Page 95 of The Deepest Lake

I can open the shutter of my mind only briefly. One flash of truth at a time.

If Barbara were the only problem, Eva would have called her friend Chief Molina and had Barbara arrested.

But maybe Eva doesn’t want her to be arrested. Maybe Barbara would tell the world about Eva—her financial shenanigans, her literary duplicity, and Eva’s dream life would collapse.

I try to put myself in Eva’s shoes, the same way I’d put myself into the mind of a fictional character. I think about how knotty problems are constructed. We want two things, and we can’t have them both, and neither of them are so good, anyway, so we get ourselves stuck—on the horns of the dilemma, as Professor Wright used to say.

I can’t be dead. That would make Barbara a murderer.

I can’t be alive. A victim set free longs to speak.

I think of Eva’s lie about Adhika in her memoir, and how when Eva couldn’t find a way out, she simply prolonged the fiction, hoping the problem would go away—and it did. Fans believed in Eva’s story. When In a Delicate State was published, Eva didn’t just become a bestselling memoirist again. She became an icon. Her refusal to come clean—her strategy of just waiting it out—worked to her advantage. She got everything: money, fame, even better reviews.

Not everything, I think. She didn’t have a baby.

She’s waiting it out now, the way she did before.

I can wait it out, too. Twelve weeks.

Maybe if the antibiotics work and the leg heals and I no longer look like an attempted-murder victim, Eva will be able to let me out.

She’ll need to be reassured that I won’t press charges. I can do that. I can help her believe in the fiction she’s creating yet again—the imaginary world in which there are no consequences for her actions or anyone else’s.

The next day when Eva visits, I have a monologue ready. I’m prepared to tell her that I don’t blame Barbara, we both were responsible for our angry tussle, it was all just a big misunderstanding, and I’m grateful that Eva showed up in her kayak just when I was on the verge of drowning.

“And so, I think we should agree that when I’m feeling stronger—”

Eva won’t let me get the words out. She pushes the straw into my mouth.

“Three more big sips,” she says. “No cheating.”

I choke and sputter, swallowing as much as I can. The lukewarm, acidic tea stings my throat.

When I try to speak again, she gently sets the tips of her fingers against my chapped lips.

“Shhhhhh,” she says. “Your jaw. Remember?”

Her eyes are wide, the eyeliner around them blurred, giving her a sleep-deprived, manic look.

“Eva,” I try to say, but she presses harder.

“Shhhhhhhhhhh.”

She claps her entire hand over my mouth, one finger pushed too close to my nostrils, so it’s hard to breathe. I try to pull away, but it only makes her press harder.

She sounds scared, and the fear is infectious. I struggle to inhale, breath hitching, the shallow incomplete gasps making me lightheaded, the desperate hunger for air taking me back to those moments in the cold black water, twisting, lungs burning, panic rising.

From behind her fingers, I mumble and beg, sputtering, but she doesn’t give an inch.

“Stop,” she says. “No, I mean it. Stop now.”

So I do.

I force myself to be still, to not pull away or shake my head. I need her to see I’m calm now. I won’t speak. I won’t do anything to set her off.

She slowly lifts her hand away so that I can breathe more clearly. Her expression hasn’t changed: eyes still wide, eyebrows arched. She looks deranged.

It’s what I feared. She’s not just stressed, not just unpredictable, not just taking the briefest of breaks from reality. This is the real Eva Marshall, not the meticulous construction she created on the page.