“Rachel died last night,” I said. She pulled away to look me in the eye. Even in the dark, I saw her confusion. “Well, I lied.”
I wanted to see her face, so I pulled her up to a straddling position. Her shoulders slouched. I brushed her hair from her shoulders. It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw.
“I’m sorry. There’s more. Do you want me to come clean?” I asked.
She put her hands on my shoulders. “Ok, go ahead.”
“Rachel required constant care. The accident left her in a vegetative state. She wasn’t even herself anymore, so little of her brain was functioning. She could have lived forever, except that when Jessica first met you at the Stock, the day with the cast on her arm, I panicked. I thought she’d tell you everything. I didn’t know why, and mostly, I didn’t know why I cared so much, but I knew I did. I needed time to think, so I moved her to another facility. She never fully recovered.”
“I’m sorry,” Monica said. “Are you sad about it?”
I felt myself smile, because that would be the question Monica would ask, not the thousand others. “Yes, but other things too. It’s complicated. I’d assumed she was dead between the accident and when I was about twenty-three. I’d done my share of grieving over it. But I found out she was alive, and Jessica and I found her and moved her.”
“Okay, wait—”
“Hold on, Mon—”
“You found her? Who was keeping her?”
“I said hold on, goddess, please.”
“Have mercy on me, Jonathan. I thought she was dead until a minute ago. You have no idea what’s been going through my head.”
“What?”
She put her forehead to my shoulder. “You killed her during sexual asphyxiation and covered it up with the accident.”
“You have a very vivid imagination.”
“So, that’s not what happened?”
“You know that’s not my kink. I mean… Jesus, I should have explained this sooner.” I pulled her up again and took her face in my hands. She looked very tired. I had no idea how to make this any shorter, but I knew we had to finish it, if she could stay awake for it. “I have to stop and tell you about my father.”
“The passive drunk you told me about?”
“One of the many lies I tell about him.”
“The one who seduced Rachel first.”
“Not a lie. That was the beginning of me learning the truth of who I am. He’s a sociopath. Clinical. He has no empathy. He only finds things interesting or not interesting, and hurting people is interesting. Young girls are interesting. Seeing my mother scream during childbirth? Same. My sister Carrie is a psychologist, and once she realized it, realized all the shit he’d done over the years, she moved to Italy. Swear to god. I see that look on your face. It’s not genetic.”
“I didn’t think you were a sociopath.”
“No, but I’m a sexual sadist.” Saying those words was hard, even though I knew how true they were. As much as Debbie had tried to remove all of my negative connotations from them, I still felt a pang of self-loathing. Monica didn’t seem perturbed, probably because it was just us on her porch. I knew that her shame was in how she was seen by strangers, not what we called each other when we were alone. “I thought for a long time that made me like him. That we were the same because I enjoy that look on a woman’s face when I squeeze a little too hard, or that I like to make her uncomfortable. I thought it was a part of him inside me.”
“And it’s not?”
“It is. But even he’s capable of doing good things. He was the one who rescued Rachel from the car and put her into a facility.”
She leaned back as if stunned. “Why?”
“She was about to blackmail him. She was going to expose that he had been with her when she was sixteen. You don’t blackmail J. Declan Drazen. He doesn’t appreciate it, let’s say.”
“Why didn’t he just let her die?”
“I don’t know. He has a thing about not shitting where you eat, so if he thought she was within his circle, he wouldn’t have hurt her. But he was secretive. We found out everything about the accident the hard way. When I went to him about it, he literally laughed. I found out I was driving when some reporter came sniffing around, probably this guy.” I tapped the envelope. “I found out she was alive right after that. It was, let’s say, overwhelming.”
“You felt like a fly caught in a web.”
She’d captured that feeling exactly. What she didn’t capture was the feeling that if I got free of it, I’d be less human for letting go of the grief and guilt. It was mine. I owned it. If I unburdened myself, what would I become? An animal who stopped caring about the things I’d done? I couldn’t allow that. My shame was made me a moral person, even if it crippled me emotionally.
She snapped up the envelope and pressed it to my chest. “You should read this.”
“I don’t need to.”
“It says you were soaked in salt water. Has it occurred to you that you rescued her?”
“I dove in, but I was too drunk to rescue anyone,” I said. “Probably nearly drowned myself.”
“They got your medical records. The skin on your hands was totally f**ked up. You were banged to shit. Like you wrestled with the ocean pulling someone out of it.”
I remembered that. In my sequestered hospital room, my mother had been at my side, smelling of whiskey, and she claimed ignorance about that and everything. Dad spoke to me after, describing Rachel’s death by drowning, the body’s absence, the car “she stole” floating into the Pacific with the tide. He’d get me another. Not to worry.
I’d been so shredded about Rachel, I’d paid no mind to my bruises or the skin missing from my hands. I figured that in my blacked-out stupor, I’d fallen. Repeatedly.
Maybe Monica was right. Maybe I hadn’t been such a passive player. Or maybe it didn’t matter anymore, because Monica’s big brown eyes looked at me for answers as if I had any. She looked at me as if she was on a starting block, waiting to win the race to forgiveness. I could tell her anything. I could tell her I’d strangled Rachel and buried the body, and she’d forgive me. God damn. I had done something truly evil in letting the woman love me.
“We ruined her family,” I said. “Not that it was worth much.”