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Inside the apartment, I head straight for the kitchen and take a second Xanax. The grape soda that follows is a rush of sweetness that, coupled with the sugar from the tea, makes my teeth ache. Yet I keep on drinking, taking several gentle sips as I pull the stolen iPhone from my pocket. A brief examination of the phone tells me that its former owner’s name is Kim and that she doesn’t use any of its security features. I can see every call, web search, and text, including a recent one from a squarejaw named Zach.
Up for a little fun tonight?
For kicks, I text him back:Sure.
The phone beeps in my hand. Another text from Zach. He’s sent a picture of his dick.
Charming.
I switch off the phone. A precaution. Kim and I may look similar, but our ringtones differ wildly. Then I turn the phone over, staring at the silvery back that’s smudged with fingerprints. I wipe it clean until I can see my reflection, as distorted as if I were looking into a fun-house mirror.
This will do nicely.
I finger the gold chain that’s always around my neck. Hanging from it is a small key, which opens the only kitchen drawer kept locked at all times. Jeff assumes it’s for important website paperwork. I let him believe that.
Inside the drawer is a jangling menagerie of glinting metal. A shiny tube of lipstick and a chunky gold bracelet. Several spoons. A silver compact plucked from the nurses’ station when I left the hospital following Pine Cottage. I used it to stare at my reflection during the long drive home, making sure I was actually still there. Now I study the warped reflections looking back at me and feel that same sense of reassurance.
Yes, I still exist.
I deposit the iPhone with the other objects, close and lock the drawer, then put the key back around my neck.
It’s my secret, warm against my breastbone.
3.
I spend the afternoon avoiding the unfinished cupcakes. They seem to stare at me from the kitchen counter, seeking the same treatment as the two decorated ones sitting a few feet away, smug in their completeness. I know I should finish them, if only for the therapeutic value. After all, that’s the First Commandment on my website—Baking Is Better Than Therapy.
Usually, I believe it. Baking makes sense. What Lisa Milner did does not.
Yet my mood is so dark I know that not even baking can help. Instead, I go to the living room, fingertips skipping over unread copies ofThe New Yorkerand that morning’sTimes, trying to fool myself into thinking I don’t know exactly where I’m heading. I end up there anyway. At the bookcase by the window, using a chair to reach the top shelf and the book that rests there.
Lisa’s book.
She wrote it a year after her encounter with Stephen Leibman, giving it the sad-in-retrospect title ofThe Will to Live: My Personal Journey of Pain and Healing.It was a minor bestseller. Lifetime turned it into a TV movie.
Lisa sent me a copy immediately after Pine Cottage happened. Inside, she had written,To Quincy, my glorious sister in survival. I’m here if you ever need to talk.Beneath it was her phone number, the digits tidy and blocklike.
I never intended to call. I told myself I didn’t need her help. Considering that I couldn’t remember anything, why would I?
But I wasn’t prepared for having every newspaper and cable news network in the country exhaustively cover the Pine Cottage Murders. That’s what they all called it—the Pine Cottage Murders. It didn’t matter that it was more of a cabin than a cottage. It made for a good headline. Besides, Pine Cottage was its official name, burned summer camp–style onto a cedar plank hung above the door.
Other than the funerals, I laid low. When I left the house, it was for doctors’ appointments or therapy sessions. Because a refugee camp of reporters had occupied the lawn, my mother was forced to usher me out the back door and through the neighbor’s yard to a car waiting on the next block. That still didn’t keep my high school yearbook photo from being slapped on the cover ofPeople, the words “sole survivor”brushing my acne-ringed chin.
Everyone wanted an exclusive interview. Reporters called, emailed, texted. One famous newswoman—repulsion forbids me from using her name—pounded on the front door as I sat on the other side, back pressed to the rattling wood. Before leaving, she shoved a handwritten note under the door offering me a hundred grand for a sit-down interview. The paper smelled of Chanel No. 5. I threw it into the trash.
Even with a broken heart and stab wounds still zippered with stitches, I knew the score. The press was intent on turning me into a Final Girl.
Maybe I could have handled it better had my home life been even the slightest bit stable. It wasn’t.
By then my father’s cancer had returned with a vengeance, leaving him too weak and nauseated from chemo to help soothe my ragged emotions. Still, he tried. Having almost lost me once, he made it clear my well-being was his first priority. Making sure I ate, slept, didn’t wallow in my grief. He just wanted me to be okay, even when he obviously wasn’t. Near the end, I began to think I had survived Pine Cottage only because my father had somehow made a pact with God, exchanging his life for mine.
I assumed my mother felt the same way, but I was too scared and guilt-ridden to ask. Not that I had much of a chance. By that point, she had descended into desperate housewife mode, determined to keep upappearances no matter the cost. She had convinced herself that the kitchen needed remodeling, as if new linoleum could somehow blunt the one-two punch of cancer and Pine Cottage. When she wasn’t grimly shuttling my father and me to various appointments, she was comparing countertops and sorting through paint samples. Not to mention continuing her strict, suburban regimen of spin classes and book clubs. To my mother, bowing out of a single social obligation would have been an admission of defeat.
Because my patchouli-scented therapist said it was good to have a stable support system, I turned to Coop. He did what he could, God love him. He fielded more than a few desperate late-night phone calls. Yet I needed someone who had gone through an ordeal similar to Pine Cottage. Lisa seemed to be the best person for the job.
Rather than flee the scene of her trauma, Lisa stayed in Indiana. After six months of recuperating, she returned to that very same college and earned a degree in child psychology. When she accepted her diploma, the crowd at her graduation ceremony gave her a standing ovation. A wall of press in the back of the auditorium captured the moment in a strobe of flashbulbs.
So I read her book. I found her number. I called.