by TAYLOR ADAMS
I’m just me. She’s the badass I want to be.
And now she’s gone.
The word dead is so blunt. Gone is better. Or sometimes I try to tell myself that she’s set free.
My sister always wanted freedom, right? Well, now she doesn’t have to breathe. She doesn’t have a body that needs to be maintained. She doesn’t have to go to the dentist. She doesn’t care about temperature or air pressure. She can go wherever she wants.
Forget Glass Beach or the Everglades. I like to imagine her on another planet, maybe a frozen moon, watching the rings of a colossal helium giant rise over bone-white glacier shelves. Or walking the yellow lava fields of Venus, leaving no footprints in sulfurous mud. Or studying the shimmering crystals inside Halley’s Comet as it hurtles at thousands of miles per second through our sky and millions of others. My sister can go anywhere. I hope she finds what she’s looking for. Wherever she is, I hope she still thinks about us from time to time. About me and Mom and Dad and the hole she left behind.
I wish I could stop thinking about solving the mystery of her death, turn off the busy clockwork inside my head and just grieve. But so many things nag at me, nipping at my thoughts. Maybe it’s a curse, and now that she’s gone, her furies have taken up residence in me. But I don’t think it’s paranoia. These are real loose ends that demand to be tugged. Like Corporal Raycevic pulling her over just an hour before her alleged suicide. Like how he described her—her, of all people—as apologetic for speeding. Or the most utterly damning evidence of all: the calls on her flip phone.
In my opinion, this should have been a bombshell.
Courtesy of Verizon’s records, we know she dialed 911 sixteen times before her death. Every call failed, because there’s no cell service between Magma Springs and Polk City. The first attempt, tellingly, is time-stamped at 8:22 p.m. Just thirteen minutes after Raycevic pulled her over.
There’s an explanation for this.
I don’t buy it.
I can’t fathom why she would call for help sixteen times before ending up dead, and no one bats an eyelash.
There’s only one explanation I can provide that feels plausible to me. Be warned, dear readers, it will sound like quite a reach when I first explain it. Maybe not quite as absurd as the same person catching a front-row seat for the only two military deployments of the A-bomb in human history, but hey, it’s close. So bear with me, and I’ll walk you gently through it.
But first, the funny part?
That Japanese man I mentioned—you assumed he died in Nagasaki, right? He survived the second blast, too. He lived a full life and died in 2010. God bless him. And I think about Cambry, twenty-four and full of wit and mystery, and the way our parents wept at her service when her sketches came up on the slide show. She always drew better than people can photograph.
Yes, life can be so strange.
* * *
“What about Cambry’s 911 calls?”
Raycevic answered as if following a teleprompter. “She suffered from untreated schizoid personality disorder, and she was clearly in the midst of an emotional crisis. We urge anyone who’s experiencing suicidal thoughts to call 911 immediately, and your sister tried to.”
“You think she dialed 911 because she felt suicidal?”
He nodded.
“Sixteen times?”
“There’s no signal out here, all the way from the campgrounds, to Magma Springs, to Polk City. I’ve been begging the county to let T-Mobile build their third tower—”
“Sixteen times, though?”
“Do you think I feel good about this?” His tone darkened. “On June sixth, I pulled over a troubled young woman, just an hour before she took her own life, and whatever the signs were, I missed them. That’s my failure. Okay? I failed. Is that what you came all this way to hear me say?” He looked at the recorder. “On tape?”
“Sixteen times,” Lena echoed.
“The county prosecutor covered everything. We have no evidence of anyone following her. No one spoke to her, aside from myself. Whatever was going on in her mind . . . her movements between my traffic stop and Hairpin Bridge were concluded to be a straight line. Nothing else is geographically possible. Your sister couldn’t get an emergency operator on the phone, and she drove until she ran out of gas on this bridge, and took her life, and I’m so sorry, Lena.”
I’m so sorry, Lena. Another familiar echo, as canned as a sound bite. Was it her boss who said it first? Her uncle? Her cousin? Did it even matter?
