The Next Time You See Me (31 page)

She pinched her eyes tight in relief and nodded.

They were close to the hill’s apex, Emily trying to mask her exertion by breathing through her nose, when Christopher touched her shoulder again. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

“What?”

He licked his chapped lips again.

“Why me? Why tell me? Why am I the one you’re—” His eyes widened and he swallowed. “The one you’re showing it to?”

She wondered what she should tell him, how much she could admit to.
Because you belong to me. Because you know me.
“Because you owe me,” she said, which was part of the truth—or just enough of it to leave him satisfied.

“Okay,” Christopher said. “Lead the way.”

2.

Christopher had never felt such a confusing and contradictory set of sensations as those he experienced on his walk into the woods with Emily. At the surface was a vibration, a kind of static charge—his pores had tightened, the little hairs all over his body had stiffened, and his jaws, while not chattering, exactly, were shivering against one another like plates in a dishwasher. Beneath that, it was harder to say. There was dread, a dread that made him want to turn tail and run—and fear, of both the body Emily had promised and Emily herself. Was he scared of her? Is that what all of his cruelty toward her—all of their cruelty—had amounted to? It was an easy answer, an answer that promised to release him from some of his guilt, but not good enough, he knew. He hadn’t forgotten that moment at the tennis courts. And now, too, mixed up in his fear and dread and curiosity was something like the excitement of those moments: a heady, uncomfortable anticipation that promised relief. What was wrong with him? Was he as weird—as much of a freak—as she was? He felt guilty for using the word
freak
again, even in his own mind, but none of this was normal. She should have gone to the police. Christopher would have to make her.

“Are we getting close?” he asked. They had slid down from the roadway into a slimy pile of black leaves. The air was cold and damp and close; he wished he’d worn his knit cap and gloves. His nostrils filled with the musty scent of autumn decay and he sneezed into the crook of his elbow. He was, he’d said many times to his parents, allergic to Kentucky; last year he’d broken out in rashes in both fall and spring, and the fact that so far this year he’d only had watery eyes and heavy sinuses made him think, with some regret, that he must be acclimating. Or assimilating.

“Yeah,” Emily said. Her cheeks were pink from the work of climbing the hill—pretty, almost. She pointed ahead at a dump site, where an old recliner and a dozen oozing bags of trash were huddled
beneath a line of small trees, as if they’d been rolled downhill like bowling balls. Christopher’s heart started pounding, but then Emily said, “We have to go around that and then over just one more hill,” so it slowed again slightly. Emily knew this terrain, walked it like she owned it, and he thought he sensed some eagerness in her manner now, as if the thing she were about to show him were not a body but a stabled horse she loved, or the secret entrance to a private garden.

The only sounds were their breathing and the crackle of leaves and branches underfoot. The light of the day was already gray. In another hour the sun would set; its low rays honeyed the crown of Emily’s head. The trees quivered in a slight chilling breeze, and a single red leaf spun down from above, landing neatly in his outstretched palm. There was a surreal quality to all of this, as if he’d entered Emily’s dreams. The feeling was a bit like déjà vu: he had been here before, walked this path, felt this same fear and anticipation. Maybe it was Emily’s manner, the way her self-consciousness had suddenly fallen away. She kept turning and catching his eye with a familiarity that assumed so much, too much—as if she knew him, as if he weren’t just some kid who had been briefly nice to her at school, and then briefly mean to her. At the top of the second hill she reached back and grasped his hand, and he was so startled by the action that he didn’t resist her, didn’t know he had the right to. Her palm was warm against his icy one.

“It’s just ahead,” she said. There was a tone of reverence in her voice.

His heart had surpassed its previous rapid rhythm, and he flushed down to his fingertips. She was looking at another rise in the land, this one hollowed out from beneath by long-ago erosion. There was a large tree, black with death, its roots dangling down like talons, as if the tree were a giant claw poised to push off from the embankment and spring toward them. A barbwire fence made a ragged line just past the point where the land sloped away, circling the tree and turning at an angle to disappear from sight. Christopher could hear, faintly, the bleating or whinnying of some kind of animals, sheep or
goats or mules. He’d grown up in the city and knew only as much about farm life as his childhood See ’n Say had taught him, and the alien sounds increased his sense of unreality.

