Every Last Promise

by Kristin Halbrook

  “No one. I just got off work.”

  “And you came here instead of anywhere else?”

  He doesn’t answer. A roar of laughter comes from the open gym doors, but I don’t see who’s making the noise or what they’ve done that’s so funny because I’m watching Noah watch me. My ribs feel like a cage for a panicked bird. His gaze travels over my bare collarbone but no more before returning to my chin, my lips, my eyes. Boldness and timidity battle in me until I catch a breath at the way he swallows nervously and then I make a decision.

  I square my body to his and take his hand in mine before I can stop myself. Think better of it. Let my arm settle on his shoulder and then, when his goes around my waist, curve mine around his neck. He knows how to keep rhythm and so we shuffle in time to the song drifting over to us, my heels crushing grass, his shoes sliding over dirt.

  “You came here instead of anywhere else,” he says into my hair. Somehow I know he’s not talking about the dance.

  Headlights brighten the night and I pull away from Noah. My body is not happy. It wants to stay in that embrace, under that warm, searching gaze.

  But I open my mom’s car door and get in.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” I tell her.

  “Is that Noah Michaelson?” she asks, peering out my window as we pull away.

  Noah waits, hands in his pockets, until we’re out of sight.

  “Yeah.” I prop my elbow against the door and rest the side of my head in my hand. “That’s Noah.”

  When we pull into our driveway, I say, “I’m pretty tired. Going to head to bed.”

  I’m halfway up the stairs when she says my name. I look down at her, standing in the entryway with the car keys held in her fist. She isn’t wearing her gardening hat anymore like she was before I left for Jen’s house earlier in the day, but her hair is still flattened against her head. It’s not the sort of thing she worries about.

  She worries about me.

  It takes her a few moments to decide what to say to me. I guess at the possibilities but there are so many I lose track. In the end, she only says, “Good night.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  I wait until I hear her and Dad’s low voices talking in the kitchen before climbing the rest of the stairs. I replay Noah’s face and words in my mind with each step I take. Yes, I came back here. I came back to reclaim a world of love and laughter, a place with sprinkles of magic at the edges. But the people who used to live there aren’t the same. The dust in the air at sunrise doesn’t shimmer anymore; it just looks dirty. The river smells murky instead of fresh. The magic is gone. From this place . . . and from me.

  And what do I do about that? I walk into my room. For a moment, facing my closed closet door, I wish I had asked Mom to come up with me. To face this excavation together. To tell me what to do.

  I open the closet door. Pull out the bag from the hospital. The bag from that night. Everything inside is folded neatly. There’s a form on top with my name on it. It’s obvious no one has gone through this bag until now. And I get that—the desire to be distanced from that night. These things are better left in the back of the closet, forgotten.

  No. They’re not.

  I scratch my shoulder absently, gathering strength. Then I reach in. Feel the remnants of that night. Silky black shorts. The hardness of a high heel.

  The paramedics would have assumed every item on me was mine. My clothing. My shoes. Whatever was in my pocket.

  What about what wasn’t on me? My purse. My driver’s license.

  I pause with my hands buried in purple sequins.

  Why did no one say anything about me not having my license?

  The heat on my face is like sticking my head too far into an oven. I get up, leaving the bag on the floor, and splash my face with cold water in the bathroom sink.

  I go back to my room.

  This time I pull everything out. Fling out the clothing piece by piece. The heels thump against the wall. And, at the bottom, is a memory.

  A phone.

  I walk away from it again. Then back to it. Pick it up and cradle it in my palm. It’s not my phone. It’s Steven’s. Just something else thrown from the car that night. Like Steven. Like me.

  I’d tucked it in my pocket, that night last spring.

  And made a promise to Bean.

  SPRING

  SELENA AND BEAN SHOWED up in a cloud of perfume and flowing dresses an hour before the party started, just as Jen and I were starting to get dressed.

  “When do your parents leave?” Selena checked her hair in the bathroom and added a spritz of hairspray to an errant flyaway.