She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t let him see the tears building in her eyes. She stared out at the distant wall of smoke to the north, a furious volcanic churn rising and smearing into trails. It looked noticeably larger. Maybe it was coming closer after all.
Raycevic studied the smoke, too, and sighed.
“If you need someone to blame,” he said, “blame me. I’m the one who let her out of my sight.”
He took in a breath, and Lena bristled. She knew it was coming.
It’s not your fau—
“It’s not your fault, Lena.”
There it was.
The classic. The original. It was only a matter of time before he stumbled across the blue-ribbon Thing People Tell You When Your Sister Commits Suicide. And here it was. Lena despised it because of what it suggested: If it isn’t your fault or mine, it must be Cambry’s, right? Let the living stay blameless. Blame the person who’s not here anymore, who can’t defend herself.
It made Lena so deeply sick. She clenched her fists.
Raycevic kept going: “Schizoid personality disorder is especially difficult. Someone described it to me once. It’s not an affliction, like an illness with symptoms you can treat. It’s how you’re wired. It’s what you want. You want the distance, to leave everyone a million miles behind you, to sever every human connection and just exist on your chosen terms in orbit around Saturn. And that solitude can make you happy for a while. Unless one day you discover you need help, and there’s nobody to—”
“I’m so sick of hearing about her mental illness,” Lena said.
He froze.
“People act like that solves the whole mystery: She jumped off a bridge because she was crazy. Because of a ten-year-old diagnosis from when she was a kid. Yes, my sister had problems. Yes, she was a loner. But I know her, and she was not suicidal—”
“Maybe you didn’t know her.” He tossed this out like an insult.
She was unprepared. It hurt.
He seemed to sense he’d overstepped, because he softened immediately and made sure the recorder heard: “Sorry, I . . . that came out wrong.”
She said nothing. Nothing at all.
Maybe you didn’t know her.
“Let me pose you a question, Lena. What are you doing?”
“Processing my grief.”
“What are you really doing?”
Silence.
He came closer. “Why did you drive all the way from Seattle? Why not a phone call?”
She’d rehearsed an answer for this inevitable question, but it still hit her between the eyes. She was off balance now.
“I . . . I’m writing a book.” She felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment, and she hated it. “About my sister. About her last moments on June sixth. There’s so much I don’t know about her, and I want to tell her story. With your help.”
He considered this.
“When we were kids, she was the artist and I was the writer. Cambry always asked me to write a story about her. I never did. Now this is my atonement, I guess.”
“I’m sorry if I sounded cold, Lena.”
She half smiled. “I’m sorry I interrupted you, Ray.”
Two fake apologies, spoken only for the Shoebox recorder. They stood ten paces apart. Like gunfighters in a Western.
From a distance and up close, Corporal Raymond Raycevic looked like two different men. He reminded Lena of a sports car one of Cambry’s exes drove—fine-looking on the outside, gutted and cigarette-bu
rned on the inside. His eyes were hollow and exhausted. His stomach gurgled with cancerous discomfort. But those biceps could probably punch a Clydesdale out cold.
“You look tired.”
“I haven’t slept since Thursday.”
She waited for him to add a reason—Insomnia? Graveyard shifts? My wife snores?—but he said nothing more. Good enough, apparently.
From here, she could see inside his cruiser. The back seat was slashed and sun-cooked. There were patterns inked into the chestnut vinyl. One in particular, behind the driver’s seat—she came closer to the window and recognized a hand-drawn dinosaur.
“You have some graffiti.”
“What?”
She pointed. “Someone drew something on your—”
“Teenagers.”
He walked back to her Corolla, his boots clicking dryly. She remained at the cruiser’s back window for a moment longer, her gaze fixed inside on that curious cartoon dinosaur, etched in spidery blue ink. She couldn’t look away. She’d seen it before.
No—she’d seen it many times.
* * *
Corporal Raymond Raycevic didn’t like how long the girl lingered beside his car, peering through the tinted glass. His back seat was empty—so what was she staring at?
