He Started It

by Downing, Samantha

‘We can take a quick swim, too,’ I say. ‘At least get clean.’

  He nods.

  We sip our awful coffee as we walk in the dark, though somehow the fresh air makes me think it’s better than it is.

  ‘Best sleep I’ve had on this trip.’ He says this like I asked him about it. ‘I love sleeping outdoors.’

  I don’t answer that. Even I have limits about lying.

  ‘I never realized how much of the country I haven’t seen,’ he says. ‘We can see a lot more when this is over. On our own, I mean.’

  ‘On our own?’

  He puts his arm around my shoulder. ‘I mean, once all the bills are paid off – the student loans and the mortgage. We’ll have a lot more money for vacations.’

  Student loans. His student loans. I worked three jobs every summer to not have student loans, and he wants to use my inheritance to pay off his.

  On top of all that, the cigarettes. Bet he thinks I’m going to pay for those, too.

  ‘Sounds great,’ I say.

  We cut through the trees on our left, to another small clearing next to the water. Felix has a small bag with him so we have fresh clothes after our bath. It’s nice that he remembers things like that. Most men wouldn’t, I don’t think. Although how would I know?

  The sun begins to appear, a brilliant orange dot on the water, and we sit and watch the final moments of its rise.

  ‘They really believed we were fighting yesterday,’ I say.

  He glances over at me. ‘Well, we kinda were.’

  ‘Why were you so mad?’

  He shrugs. ‘I just can’t believe you never told me about the camping. That’s just so … wrong.’

  The anger appears again. It’s so easy to see now. I had been thinking this might be a good time to bring up his smoking, to tell him that I knew, but now I won’t. Not while he’s angry.

  I slip my free hand into his. ‘I was wrong. I’m sorry.’

  He leans over and kisses me. A dry, chaste kiss because we haven’t brushed our teeth and we smell like instant coffee. It could have been a brother-sister kiss.

  We haven’t had sex on this trip. Not once. Maybe because Portia was in our room half the time, or maybe because the motels were so bad. Or it could be that transporting Grandpa’s ashes across the country is the least sexy thing ever.

  More likely, it’s because we haven’t had sex in months – three months and nineteen days, to be exact.

  Oh well.

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Let’s take a swim.’

  We strip down and get in the water and it’s still not sexy. It’s cold at first, then pleasant. If I had to describe my marriage, that’s the word I would use. Pleasant. Mostly.

  The water is smooth and clear, not a ripple as far as I can see. Felix follows me out beyond the shallow water, and I challenge him to a treading contest. He splashes at me. ‘No way.’

  ‘You think you can beat me?’

  He does. Felix can be so traditionally male that way. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  I start to tread, he does the same.

  My eyes stay on his, watching. Waiting. Not for anger. This time, I see the moment the sleeping pills take effect.

  He doesn’t feel it for another thirty seconds or so. ‘Wait,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  He shakes his head, turns toward the shore. Felix starts to move toward it until I grab his arm. ‘Are you okay?’ I say.

  ‘I can’t keep –’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  He shakes his head, his eyes already drowsy. That’s a hell of a sleeping pill. No wonder people get addicted to those things. So easy to get, too.

  It’s nothing at all for me to reach up and push his head underwater. He struggles, though. Even pops up for one more breath. Felix grasps at me, the horror in his eyes. The betrayal.

  He knows.

  I push his head under for good. He doesn’t struggle for long.

  Felix. Poor, sad, finicky Felix. Did I know from the beginning I would do this?

  No. But I brought the sleeping pills, so I always knew that I could. If it came to that, which it did. Now I have to make sure he stays under the water.

  If I weight him down, it will be obvious he was murdered. For this to be considered an accident, I have to get more creative. Luckily, the rocks along the side of the shore are helpful. Also, luckily, bodies are easy to move in the water. It’s a fairly simple thing to lodge his body halfway behind the rocks. He stays under that way, like he got stuck and ended up drowning.