  “Any minute,” Jen said.

  As if she knew we were talking about her, Erica Brewster poked her head in Jen’s room and tapped her red fingernails against the doorframe. “We’re going,” she said. Her eyes swept over me and Jen and Bean. “You girls look so nice.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Brewster,” Selena yelled from the bathroom.

  “You look nice, too, Selena,” Jen’s mom called across the room, even though she couldn’t see Selena. “Have a good night and be good. I have my cell so call if you need me. Kayla, I’m sure you’ll keep everyone out of trouble.” Her smile reached the corners of her eyes. “I know I can trust you for that.”

  “I will do my best.” I waved as she faded out of sight down the hall.

  Jen turned to me, her eyes sparkly. “Alone. Finally.”

  The four of us grinned and a shiver of anticipation bolted up my spine. I reached for Jen’s music and clicked it on, turning on the balls of my feet to the thump of bass.

  In the bathroom, Selena exchanged the hairspray for the bottle of vodka and cranberry juice she’d stashed in her bag and began passing it around. The juice mix was warm and I declined.

  “Orange juice next time,” I said. “That cranberry stuff you get is basically red sugar water.”

  “Lighten up, Kayla,” Selena said. She lifted an eyebrow at me over the lip of the bottle.

  “I’ll wait for something better.”

  “Don’t we all,” Jen said.

  Jay came home, bringing a handful of noisy guys with him, and we watched them set up the kegs in the backyard and pull the cover off the hot tub. Jen told them where to sink tiki torches into the grass and set tables up on the wood deck off the back of the house. Bean and I emptied bags of chips into big plastic bowls.

  “You’re missing the bowl,” I said as half of the pretzels Bean was pouring ended up on the table.

  “Oops.” She giggled and moved her whole body to see the mess she was making. Her feet stumbled over each other and I laughed and put a hand to her shoulder to keep her steady.

  “How much booze has Selena given you?” Bean and I were the nondrinkers, usually. The lightweights.

  “Oh God, I don’t know. We had some at my house before we came over.” She stopped, her eyes lifted to some point over my head, and pointed. “Look at that.”

  I turned and together we watched the gold and scarlet brushstrokes of the sunset deepen and bleed into one another. Across the table, Bean’s hand found mine. We breathed out the air of day and in the air of the falling night. “You should paint it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said softly. Her pale face reflected the dying yellow rays of the sun, her eyes took on a washed-out turquoise color that reminded me of the waves that lapped against the shore during our Florida spring break vacation. I squeezed her hand.

  “Now kiss.”

  The moment was broken by a grating boy voice behind us. We turned.

  Steven McInnis pointed his phone at us, his arm steady, his eyes fixed on the screen. Bean frowned.

  “We’re not here for you to get your rocks off.” I swiped at his hand, but he whipped it away too quickly.

  “Too bad. I could get into this thing.”

  “Piss off, Steven.”

  Steven shook his head. “Don’t be like that, Kayla. Why do you have to be cruel? Smile. It’s the first day of summer.
You look prettier that way.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m not trying to look pretty for you.”

  Walking up behind him, Selena pulled her fist back and slammed it into Steven’s shoulder.

  His face crumpled. “What the hell . . .”

  “Stop being an asshole, asshole.”

  Steven flashed her a look, all dark eyebrows and shaded eyes, but skulked off to bug someone else.

  I flashed Selena a grateful smile. “I’m going to run in the house and grab Bean some water,” I said. “You should stay with her. She might need . . . holding up.”

  Bean stuck her tongue out at me and Selena laughed and slipped her arm through Bean’s.

  Through the window above the kitchen sink, I saw Steven do a dorky dance toward Maria. She planted her fists on her hips and ignored him. But the girl she was talking to giggled at him.

  I took a drink of Bean’s water. The yard was filling quickly as carloads of people emptied onto the Brewsters’ sprawling green lawn. Someone turned the music up.

