Page 26 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth

Twenty-Five

Emily

W e sit at the table. The food is gone. Our plates are empty, and the wine bottle is too. Alex stares at her hands while I stare at her.

I asked her to tell me about Tristan’s dad committing suicide at least five minutes ago and she hasn’t said a word in response.

I shift in my seat, feeling awkward and ill at ease, and finally I leave her there, inspecting her palms, while I carry the dirty dishes out to the kitchen.

As I place them in the basin and fill it with hot water and a squirt of dish soap, I look out the window over the sink.

The farmhouse’s exterior lights illuminate the ground.

The snow is piled at least up knee-high now and shows no sign of slowing down.

I’m grateful to be in this house with heat and electricity, and even I have to admit, Alex.

The conversation hasn’t been fun—far from it—and she’s not the warmest person I’ve ever met.

But I wouldn’t want to be alone in the cabin right now.

Not even if it had power. So I need to draw her out.

I need to pull this story out of her, in part to delay my departure, but also because I have to know what happened to Tristan’s father.

And I can tell that somehow his death relates to whatever it is that drove her out of Windy Rock.

I spy a dusty bottle of table red in a wine rack near her spice cabinet and grab it. It has a screw top, so I twist off the cap and carry the bottle into the dining room.

“Why don’t we go back and sit by the fire, and you can tell me your story now?” I suggest.

Still fixated on her hands, she doesn’t answer.

So I pick up her glass and mine and carry them into the living room.

It’s a trick I learned from Tristan. Sometimes, when I’m lost in my thoughts and I can’t seem to break free, he’ll take a sudden action that pulls me along.

Activation energy he calls it. All I know is it works.

It gets me out of my head and back into my body.

Apparently, it works for Alex too, because after a minute, she pushes in her chair and joins me in the living room. I fill her glass and hand it to her. She takes a sip, then a deep breath. I steel myself, preparing to hear the circumstance of Tom Weakes’ suicide.

But instead she says, “Twenty-one years ago, during a nor’easter, I woke up in my apartment—lightning crashing, thunder crashing, rain and wind just pounding the windows. I think so, at least.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t actually have a memory of waking up that night. The doctors say it’s a protective mechanism, selective amnesia.”

I know what selective amnesia is. I’ve prayed for it, to no avail. My throat is dry. I drink some wine. We probably should have switched to water, but it’s too late now.

“What’s your mind protecting you from?” I ask quietly.

“There was a man in my apartment. He attacked me—stabbed me.”

I gape at her until I find my voice. “If this is a joke, it’s fucked up.”

She gives me a sad smile. “I wouldn’t normally do this, believe me. But you and I need to put all our cards on the table, Emily.”

She unbuttons the top three buttons of her flannel shirt and pulls aside the base layer t-shirt underneath to reveal the top of a jagged, diagonal scar that starts at her collarbone.

I gasp.

“He cut me from here.” She points to her collarbone and traces a diagonal line all the way down the fabric of her shirt to her abdomen. “To here.”

“Oh my God.” I try to breathe.

“I don’t remember any of it. I apparently fought him off because my neighbor called the police with a noise complaint. She told them a domestic violence incident in my apartment was making it impossible for her to hear her television program. That cranky bitch saved my life.”

“What happened?” I say it mainly to encourage her to keep talking, but now that she’s started telling her story, she needs no prompting.

“It took the police a long time to get there because of the storm. When they did, my bedroom window was open. The rain was pouring in and I was bleeding to death on my bedroom floor. They life-flighted me to the hospital in Bangor, and I—” She stops abruptly and takes a shuddering breath before biting out the words, “I shouldn’t have survived. ”

“But you did.”

“But I did. Everyone called it a miracle. It didn’t feel like a miracle.” She laughs bitterly. “It felt like I’d have been better off if I hadn’t. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t remember anything. I was terrified. I didn’t know who’d done this to me or why or if they’d be back.”

I reach over and gently squeeze her free hand as it dawns on me. “That’s why you were so freaked out when I told you Tristan was from Windy Rock. Did you recognize him?”

“No. But I did some research last night and connected the dots.”

I’m casting around for something comforting to say, but she’s committed to pushing through to the end of her story.

She swallows audibly, clears her throat, and says, “When I got out of the hospital, I did a stint in a rehabilitation center to re-learn how to walk and talk and use my hands again. But I never regained my memory of that night. In fact, I don’t remember anything in the days leading up to the attack.

But as soon as I could, I got the hell out of Windy Rock and never looked back.

I met my husband in Boston, and when he was transferred out to the West Coast, I tagged along even though we’d only been dating for a few weeks. ”

Then I wonder—did Tristan recognize her? Or, worse, did he know ahead of time who she was? The thought makes me dizzy. “You weren’t Alex Liu in Maine, right? Could Tristan have known who you were when he rented the cabin?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve gone over it a dozen times. I don’t know how he could have found out. I’ve been extremely careful. He knew me as Lexi Lincoln.” She pauses here to give me a knowing look. “In Windy Rock, I’m forever Lexi Lincoln, the girl who was stabbed.”

My heart twists. This story is horrific—so much worse than mine. But I don’t know why she’s telling it. I’m here to hear it, to bear witness. But it’s not related to Tom Weakes’ suicide. Then I falter. It’s not, right?

She searches my face as though she can read my mind and then says, “Three days after I was stabbed, while I was still in a medically induced coma, Tom Weakes jumped off the cliffs outside town into the ocean.”

