Sweet Water(101)

“And history repeats itself.” Josh sighs, so disappointed in me that I know any connection we’d recovered is now lost.

“She was already dead, Josh.”

He’s shaking his head. He can’t look at me. I don’t blame him. It’s been hard to look at myself in the mirror for days.

“Martin was so sure it would ruin Finn’s life if we called the cops. He said they might let him out on bail or that they’d put him on house arrest, but that his life, as a whole, would be marred because of the drugs and the scandal surrounding the girl’s death.”

“Sarah, you can’t be that blind.” Josh’s voice is angry.

“He also didn’t believe Finn had done anything wrong. He said the colleges would refuse to accept him if they caught wind of what happened, and he’d worked so hard and hadn’t had any problems—”

“Stop!” Josh is furious now. “All these excuses he told you, Sarah. Don’t you see now this was never about Finn?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did he do to you when he had you locked up in that ivory tower?”

“I don’t understand,” I say. My arms have grown a slow chill, pushing up goose bumps, but I can’t wrap my arms around myself to quiet the cold. Everything that used to be good is gone. It’s not the idea of not having Martin or the Ellsworths anymore; it’s the loss of everything I’ve believed in.

“Sarah, Martin was protecting his estate, his reputation, and his business. He has enough money to pay the masses to make sure Finn never saw a day in prison, and surely he could pad the right pockets at the universities to make the scandal surrounding Yazmin’s death disappear too.”

“No . . . you’re not right about that . . . Then why . . .” My mind whirls in disbelief. It can’t be true. We left Yazmin because we had to protect Finn. “Martin said . . . Martin said—”

“Let’s see, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks on scholarship at the Academy is found dead with the townie rich kid. What could that mean for Martin Ellsworth and his family? He was worried he’d be sued. He was worried he’d lose his money and be defamed at work as the man who was connected to the death of a poor girl from the Rocks, and most of all, he was worried it would affect his brother’s seat as city commissioner. Everyone in town knows Martin’s been looking at that riverfront property—”

“No.” I’m shaking my head now, my vision blurred with tears. This cannot be politically motivated. It cannot. My stomach is gyrating like Dad’s old washer.

“I thought you wanted to help kids. Use your degree to do good,” Josh says.

“I did,” I say. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping young women. Their children too.”

He’s been here two years. If he knew I was stuck in this ivory tower, why didn’t he try to break me out?

Josh sighs. “Funny. I passed my old house one day and considered stopping by, because I knew you lived there, and I had mixed feelings about it, but I tried to be happy for you, because I knew how much you loved that house. Then I saw the political signs in your yard, and I drove right on by.”

“That’s not fair.” Those damn signs. They’d become a game in our house. I would take them out and throw them away, and Martin would manage to find more and restake them the very next day. It was a prank to us—the staking and un-staking of the signs. But to Josh, it was a statement of who I’d become. One that kept him away.

As Josh talks, I can’t take my eyes off the journal. I thumb back through Yazmin’s pages that detail her struggles with sleeping, closing her eyes, reinventing herself, loving my son despite the fact that her brother was trying to use him for his own devices to make up for her father’s death—something no one had any control over. Cash was trying to regain control by misdirecting his anger, and for some reason, he chose us.

“Josh, she was dead when we got there,” I reiterate. “I don’t see how we could’ve changed the outcome.”

“And did you think it ended there? With her death.”

My throat constricts. I know what he’s going to say next. Alisha was more upset with the condition of Yazmin’s body than the fact that we hadn’t reported her death. Her hissing mentions of animal life and insects eating away at her daughter’s face resurface, along with images of Yazmin’s face frozen with her eyes wide-open, her mouth stuck in a screaming position. I never actually saw it, but this is the picture I see in my head when I lie down at night. Only now it will have worms and animal bites to go along with it.

“How would you feel if another parent did that to your child?” He pauses, his voice strained. “To her and her family, you did much more than just leave the woods.”

“I know.” I wrap my arms around myself, my goose-pocked flesh feeling dirty and soiled with shame. “Yazmin was in the car accident . . . her father died . . . she was stuck in the car for hours, almost died. Why didn’t they come after us if they knew we left her? She was left to die once. You would think they wouldn’t stand for it again.”

“She tried, right, to get you to make Finn come forward? Maybe she thought Finn left the girl and came home and that you did nothing to find her daughter. Or it’s possible she was afraid that if it was found out that Cash gave the kids the drugs, he would be charged? She likely feared her last child would be taken away from her and that people like Martin could make it happen if it threatened the family’s wealth.”