The Telling (4 page)

The good and bad are indistinguishable in the dark.

I was in shock. There was a drumbeat in my head. I clawed at the window, leaving bloody finger streaks on the glass. I don't think I spoke, or else I never stopped. Finally the car parked. It was only a mile away, but it felt as if we'd been traveling for an hour. I jammed the window button and led with my head. I hit the pavement, scraped my shoulder, popped up, and started sprinting in the direction we'd come from.

I lost a flip-flop after a yard. I was dizzy and staggering. Maggie caught me easily, yelling, “Call the police. Call the cops.” I tried to throw her off. She was stronger than me, her wiry fingers locking around my arms. She shouted right in my ear, “You can only help him by staying here and calling the cops.” And that's the worst thing I've ever done. I didn't tell Maggie that she should call the cops. I didn't run for Ben. I trusted her. I called the police like I would have to report a dog in a car with the windows up on a hot day.

Gant's police force arrived. They searched for Ben and his attacker. They took pictures of the evidence. The investigation was hopeful initially. This was Gant. The police would do their jobs; they'd find the person who stopped our car; Ben survived the attack and the authorities would find him. I'm not sure if Sweeny doubted Maggie immediately. But the police told Dad that they were suspicious of Maggie's account the following day.

The first red flag was the improbability of Maggie's version. How
did a man with a painted face just appear on the highway? Why would Ben have stopped the car for a man like that? There were flares of alarm as Maggie worked with a sketch artist the morning after the attack. Each time she described him, other than the paint, his features varied. Her descriptions produced twelve sketches of twelve very different-looking men. The police grew impatient.

Unfortunately, I couldn't help. I'd gone to sleep and woken up to a world more dangerous. One where I didn't know the rules, or else there were none. A shadow man, I told the police. No features. No identifiable details. A variation of darkness in the night that I'd opened my eyes to, watched steal Ben away, and then lost. Gradually, in the days after, the hopeful talk about finding Ben alive, or at all, tapered off, until on the third afternoon I visited the police station with my dad and the officers, and Sweeny began using that pitiless word,
murder
.

I got the impression that they'd been using it for a while, quietly, hesitantly trying it out. The experts said that Ben had been stabbed at least twenty times, and the first few and bloodiest wounds were inflicted in the driver's seat. The spatter in the car, on the highway, and on the rocks told the story. Ben had lost more than half his blood. It was a near impossibility that he could have lived, even had he not been thrown thirty feet.

They couldn't find Ben's body. He was gone by the time the police followed the trail of blood across the road, trickling over the bluff, and to the tide pools below. That didn't surprise anyone. Tides converge a few hundred yards offshore, and the sound is deeper and rougher on that side of the island. The shadow man tossed Ben over, his bones broke on the rocks, and the tide swept him away. The coast
guard searched, the chance he'd never be found increasing with each passing hour. There are schools of fish that nibble at dead flesh, and sharks as big as cars, and inlets for a body to drift into. The waters are carved up, with shipping lanes full of tankers and ferries with blades that could chop up remains. Three years ago a boat sank off a neighboring island, and two of the passengers still haven't been recovered.

On the fourth day, there hadn't been so much as one false tip or sighting of a stranger in Gant. The police began to discuss alternative explanations, including Maggie not being as innocent as she claimed. On the seventh day, Maggie Lewis left her family's trailer—a neighbor reported seeing her load a suitcase into her trunk—and drove away.

The details of Ben's death were all over Gant, and everyone accepted the only reasonable explanation. Like everything in Gant, Ben's murder came down to money. We had it and Maggie didn't, so she was a liar. It was a carjacking gone wrong. Maggie either recognized the man responsible or else she was working with him. Maggie hadn't even belonged in Gant; she only came to school here from off the island because her rightful high school was overcrowded. Maggie was scorned and Ben was leaving her. The SUV was pricey and a gift from our parents. Ben had cash in his wallet. The man stood in the road or else he waved the car down. Who knows, maybe Maggie convinced Ben the stranger was harmless?
Pull over,
she urged. Ben didn't give the car up easily.
He wouldn't have,
people said, nodding at his bravery,
not with his little stepsister asleep inside
. Ben was tall, broad, and strong, and people figured he'd fought back. Yes, a carjacking turned brutal murder.

