The Night Before(65)

Laura: You try telling her that, Kevin. She doesn’t listen to me.





THIRTY-EIGHT


Laura. The Night Before. Friday, 1:15 a.m. Branston, CT.

Jonathan reads the note. He looks at me with concern.

“What does this mean?” he asks.

I tell him it’s the fourth note I’ve received since returning home. I tell him what each one said and where I found it, and while I do, I search for clues on his face and in the way his body moves. I do this even though I know I have no ability to decipher them. My brain is hobbled by this defect, this giant hole where instinct and reason should be.

“Laura…” he says. His surprise appears to be genuine, but I don’t let myself trust it. “Why haven’t you gone to the police? This is serious.”

I take the note back into my hands. I fold it and put it in the purse.

“I don’t know.” This is the truth.

“Do you have any idea who would do this? Mitch Adler’s family? Or a friend? And what about the homeless man who was sent to that institution?”

“No one from either family is local, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t come back when they heard I had returned. And friends—my God, it could be any of them. Mitch was really popular. But who would go to all this trouble after so many years?”

Jonathan’s eyes light up. “What about that other girl? What was her name? Britney—the one from the party the night he was killed? His girlfriend for over a year. What if she was in love with him and blames you for taking that away from her?”

My head feels light suddenly as I see her face. Britney. Long blond hair. Big blue eyes. Puffy baby cheeks even at sixteen. I had never considered this. I never saw her again after that night.

“But why wait so long?”

Jonathan looks at the ground and shakes his head. His eyebrows scrunch together as he strains his brain for answers at one in the morning after scotch and sex and beer. And pizza. Half a pizza. Would he be able to eat if he wasn’t just who he says he is—Jonathan Fielding, divorced hedge fund manager whose car is in the shop?

I stare at him. I study him. I wait for an answer, but it doesn’t come.

I remember Dr. Brody explaining all of this to me. How this hole came to be, this defect. A child is told she is loved but then feels nothing. Tugging at a sleeve, waiting for a head to turn her way. Confusion is all she will ever know. And that’s exactly what I feel as I watch this man in front of me.

Nothing but confusion.

I have to get out of here. My mind turns to my keys, the ones that fell to the ground and that he picked up. What did he do with them?

I remember—he put them on the counter—and I start to turn my head that way.

But he looks up suddenly with a new thought.

“What about the guy from New York? What if this has nothing to do with the past—but the present?”

I stop in my tracks and confront this new absurdity.

“It doesn’t make sense. He dumped me. We haven’t been in touch for weeks.”

But Jonathan is not deterred.

“What if he expected you to do what you used to do—come back, do anything to make him love you again? Isn’t that what you said? Your pattern with wrong men?”

He speaks of these things as though we are lab partners conducting a science experiment. He speaks of them and they are punches to my gut, forcing the air out of my body with the violent strikes.

Maybe I’ve spoken of them the way he now does, with detachment as though it’s all in the past. As though I haven’t spent every minute of the past six hours wondering if I’m doing it again, right here and right now with him. And my God, is that all it’s been? Six hours? It feels like a lifetime that I’ve been with Jonathan Fielding.

He keeps on with his new theory about Dr. Kevin Brody, and I hate that I am even considering it. If Kevin was a wrong man, then I am truly lost. He said he loved me and he said it knowing every piece of me and how they all fit together in a broken heap. He had started to fix them. To fix me. The tables turned on my pattern of fixing broken men.

“I don’t know,” I say. “That would make him pretty crazy.”

Jonathan likes his new theory.

“People are crazy,” he says. “Haven’t you figured that out? No one is what they seem.”

I stare at him now. What is he trying to tell me? I think about his lurid voice telling me how he wanted to fuck me again. I think of the soft touch of his hands, and the sweet sighs when we did a drive-by in his bed. Yes, it was short, but it was sweet and passionate.

Wasn’t it? Wasn’t he?

Wasn’t Dr. Brody, when he told me he loved me?

Jonathan looks at my purse. “When did you last look in there?” he asks.

I take a moment, because he is moving too fast now. From theory to theory to pontifications about mankind and now to his Sherlock Holmes Q&A.

“Uh…” I stammer. “At the house. It’s Rosie’s purse. I borrowed it.”

He rubs his chin, thinking and thinking. Then he says, “Was it empty when she gave it to you?”

Where the hell are you going with this, Jonathan Fielding, the liar?

“I thought so,” I say. But I really don’t know.

“Did you get it yourself, or did she give it to you?”