  Jen caught sight of me and beckoned. I laughed at her come-hither expression and started to dance out to her.

  I left the cup next to the sink. I forgot my worry for Bean in the house.

  FALL

  MY BIKE STILL CREAKS. It always will, I guess.

  The phone burns a hole in my pocket.

  My route takes me from one end of Third Street to the other, but it’s too late—or too early—for the smell of baking rolls to sweeten my journey.

  At Jen’s house I stop and wait, staring at the dark windows, knowing she’s still at the dance or in the backseat of the car I rode in earlier, parked down by the river or on a dark road somewhere. My house is an old farmhouse that my grandparents built when they moved out here ages and ages ago. Jen’s house is brand-new. Shaped like a box with lots of windows. It’s been here long enough that I don’t think twice about it anymore, but when it was first built, I had to squint when I looked at it. It’s like a boulder in the middle of the river, disturbing the natural flow of things.

  It doesn’t belong here.

  I walk my bike another hundred yards or so before getting on again. It’s easy to find the right spot. I look for signs: the bark ripped from a tree, the hill cresting just ahead. It lives in my head like a landscape painting I just found in the attic. Cloudy for all the dust I’ve blown off it but recognizable.

  When I get there, I drop my bike and sit. I could be sitting on old oil or blood from the accident. It doesn’t feel weird, and it doesn’t feel familiar, like everything else in this town does. It feels like it shouldn’t exist at all.

  But I pull out the phone. I’d left it for an hour on the charger I found in Caleb’s room. There are voices in my head telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. Some belong to other people.

  Don’t go snooping.

  You really don’t remember anything about that night?

  It’s okay, it was an accident.

  We already sold your pie.

  Others are only mine.

  Watch it.

  Don’t watch it. It will change everything.

  It doesn’t have to. Watch it.

  Don’t watch it, Kayla. Don’t.

  This phone belongs to a dead boy. I swipe my thumb across the face of it and blink as Steven’s home screen loads. I’m glad it’s not locked. Aren’t I?

  I choose the photo gallery from his apps and, before I lose my nerve, press on the first image that pops up. The video begins with the sound of clinking glass, of sloshing liquid. Of laughter and catcalls and faces pressed close to the screen. Big eyes, open mouths, dizzying camera movement. Then there’s moving grass for a long time. A beer bottle falls to the ground.

  A voice: “I just fucked up my shoes. You owe me a new pair.”

  “Like fuck I do.”

  “It’s your house. Claim it on your insurance.”

  Guffaws.

  My hands squeeze the phone so hard that it makes indentations in my skin.

  There is a quick change of scenery. Jen’s barn appears. Then grass again. Then the barn. I feel sick. Dig my heels into gravel and round my back so my head is closer to the ground. When I breathe, it smells like beer and horses. Someone left a stuffed animal here for Steven.

  “Look who’s out here,” the familiar voice in the video says softly.

  I stop watching because I have to.

  I only listen, and listening is enough.

  The conversation they almost have, because Bean’s words are too slow and slurred to be a real conversation. Laughter. The argument over whether to turn off the video or not. More laughter.

  Crying. And laughter. And suggestions so horrible I am sick again.

  Another voice. I sit up. I hate hearing my recorded voice.

  “Bean? Oh my God.”

  I flip the phone over again so the screen faces me. Just in time to see a blur, someone say, “Shit,” and watch it click off.

  Another light fills my vision. I scoot farther back from the road, squinting into headlights. I can’t tell whose car has pulled off the road in front of me until the lights go out and I recognize Bean’s Honda. The driver’s door opens.

  “I come here sometimes, too,” Bean says by way of a greeting as she steps out of her car. Her teal sequins glitter in the bath of her headlights. A pile of red hair sits on top of her head. Gravel crunches under her silver shoes.

  The phone slips from my hands and lands under my leg.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “You asked me to be your homecoming date,” she says. “I accept.”

  I’ve already changed out of my dress and into jeans.

  “That’s . . . kind of creepy, Bean.”