Bile rises in my throat. “A coincidence?” I croak.

She doesn’t answer directly. Instead she says, “By the time I was discharged from the hospital to rehab, Tara and Tristan were long gone. They left Windy Rock for good the day after Tom’s funeral, or so I heard. Tristan didn’t tell you any of this?”

I shake my head. “Like I said, he never talks about his father. Mr. Weakes, I mean. When he mentions his father, he means Jon Rose. And he never talks about Windy Rock.”

Alex watches me closely. I drink my wine and look back at her. She’s waiting for something, but what? Then understanding hits me like a punch to the gut.

“You think it was Tom. You think Tristan’s dad attacked you, tried to kill you?”

She responds in a measured tone. “I told you, I don’t have any memory of the attack. But people talked. The timing was curious, if nothing else.”

“Surely the police investigated him,” I say, grasping at straws.

“After a fashion. There wasn’t a lot to go on. Tara and Tristan had left town. I had no memory of the attack. And Tom was dead.”

“But Tate wasn’t.”

She gives me a grave look. “That’s right. Tate wasn’t dead, and he didn’t leave with his mother and brother.”

I’m confused. No, I’m reeling. “Wait, do you think Tate did it, and his father found out and couldn’t live with it? Or they did it together? Or what, exactly?”

“I don’t know what to think. I’ve never known what to think. But now, I look at the facts. I look at you showing up here. Tristan Weakes’ wife?—”

“Tristan Rose’s wife,” I interrupt fiercely.

She raises an eyebrow and continues. “You just happen to be married to this person who’s enmeshed with my past. And your roommate just happened to be stabbed and left for dead during a storm. That’s … well, it’s something.”

I’m not following her, so I come out and tell her, “I don’t know what you’re driving at, Alex. You’re going to have to spell it out.”

“Maybe Tristan and his brother aren’t estranged,” she says.

I stare at her in horror. “You think Tate and Tristan tried to kill you? And, what, teamed up to kill Cassie fourteen years later? That’s absurd. Tristan was nine when you were stabbed.”

“I know that, and I don’t think Tristan was involved in my stabbing.”

“But?” I demand, my voice shaking with anger.

“But,” she says, “generational trauma is real. It has an impact. Isn’t it possible—just possible—that if Tate and his dad stabbed me, years later, Tate stepped into Tom’s role, brought Tristan in, and they stabbed your roommate? The echoes of the past and all.”

I can’t breathe. She’s kidding, right? “You’re not serious. Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds?”

She places her glass on the coffee table and spreads her hands wide in a gesture of appeasement. “It’s a theory. Or it was. But you say Tristan isn’t in contact with Tate, and Tristan wasn’t even living in Ohio when your roommate was murdered. So I guess the theory falls apart.”

My skin heats and my heart hammers. I narrow my eyes at her sudden change of tune. “You don’t believe that. You don’t think this is a coincidence.”

To be honest, neither do I. Two stabbings and Tristan’s on the periphery of both of them.

She gives a self-deprecating laugh. “Honestly, Emily? What I think is I must listen to too much true crime.”

I look at her. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you listen to true crime podcasts? Do you watch documentaries about murders?”

Her eyes flick involuntarily toward the book at the arm of the couch and I follow her gaze to read the title: The Bloody Harpe Brothers: The True Terrifying Tale of America’s First Serial Killers.

“I guess I have my answer.”

“Why do you ask?” she says, leveling me with a look.

“Because Tristan does. Incessantly.”

“I’ve heard it’s common for crime victims, survivors, and family members to be drawn to true crime in an effort to make sense of the unfathomable,” she says.

I hold her gaze, unblinking.

She tilts her head, appraising me. “But not you.”

“Not me,” I agree.

“That’s interesting.”

I eye her, weighing whether to tell her.

“What?” She asks.

“What, what?”

“You’ve got something on your mind. What is it?”

There’s no reason to hold back at this point, so I say it. “I don’t need to make sense of it. I know why it happened. Cassie wasn’t supposed to die that night. I was.”

To her credit, she doesn’t spout off the standard, ‘It’s common for survivors to blame themselves,’ line. Instead, Alex Liu, survivor of a murder attempt, takes my statement at face value and asks, “How do you know?”

I tell her what I’ve never told anyone. “I know because he told me.”

“He told you,” she repeats.

As I’m explaining the note I found after Cassie’s murder, an even worse thought hits me and bile rises in my throat. I clasp my hand over my mouth and jump to my feet.

“Bathroom’s that way.” She points.

I race down the hall and throw up into her toilet bowl. After my stomach is empty, I cup my hands under the stream of water in the sink and splash my face, rinse out my mouth. I spare a glance in the mirror. I look every bit as shitty as I feel.

When I walk back into the living room, she gives me a concerned look. “Feeling better?”

“No,” I tell her. “I realized something. There aren’t two stabbings where Tristan’s the common denominator. There are three.”

“Three?” she echoes.

I nod. “There was a murder in Little Sweetwater last week, where we live. A twenty-year-old woman was murdered last week. Her roommate found her.”

“Stabbed to death?” Her voice shakes.

“Yes. And Tristan’s working on the case.”

My stomach heaves, but I know there’s nothing left to vomit. So I force down my nausea and say, “And just like you and me, Giselle Ward was a redhead.”

We stare at each other for a long wordless moment. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I’m thinking it’s possible my husband’s a killer.