The police assumed that the crime went so badly that Maggie
made up an absurd tale about a man with a painted face who appeared on the road to confuse the authorities and escape suspicion. All the bizarre details were her embellishments to make the crime seem like so much more than what it had been. She kept his identity a secret, even as the police threatened to charge her as an accomplice without his name. Then, before the police could prove that Maggie was at fault, she ran.

By that time, other than to attend the funeral, I wasn't leaving the house. School was out for the summer—not that I would have gone to classes anyway. I remained curled into a ball when Willa sat at the foot of my bed. I refused to speak when Dad brought grief counselors; I didn't move when Dad sobbed and begged me to come downstairs, to eat something, to let him open the curtains for a little sun. I collapsed into myself—my knees to my chest, my heels to the backs of my thighs, my head tucked under my arms. The only way I could stand the pain was to be as small as possible. It was simple. If there was less of me, there was less to ache.

The whistle of the espresso machine traveled upstairs; the putter of the mail truck reached me as it crept by in the afternoon; the front door shook the house as Dad went for appointments; the bird cry of his phone woke me when he worked from his study. It was a fever dream of the ordinary. How was life going on as it had before? I wouldn't—couldn't—do it. Not with Ben gone.

So instead, for twenty-eight days, I relived our shared childhood. No. Lived is wrong.
Lived
means too much and
imagined
means too little. I wasn't a kid talking to her invisible friend or playing with a plastic castle. But I also wasn't a girl gone mental, gabbing on with the ghost in the corner.

I would stay in bed and watch our adventures as the curtain of my eyelids dropped. It was like watching the play of my life. As kids Ben and I were drunk off make-believe. At the spring we were natives taming the wild. In the dinghy on the harbor we were lost at sea, the pretend so real it would take a gallon of water for me to stop being thirsty. In the dining room we built elaborate and colorful blanket forts—
cathedrals,
really. We'd stay inside their walls for hours as Ben told stories of cannibal pirates, mad kings, pitchfork-wielding scarecrows, and bloodthirsty lunatics.

There were hundreds, all the sort of dark, twisted fairy tales you find in dusty, yellowed books. Except these weren't from books—they were out of Ben's head.
They were ours.
And no matter the faraway land or the plot or the crimes of the villains, Ben always made the two of us the heroes. We were better and braver versions of Ben and Lana McBrook. Ben's fictive self defeated beasts. Mine was the warrior, bloody-knuckled after every fight. It was good against evil, and we always won.

I was ten, eleven, and twelve when Ben told them. They'd dazzled me like thundering fireworks lighting up the sky or a traveling acrobatic circus. I was tipsy and amazed, and like all things magical, it was impossible to recall how they'd worked. Their acts became disjointed. The details were weathered by time. I hadn't bothered to memorize them just like I've never memorized my favorite books. They were mixed in with all the other random stuff of life: the birthday cake preferences of my family members; the whickering echoes of laughter as we roamed the canals in Venice on my thirteenth birthday; fireside ghost tales told during fifth-grade camp. I set about piecing our stories together, using the fragments floating in my head.

It was better than getting out of bed and leaving my lightless room. I didn't want to see that Gant had returned to its version of normal—the nowhere place everyone pretended was the center of the universe, population every single person worth a damn.

Ben was gone. Maggie had gotten away with her part in it. And I never thought I'd see her again, until she showed up dead,
here
, at the bottom of our spring.

T
he police bring flashlights; their beams make slices in the dark, cuts that heal as soon as they're opened. Voices intensify as they spot Maggie's body. Josh explains how we found her, what we were doing before, and how he tried to revive her. He pilots us forward. I wonder at the calm making him stand straight over the dead girl. Each sentence is delivered levelly. When questioned we give mostly identical answers, our words spiraling around us. I get lost on a tangent, yammering to an officer about coming here since I was little, learning to dive with Ben.

Soon we're herded away from the spring; told we'll need to come into the police station and wait for the detective who'll head the investigation before we're sent home.

