How to Save a Life(53)

The black descended before the pain could find me.





Muffled words and shouts. I listened through a gauzy haze of pain. I tried to open my eyes and but couldn’t.

Pacing footsteps. Floorboards creaking. Heavy treads and a crash. Lee was on a rampage.

“It’s f*cking over…”

That’s not Lee’s voice. Someone else is here.

My head thundered with pain, drowning even my thoughts. I tried to claw my way to the surface, but slipped back under…





Pain woke me, a dull prodding against my temple. I opened my eyes to a blurred vista of cruddy green carpet strewn with squashed cigarette butts. I moved my gaze up and a flash of pain came like a white beam, lancing through eyes into my brain. When the light faded, I saw a jean-clad leg and a boot. Lee’s boot. I blinked and looked again. I was on the living room floor. Lee was lying a foot or two away from me. Lying so still, the carpet stained under his head…

I flinched as gentle hands touched my shoulders.

“Jo?”

I got to my knees, wincing at the agony flared at my neck, while my head kept a dull banging in time to my pulse. My stomach roiled with nausea. The strong hands helped me to stand, but the frantic fear of my fight with Lee awoke and sang in my veins. I pushed the hands away brushed the hair from my eyes.

Evan Salinger. Here in my living room. I struggled to remember what came before.

I was leaving with him. He was waiting for me.

Blood leaked from Evan’s nose and split lip. His t-shirt was torn at the shoulder and blood smeared all along the collar. I looked at his hands—swollen, bloody knuckles—then to Lee on the carpet. The stain under his head pooling now. Red. His head. Jesus Christ, the back of Lee’s head was dented in, his dark hair damp with blood.

“Did you do this?” I asked when I’d caught my breath. “You…killed him? Because he’s dead, isn’t he? Lee’s dead?”

Evan stared at me hard for a handful of seconds that seemed like forever.

“Yes,” he said finally, and bent to pick up something I hadn’t noticed before on the floor—the heavy iron skillet.

Evan took up the pan, twisting the handle in both hands, like he was strangling it. There was a wet, circular splat of blood on the back. I thought I’d be sick.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Evan said, still looking at me, his voice low and calm. “It was an accident. But he was hurting you and it had to stop.”

Just that simple. I’d had that same thought a million times a day for the last year: He’s hurting me and it has to stop. And here comes Evan f*cking Salinger, in town for less than five hours, and he’d made it stop. Relief flooded through me, and for three glorious seconds, I reveled in my new freedom. And then reality crashed back in.

“No, no, no,” I said, and hurried to the front window, to throw the curtain shut. “You shouldn’t have done this. Why did you do this?”

“He was hurting you…”

“Evan!” I cried. “They will kill you, Lee’s friends. Or prison…They’ll lock you up again…”

“We’re leaving,” Evan said, still so maddeningly calm. “I’m taking you somewhere safe.”

I shook my aching head, pacing well away from Lee’s body that was so still. Not sleeping still, or unconscious still, but dead still.

“There is no place safe,” I said, my thoughts a jumbled mess and bursting out of me in fragments. “Not for me…Sure as hell not for you. I might’ve been able to claim self-defense. I might’ve…But no. You…you fought with him? You beat the shit out of him and then you killed him. Your goddamn DNA is all over everything…”

“Jo.” Evan’s voice was like a balm over a raging burn. “I did it. You’re not going to go to jail for this.” And then a crack in his voice, his jaw twitched and his eyes hardened. “You’re not going to pay for this, not after what he’s done to you. No. I did this. I’ll pay for it. But not yet. Right now, we have to get you out of here.”

Get me out of here. Because Lee was dead. Oh my f*cking god Lee was dead. The enormity of it stole my strength.

I started to sink down. Evan moved to catch me. I tried to hold onto consciousness, but it was like sand through a fist. My fingers clutched Evan’s jacket and fell away, boneless. The house, Lee’s body and Evan’s face blurred together, as if I’d been submerged underwater. Evan’s voice grew more and more distant. He was speaking through a wind tunnel. Yelling across river rapids. The roar and rush of blood in my ears.

“Shh, Jo.” Evan’s voice against my ear. “You’re all right.”

He got another arm under my knees and lifted me. My head ached as it banged against Evan’s shoulder, a thousand hammers pounded from the inside my skull.

The bang of the screen door and the outside humidity wrapped around me. Then I was sitting upright. A car door shut and I smelled clean leather and coffee.

Silence.

I was alone.

“Evan? Evan!”

The wail of my voice made my head pound harder. Then he was back, sliding on my left. An engine growled to life beneath me. The house I’d lived in with Lee—pale and drab in the falling night—began to slip away. My eyes fell shut, blinded by a sudden flare of orange in the front windows as a fire caught and roared, and then I went under.