Chapter fifty-six:

 

 

“Where did you go?” I ask her.

Carrie looks up at me. She’s sitting with her legs over the edge of the table, staring down at her feet. But now she looks up at me, and I see the same look in her eyes that I saw so many years ago. It’s both hope and thankfulness. It’s both yearning for freedom and escape, and still feeling trapped. I make her feel trapped, I realize.

“I got the night bus to Chicago. But I moved around quite a bit.” She smiles, her mind far away, back on that bus in the middle of the night. “I went home and showered quickly and then I left. I’d already packed my things earlier.”

“You knew you were going to leave without me?” I ask, and there’s no anger there because I’m finally understanding, and that can only be a good thing.

“Yes,” she says. “I didn’t want you to come with me.”

And I am still a pussy because I cry now. Why the fuck not? My heart’s been torn out, and I have a feeling there’s more to come.

“You—” she starts, but stops and then starts again. “I never loved you.”

“But the things we did?”

“It was just sex, Ethan. I had sex with lots of people I didn’t want to back then. It was a way to get what I wanted. That’s how it started with your dad.” She looks away, ashamed. “I seduced him thinking he would help me with my dad, but it didn’t work out that way.”

I frown. “What happened?” Because I don’t want to know, and yet I do. I need to know how my father, who was once so wholesome and good, turned into the monster that I killed.

“My dad found out and began blackmailing him,” she laughs. “The irony was that he then became my dad’s best customer. It seems I awakened a desire in your dad that he didn’t even know he had.” She swallows, and I hope she chokes, because this was her fault—she turned him into the monster.

She looks up and sees my angry glare. “You can hate me all you want, Ethan. He was still the one at fault. He still raped a little girl, because that’s what I was. A child. But you men are all the same!”

“We’re not!” I yell back, and I need to do my counting but I can’t think straight, so I tap the nails of my left hand onto the ones on my right hand, over and over. “I’m not like that, I loved you.”

“I know you did, but you also took what you wanted whenever you wanted it. Even now you’re still doing it, Ethan. Even now you’re still demanding that I love you, that I touch you, that I fuck you. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you. I used you to kill my dad. We were friends and then I was a victim and I used you to help me get free!” She screams the words at me, and I let them absorb, let them really sink into my skin.

“They blamed me for killing you,” is all I can come back with.

“I know.”

“They asked me over and over where I had hidden your body.”

She says nothing, but her eyes say everything.

“You,” I say with tremors running through my body as I let myself speak the truth I have tried to deny for fifteen years. “You set me up.”

She lifts her chin high, no fear in her eyes. “I did.”

“You made it look like I killed you, and your dad, and then my dad.”

My dad didn’t ignore me. My dad was dead.

How could I have forgotten that?

Maybe I did deserve to be in the hospital.

Maybe I didn’t deserve to get out.

“You ruined me.”

It’s like thunder in my ears as I say the words out loud. As I admit the truth I’ve tried to deny for so long. I’m not stupid; I think I always knew. It was all too perfect, really. But love makes you blind, and I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to think so badly of her. To believe that she would do something like that. They told me that I must have blocked out her murder. That the trauma had wiped the memory away. Her mom lied and said that she saw me do it, but both she and I know that’s not true because she never even woke up as Carrie butchered her dad.

“The police, they blamed me for everything, Carrie. The things that happened to me inside. My poor mom!” I wail, angry and sad and confused.

“I’m sorry,” she replies. “I had to, don’t you see?”

*

I see the lights before I hear the sirens.

I’m watching for Carrie’s shadow running between the houses, her bag slung over one shoulder, but she hasn’t come. It’s been over an hour now and I’ve been tempted to go to her house and find her. But I stayed where I was, waiting.

Scared half to death to go back to the house of blood.

She’d be back soon, I told myself.

I changed my bloody clothes and packed them in a plastic carrier bag. I have them with me; I’m going to get rid of them on the way.

The lights bounce from house to house, red and blue and red and blue, and the sirens blare to life. A scream in the still night air.

The police car comes to a stop at the sidewalk and an officer gets out and puts on his hat. He hasn’t seen me yet. Another car stops at Carrie’s house. ‘Oh shit,’ I think.

I stand up slowly, my bag over my shoulder, and I take a cautious step away from my house, hoping to be swallowed up into the darkness. But he sees me.

“Stay right where you are,” he yells.

I take another step, seeing one of the officers going inside Carrie’s house. A flashlight shines through the windows, a spotlight in the darkness.

“I mean it, stay right where you are or I will shoot you.”

I feel sick. I feel dizzy. I feel numb. I feel heavy. I feel lost. I feel found.

A scream erupts from my house.

My mom woke up.

She’s seen my dad, dead, stabbed through the heart while she slept with her unblinking eyes.

But I don’t run.

Because there’s nowhere to run, not without Carrie.