight.

Tears streaming down my dirty face. My dirty soul.

“I wasn’t going to have sex with him in that car. I let him think that, but I wasn’t going to have my first time be like that—in the backseat of a car with a jerk who brought someone else to a party. Someone else named Britney who happened to be his real girlfriend.”