“You didn’t have to kill her.”
Noreen held her breath for a moment and stopped crying. She looked at me, and I saw a different woman. Furious. Rageful. “I didn’t mean to kill her,” she said slowly, each word dripping from her mouth like acid. “I just needed her to quiet down.”
“Well, she did.”
“And now what?”
“I don’t know.” I turned in a circle, and that’s when I spotted something. It was a small tooth in the corner by the blackboard. Noreen must’ve knocked it out when she hit Tiffany. I don’t know why, but I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket. “We have to call the police.”
“No!” Noreen reached out for me, her eyes wide with terror. “We can’t call the police. We can’t let anyone know what happened. It’ll ruin us. They’ll put me in jail and take my family away. Jackson will take the girls and I’ll never see them again.”
“It was an accident.”
“The police won’t see it that way. They’ll put us both behind bars, and we’ll rot there for the rest of our lives. No, we can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.”
Noreen scrambled to her feet and went to my desk. She grabbed my jacket from the back of my chair and was moving before I knew what she was doing. She was in survival mode.
“I love you, and I’m not going to hang us out to dry,” she mumbled. “I know this isn’t right or ethical or even halfway sane, but I need you to just trust me here. Can you do that?”
I looked at her, but I didn’t know what to say. Maybe shock was taking hold.
She held up my jacket. “I’m going to wrap this around her head to stop the bleeding from getting all over the place. We’re going to put her body in the coat closet in the back of the room, clean up this mess, and you come back later tonight when the janitorial crew is gone. Take her somewhere and bury her. When she doesn’t come home, we’ll act as shocked as everyone else in town, and we’ll volunteer to help look for her. Day and night. As long as it takes. After enough time goes by, the police will stop searching and we can all go about our lives.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Are you serious?”
She shrugged and smiled as if we were arguing about who was going to do the dishes.
“Do you have a better idea?” she asked. “Because I don’t. Do you want to confess?”
“I want to call the police. There’s nothing to confess. It was an accident.”
“They won’t see it that way. A little girl is dead at the hands of two adults who were having an affair. How do you think that looks? How do you think the police and the judge and the jury and the rest of the town will see it? You can’t kill a child and get off on a misunderstanding. Her parents will want to see justice. They’ll ask for the death penalty.” Noreen started crying again. “I was just trying to make her stop.”
It was my first step into the abyss. Love, fear, guilt, confusion overwhelmed me, and so I simply handed my freedom over as if we were trading baseball cards. “Okay, I’ll do it. You go home and act normal. No hysterics. Be yourself.”
“I’ll try,” Noreen replied. She was shaking all over. “Do you love me?”
“Of course.”
“Then we have no choice. We have to do this.”
I got my arms under the little girl’s body and lifted her off the floor.
“Wait,” Noreen said as she fumbled through my desk. She came away with a pair of scissors. “I want a piece of her hair to remind me of what I’ve done. I don’t ever want to forget. I don’t ever want to give myself the satisfaction of moving on. I want to remember what we did and what we’re doing. Always.”
We didn’t know we were passing the point of no return on that sunny afternoon, but we should have. We should’ve realized you can’t do something like that and go back to the way things used to be.
That’s not how fate works.
12
James sat in the middle of the basement, his arthritic hands gently caressing the rubber treads of his wheelchair. He looked at the digital clock that had been set up next to the television. It was flashing 12:00 over and over. What good was a clock that didn’t tell the time? At least he had the windows to tell him if it was day or night. He couldn’t see out of them, but he could see that it was night outside. The woman whose name he couldn’t quite reach in the fog had told him it was raining, but he had no proof of such news. His room might as well have been on Mars. He couldn’t see anything but light and dark. There were no other details beyond the concrete walls that surrounded him, dressed in drywall and painted a calming yellow to try and make him feel like he was living in an apartment. But the reality was, he was trapped in that room, in his chair, and within his failing mind. He was a prisoner in every sense of the word.
James spun around and wheeled himself to the landing when a different set of legs started down the stairs. These legs were thicker. Longer. Brown leather boots and khaki pants.
“You look familiar,” James said as he backed away and let the man come all the way down. “We’ve met, I think. I can’t remember what you told me your name was.”
“Not important,” the man replied. “It’s time for bed.”
“Where’s Bonnie?”
“Who?”
“Bonnie? Where is she? I need to see her. I think something might’ve happened. I think Noreen got ahold of her.”
The man ignored him and walked behind the wheelchair before grabbing the two handles and pushing James toward the bedroom portion of the space.
“I think she might be hiding,” he continued. “I can’t find her, and if I can’t find her, then that means something might’ve happened. Have you seen her?”
“You’re not making sense,” the man said without any inflection in his voice. “No one knows who Bonnie is, and it doesn’t matter if you think she’s hiding or whatever. You won’t remember any of this come tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing to say.”
The man remained quiet as he pushed the wheelchair to the edge of the bed, engaged the brake, then came around to face James. He unhooked each leg from the chair but left them in the braces, easing them to the floor.
“How long have I been here? I don’t remember ever doing this before. Please.”
The man bent down, laced his arms under James’s, and lifted him out of his seat, spinning him quickly and dropping him onto the bed. Before James could move himself, the man straightened his legs, positioned his torso so it aligned with the rest of his body, gently placed his head on the pillow, and pulled the covers up to his chest.
“Am I going to bed?”
“Yes.”
“I need to change into my pajamas.”
The man pulled the covers back. “You already did before.”
James looked down and saw he was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas. He had no memory of putting them on. “I . . . I . . .”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me you don’t remember doing this tomorrow night too. That’s why it doesn’t matter what my name is or where Bonnie is or whether Noreen has her or whatever else you have on your mind. None of it will matter because you’ll wake up with the same questions tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, and to be honest, I have enough to worry about. When we get to the end of all of this, we can take a breath, but for now, I just don’t have the patience or the time.”