We Were Never Here(61)

    Kristen had been very into basketball back then, too, so I scanned the faces one by one. My heart jumped when I found her—while all the other girls were gazing up at Jamie, who’d presumably sunk the winning basket, Kristen was in the back, eyes uncertain, staring straight into the camera.

I found Jamie’s obituary: survived by her parents, Thomas and Jennifer Rusch, and a little brother, Luke. Found dead on November 24, 2001. Two weeks to the day after Kristen’s parents died.

Her best friend and both parents had died in the same month. And she’d never mentioned it.

I scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw that the address for the memorial fund was in Las Vegas, that wacky man-made oasis. I googled the elder Rusches; the mom was in marketing, the dad a realtor in Henderson. Far from their Wisconsin dwelling, the pineapple house between Kristen’s first home and Nana and Bill’s mansion. The Mojave Desert is another spot where there are hardly any shadows, sun-splashed by day and moonlit at night. The kind of place where you could bury a body but the stars, all those floodlights, wouldn’t keep it in the dark for long.

Kristen had kept this from me. I knew about her childhood pet (Green Bean the guinea pig), the time she broke her wrist showing off on a swing set, and the ridiculous Easter-themed play she’d written in fourth grade, which her classmates had dutifully performed. I should’ve heard about the loss of a close friend, and whatever bad thing led to those angry black scribbles, now hidden in a basement’s silty dark.

A thought I’d almost but not quite had when the birthday treasure hunt had reached its dramatic conclusion: Is it really a good idea to be alone in a cabin in the woods with Kristen?

A floorboard creaked above me and I flinched. Why did everyone who got close to Kristen wind up dead? The sudden house fire, a horror-movie cliché…a chill radiated across my shoulders as I started to type in any details I could remember, anything that might lead to news articles about the blaze that killed her parents. But before I could hit Enter, the Internet sputtered out—I’d burned through all five gigabytes. I closed my laptop and sat in the dark while night sounds pressed in around me.



* * *



—

    We rocked in our seats as the road swerved through the trees. Kristen was taking it too fast, accelerating as we snaked around hairpin turns.

“Why is it so twisty?” I asked, clutching the handle on the door.

“They had to carve the road out around all the lakes and swamps and ridges up here,” she replied. “It’s actually hillier than you’d think. Like here, it’s a crazy drop-off if you go off the road.” She gestured my way.

“So how about slowing down?”

“I’ve driven here a million times.” She careened around another corner and the seatbelt tugged at my neck.

I took a deep breath. “Hey, so I wanted to ask you about your friend Jamie.”

She squinted through a patch of sun. “Didn’t I say I don’t want to talk about her?”

“Well, I googled her. I was curious to see if she looked like me.” A ham-fisted lie, but the best I could do. “And I saw that she…died by suicide.”

“That’s right.” Camo-like shadows rippled across her face from the sun peeking through the trees.

“I thought you said it was an accident.”

She shot me a raw, strangled look. “Because it’s painful for me. Okay?”

“I’m sorry. I really am. I know she was like a sister.”

“Yeah.” She shook her hair out of her eyes. “You know, if someone said to me, ‘Do you think a twelve-year-old could stand it if both her parents died, and then her best friend since birth killed herself a few weeks later?’ I’d be like, ‘Obviously not.’ But here I am. Here we are.” She turned to me. “It was really hard. Losing her. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

    She stayed that way for a beat, watching me. Unease billowed in my torso.

“I can’t even imagine. What…what happened?”

She shrugged. “No one knew how much she was hurting. Not even me.”

“Was she depressed?”

“Guess so, yeah.”

“God, she was just so…young. For someone that age to…”

“It’s more common than you’d think.” She swallowed. “Remember how we both used to love The Virgin Suicides? ‘Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’?”

We burst out of the woods and onto a country road, with a bar on one side and a dingy gas station on the other. At the last second, Kristen took a sharp turn and pulled up to a pump. “It’ll be cheaper up here,” she said, before snatching up her purse and slamming the door.

My brain was like minnows in a pail: Thoughts crisscrossed and swarmed and bumped into one another. Was Kristen being weird about Jamie, or was I the one seeing menace in the wholly explicable, as Kristen kept insisting? Was Jamie’s death really a suicide, or had Kristen had, well, something to do with it…and was I an awful friend for thinking that? Then there was the next stepping-stone in logic, something I’d never allowed myself to face head-on: Could all this death mean that…that the night with Paolo—?

Kristen opened the car door before I could finish the thought. She jabbed a button on the dash and the radio bellowed on. As we pushed back into the forest, I replayed our conversation in my head. All Kristen’s talk of losing Jamie, how she couldn’t go through that again…what was that?