Page 15

My finger jumps off the screen. An involuntary recoil. I stare at the address until it sears itself onto my vision, the afterimage lingering when I blink.
I know of only one person who could have that address, and she’s been dead for more than a day. The realization forms a nervous tickle in my throat. I swallow hard before opening the email.
Quincy,I need to talk to you. It’s extremely important. Please, please don’t ignore this.
Beneath it is Lisa’s name and the same phone number written inside her book.
I read the email several times, the tickle in my throat transforming into a sensation that can only be described as fluttering. It feels like I’ve swallowed a hummingbird, its wings beating against my esophagus.
I check when the email was sent. Eleven p.m. Taking into account the several minutes it took for police to trace the 911 call and get to her house, it means that Lisa sent the email less than an hour before she killed herself.
I might have been the last person she ever tried to contact.
5.
Morning arrives gray and groggy. I awake to find Jeff already gone, off to meet his accused cop killer.
In the kitchen, a surprise awaits me: a vase filled not with flowers but baking tools. Wooden spoons and spatulas and a heavy-duty whisk with a handle as thick as my wrist. A red ribbon has been wrapped around the vase’s neck. Attached to it is a card.
I’m an idiot. And I’m sorry. You will always be my favorite sweet. Love, Jeff.
Next to the vase, the unfinished cupcakes resume staring at me. I ignore them as I take my morning Xanax with two swallows of grape soda. I then switch to coffee, mainlining it in the breakfast nook, trying to wake up.
My sleep had been plagued with nightmares, a phase I thought had passed. In the first few years after Pine Cottage, I couldn’t go a night without having one. They were the usual therapy fodder—running through the woods, Janelle stumbling from the trees, Him. Lately, though, I go weeks, even months, without having one.
Last night, my dreams were filled with reporters scratching at the windows and leaving bloody claw marks on the glass. Pale and thin, they moaned my name, waiting like vampires for me to invite them in. Instead of fangs, their teeth were pencils narrowed to ice-pick sharpness. Glistening chunks of sinew stuck to the tips.
Lisa made an appearance in one of the nightmares, looking exactly like the picture on her book jacket. The well-practiced form of her lipsnever wavered. Not even when she grabbed a pencil from one of the reporters and dragged its point across her wrists.
Her email was the first thing I thought of upon waking, of course. It spent the night sitting in my mind like a spring-loaded trap, waiting for the smallest bit of consciousness to set it off. It remains gripped to my brain as I down one cup of coffee, then another.
Foremost in my thoughts is the unshakable idea that, other than her aborted 911 call, I truly had been the last person Lisa tried to contact. If that’s the case, why? Did she want me, of all people, to try to talk her off whatever mental ledge she had crawled onto? Did my failure to check my email make me in some way responsible for her death?
My first instinct is to call Coop and tell him about it. I have no doubt he’d drop everything and drive into Manhattan for the second day in a row just to assure me that nothing about this is my fault. But I’m not sure I want to see Coop on consecutive days. It would be the first time that happened since Pine Cottage and the morning after, and it’s not an experience I long to repeat.
I text him instead, trying to keep it casual.
Call me when you get a chance. No rush. Nothing important.
But my gut tells me itisimportant. Or at least it has the potential to be. If it wasn’t important, why did I wake up thinking about it? Why is my next thought to call Jeff just to hear his voice, even though I know he’s in court, his cell phone switched off and shoved into the depths of his briefcase?
I try not to think about it, although that proves to be impossible. According to my phone, I’ve missed a dozen more calls. My voicemail is a swamp of messages. I listen to only one of them—a surprise message from my mother, who called at an hour when she knew I’d still be asleep. The latest of her constantly evolving attempts to avoid actual conversation.
“Quincy, it’s your mother,” her message begins, as if she doesn’t trust me to recognize her nasal monotone. “I was just woken up by a reporter calling to see if I had a comment about what happened to that Lisa Milner girl you were friends with. I told him he should talk to you. Thought you’d like to know.”
I see no point in calling her back. That’s the last thing my mother wants. It’s been that way ever since I returned to college after Pine Cottage. As a new widow, she wanted me to commute from home. When I didn’t, she said I was abandoning her.
Ultimately, though, it was me who got abandoned. By the time I finally graduated, she had remarried a dentist named Fred who came with three adult children from a previous marriage. Three happy, bland, toothy children. Not a Final Girl in the bunch. They became her family. I became a barely tolerated remnant of her past. A blemish on her otherwise spotless new life.
I listen again to my mother’s message, searching for the slightest hint of interest or concern in her voice. Finding none, I delete the voicemail and move on to that morning’s copy of theTimes.
To my surprise, an article about Lisa’s death rests at the bottom of the front page. I read it in one distasteful gulp.
MUNCIE, Ind.—Lisa Milner, a prominent child psychologist who was the lone survivor of a sorority-house massacre that shocked campuses nationwide, died at her home here, authorities confirmed yesterday. She was 42.
Most of the article focuses on the horrors Lisa witnessed that long-ago night. As if no other moments of her life mattered. Reading it gives me a glimpse of what my own obituary will be like. It churns my stomach.
Yet one sentence gives me pause. It’s near the bottom; almost like an afterthought.