  “What is? You asking? Or me not calling to say yes before just showing up?”

  “Showing up here.”

  “I wasn’t planning on coming here. I was on my way to the dance. You rode right past me on Third and didn’t even notice.”

  “And you followed.” I can’t decide if I wish I stayed at the dance now or if I’m glad Bean and I weren’t seen together there. What I do know is that the way she’s looking at me—intense, knowing, vindicated—scares me a little. I’m like an animal flushed from its burrow. No more hiding.

  “I was curious where you were going. This is a strange choice for your after-party.”

  “It wasn’t much of a party.” I wince. I know we’re not going to talk about the homecoming dance, but I want to. Anything to keep Bean from saying the things I’m certain she wants to say.

  I can’t stop her, though. All the words she’s kept inside come tumbling out.

  “I marked the tree so I’d remember where it happened.” Bean points to the X dug into the bark behind me then to the furry fabric on the ground. “I brought that bear for the memorial. Does that seem sick to you?”

  Yes, I want to say. But I can’t. I don’t want to think about Bean standing here, holding a gift for Steven’s memorial because no one would listen to her.

  “When I come back here, I think about how he died in the accident. Everyone says I’m the nicest girl they know, but I’m glad someone died. I wished someone else dead, too.” She sits close to me and peers into my face, as though searching for something. Agreement. Confirmation. Because I, of all people, can’t think poorly of her for wishing someone dead. And what she finds satisfies her because she nods. “I don’t feel guilty, either, wishing that. Then I wouldn’t have to look at him every day in school. And feel, over and over, what he did to me.

  “It’s what you wanted, too, huh, Kayla? For them to die. Or to hurt them, somehow. To not let them get away with it. You did it on purpose. Turning the car into the ditch. You did that for me.”

  “I didn’t . . . ,” I croak. Swallow. “I didn’t see everything. That night, I mean.”

  Her hand reaches out. Touches my shoulder. Pulls away. “Doesn’t matter. You saw enough. You replay it. In your head.” She nods at the phone. “With the
video. You remember what happened now, don’t you?”

  I remember. I remembered long before “now.” I didn’t remember, yet, when they’d asked me, the police, so it wasn’t a lie then. But I remembered long before I came home, the pieces falling into place as I explored Aunt Bea’s suburban neighborhood in Kansas City. I remembered when I ate, the swallowing harder the more I thought. When I slept, my dreams taking on the graininess of an old movie, until the only thing I recognized was a night outlined in fear.

  But every day I was gone, I talked to my parents. And when they didn’t bring up what happened that night before the accident—the things that had led up to the accident—I realized that Bean hadn’t told anyone what they did to her. And Bean’s silence made me feel like I could come back. I thought she didn’t want to tell. Eventually, I thought that maybe I had remembered things wrong. That it was all a mistake.

  Jay was a star athlete. A hero. A boy everyone had such hope in. He could have any girl. And he certainly wouldn’t have to rape someone.

  I know better now. Rape isn’t about sex.

  “Does Jen know?” I ask softly.

  “Yeah. She knows.” Her expression softens. She swallows and looks at her keys cradled in her hands. “I told her that night. Before we heard about the accident. She told me I was drunk and hallucinating and that I should go home.”

  “I tried to come back for you,” I say. “It would have been different.” The moon glints off the silver key. Off sequins. Her skin is so pale. Why did I try so hard to come back for Bean that night but not after? How did her experience, how much I care about her, change so much in the time between the car crash and waking up? How can I still hesitate when she’s right here, in front of me, putting so much faith in me?

  “I know you did. Someone else gave me a ride home. I can’t even remember who. The whole night was happening in a dream . . . a nightmare. I didn’t hear about the accident until the next morning. I was in my room all night, staring at the wall like I’d lost my mind.”

  The same way I did all summer long. Eyes locked on the plain, white ceiling in Aunt Bea’s guest room, seeing my memories as though they were being replayed in a rearview mirror.