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“There’s no recovering from that,” Sam says. “If you go to the cops, life as you know it will be over.”
The words are ugly in her mouth, even though she’s only telling the truth. Yet I hate her all the same. Hate her for showing up, barging into my life, bringing me into this park. Mixed with that hate is another, more unwieldy emotion.
Despair.
It bubbles inside me, making me sweat and cry and feel so helpless that I long to plunge into the pool’s water and never resurface.
“What are we going to do?” I say, hopelessness splitting my voice.
“Nothing,” Sam says.
“So we just leave the park and pretend it never happened?”
“Pretty much.”
She picks up her jacket, which I had shrugged off at the water’s edge. She puts it around my shoulders again, nudging me forward. Our pace is slower this time, both of us keeping watch for signs of police. We take a different route out of the park.
Few people see us on our way from Central Park West to my building. Those who do probably write us off as two drunk girls stumbling home. My dizzy swaying helps sell the charade.
Once home, I fill the tub in the guest bathroom and peel off my clothes. The amount of blood on them is gut-churning. It’s not as bad as the white-dress-turned-red at Pine Cottage, but close. Bad enough that I start sobbing again as I lower myself into the tub. Tendrils of pink form in the water, swirling slightly before vanishing into nothingness. I close my eyes and tell myself everything about tonight will disappear in the same manner. A flash of color quickly gone. The man in the park will live. Because he was carrying a knife, he won’t mention what I did to him. Everything will be forgotten in a few days, weeks, months.
I examine my knuckles and see that they’ve turned a ghastly bright pink. Pain pulses through them. A similar ache throbs in the foot I had used to kick the man into unconsciousness.
More sensations from earlier in the night come back to me. The pulling of my hair. Seeing Him crouched on the floor, bloody knife within his grasp.
Memories.
Not of tonight but of ten years ago.
Of Pine Cottage.
Of things I thought I had forgotten.
I tell myself that they can’t be. That almost everything bad about that night has been sliced from my mind. But I know I’m wrong.
I had remembered something.
Rather than sit up, I hunch down farther in the tub, hoping the hot water will wash it all away. I don’t want to remember what happened at Pine Cottage. That’s the reason I’ve mentally cut it out of my brain, right? Because it was all too horrible to keep in my head.
Yet like it or not, there’s no denying something has come back to me tonight. Nothing major. Just a brief flash of memory. Like a faded photograph. But it’s enough to make me shiver even while neck-deep in the steaming tub.
There’s a quick knock at the door. A warning from Sam that she’s about to enter. She manages one step before being stopped cold by my bloody clothes on the tiled floor. Wordlessly, she scoops them up.
“What are you going to do with them?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about it. I know what to do,” she says before carrying them out of the bathroom.
Yet I am worried. About the memories that have suddenly scurried back into my consciousness. About the man in the park. About why Sam stayed back and watched as I beat him senseless, as if it were simply another one of her unspoken tests.
Suddenly, I’m struck with a thought. A question, really, made hazy and distant by the steam rising off the water and my own exhaustion.
How does Sam know what to do with my bloody clothes?
And another: Why was she so calm as we fled the scene of my crime?
Now that I think about it, she was more than calm. She was utterly thorough in the way she whisked me from the scene, making sure to shield me and the blood from onlookers, finding a water source in which I could be cleansed.
No one could be that efficient in such a situation. Not unless they had done it before.