That night with Detective Holloway and AD Massey feels like another lifetime. In the fourteen days following her arrest, she’s been charged; processed; admitted; screened for medical, dental, and mental health; assessed for trauma; and assigned a case worker named Aubrey, a flighty woman only a few years older than Anna who doesn’t seem cut out for the juvenile justice system. Anna should be home, packing for SUNY New Paltz. The semester will start next week, without her. A trial date hasn’t even been set.
“But you’re also totally delusional. You know that, right?”
This isn’t the first time Anna has considered the possibility that something may be off-balance with her “mental health and wellness,” as the counselors here like to say. At night, in her cot, she closes her eyes and sends a mental searchlight around the inside of her head, scanning for a sign, a clue, a patch of rot. But her mind stays inscrutable. And she passed her intake screening. No one has said a peep about mental illness, at least not to her face. Either she has everyone fooled, including herself, or her memories of that night are real.
“Maybe,” she concedes to Kaylee. “But I know what I remember. What I did.”
“Murder, Anna?” Kaylee squeaks. “You seriously think you killed some girl out in the Hamptons?”
Anna holds the receiver away from her ear until silence settles on the other end. She shifts her weight back and forth, back and forth, listening to the squish-squish of her sneakers. “Not murder, manslaughter,” she says softly.
“And the difference is?”
In the past two weeks, Anna has become an expert. “They’re charging me with manslaughter in the second degree. It means I recklessly caused her death.” And then concealed her body, a second felony. The two charges combined carry eight to twenty years in prison. Anna turns eighteen in December. If convicted, they probably will send her to Rikers Island. There’s been talk of shuttering the notorious jail complex for years, but it won’t be fast enough for Anna.
“Your memories are shit,” Kaylee says, shattering Anna’s thoughts, a rock into a sheet of glass. “You told them I was with you that night. Are you trying to punish me for what happened on the beach? Is that what this is about?”
It takes a minute for Anna to register what Kaylee’s asking. Her mind travels back a month and a half, to the Fourth of July, on the beach on Montauk. The last time she and Kaylee were together. “It was just a party. And I was never mad; I thought you were.” This isn’t about that, not even close. Isn’t really about Kaylee at all.
“You want to sink your own ship, fine.” Kaylee can’t see Anna flinch at her poor choice of words. “But leave me the hell out of it. All this time, I thought you were too messed up that night to remember anything. But apparently, you were much more messed up than I realized.”
“What do you—?”
“Listen to me, Anna. If you remember anything real, you have to know what happened—whatever happened—it wasn’t our fault.”
Anna tries to swallow, but her mouth is all sand and grit. “I said you were inside when she died,” she manages. “I told them you didn’t have anything to do with hiding her body.”
“No shit I didn’t. Because I wasn’t in the Hamptons, Anna. And neither were you. I don’t know how you got things so freaking scrambled. Mom and I had the cops here earlier this week, you know that? Wanted to have a little chat about my account of New Year’s Eve.”
Anna sucks in a sharp breath. “What did you tell them?”
“The truth, obviously. Well, the parts that mattered. That I never left Brooklyn. We never left Brooklyn.”
“But—” Anna wants it to be true. But she knows better now.
“No, you listen. The story you told police, the one they wanted me to confirm? Girl, you are way off, so let me jog your memory. We were at Starr’s. Everyone wanted to go dancing, but you were passed out on the couch. Mike and I got you in a cab, and you were home before ten. Got it?”
One more piece clicks into place for Anna. Kaylee got her in a cab. But Kaylee’s not telling the whole truth, because she got in that cab too. She was with Anna at Windermere. Anna remembers the three of them on the balcony together. Zoe’s silvery laugh in Anna’s ear. Kaylee pinching her cheek, holding back her hair. The freezing bite of the night wind rolling in off the ocean.
“Do you have a lawyer, Anna?” Kaylee asks, voice taut with exasperation.
“Of course I do.”
“And what does he say?”
“She says I shouldn’t have talked to the police without my mom present. Without hiring her first.”
Kaylee’s sigh is so loud Anna swears she can feel it blow through the phone line. “Well, I guess it’s too late for that now.”
From down the hall, the guard jerks her chin at Anna, taps her fingers to her wrist. Wrap it up.
“I have to go.”
“Tell them to stop sniffing around my place. Deep in your heart, Anna Cicconi, you know no good is going to come of this.”
“I really have to go.”
“What you need is to get your head on straight. Tell them you were wrong; you didn’t do it. Make that lawyer of yours get the charges dropped.”
But Anna did do it. How else can she explain everything she remembers about Herron Mills, about Zoe? She’s not sure if it really was manslaughter. What she remembers sounds a lot like an accident. But they told her Zoe didn’t drink, ever, not with the medication she was on. So it must have been Anna who got her drunk that night. Anna’s bad influence. Anna who behaved recklessly. It sounds a lot like the person she used to be. The person she was with Kaylee.
The guard starts to walk in her direction. She puts the receiver back in its cradle without saying goodbye.
“Excuse me?” Anna asks. “The update I requested to my approved visitors list. Do you know if it went through?”
“Can’t add anyone who isn’t family.” The guard ushers Anna away from the phone bank. “You know the rules.”
“But Aubrey said Pathways might make an exception, since family’s just my mom, and she can’t—”
“Take it up with the office, honey.” She motions to the inmate at the front of the line. “Next!”
5 THEN
June
Herron Mills, NY
MY THIRD EVENING at Clovelly Cottage, I post up by the pool with my sketchbook and charcoals as soon as dinner is cleared. While the light is still good, I want to capture the way the water looks like it’s vanishing clean into the landscape, inky and alchemical. I draw the pool first, then the lush yard behind, thin blades of grass fanning out to meet a robust bank of pristinely manicured trees. I brought my watercolor pencils and some oil paints too. Maybe once I’ve gotten a few sketches down, I’ll play around with painting the pool’s silvers and navies, the emeralds and laurels of the lawn, the way the sky is a soft powder blue until the first tendrils of orange and pink sluice across it like melting sherbet.
It gets dark too fast. By eight thirty, the pool lights have cast the patio in a bright wash of yellow, and the world beyond the water is pure black. The back of my throat itches, and I cough into the crook of my arm, but the itch only gets worse. Summer nights mean dark bars where the air-conditioning can’t compete with the body heat. Long walks on never-quite-empty beaches with Starr and Kaylee, the world soft and pill-blunt around us. Fumbling, boozy hookups that were better as stories after than they were in the moment. Summer means never sitting still. I don’t want to be back in Brooklyn, not exactly, but I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not working. Last night, I had unpacking to keep me busy once the stars came out. But tonight, I’m fully settled into the guest cottage / pool house, and at least three hours stretch between me and a reasonable bedtime.