CHAPTER 19
We move quickly, a pair of fugitives hurtling through the darkness. Sam’s thrown her jacket over my shoulders, her hand pressing the small of my back, pushing me forward. I keep going because I have to. Because Sam won’t let me stop, even though all I want to do is collapse onto the ground and stay there.
Breathing has become a chore. Each intake of air is hampered by an anxious shudder. Each exhalation is accompanied by a sob. My chest expands from the lack of oxygen, my desperate lungs pushing themselves against my ribs.
“Stop,” I gasp. “Please. Let me stop.”
Sam ignores me, increases the pressure at my back, forces me onward. Past trees. Past statues. Past bums stretched across benches. When we come upon others—a man on a bike, a pair of joggers, three friends drunkenly walking arm in arm—she turns inward, shielding my blood-soaked body.
We stop only when we reach the Conservatory Water, that elaborate pool where in the daytime kids watch their toy sailboats traverse the shallow water. I’m guided to the pool’s edge, lowered to my knees, hands plunged into the water. Sam cleans me off as much as possible, splashing water onto my arms, my neck, my face. On the other side of the pool, a homeless man is doing the same thing to himself. When he stares at us, Sam yells, her voice skipping over the water.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
The man backs away, grabbing his fistfuls of trash bags and disappearing in the darkness.
Sam dips a hand in the water, scooping liquid onto my forehead.
“Listen,” she says. “I think he’s still alive.”
I want to believe her, but I can’t let myself.
“No,” I say. “I killed him.”
“I felt a pulse.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I’m sure.”
Relief pours over me, more cleansing than the water she continues to splash onto my bloodstained skin. I can breathe easier. My throat opens up, releasing another sob, this one grateful.
“We need to call for help,” I say.
Sam lowers my hands into the water again, rubbing them beneath her own, erasing the evidence of my sin. “We can’t do that, Quinn.”
“But he needs to get to a hospital.”
I try to pull my hands from the water but Sam holds them under.
“Calling 911 will get the police involved.”
“So?” I say. “I’ll tell them I was acting in self-defense.”
“And were you?”
“He had a knife.”
“Was he going to use it?”
I can’t answer that. Maybe he would have, eventually. Or maybe he would have walked away. I’ll never know.
“But he still had it,” I say, unsure of who I’m trying to convince, Sam or myself. “The police wouldn’t charge me if they knew that.”
Sam finally lifts my hands from the water, turning them over to see if any blood remains. It’s all gone. My palms are pale and glistening.
“They would if they knew our reason for being out here,” she says. “Especially if they knew we were trying to lure someone. Especially if they found out you could have gotten away.”
The only way she could know this is if she had been there. Hiding. Watching me the whole time. Watching even as the man’s knife dropped from his pocket. For a moment, that particular truth eclipses everything else.
“You saw me?”
“Yeah.”
“You were there?”
I start to hyperventilate again, my body wracked by a series of lung-scraping gasps. The sudden lack of air makes me dizzy. Or maybe that’s just from shock. Either way, I have to steady myself against the pool’s edge to keep from tilting over.
When I speak, it’s in sharp, ragged bursts. “Why—didn’t you—help?”
“You didn’t need help.”
“He had a knife,” I say, a warm slick of anger rising in my throat. It feels like a swallow of Wild Turkey moving in reverse, inching its way higher. “You just sat back and fucking watched.”
“I wanted to see what you would do.”
“And I almost killed a man. Happy? Was that the reaction you were looking for? Why didn’t you try to stop me?”
“The question you should be asking is why you didn’t try to stop yourself.”
I manage to stand, shaking water from my hands before striding off. Away from the pool. Away from Sam.
“Quinn,” she yells to my back. “Don’t go.”
“I’m going!”
“Where?”
“To the police.”
“They’re going to arrest you.”
It’s the way she says it that stops me. Her voice is flat, the words alarmingly matter-of-fact. She’s right, and I know it. Panic boils in the depths of my stomach. I’m the moth that got careless with the flame. Now I’m engulfed.
“Knife or not, the cops aren’t going to understand,” Sam says. “They’ll only see you as a vindictive bitch who came here looking for trouble. You’ll be arrested for aggravated assault. Maybe worse. The kind of charges your boy Jeff won’t be able to talk the cops into dropping.”
I think of Jeff, mere blocks away, oblivious in his slumber. This could ruin him. He has nothing to do with it, but no one would care. My guilt is enough to destroy us both.
The dizziness returns, bringing with it a harsh tremble that paralyzes my legs. I sway, unsure how much longer I can remain upright. Sam keeps talking, only making it worse.
“You’ll be in the papers again, Quinn. Not just one, but all of them.”
Oh, I’m sure of that. I picture the headlines. Final Girl snaps, goes into violent rage. Jonah Thompson will have an orgasm over it.
“There’s no recovering from that,” Sam says. “If you go to the cops, life as you know it will be over. You would have been better off dying at Pine Cottage.”
The words are ugly in her mouth, but 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, the despair 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. The blasts of pain to my shoulder. Seeing Him on the floor, the knife slick with blood.
Memories.
No. 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 further in the tub, hoping the hot water will wash them 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 whisking 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 simply stayed back and watched as I beat him senseless, as if it was 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.
Those thoughts are quickly followed by another one. Not a question this time. A certainty, screaming into my brain so fast and loud that I bolt upright in the tub, water sloshing over the sides.
The purse.
We left it behind in the park.