Emily tugged his hand. “Come on,” she said.

They covered another dozen steps, and Christopher felt a sudden tension in Emily’s grasp—it tightened, and then she snatched her fingers away from his, making him feel a momentary sense of loss and helplessness. She hurried forward, stopped, head darting left and right. She made a sound, a sound almost like that of the unseen animals, a sob or a bleat, choked, primal. Before he could stop her she was on her knees and crawling through the leaves, pushing away stones and sticks, raking back dirt with her bare fingers. “It’s gone,” she said breathlessly, and when she turned, her eyes were wide and wild, and Christopher noticed for the first time how bluish the skin beneath them was, like dirty thumbprints. Tears started running down her cheeks, and her scurrying became more frantic, the sound of sorrow she emitted steadier and constant, just this creepy humming that he thought she must not have even known she was doing. He shuffled his feet and squeezed the handles of his backpack. His first thought was that she had gotten the place confused, and he started darting his own head around, casting his gaze, as though the body were something she had dropped and was in an obvious place she was just too hysterical to notice. His second thought, which intruded insidiously on the first, was that she was lying, putting on a show for attention. There was never a body. It was just something that Emily had come up with to get him out here, so that she could be alone with him, so that she could hold his hand. He wiped his fingers on his jeans and grimaced, backing away in quiet disbelief.

“Someone took it,” she was saying. “I put the rock and the branch on top of it. I know I did. But now the rock is over there”—she pointed toward the hollow under the tree—“and I don’t even see the branch.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Christopher muttered. He turned and started scurrying up the other side of the washout, heading back toward the
dump site and the road, and he felt Emily’s hands on him and almost screamed, which was stupid, because she was just a dumb girl with a crush on him, a weird girl who made up shit about dead bodies because she was that screwed up in the head about how to make a boy like her back, and what could
she
do to
him
? Hurt him? Outrun him? Even if she told people he’d come here with her, he’d lie and say he didn’t, and that’s what people would believe.

“Wait, Christopher,” she said, blubbering like a baby, and he was sick at her touch. She even smelled bad, he realized—really bad—like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. He hadn’t noticed that about her before, but like her hint about her parents, how hard they were on her, he quickly incorporated that detail into his understanding of her, how Emily-like it would be for her to not take regular baths, being poor and weird and gross. “Christopher, you have to believe me, it was here. It was really here. Somebody must have moved it.”

“I need to be back home,” Christopher said. “I’m going to be in a crapload of trouble over nothing.” He backed up again, pulling his arm away from her grasping hand. “I guess we’re even now.”

“It was here! Somebody moved it.”

“Bullshit!” Christopher shouted, now near tears despite himself. She grabbed at him again and he didn’t think—he just pushed as hard as he could, and she went flying and landed roughly on her backside, her sobs coming to a sudden stop as if the wind had been knocked out of her. He thought of how all of his friends would have laughed at the sight, how they would have cheered him on. “It’s bullshit, Emily. You’re lying and you know it. Just cut it out.”

“I’m not lying,” she said, so softly he barely heard her. She was a sight: hands grimed with dirt, the knees of her blue jeans brown and wet, eyes red from crying, and hair hanging in strings over her cheeks. “You have to believe me. I’m not lying to you.”

“Then you’re crazy,” Christopher said. “Either way, I don’t want you to ever speak to me again. Leave me alone, and leave Leanna alone. Don’t talk to us, and don’t spy on us, and maybe I won’t tell people that you’re a nutcase ranting about made-up bodies in the woods.”

It felt good to talk to her this way, to use his words like fists. He almost hoped she would keep arguing with him so he could say more. It was confusing, how much he felt pulled between pity and contempt, how one emotion flowed so easily into the other.

“All right?” he said.

She didn’t speak, and she didn’t nod. Her head dropped, and she covered her face with her hands, shoulders shaking silently.

“All right, then,” he told her, and he scrambled up the embankment toward Hill Street.

Chapter Twenty-Two

1.

