Chapter Nineteen

The closest bar isn’t nearly close enough. Ray’s Tavern—a dump that shares a parking lot with a Fireworks Emporium—is already half full, despite the fact that it’s only four P.M. Some of the customers look like they may have been crusted on those same stools since the beginning of time. They appear to be grown into the décor, like alcoholic barnacles. I can’t stop scraping my palms with a cocktail napkin, as if Lilian McMann’s story has embedded itself in my skin.

I don’t know that I can believe her: not because she’s lying, but because she might simply be wrong. The problem with spending a lifetime looking for patterns is that it teaches you to see them everywhere; but coincidences happen. Colin Danner might simply have known about the pictures through his son, and decided to give one final twist of the knife before Lilian left. In all likelihood, that is what happened.

But her story has left me with a bad feeling, like I’ve just swum through oily water, and the sink in the bathroom is so filthy that washing my hands only makes me feel dirtier. My first whiskey-soda does little to help and the second only makes me sad. I can’t help but think of Becky Sarinelli, and of that poor fluttering photo that landed in the aisle at that pep rally: her skin a glare in the camera flash, her exposed body. And that was before photos could be instantly shared the way they are now.

Thinking of Becky Sarinelli gets me back to thinking about Condor, and wondering why and how he could have done that to her.

Old mistakes, he’d said, about Hannah’s mother. But old mistakes are never old. We relive them again and again. We repeat them, and hope this time things will turn out differently.

I don’t want Condor to be a mistake.

Or maybe I just don’t want to be alone. Being in Barrens is reminding me of how lonely I was here. It’s reminding me I’ve never really stopped being lonely.

That was what drew Kaycee and me together as kids: we were the two loneliest best friends in the history of the world. My father was lost in his religion, and hers lost in his alcohol, his rages, his black-market economy and the people who bought and sold from him. My mother was dying. Hers might as well have been dead.

But being best friends with Kaycee could be just as lonely as having no friends at all. She was so unpredictable, even back then. She could be cruel and distant, explosive. She could hit you and then stroke the bruise, promising to make it better. Either way, I soaked up the attention. I remember building forts with her in the woods, and how I would always turn tree stumps into crowds of friends, into imaginary siblings who comforted me and cheered me on. Kaycee wouldn’t invent friends, but subjects. That way, she said, they would never disobey her when she ordered them to stay.

Sometimes I think Chestnut—a stray, just like me, skinny and desperate and fearful until I managed to coax him to me with a handful of shredded chicken—was the only real friend I ever had.

In a sick way, it made sense that Kaycee had to kill him.

By the start of my third drink I know that calling is a very bad idea, but by the bottom of it, I don’t care.

Pick up, I think. And: Don’t pick up.

He does, on the second ring. He sounds clean, even over the phone.

“Abby,” Brent says, and I try to pretend that he’s the one I wanted to call all along. “So crazy. I was just thinking of you. What’s up?”

I shred the damp napkin beneath my now empty drink and eye the clock over the bar. Four forty-nine. “I’m just leaving the office,” I say. “How about a drink?”

“How did you even find this place?” Brent asks, as he fumbles onto the stool next to mine. In his collared shirt and suit jacket, he looks out of place.

“A friend recommended it,” I say. No one in their right mind would recommend this place.

“I like it.” He makes it sound convincing. But rather than feel reassured, I feel a quick pulse of anxiety. Brent is a good liar.

He orders a tequila and I get another whiskey-soda, pretending it’s my first, and the bartender, with a face worn from hard living, doesn’t comment.

“I was gonna call you,” he says. “When you saw Misha at my place…I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea…”

“What idea is that?”

“Misha always had a thing for me,” he says bluntly. Somehow, hearing the words out loud is a relief. Because, of course, thinking back on it, I see that he’s right, that it was always so obvious.

“For a little while, after Kaycee disappeared, she pushed us to…” He trails off, shaking his head. “But I never thought of her that way.” He adds, a little more quietly, “I like you. A lot.”

“I like you, too,” I say. But as soon as I say it, I know it’s not true. In high school, I would have said I loved him. I dreamed of all the improbable ways I might find myself alone with him—a sudden fire that forced just the two of us into one portion of the school, waiting for the fire department to reach us; a flat tire that might leave me stranded only a few yards from his street. But it occurs to me now for the first time that I’m not sure how much of that feeling was simply because Brent belonged to Kaycee. Maybe I always intended revenge. Maybe I wanted to take from her, like she had taken from me.