I wonder if it will be Detective Sweeny arriving from Seattle. Before Ben, Gant never needed a homicide detective. It used to be the kind of idyllic place that sells postcards and waterfront homes to dot-com millionaires. I haven't seen Sweeny since the last time she visited our house, the day Maggie disappeared. Sweeny headed back to Seattle, I assume. No one could question Maggie if she was
MIA, and they hadn't had enough evidence to arrest her anyway. She vanished, and with her went everything she knew about Ben's killer.

This is why a shot of awful glee cuts through me as I glance at Maggie's body for the last time. It doesn't last. I want Maggie to look defeated. Instead the ground fades from under her and she's floating, luminous and otherworldly. She looks powerful and wicked, a sleeping, supernatural creature straight from my childhood. I swing my arms against my sides, trying to scrape off the sensation of Maggie, rubbery and goose-pimpled as raw chicken skin.

I'm guided into a police cruiser. I realize the others have been filtered in different directions. Someone's drawn a fist with a middle finger up on the outside of the cruiser's windshield. The defogger kicks in as we accelerate on the two-lane highway. I watch the picture disappear. Ben and I used to leave doodles in the steam on windows. More like Ben drew and I doodled. Ben loved to reinvent the ordinary. Using pencils and his sketchbook, he reimagined a potholed parking lot as a veiny metropolis for a civilization of insects. He'd draw sailboats in the steam on the kitchen windows that faced the harbor, giving the illusion that they were on water. Once, I went down to breakfast to find a whole fleet of them.

I rejoin the others as we're led through the back door of the police station and to the waiting room, its framed flat-screen TV on mute, showing a Mariners game. I sink into a leather chair next to Carolynn. Opposite a reception counter, there's a bank of desks, uniforms crowded between them, heads bent, little more than susurrant voices reaching us. I pull my knees into my chest to make myself small.

Willa is across from me, staring blankly at the tops of her shoes.
Willa is usually like the heroines of the mysteries she watches on PBS. Steady gaze, cool calculating mind two steps ahead, a snappy comeback that strikes the antagonist between the eyes ten minutes after she leaves the room and they belatedly grasp her true meaning. I've never seen Willa go catatonic.

Becca's feline eyes are shifty and concerned. “When can we go home?” she calls to the officers amid the desks. No response. She whispers under her breath, words coming fast, “If they tell my mom we were drinking out there, I'll get sent to live with my dad. Mom is just looking for an excuse. And my stepmom hates me. She doesn't wear makeup and never cuts her hair and doesn't believe in soy milk and they don't even have a Starbucks nearby.”

“This is bullshit. They're treating us like we aren't islanders,” Duncan complains. I cringe. The way some kids, even some adults, refer to themselves as
islanders
in Gant drives me crazy. All that
us
versus
them
stuff does. I didn't used to notice it. But then I got to see Gant through Ben's eyes, an outsider's, once he got older and started forming opinions. After that it was impossible to go back and act like Gant is normal. Willa moved here when she was nine and she's said similar things about Gant, albeit not as loudly. Most places don't have so many fro-yo and cold-pressed juice shops, and kids aren't given sparkly new luxury cars, and parents aren't usually new-moneyed, working in tech, or island families whose ancestors built Gant.

Carolynn twirls her finger in the air with the look of someone impossible to horrify. “We found a body—Maggie's. There were beer bottles everywhere, and we weren't supposed to be out there past dusk. It looks shady. They weren't going to give us gold stars and say, ‘Drink on,' ” she says.

Josh holds his head in his hands. His dry hair is the color of honey; wayward and fluffy. I don't want to think that he's sad about someone like Maggie, but then I think how I probably wouldn't like him if he were the kind of boy who wasn't sad about a dead girl.

Even though the fruitless investigation, the hunt for the man on the highway, and the search for Maggie had died down by the time I started hanging out with the core, they still know all about it. They went to school with Ben and Maggie just like I did. Ben ate lunch in the quad with the core and the populars. They belonged to the same little community at school; they went to the same parties; they played the same drinking games. And even though Maggie wasn't one herself, they put up with her for Ben. While it's true that Gant's the kind of place where grown-ups smile tightly over a subject as messy as Maggie Lewis, and they're apt to remind the speaker that Maggie wasn't from Gant, my peers don't have as much restraint.