Page 32 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

There was a season of Love on the Lake during which it was discovered that Pierce had been cheating on his long-term girlfriend for several months.

She’d responded to the discovery in a normal way, which was to say that she was absolutely hysterical.

In that hysteria, she confessed that sometimes she thought about killing Pierce.

“I mean, not literally kill him, but, like, I want him dead. Metaphorically,” she’d said.

We all knew what she meant, because everyone had people like that in their lives, whether they were significant others, friends, parents, or coworkers.

Wanting someone to die didn’t mean we wanted them to die.

Rather, we wanted some kind of finality in our interactions, and we wanted them to suffer a little bit for whatever they’d done.

Had I wanted Noah to die? I recounted our last night together, how he’d come over, eaten my food, slipped inside me, and left.

Afterward I’d gotten drunk. Had I been so drunk that I could’ve forgotten killing my fiancé?

Or maybe the drinking was a mere excuse.

In my college psychology classes I’d learned about repressed memories.

They were a defense mechanism of the mind, a kind of protection enacted when we experienced things that were too terrible to comprehend.

The concept was complicated. It meant that sometimes people weren’t able to come forth with accusations until years after the fact, not because they hadn’t wanted to before but because they didn’t know until they did.

On the flip side, the concept had been used to accuse people of crimes they hadn’t committed.

Remembering and forgetting were equally fallible.

I didn’t remember hurting Noah. I wanted to believe that I wouldn’t do such a thing to a person I loved.

I certainly hadn’t been responsible for the heart at my door or the display laid out in front of me.

It had to be someone else who had killed him, someone who wanted to implicate me in what they’d done.

I checked social media. That was how my brain processed things.

I had a free moment at work? Time to look at my phone.

There was a catastrophic weather event? Better look online and see what people were doing.

Parts of my murdered fiancé’s body were arranged as a kind of grotesque Valentine’s display in my house?

I should check and see if his disembodied limbs had posted anything.

It was lucky that my parents had gone to prison before social media became the beast that it was now.

My mother was the kind of person who would’ve disdained the concept until suddenly she had a camera roll filled with selfies.

She wouldn’t have been able to resist posting pictures of herself with her victims—they were very beautiful women, after all.

I knew from watching crime shows that serial killers liked to collect trophies.

My mother’s fetish was to keep pieces of jewelry.

Social media turned everything into a trophy.

A good brunch was counted as a win, as was an outfit or a face full of makeup.

People ran marathons solely to post pictures online.

There were multiple reasons why the scene in front of me was difficult to cope with.

The man I thought I was going to marry was dead, my whole future obliterated.

Someone had broken into my house in the middle of the night to arrange his body parts.

That someone was likely a killer, which meant that I was fundamentally unsafe in my own home.

All of that, and I couldn’t even talk about it online.

I was left to process everything by myself.

When I checked Noah’s accounts, I discovered that, while he hadn’t posted in a while—for obvious reasons—one of the other medical residents had reported his disappearance to the police and had tagged him in the post, which meant that everyone who followed that resident could see what they’d said.

“Fuck,” I said.

I was wary about police involvement when I thought that Noah might still be alive. Now it threatened my very existence. It was only a matter of time before they showed up on my doorstep. I couldn’t let any piece of Noah still be here when they did.

I wasn’t allowed to grieve.

I got extra-strength garbage bags out of a closet as well as a pair of rubber gloves, and packed up the whole display.

I’d once thought that I’d be a woman like Noah’s mother, who decorated her suburban home for all the holidays, and instead I’d become a woman cleaning up a corpse.

Well, parts of a corpse. A lot of it was still missing. The head, for instance.

In some ways, having a task was nice. What would I have done if given space?

It wasn’t like me to sob. I probably would’ve sat on the couch and watched old episodes of Love on the Lake until my eyes bled.

That was one annoying thing about death—there were no good ways to react to it.

I could go to therapy, or I could get drunk, but at the end of the day Noah would still be gone.

The absence was greater than him. It was the absence of my whole future.

As I wiped my mantel clean, I said goodbye to the house, to the wedding and the kids that we never got to have.

The weight of Noah’s body getting into bed when he’d come home after a shift.

The anniversary dinners, the little gifts, the notes left around the house. All of it was gone.

I hadn’t totally processed it. Our love was a phantom limb that would continue to ache.

I loaded the garbage bags that contained the dismantled display into the trunk of my car and drove back to the hiking trail, putting my phone in airplane mode and hoping that was enough to prevent the police from tracing my whereabouts.

It struck me that a murdered Noah wasn’t entirely different from Noah when he was alive.

Our relationship had been good because it was convenient.

I didn’t mind that he spent so much time at work, and he didn’t mind that I never entirely let him in.

Or at least I thought he hadn’t minded. It turned out that there were a lot of things that we hadn’t told each other.

I made my way down the dark trail like a map of it was ingrained in my veins.

There were, I reasoned, more destructive things I could’ve done in the hours after finding out that my fiancé was dead.

Due to the cold, the heart was still where I’d left it beneath a loosely arranged pile of leaves.

I’d read about cryopreservation, when rich people had their corpses frozen with the idea that they would be reanimated when science caught up to their dreams. It didn’t seem totally impossible that, if I hadn’t been missing his head, I could Frankenstein Noah back together.

But I wasn’t the doctor; he was. I was a matchmaker, and somehow I’d gotten our love wrong.

I looked down at the body parts in front of me.

They looked like Noah and they didn’t. A person was more than the form in which they resided.

That was why people could fall in love through letters, through DMs on social media, and by seeing someone on a television screen.

Whatever Noah was, whatever he had been, it was clear that he’d vacated the body parts that were now on the forest floor.

I had a confessional in the woods. The trees were my viewership. They’d dressed for the occasion, branches stark and empty.

What would you have said if you could have had one final conversation with him?

My brain, the producer.

“I would’ve told him that I really thought the two of us were going to end up together.

I would’ve told him about my parents, explained why I held him at such a distance.

I would’ve painted a portrait of the world that I wanted us to live in before it all started to crumble.

I would’ve told him that I loved him. I would’ve explained the pain of his absence in terms that would’ve made him cringe because they wouldn’t have been medically accurate.

I would’ve warned him that someone was about to kill him. ”

The words failed me. I talked and talked, and nothing I said brought him back to life. I began to shiver. The cold was a punishment made especially for me.

I remembered talking to my mother after my father died.

“What are you talking about?” she asked when I tried to broach the topic of his passing. “Why would you say such a thing?”

I’d taken her denial for indifference. I hadn’t realized that grieving was standing on the edge of a cliff on a windy day and doing everything in your power to prevent yourself from being knocked over the edge.

Noah was dead, a truth that I would have to grapple with forever and ever, but I was still alive and I needed to keep moving forward, regardless of the feeling of glass in my spine.

It wasn’t until I was back in the car that I returned to the question of who was responsible for killing Noah and setting up that night’s spooky display. Aidan was the obvious answer. There was something comforting in the easiness of it. Of course it was the psychopath I’d turned down for a date.

The other possibilities were more unsettling.

Paul, somehow having discovered my address.

Molly, suddenly a killer. Then there was my mother to consider.

She didn’t know where I lived, what I did, or what my last name was, but was it possible that she’d somehow engineered Noah’s murder?

Maybe her obsession with Noah wasn’t rooted in a love of romance as I’d thought. Maybe she’d wanted to kill him.