Wilder Girls(48)

I hear Taylor’s voice from inside the house. “Is that it, then?”

A pause, and I squint into the dark. Welch is facing the birch, peering at something on its trunk. She’s quiet for a beat too long, and then she turns back to where Taylor must be standing.

   “That’s it,” she says. “Let’s get back.”

“Wait,” Reese whispers, like she knows I’m only a few seconds away from dashing into the house and tearing open the body bag. “Just a little longer.”

Welch comes tramping out of the house, with Taylor close behind. Taylor looks like she’s about to be sick, and against my will I feel a pang of pity. Maybe she didn’t ask for this. But then neither did I.

They head off down the path, and I track their flashlight beam through the trees. Smaller and fainter, until I can’t see it anymore. I stand up, branches cracking underfoot. I don’t wait for Reese, just snatch up the shotgun and make a break for it across the reeds. I don’t know how long we have before the others show up. I won’t lose my chance.

Into the red light of the house. There’s the body bag, tucked at the base of the birch, black plastic and rubber. I stop short, the shotgun falling to the ground.

This is it. The end, or something starting.

Carefully, I step around the edge of the body bag and kneel down next to it. Think of the last time I saw Byatt, how I bent over her just like this. How she looked at me like she needed me.

Please, I think, and I reach for the zipper.

The plastic peeling back. The zipper catching, my hands shaking, and there, there—pale, sallow skin, ink-dipped fingers, and curling red hair.

   Mona.

A sob shatters out of me. I pitch forward onto my hands, gasping. It’s not her. Not her not her not her.

“Hetty?”

Reese comes up behind me, lays a hand on my back. I close my eye. My whole body trembling with relief, and I think if I stood up, my legs might collapse under me.

“It’s Mona,” I say. As sorry as I am, I can’t hold back a smile, and I don’t want to.

“Shit,” Reese says. “Where the hell is Byatt, then?”

She crouches down next to me and starts zipping Mona back up. But I’m not watching Mona’s bloated face disappear. No, I’m looking at something else. There, on the trunk of the birch tree, where Welch was looking before she left.

I stand up, step over Mona’s body. The bark is curling, light from the flare casting long strange shadows, but I can see it. Carved faint and unsteady, but I recognize it. BW. Byatt Winsor.

“She was here,” I say. It’s the best thing in the world, relief sweet and soothing. “Look. She was here, and she was alive.”

I wait for Reese to tell me I’m wrong, to remind me how things usually go, but she doesn’t. Just rests her chin on my shoulder, her cheek tilted against mine. The birch bark is smooth, and my fingers leave trails of blood behind from where Reese’s silver hand punctured my skin.

   “Do you think she misses us?” I say. I’m aching for it, for the day I’ll hear Byatt tell me she wanted to come home as much as I wanted to find her.

A moment, and then Reese steps away from me, into the shadows. I turn to face her. Of course she misses us—that’s all Reese has to say. But she only looks at me and doesn’t say a word.

I raise my eyebrows. “What?”

The flare light catches on the curve of her mouth as she smiles. “You don’t really want an answer to that question.”

“No, come on.” Maybe I’m goading her. But I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me, like she knows something I don’t. “Say it.”

“I just…I guess you know a different Byatt than I do,” Reese says, shoving her hands into her pockets. “Because I’m not sure she ever missed anything in her life.”

“We’re her best friends, Reese.” I blink back the sudden sting of tears, feel them catch and freeze on my eyelashes. She can’t be right. What has all this been for if Byatt doesn’t want to come back to us? “Her best friends. Don’t you think that matters to her?”

“Well,” Reese says, and there’s an edge to her voice, a warning, “let’s not pretend. It was the two of you and then me, and that’s fine. Because people are messy and that’s how it goes. But let’s not pretend.”

Shame curdling quick, because she’s right, and I hate that I’m proud of it, proud of how much closer I got to Byatt than she ever did. But I’ll never tell her that. “I think it’s pretty selfish of you,” I say instead, “to be pissed about that when Byatt is God knows where, suffering through God knows what.”

   “I’m not pissed.” She shrugs. “It’s just true. That’s all.”

I should never have brought her. I should have known she wouldn’t understand. “Why are you even here?” I snap. Around us, the patchwork walls of the house pressing in, the birch looming, Byatt’s initials traced in blood. “Why did you come at all?”

Reese doesn’t answer. But I can hear it all the same. Everything about her—the sorrow buried in her eyes, the tightness of her mouth—all of it screaming the same thing:

For you, Hetty.

It’s too much. I can’t even say I never asked her to, because I did—I did, over and over again. I’m doing this for Byatt, and Reese is doing this for me.