  I take one last look before walking away.

  Our marriage was never going to work.

  When I met Felix, I had no one. My father was dead, my mother in prison, Nikki had been gone for years, and I certainly wasn’t close to Eddie or Portia. If I’m being perfectly, totally, 100 percent honest, I was so lonely, anyone I met could’ve become my husband. It just happened to be Felix. He was the one I latched onto, clung to, stayed with, and married. And for the most part, he’s been a wonderful husband – at least right up until he slammed his fist on the dashboard, reminding me that even the kind, easygoing men are capable of violence. I’m not waiting around to see if that fist hits me.

  No, I don’t need Felix anymore, not the way I used to. Don’t even want him, because I’m going to find Nikki.

  My mother would understand, because she realized the same thing about Dad. She just didn’t need him anymore. Not if he was going to insist Nikki was dead.

  Remember, a cheating wife is just one deal breaker. Murder is the other, which means neither my mother nor I can be the heroine of this story.

  ‘We have to call the police.’

  When Nikki disappeared, that’s what I said. We have to call the police.

  Grandpa looked at me like I was the crazy one.

  I turned to Eddie, who couldn’t hate our sister that much. ‘We can’t just leave her out here,’ I said.

  ‘You know what the police said when she ran away,’ Eddie said.

  Which time? There had been quite a few. The first was years earlier, and the police were pretty serious about looking for her, given that she had been fourteen, and young girls who disappeared were all over the cable news back then.

  They found Nikki in less than a day. She was hiding at a friend’s house.

  The second time she ran away, they didn’t take it as seriously. They said, ‘She’ll be back in a few days.’

  The third time, they barely wrote a report. Nikki always came back whenever she stopped having fun or ran out of money. They usually happened at the same time.

  ‘She’ll call Mom and Dad when she’s ready,’ Eddie said.

  ‘No,’ I said. This wasn’t like when Nikki ran away at home, where she had friends and family and a town she was familiar with. This was the wilderness.

  And she was pregnant.

  ‘We have to find her,’ I said.

  ‘Where? How?’ Eddie said. He was throwing his stuff in his bag, no longer looking for Nikki. ‘Just let her go. She knows how to use a phone.’

  I went to Grandpa, who was cleaning up our cooking stuff. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I bet we can find her.’

  He looked at me, his eyes hard. ‘Did you help her?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t help her! No!’

  Grandpa just stared at me.

  ‘Do you really want to go back home without Nikki?’ A threat, yes. I’m not even sure I knew I was making it. The question just seemed obvious. ‘Do you want to explain this to Mom?’

  ‘Nikki!’ Portia yelled. She may have been tricked by Nikki, but Portia still wanted to find her. ‘Nikki!’

  She just kept yelling. No one answered.

  Grandpa sighed. He looked off into the woods, maybe thinking about what to do next.

  ‘We really should call the police,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘Before we do that, let’s try to find her first. You know she runs away a lot.’

>   I had to agree with that.

  ‘Do you have any idea where she would go?’ Grandpa asked.

  I smiled. Yes, I did know. ‘Ever seen Thelma & Louise?’ I said.

  ‘Your grandmother loved that movie,’ he said. ‘I never understood it.’

  ‘Nikki loves it, too. And there’s a desert in it. She always talks about seeing that desert.’

  ‘Then let’s go see the desert.’

  It was impossible for me to know, to visualize, just how big the desert was, or that there were so many of them. At least we were looking for her, though. That was the important thing.

  No such luck for Felix. I went back to camp and gathered up his things before Eddie and Portia were awake. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. Sometimes daylight savings is a good thing.

  I hid his things in the bushes near where we went swimming. They were buried well, so no one would stumble across them anytime soon. Last, I went back to our camp and made more instant coffee, like I had just woken up and hadn’t gone for a walk, hadn’t gone swimming, hadn’t killed my husband.

