The Truth About Keeping Secrets(69)

‘I don’t!’ I didn’t move. My shoulders were fixed forward. I dug my nails into my thighs to keep my hands from trembling. June went on, ‘I don’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

I tried to look at her out of the corner of my eye.

‘I was wrong. OK? About all this. You’re right. You’ve done so much for me and I never appreciated it. I’m ungrateful. Didn’t realize how good I had it. And Sydney, she’s, she’s nothing. She’s nothing to me at all.’

I knew what she was doing, but fuck, I wished she’d stop.

‘Just stop. Drop Sydney off wherever. Throw her – throw her out, for all I care. Let’s go back to yours. I can spend the night, baby, we can do whatever you …’

Heath took his eyes off the road for a moment to look at June. ‘You’re a fucking horrible liar.’

June’s face warped. She knew she’d lost. ‘I’m not lying –’

Heath gripped the wheel, hard, and jerked, sending us careering to the right and then back again. My heart groaned as I dug my nails into the seat for some stability.

That was the first moment I realized somebody could actually die.

This wasn’t going to end with a slow stop. It would be too hard and too fast and Heath was too far gone to be reasoned with and the pitching in the pit of my gut told me that this was last-moment material. I’d spent the majority of my time since Dad left wondering what this would look like. Sort of fitting, I guessed. It occurred to me that maybe we’d be caught on surveillance footage, swerving, smashing, leaving, and in a couple of months the comments would pile up, and a girl somewhere else who’d just lost her dad would be thinking, watching, trying to piece together the lives of the people who died, wondering who they were or how this could have happened …

‘Heath!’ June screamed. She really did scream this, shrill on the vowels. I had never heard her so afraid. The sound tore into every part of me. ‘Stop!’

‘You stop! You fucking stop!’

‘You sound insane,’ she said. ‘There’s no mass conspiracy. Sydney didn’t do anything wrong. She did nothing. Neither did her dad. You do this. You did all of this to yourself.’

Heath choked on a sob; was it real? I couldn’t tell and I guess it didn’t matter. ‘I love you. That’s not wrong.’

‘It is. Because it’s impossible to love someone and treat them the way you treated me. It’s impossible.’

Fast. We were going too fast.

‘I have given you every good thing you have,’ Heath said.

‘You’ve given me shit,’ June said. ‘Sydney’s dad talked to fucking Child Protection Services, Heath. That’s real-world stuff, OK? That’s real-world stuff that you can’t just wave away. You can’t just get out of that.’

‘It was bullshit! All of it. This, Sydney, the fucking therapy – it was all deliberate sabotage and you know it. Everyone tries to take everything I have. I’m a victim, June. We’re both victims. Why can’t you see that?’

‘I wanted to help you. You took advantage of that. Of me.’

Heath sobbed again. ‘I begged you. I reminded you of everything, of how volatile this whole fucking thing is and how delicate, really, truly delicate, and you didn’t even care. You didn’t even care that it was gonna hurt me, and that I was gonna hurt myself. And now, look. We all have to fucking care.’

We took a turn then and I tried to get my bearings: the street sign.

RIVER STYX ROAD.

He was driving towards the river.

‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I’ve lost you to some dyke!’ He slammed the steering wheel. ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it, June. Were you that desperate?’

By now we were barely staying within the lines of the road. The earth shook beneath us, intermittently left us as we shifted up and on to kerbs. A bright, white light tore towards us at an impossible speed and Heath barely jerked the wheel to miss it. June shrieked.

She was crying now too. ‘Stop!’

‘June –’

‘Sydney, he’s not OK, he’s gonna –’

‘Oh my God, shut up!’ Heath pounded on the brakes, then immediately back on the gas. Screeching of tyres. The sudden stop and start meant the dashboard got closer then too close and my face made contact.

I recoiled, my hand shooting up to the warm, wet spot on my cheekbone. My ears rang. Everything slowed; I rested my head against the cool glass of the window while behind me June said something I couldn’t make out. I watched the rain fall down, a million tiny comets …

The rain. The Styx.

The quicksand.

The quicksand. It was just to the side of the river. And with the rain, the mud would be loose enough to hold the car, easy.

Synapses fired and words and thoughts and phrases all came from nowhere, and I settled.

Beside me, June grabbed at her hair in handfuls. Begged.

June in the driver’s seat. June in a beanie. June at the River Styx. June. June decomposing in the driver’s seat.

Too fast.

‘I don’t want to do this any more, June.’

My mind spiralled. Absolute chaos. The world hurtled past, none of it really making any sense. You don’t understand what it’s like to be in a situation like this until you’re in it, I think. You can watch movies, but there is nothing comparable to a sense of imminent death. Of primal fear. A million years of evolution had led up to this, a million years of searing, primitive fight-or-flight instinct with no way to fight and nowhere to go.