We Were Liars(48)

I swallow as much anger as I can. “I understand not writing back, but why wouldn’t you even read my emails?”

“I know,” Mirren says. “It sucks and I’m a horrible wench. Please, will you let me read them now?”

I open the laptop. Do a search and find all the notes addressed to her.

There are twenty-eight. I read over her shoulder. Most of them are charming, darling emails from a person supposedly without headaches.

Mirren!

Tomorrow I leave for Europe with my cheating father, who is, as you know, also deeply boring. Wish me luck and know that I wish I were spending the summer on Beechwood with you. And Johnny. And even Gat.

I know, I know. I should be over it.

I am over it.

I am.

Off to Marbella to meet attractive Spanish boys, so there.

I wonder if I can make Dad eat the most disgusting foods of every country we visit, as penance for his running off to Colorado.

I bet I can. If he really loves me, he will eat frogs and kidneys and chocolate-covered ants.

/Cadence



That’s how most of them go. But a few of the emails are neither charming nor darling. Those ones are pitiful and true.

Mirren.

Vermont winter. Dark, dark.

Mummy keeps looking at me while I sleep.

My head hurts all the time. I don’t know what to do to make it stop. The pills don’t work. Someone is splitting through the top of my head with an axe, a messy axe that won’t make a clean cut through my skull. Whoever wields it has to hack away at my head, coming down over and over, but not always right in the same place. I have multiple wounds.

I dream sometimes that the person wielding the axe is Granddad.

Other times, the person is me.

Other times, the person is Gat.

Sorry to sound crazy. My hands are shaky as I type this and the screen is too bright.

I want to die, sometimes, my head hurts so much. I keep writing you all my brightest thoughts but I never say the dark ones, even though I think them all the time. So I am saying them now. Even if you do not answer, I will know somebody heard them, and that, at least, is something.

/Cadence



We read all twenty-eight emails. When she is finished, Mirren kisses me on the cheek. “I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”

Then she is gone.





75




I bring my laptop to the bed and create a document. I take down my graph-paper notes and begin typing those and all my new memories, fast and with a thousand errors. I fill in gaps with guesses where I don’t have actual recall.

The Sinclair Center for Socialization and Snacks.

You won’t see that precious boyfriend of yours again.

He wants me to stay the hell away from you.

We adore Windemere, don’t we, Cady?

Aunt Carrie, crying in Johnny’s Windbreaker.

Gat throwing balls for the dogs on the tennis court.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

The dogs.

The fucking dogs.

Fatima and Prince Philip.

The goldens died in that fire.

I know it, now, and it is my fault. They were such naughty dogs, not like Bosh, Grendel, and Poppy, whom Mummy trained. Fatima and Prince Philip ate starfish on the shore, then vomited them up in the living room. They shook water from their shaggy fur, snarfled people’s picnic lunches, chewed Frisbees into hunks of unusable plastic. They loved tennis balls and would go down to the court and slime any that had been left around. They would not sit when told. They begged at the table.

When the fire caught, the dogs were in one of the guest bedrooms. Granddad often closed them in upstairs while Clairmont was empty, or at night. That way they wouldn’t eat people’s boots or howl at the screen door.

Granddad had shut them up before he left the island.

And we hadn’t thought of them.

I had killed those dogs. It was I who lived with dogs, I who knew where Prince Philip and Fatima slept. The rest of the Liars didn’t think about the goldens—not very much, anyway. Not like I did.

They had burned to death. How could I have forgotten them like that? How could I have been so wrapped up in my own stupid criminal exercise, the thrill of it, my own anger at the aunties and Granddad— Fatima and Prince Philip, burning. Sniffing at the hot door, breathing in smoke, wagging their tails hopefully, waiting for someone to come and get them, barking.

What a horrible death for those poor, dear, naughty dogs.





76




I run out of Windemere. It is dark out now, nearly time for supper. My feelings leak out my eyes, crumpling my face, heave through my frame as I imagine the dogs, hoping for a rescue, staring at the door as the smoke billows in.

Where to go? I cannot face the Liars at Cuddledown. Red Gate might have Will or Aunt Carrie. The island is so fucking small, actually, there’s nowhere to go. I am trapped on this island, where I killed those poor, poor dogs.

All my bravado from this morning,

the power,

the perfect crime,

taking down the patriarchy,

the way we Liars saved the summer idyll and made it better,

the way we kept our family together by destroying some part of it—

all that is delusional.

The dogs are dead,