  I make it sound easy, right? Like killing someone is an everyday thing for me. It isn’t, I promise.

  What I can tell you is that the killing is the easy part. It’s the getting away with it that makes it so difficult. Eventually, Felix will be found. That’s a different set of problems than having him here.

  Portia wakes up first. She holds her head as she walks over to me, obviously hung over.

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  ‘Hi.’

  She grabs a bottle of water and downs half of it. I drink my second cup of coffee. I did bring Felix’s cup back with me, I even washed it out with our antibacterial spray to get rid of any residue from the sleeping pills.

  ‘Is that coffee as bad as it smells?’ Portia says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I have a cup?’

  She doesn’t move to make it herself, she asks me to do it for her. Like she’s still a child, the baby.

  I make her the cup. Portia takes a sip, makes a face. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Told you.’

  She glances over to Eddie’s sleeping bag. ‘Of course the guys are still asleep.’

  ‘One is.’

  ‘Oh right. Felix gets up early.’ She glances around. ‘Is he already packed and ready?’

  I take another sip of coffee. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Gone,’ I say. ‘He left.’

  She is stunned, and then she gets it. ‘Oh shit. I knew you guys were fighting, but …’ She scuffs her toe in the dirt, scratching out a circle. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  I pull the note out of my pocket, the one I wrote yesterday. That’s how long I’ve known for sure. I also knew phones wouldn’t work out here. He couldn’t send me a text.

  I can’t stay on this trip. It’s not doing us any good.

  We’ll talk at home.

  ‘What a dick,’ Portia says. ‘Did he just walk out of the woods?’

  ‘Probably. I bet he called an Uber from the road. He can fly home from … I don’t know, Portland or wherever.’

  ‘Dick.’

  I shrug. ‘Yeah. But you know, it’s comforting in a way.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sometimes it’s good to be reminded they can all be assholes. Like a genetic thing. So I don’t forget.’

  ‘Cheers,’ she says, holding up her coffee. We tap cups.

  Do I think it’s going to work? That I’ll get away with it? Timing. It always comes down to timing.

  I’ve laid the foundation, put everything in its place. The arguing everyone saw. The road trip no one wants to be on. The note. The plan to see him at home. When I get there and he’s not around, I’ll call the police and report him missing.

  Without a body, a crime scene, or any suspicion of foul play, they’ll assume he has left me. They’ll have nothing to go on, no reason to suspect Felix is anything but a husband who had enough of his wife. I plan to be extra annoying to the cops to solidify that belief. I can be the woman no one wants to marry.

  Maybe they’ll ping his phone. They won’t find it. What they will find, if they bother to get his phone records, is a bunch of calls and texts from me, from his boss, from his friends. He’ll be the man who just walked away and went on a road trip of his own.

  That’s assuming Felix’s body doesn’t show up first.

  One day it will. He will be a drowning victim. A husband was on his way to leaving his wife, he stopped to take a little bath in the lake before splitting.

  That’s when things could get tricky. Maybe I’ll get away with it, or maybe I’ll have to use money to buy my way out of it. Good thing I’ve got that inheritance coming.

  Down to the three of us, the Morgan siblings. We’re the only ones left.

  ‘I knew he wouldn’t make it,’ Eddie says. He’s rolling up the sleeping bags, including Felix’s. ‘He’s not the road-trip kind of guy.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I say. ‘Stop talking about him.’

  We finish gathering everything up in silence. Before we leave, I head out to the woods to use the facilities. Also to check for that cell phone.

  I may have been preoccupied with Felix, but I didn’t forget that music. I never could.

  I dig around in what I think is the same spot, wishing I had picked up the phone the night before. Stupid me.

  ‘Lose something?’

  Portia. She has followed me out here, maybe to retrieve that wallet or bury it a little better.

  ‘I hid some toilet paper out here last night,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to leave it behind.’

  ‘Ah. Okay. Well, don’t let me interrupt.’ She keeps walking past me, carrying her own toilet paper roll.

