The Last Thing She Ever Did(43)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MISSING: FOUR DAYS

Over the next few days Carole and David would appear in front of the cameras. Carole would plead for their son’s return. She’d hold a framed photo of Charlie against her chest, much in the same way she’d held him when he was a baby, rocking slightly back and forth. David sat there impassively, responding to questions only when prompted, and never when Carole was speaking.

“Our Charlie was our dream come true,” he said during the interview with the reporter from KATU. “If you know anything about where he is or what happened to him, please call the Bend Police Department.”

When the lights went off, the war between Carole and David would start again.

After a while, only Carole and her precious framed photo would meet the press.

David was nowhere to be seen.



Liz filled the old white claw-foot tub and stripped while the bathroom filled with the dense vapors of the rising water. She sat awkwardly on the edge of the tub, thinking about what to do. She’d lost a couple of pounds since the accident, the only good thing that had happened because of it. Stress had made her hair fall out in the back, and she’d taken to wearing a ponytail to conceal the physical effects of her guilt. Her skin above her breasts broke out in a light pink rash, and no amount of calamine could calm its angry hue.

The bath was an escape more than anything. She needed an escape. From everything. And everyone. Especially Owen. He was flopped on the bed reading some paperwork and cursing Damon, who he was all but certain was trying to screw him over.

“He’s just a nerd without any game,” he said as she slipped away to the quiet of the bathroom. “All of a sudden his balls have grown to grapefruit size and he’s trying to push me around. What a joke. He’s such a prick. He thinks that he’s the one that created Lumatyx. It wasn’t even his idea. It was mine. I was the one who came up with everything. He just worked the code and the back end.”

She wondered how long this had been going on, how long her husband had been a stranger. She’d been immersed in her law books and her volunteer work at the humane society and hadn’t been paying attention.

The water beckoned her with the promise of an end to her misery.

So did the expensive razors that Owen had been buying online.

Liz slid into the water, letting it envelop her. Her head slipped below the surface, and she opened her eyes. The surface swirled, breaking up the light from the overhead fixture. She wondered if drowning victims were able to see the world from the depths before they died. Was it beautiful to them?

She stayed under the surface for a long time before emerging, gasping and sucking in air. Drowning would never work. With drowning there was too much time and too much fear baked into the solution.

A razor glinted at her.

I’m over here! it seemed to say. Pick me up. Easy. Quick. Never dull.

She pictured the pool of red all around her. Owen busting down the door. Crying out as if he were so upset about what she’d done. Tears and histrionics as though she mattered to him more than anything on earth. That was a big laugh.

She thought of Carole rushing in and pulling her from the water, because Owen wouldn’t know what to do. Or yes, yes he would: he’d stand still, making sure that she was really, really dead.

Her fingertips grazed the handle of the razor. Just the slightest touch. In doing so, she felt a surge of electricity run through her body. She touched it again, this time with more purpose. Yet she couldn’t pick it up. Not even to shave her legs. The temptation was there, but not enough to propel her to take that step. Instead, she reached for the bar of lavender soap. She wanted to die. She deserved to die. She couldn’t do it, though. She finished her bath and went to bed.

She was grateful that Owen was asleep when she slid between the sheets. He was naked, a signal that, later in the night, he’d pretend to be reaching for her in his sleep and wanting sex. It was his MO. A game. She normally played along, pretending she was sleeping too, and the two of them would make love until the sheets were knotted by their feet, and every fiber of their bodies pulsed with the ecstasy of their touch.

But that was BC.

Before Charlie.

Now Liz couldn’t imagine touching him, and she made sure that she went to bed after he did. She went so far as to put an extra pillow between the two of them as a kind of dam to keep him at bay. When he reached for her at night, she said she was having her period and was using a tampon.

He fell for it.

She knew then that her husband didn’t know her at all. She’d stopped using tampons a year ago.

And although she’d started the chain reaction of everything that had happened since the accident, she’d grown to despise Owen. She knew that he’d never admit it to anyone—it would reflect poorly on him—but he felt the same way.

It started to rain that night, and Liz lay there, eyes open, listening. If suicide wasn’t the way out, what was?





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

MISSING: FOUR DAYS

Liz was not asleep. She was in a foggy twilight of memory.

She had never been so cold in all her life. The cold was always the first thing she remembered when her reflections—thoughts she tried to vanquish—returned to the flash flood.

The chill gripped her as she and her brother clung to a rocky ledge and watched in horror as the waters swept away Dan and Seth Miller. The memory was still shattered glass, and she would always allow herself a way out from it by wondering if she was remembering what had happened at all, or if it had been told to her. Or if she’d pieced things together incorrectly. Had she seen Seth look at her and call out that he was going to be all right? Or had there been a flash of panic in his eyes as he realized that, by saving Liz, he’d be risking his own life?