The Truth About Keeping Secrets(53)

The person underground says a fingernail would do the trick.

She reluctantly agrees. Peels off the nail from her pointer finger and drops it down the hole.

The person underground says that they just need an extra finger to prop open the lid.

So she cuts off her finger.

The person underground says they could dig themselves out of there, if only they had one more hand.

So she cuts off her hand.

And the person underground keeps saying, I need this, I need this, I need this, and the girl keeps complying, slicing off little bits of herself until all of her has gone down the hole and there’s nothing left.

Leo and I became makeshift detectives with no leads and barely anything to investigate, which was where the ‘makeshift’ came from.

I went to his house for the first time towards the end of February. Mom was happy to drive me – she sensed I had fallen out with Olivia and was glad, I think, that I had a friend (besides, of course, the ‘girl who gives you rides’, who she knew nothing about) – even though Leo lived a good half-hour away. Though if she had known what we planned on doing, I don’t think she would have agreed.

Leo: excited to see you. have all the info?

Me: Names, at least

Leo: cool. also cole’s here, if that’s OK.

Me: Gross. Turning around

Leo: k. bye bitch

Leo: jk

Leo: see you soon.

An uncharacteristic heatwave had been threatening to thaw the frozen expanse of north-eastern Ohio for a couple of weeks, and now it seemed like it might have actually happened; little splotches of yellow-green poked through the whiteness, and for the first time, I thought about a world without Dad in it that was warm. Spring would have to come eventually.

I convinced Mom to drop me off without coming to the door with me; Leo retrieved me, wearing an Adidas T-shirt under a denim jacket, and escorted me up to his room.

Cole was sprawled across the bed in Leo’s bedroom, rapidly pressing buttons on his Nintendo DS. I had only seen him in pictures, so seeing him here was sort of weird. Even lying down I could tell he was shorter than I’d imagined, and his style was almost the opposite of Leo’s: he wore a plain black T-shirt and skinny jeans. ‘Hey,’ he said, hardly looking up from the screen; not necessarily in a rude way, but in the way you might greet someone you’ve known for a long time.

‘That’s Cole,’ Leo said, booting up his desktop. ‘He’s bi and likes anime and honestly that’s all you need to know about him.’

I smiled and looked at Cole, who didn’t react. ‘I’m sure there are more facets to his personality than that.’

Cole looked up and grinned. ‘Debatable.’

Leo tapped at his keyboard. ‘Fucking anime,’ he mumbled to himself.

Leo’s room looked plucked from a book you’d buy in Urban Outfitters about how having fewer possessions brings us closer to our spiritual selves, or something: white bedsheets and white furniture and white walls which were mostly bare, only home to a framed picture of himself and his brother which hung overtop the headboard. In it, they’re both in nice pressed shirts in some green-looking place.

Leo caught me looking at it and I was intensely embarrassed, but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that was the one thing I was allowed to keep up.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This place looked like – I mean, straight up, it was some John Nash shit. I put everything on the walls. Any pictures I could find. Pictures of us. Stuff from his room. Old schoolwork. To the point where I was hiding it because I knew it was fucking weird. Like, I tried to keep Mom out for as long as I could. Even Cole didn’t know about it. Mom saw and had me take it down. Turned out instead of grieving I was building a shrine, which might sound not all that bad, but –’

‘It was,’ Cole said.

Leo sighed, then looked towards me. ‘You know that feeling where, like, the world is spinning at a thousand miles an hour and there’s nothing you can do to stop it and then you start to feel like there’s nothing you can do about anything ever?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, because I sort of did.

He shrugged. ‘I just wanted something to do that was … tangible. Something that I could look at and say, hey, I have the power to impact this.’

I found myself with an unwelcome curiosity: how he’d done it. His brother. Was it in the house? But for maybe the first time, that went away, because looking at Leo and this lone picture on his wall was enough to affirm for me that really, it didn’t matter at all. I didn’t need the gory details. I didn’t want them. All that mattered was that he was gone and Leo was alive to deal with it.

And then the subject of my visit came up: the list.

I’d made a list of all of Dad’s patients based on the folders, and we were planning on doing a thorough search of each and seeing if anything incriminating came up. Leo had convinced me; I’d been hesitant at first, and still wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, but he seemed confident that we’d find something.

Leo and I began to sort through the names. He started from A and I worked backwards from Z, and even though we had music playing and were joking occasionally, I was growing increasingly frustrated. There was almost nothing about anyone online, and even when there was, I felt strange; guilty, mostly, because we really shouldn’t have been going through the names in the first place, but also annoyed because this felt completely pointless. Just because someone had driven drunk once didn’t make them a serial killer.