  I do not find the phone.

  My nerves get to me before we leave. I keep checking and double-checking everything in my bag, in my head, around the campsite. Making sure I didn’t forget anything.

  This is the part not many talk about. The nerves. They feel electric, almost painful. I’m convinced it’s a form of panic because, really, it’s fear. Fear that I’ll be caught, fear that I’ve screwed up. Fear that everyone is in on it but me.

  That last one is the worst.

  But I don’t throw myself on the ground and scream. I don’t hyperventilate. No tantrums, just movement. I cannot be in this place for one second longer.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Eddie says. He spits out the instant coffee. ‘This is like … mildewed water or something.’

  ‘Mildewed water?’ Portia says.

  ‘Yeah.’ He doesn’t explain further.

  Once all our things are picked up, we stop at the path and take one last look. The area is as pristine as we found it. You’d never know anyone was here.

  ‘Come on,’ Portia says. She leads the way, Eddie goes next. I’m last.

  ‘These road trips are so screwed,’ Eddie says. ‘We always lose people along the way.’

  Indeed.

  The path out is uneventful. We don’t talk until we get to the car, which is right where we left it. Nothing looks amiss, there are no flat tires, and I hear the doors unlock when Eddie hits the button. Even the chirp sounds perky.

  Two more days. That’s what I’m thinking. Two. More. Days.

  The first time, I had no idea how many more days we’d be on the road, or how long it would take to reach the ocean. It didn’t matter after Nikki ran away, because we had to go to the desert. The ocean had to wait.

  I talked about the desert like it was a town. Eddie never told me I was wrong or stupid, which should have tipped me off. Geography was never my strongest subject. Maybe Eddie didn’t know or maybe he just kept his mouth shut. Grandpa knew, though. He never said a word, just let me go on and on like there was a place called Desert.

  We don’t talk about the desert this time. We’re all too busy looking at our phones.

  I check up on Cooper and then scan t
hrough my e-mails, looking for any updates on the job cuts at work. I have an e-mail from Sandra, who says there are so many rumors flying around it’s impossible to know who will be cut next. I starting typing an e-mail back, thanking her for trying to keep me in the loop, when Eddie’s voice makes me jump.

  ‘What the hell.’

  I look up. He has just opened the back of the car, and the lid to the hidden compartment is open.

  Inside, the wooden box. Grandpa’s ashes are back.

  If you could bring someone back to life by staring hard enough, Grandpa would be with us again. That’s how long and hard we stare at that box.

  ‘Impossible,’ Eddie says.

  No. Not for Nikki. I already know she was here last night because of the phone.

  ‘Convenient,’ Portia says.

  Eddie turns to me. ‘Felix left last night. You think he might’ve done it?’

  This is the single worst thought Eddie has ever had. ‘Why the hell would Felix take the ashes and then put them back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you married a psycho?’

  ‘He’s not a psycho.’ He’s just dead. He couldn’t have done this.

  Portia steps between us. ‘Has to be the guys from Alabama. They’re still messing with us.’

  ‘Either that or it’s one of us,’ Eddie says.

  We all look at one another until one of us breaks. It’s me, because you can’t stand around and do nothing forever. Eventually you have to get on with it.

  ‘Are we going to stare at those ashes all day?’ I ask.

  Eddie and Portia exchange a look that clearly says, She’s being a bitch because her husband left.

  I can work with that.

  Eddie closes the back compartment and we load our bags in. We all managed to roll our bags down the path, except Eddie. As far as I can tell, none of the wheels broke, either. He shuts the back just as Portia says, ‘Shotgun.’

  Shotgun?

  She climbs right into the seat next to Eddie, ignoring the fact that we now have two empty rows in the back. Plenty of room to stretch out and sleep, just as she’s been doing the whole trip. Now all of a sudden she wants to be in the front.

  I sit in my usual seat, right behind Eddie and now Portia. It doesn’t feel right at all.