Or maybe, in a weird way, I thought that if Brent could love me, Kaycee would have to love me, too.

“Why did you kiss me that day in the woods?” I blurt out.

“It was the last day of school,” he says. I can tell I’ve surprised him. “I guess…when I saw you there, in the woods, like you’d just appeared…” He smiles. “It felt like a sign.”

That’s what he said the other night, at the bonfire: that my arrival was a sign. “You were my first kiss.” Immediately, I could punch myself for telling him this. My tongue is slipping. I set down my drink.

Brent smiles, big-wattage. The smile that used to knock the wind out of me in the cafeteria. “You know, back then it seemed like we were really at the end of something. All those girls getting sick, and no one could explain it. It was like Kaycee turned a lie into an actual infection. Like we might all catch it eventually.” He brings his hand to my face, just like he did that night at the bonfire. “Not you, though. I always knew you were just beginning.”

I shift away from him. Does he really believe that? Does he really think I can believe it? “You really never tried to find her, after she left?”

He sighs, as if I’ve disappointed him. “I tried calling her, obviously,” he says. “She never picked up. Misha said she didn’t want to talk to anyone.” This gets my attention. Maybe Misha was more attuned to her former best friend than she claims. Turning back to the bar, Brent fiddles with a damp cocktail napkin. “The funny thing is, Misha and I weren’t even close until Kaycee ran off.” He takes a long pull of his drink. “Tragedies do that, I guess. Bond you with people. I think she was hoping it would do more than bond us.”

I think of surprising Brent and Misha together at the Dell. Brent was either comforting her or pleading with her—I couldn’t tell which. They looked close then. But even then I had the impression that Kaycee was with them; that she was hovering, unseen, outside the circle of their bodies. That they’d been talking about her.

“Is that what it was, when Kaycee left? A tragedy? At the diner, you seemed happy about it.”

“Never stop being a lawyer, do you?” He says it jokingly, but I can hear the reprimand. “Can’t it be both? I was…happy, to be free of her. But it was tragic that it got to that point. She…destroyed things. Do you know what I mean?”

For a moment I imagine Kaycee coaxing Chestnut toward her with treats. How furious she was when Chestnut began to snap and growl. There’s something wrong with that dog. It’s probably rabid. Someone should shoot it.

“Yes,” I say simply. Then, without thinking: “Did you ever love her?”

Brent is quiet for a while. He stirs his drink and then empties it in one swallow. Finally he looks at me.

“What did I know? I was young.” Now his smile has left behind a lingering exhaustion. “Can you love someone who isn’t capable of loving you back?”

Funnily enough, it’s my father who comes to mind. Do dogs go to heaven? I asked him once, my throat raw from crying after Chestnut died.

No, he replied shortly. But afterward he took a plastic garbage bag from the toolshed and bundled Chestnut’s body inside of it, and told me to get the shovel. We walked down to the lip of the reservoir, and in silence he made a grave and lowered Chestnut into it. Heaven is for redeemed sinners, he said, after hours of silence. Dogs don’t need it. They live their whole lives in heaven.

And I loved him more then than I’ve ever loved anyone.

“Oh, sure,” I say. My drink tastes like hair spray. I’ve let it sit too long. “I think that’s probably the realest love of all.”

Outside, the sun is just setting, and a golden glow lingers over the parked cars.

“Listen, Abby.” Brent seizes my hand when I’ve already said good-bye—embarrassed, in the sudden light, that I’ve said anything or called him at all. He takes a step closer to me, and for a second, I’m sure he’s going to kiss me. “I know you’re here for blood, okay? You’re not going to find anything.”

“I’m not here for blood, Brent.” We’re standing so close I can see the veins of color in his eyes. “I’m here for the truth.”

He frowns as if he doesn’t believe it. “I know it sounds crazy, but this town loves Optimal. I love Optimal.” He’s searching my face as if for signs that I believe him. “They’ve done a lot of good. You should see the new community center—you should see the theater they’ve built, a whole arts wing for the school to use. They’ve given life to this town.”

He talks like the converted do about church.

I extricate my hand from his. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about you. I just…don’t want anything to change between us, okay?” he says at last, though I’m almost positive that isn’t what he originally intended. “After all these years…” He sucks in a breath. “I always wanted to see you. I always hoped I would.”

Then he does kiss me. His lips are cold and taste like cheap tequila. A little like metal, too.

Like he’s the one who’s out for blood.