Sarah’s day passed in a fog. She did her job. Mr. Anderson narrowed his brows at the needle as if preparing to give her grief, saw something in her face, and pinched his lips shut. She drew his blood without saying more than a perfunctory “Good morning” and “Thank you” to him, then moved on to the next room. At lunch she ate too much in the cafeteria, taking helpings of both the Salisbury steak and the lasagna, plus a banana pudding for dessert, then rushed to the bathroom half an hour later to vomit. It was stupid, she kept telling herself—stupid to be this upset, to succumb to this despair. She didn’t know anything for certain yet. But she had by now read the article in its entirety, seen the fact that the man was spotted with the missing woman at Nancy’s the same night Sarah had met Wyatt there. Between this detail and the similarities in the drawing, there was no disputing the fact that the image was of him—that Wyatt was the man the police were looking for. She couldn’t kid herself; she wasn’t the type. And so Wyatt must have also been the man at the gas station with Veronica Eastman, and what did
that
mean, exactly? If Sarah weren’t the woman who had just spent the night in this man’s bed, lacing her arms and legs with his—if she
weren’t the woman who had nursed him back to life, to the desire to live, and seen how sweetly sincere he was, how thoughtful, how tender—would she believe there was a chance he wasn’t connected somehow to the woman’s disappearance?

No. She wouldn’t.

Back at the nurses’ station she reread the article surreptitiously, not wanting Jan to notice her, hoping to find some detail that changed things, that made all of her darkest suspicions groundless. There was nothing. She thought back to that night at Nancy’s, to the group of young men that Wyatt had accompanied there, and realized that any one of them could be making the same connection she was now making—or had perhaps made it already. She wondered if she should call Wyatt at home, to see if he was still there and how he sounded, but her hand kept faltering short of the telephone. What would be worse? Hearing the phone ring and ring and ring, or hearing his voice, trying to decide what she could say in response to it?

The patient call alert sounded loudly, but no more loudly than it always did, and yet Sarah jumped. The newspaper fell out of her hand and onto the floor.

“What’s with you today?” Jan said. “You want me to get that?”

Sarah nodded silently.

“All right, then.” Jan put down the fashion magazine she was reading and rose. “But if someone filled his britches, you’re getting the next five.”

“That’s a deal,” Sarah said softly.

By five o’clock she was a nervous wreck. She had told Wyatt she would come to his house as soon as her shift ended, to make him dinner but also to check his blood pressure, which had been better this morning but still not good. Even now, as torn up as she felt about what she had seen in the paper, she couldn’t just shut off feeling concern about him. If he had not continued to show improvement over the course of today—and she had insisted that he stick to his bed and easy chair, not exerting himself—then her plan had been to insist
he go back to the hospital immediately. But now, with Jan’s curiosity piqued, could she? And more important: Did she want to?

She went to her car in a daze and sat behind the wheel for a while; when she finally turned her key in the ignition, the digital clock read 5:20. He would be wondering about her by now but not yet concerned. He would think she had swung by the grocery store on the way to his place, that she was picking up ingredients for dinner. That was, in fact, what she had intended to do. A heart-healthy romantic dinner: she’d originally planned, driving in to work, to buy fish, brown rice, salad greens. Wyatt had mentioned to her that he would miss the catfish at Gary’s Pit Barbecue, and so she was going to whip up her almond-coated, oven-baked tilapia, a recipe she’d happened upon years ago in a
Ladies’ Home Journal
and trotted out whenever she was making a new go at a diet. She had even thought that she might splurge on some candles. How absurd this all seemed now.

She started driving toward his place. It was cold out, but she rolled down her window halfway and hoped the brisk air would clear her head, would make her see the right course of action. She could confront him, demand an explanation. Perhaps she owed him that. Perhaps she owed herself that. She could go to the police. Her thumbs tapped out a beat on the steering wheel, her breath hitched. She imagined the conversation with him:
I saw you in the paper. I know it’s you. What happened? Don’t lie to me.
She tried to script for him a response that would explain everything, that would make it all right for her to love him.
She just gave me a ride home. I honestly don’t know what happened to her after that.
Or maybe the man in the sketch wasn’t him, it was all a ridiculous coincidence, and he had an alibi proving that he wasn’t with Veronica Eastman at the gas station.