We Were Never Here(92)

    The revelation swept through me. Kristen had been gaslighting people since she was young. Jenny figured it was just a little-kid quirk of Kristen’s, but I knew the truth; I knew Kristen was still at it, decades later. Scrambling my memories, accusing me of acts she herself had committed. Don’t play dumb—I watched you kill him. How easily she’d convinced me.

At least I was certain now: Kristen had killed Sebastian. My shouts had been the drumbeat, a desperate plea as she kicked the life out of him: Stop. Stop. Stop.

“And was…was the bullying the reason Jamie…?” I couldn’t finish the thought.

Jenny shook her head as we bumped into the hotel’s parking lot. She pulled into a spot and turned off the car, then leaned her brow against the steering wheel and sobbed.

I touched her shoulder gingerly. “Do you want to go inside, or…?”

She shook her head again. “I need to finish saying this or I’ll never get it all out.”

    The car was already heating like a pot of water on the stove. “Um, is there any way we could turn the AC back on?”

“We have OnStar. When the car’s running, it records everything.”

It was so like Kristen—practical yet paranoid, sensible yet absurd. I nodded and unbuckled my seatbelt.

“Jamie was being abused,” Jenny said, fighting to keep her voice under control, “by her basketball coach. Kristen’s father. She didn’t tell anyone, but she wrote about it in her diary, which I found afterward.”

My stomach lurched. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Kristen’s asshole father—he wasn’t just an asshole, he was a predator, a child molester. Had he abused his daughter too? She’d said she hated being alone with him. I’d spent so much time wondering what lay beneath her dark compulsions; I’d questioned whether Kristen was a run-of-the-mill sociopath or maybe a vulnerable child cracked open by her parents’ death or her grandfather’s casual tyranny. But if her own father had modeled a cycle she couldn’t help but reproduce—bullying, gaslighting, violence—well, it didn’t justify anything, but it might help explain it.

“I’m so sorry, Jenny. I don’t know what else to say.” My heart seemed to be folding in half like a soggy paper plate. Poor Kristen, poor Jamie, poor anyone else who got in that awful man’s way. It was no wonder Kristen hadn’t had any serious romantic relationships in all the years I’d known her.

“Thanks.” Jenny battled the tears for a few seconds, then went on. “Her diary said something else too. She’d…she thought the only way to stop the abuse was to kill him. She was so young—she just wanted it to end. She—she thought it would be okay because he was a Christian, and that meant he’d automatically end up in heaven.”

Now I was crying too. Steam from our hot breath and tears crept up the windshield, closing us in.

“She did it on a night when she thought only Jerry would be home. Just waltzed right in and did what she thought she had to do. Only, Anne was home—Kristen too.” She wiped her trembling hand beneath her nose. “But Kristen saw her. Ran after her, all the way to our house, screaming. It woke me up, but I—I thought I was dreaming.” Her sobs shook the car as fog climbed into the windshield’s center, hazing out the hot world outside.

    “I don’t know how to say this,” I ventured, “but I have to ask—are you sure it was Jamie and not Kristen who started the fire? If Kristen’s MO was accusing Jamie of things she did herself—”

“No. I read her diary. Jamie came up with it all on her own.”

“But if Kristen—”

“Kristen knew that Anne was home,” she cut in, hunched over like a teenager. “Jamie didn’t, but Kristen knew her mom had decided last-minute not to go away for the weekend. And Kristen would never hurt her mom. She loved her more than anyone in the world. When she—that night, when she gave up on Jamie and ran to Tabitha and Bill’s, yelling so loud she woke me up, she was screaming one word over and over: Mommy.”

“Oh my God.” It fit, but I wasn’t sure I could accept it—could Kristen, an agent of hurt and chaos, really have been adjacent to that tragedy and not directly involved? Or maybe her parents’ death was the spark that ignited her cruelty. Perhaps she’d then guilted young Jamie into killing herself, or blackmailed Jamie by saying she saw her start the fire, or…

I glanced over at Jenny. She was curled like a question mark, silhouetted in the window, and for a flash I saw what Jamie would look like now, button-nosed and pretty. My heart sank. Could another twelve-year-old, driven to desperation, really have behaved as destructively as Kristen?

Just look how far she pushed you.

Jenny sniffled. “So Kristen screamed all the way to Tabitha and Bill’s, and they called 911 and kept her safe. But she told them—she knew she’d seen Jamie in there, and though I never asked her, I bet she had some idea why Jamie would want her father dead. Oh God. Jamie used to go up to their cottage with them on weekends—I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself.”

    A cry, then, so long and mournful I thought of the loon, its call echoing as if to channel all the pain of a broiling, dying Earth. I let my own tears stream over my neck, soaking into the collar of my dirty tank top.