Good Girl Bad (45)
Left, right, left.
She needs to get there, but she doesn’t know where “there” is.
She must find Tabby.
Will she ever get a chance to tell her how sorry she is?
What can she say? What does it all mean? How can she explain it?
Will she get a chance to fix it?
Is it even possible?
Here Rebecca stops again. She bends over, hands on her knees. Her eyes aren’t clear anymore. And she has the terrible feeling that once she starts crying, she might never, ever stop.
42
Disappearance Day
“No, Tabby!”
Leroy is on his feet immediately, adrenaline surging through him and propelling him up with so much force he goes too far.
He tries to correct himself.
His ankle turns underneath him, and he arcs away from Tabby, his face toward her. Blind panic.
For a moment, it’s like he’s suspended there, connected to Tabby by his eyes, his mouth open as though he’s going to tell her something.
Don’t jump.
Live.
I love you.
You’ll be okay.
But all she hears is his scream, and a sickening crunch as he hits the rocks below her.
Then a gentle splash.
She lets out a sob, collapsing over the wall, straining to see in the dark.
Later, she’ll replay her actions, thinking of all the things she could have done. But what she’ll remember is running down the bank, wading into the water, calling Leroy’s name.
Feeling more alone than she ever has in her whole entire life.
She’ll remember feeling paralyzed, not knowing what to do, crying, cursing her stupidity for leaving her phone behind, for not being able to call for help.
Two phones, and she forgot them both.
There are houses on either side of the river, no more than five hundred meters away, but in her distress, it doesn’t even occur to her to knock on a door.
She stumbles around in the river in the dark until she is so cold she thinks she might die, and she wishes, in fact, that she would.
43
Thursday
Rebecca walks in the door a minute after Casey.
She’d started and stopped all the way home.
She needs to tell someone.
Rejection.
The link had suddenly seemed as clear as day. How did she not see it before?
When she feels rejected by Tabby.
Nate, too.
When she feels rejected, she loses her mind.
She wants them to love her. She wants to be loved. And when she feels unloved, it’s Moira who she sees. Moira who she lost. But she didn’t just lose Moira, did she? She lost her parents too. They could never love her after that. How could they?
It’s like a movie reel in slow motion.
Click, click, click.
Everything so simple.
She hungers for their love. And when she feels like it is withheld from her, she attacks them so that they’re the hurt ones, not her. So she feels powerful, and buries that little secret so far down, it’s drowned out by all the other noise.
Unlovable.
The word whispers in her ear, dances and swirls around her, and she had had to stop, sobbing so hard her knees gave out, and she’d collapsed on the sidewalk, great tearing sobs barking from her gaping mouth.
She knew she exerted power to get things.
She just never knew that the things she thought she got—compliance, deference, everything the way she liked it—were not the things she really got.
What she really got was to bury her pain and her shame. She lost her sister, and her parents didn’t love her, and the two were tied together, one didn’t exist without the other, and she couldn’t bear either of them, she couldn’t bear anything to feel as bad as that, and she knew how to drown them out, with a roar so loud that no one would ever see them, ever know that they were there.
Most especially herself.
Rebecca stops abruptly.
Casey, Cheryl, Rob, and Nate all stare at her.
Casey speaks first. “We accessed the data on Leroy’s phone. You weren’t exactly honest with us about why Tabby and Leroy left that night, were you, Rebecca?” Her voice is harder than Nate has heard it, a grinding edge to it that is almost frightening.
He doesn’t know what his face belies. He can’t truly believe it. For all the hell she’s put him through, he just can’t believe that Rebecca would kill a dog. As though it was nothing.
He stares at her, as though she could have been any stranger at all, walking in to their old kitchen.
He thought he knew the darkness in her. He thought he had seen her at her worst.
He feels now that he knows nothing.
“No.” Rebecca shakes her head. “I lied to you. But that’s not the worst thing.” Her eyes find Nate’s, and there is something new there, something he can’t quite place. Something open, instead of closed? Pain, instead of anger?
“I was lying to myself, too. Mostly, to myself.” She wants to tell Nate, to explain, but four pairs of cold eyes make her falter.
She turns back to Casey.
“I moved Tabby’s phone. I tried to get into it, to see if she’d told Leroy anything. I couldn’t crack the code. Later, after Gen told us the code, I deleted Tabby’s messages to Leroy that night. I know it’s all my fault. She was running from me. I didn’t want you to see how bad I could be. I didn’t want to admit it. Or that I knew Leroy would have been trying to help her. That that’s why they left. And I will answer to that. But that’s not the most important thing now. The most important thing is finding her. And I think I know where she might be.”