He caught himself staring, too. At her.
She looks exactly like her sister did.
There were superficial differences—Lena had long hair and bangs, while Cambry’s had been self-cut and ponytailed. Lena was pale, Cambry bronze-skinned; Cambry’s jeans had been frayed and browned with a dozen climates of sunbaked dust, while Lena’s could have come off the rack yesterday. Underneath all of it was the same person, somehow. That they must have tried so hard to be different, to forge their own selves—maybe that made it all the more tragic that they couldn’t escape each other.
Jesus Christ. He had to marvel.
It’s like looking at Cambry’s ghost.
Lena didn’t notice. She was still squinting inside his car. It made Raycevic’s insides clam up. He tried to remember—was there anything damning in his back seat? What could she be looking for, amid thirteen years’ worth of slashes and stains?
No, sir. He didn’t like this at all.
He needed to change the subject. “Okay,” he said over a reluctant sigh. “I’m going to tell you the truth now.”
* * *
“What?”
“I lied to you, Lena.”
She blinked, certain she’d misheard.
“And I’m sorry.” He turned away again.
Lena’s stomach fluttered with excitement at the trooper’s words. I lied to you . . .
“Back at Magma Springs, I told you I couldn’t imagine what it’s like to lose a sibling, but the truth is, I can.” He stopped at the guardrail and stared out into the smoke-shrouded hills. “I’m a twin.”
She followed. But kept her distance.
“My brother’s name was Rick, and he always wanted to be a cop. Ever since age five, when he’d arrest me with plastic handcuffs. And at eighteen, we both decided we’d take the same path with law enforcement. We both took the written, the psych panel, the fitness—but only I made academy selection. Rick washed out. It still surprises me, honestly, because I think he wanted it more than I did. Maybe he wanted it too much. And then I wonder if I only wanted it because I was following his lead. You know? Rick was the older twin, by two minutes.”
Lena remembered her mother once telling her that she was Cambry’s elder by a similar handful of hospital minutes. Not that it mattered. Cambry and her furies had always felt older, tougher, wiser.
He exhaled. “The night before I took my bus to Missoula, Rick put a twelve-gauge under his chin.”
She felt like she should say something. She didn’t.
“And you think I don’t get what you’re going through with Cambry’s suicide, and it’s true—I don’t—because everyone’s journey through grief and guilt is different. But I do have an idea of what you’re going through.” He looked back at her. “I have nothing but sympathy for you, Lena. And I’m urging you: Stop chasing her ghost. Look forward, not backward.”
She looked forward. At him.
“And it was fifteen,” he said. “She tried to call 911 fifteen times, according to the SIM card.”
She said nothing. She was certain it had been sixteen.
Right?
“A clerk might have made a mistake when they were counting them for you over the phone,” Raycevic said. “It was over the phone, right?”
Still, she said nothing.
The sun was high now. The shadows short. The sky a smoggy brown, thick with grit. The wind had ceased, creating a tense stillness. She was already thirsty, her lips cracking and her head beginning to ache. She wondered now if Raycevic was right about the call records. And if that was the case—what else could she be wrong about?
A metallic chirp interrupted her thoughts.
Raycevic recognized it. “Sorry. One sec.”
She glanced back—it had come from his police cruiser. His radio, maybe. The Charger’s front window was open a half inch, so the sound carried in the still air. Every sound seemed to carry. Every flexing grass blade, every footstep, every withheld breath.
No. She called 911 sixteen times.
I saw the records myself. I counted the lines.
The cop excused himself and jogged back to his patrol car at a harmless-looking trot. She watched him squeeze inside and shut the door. She wouldn’t dare let him out of her sight.
I’m not crazy.
She couldn’t afford to doubt herself. Her mind swirled—the SIM card, the cartoon dinosaur in the Charger’s back seat, the startling coldness in Raycevic’s voice when he suggested she didn’t know her own twin sister. Nothing fit. Nothing felt solid. Like a mouth full of loose teeth.
She tried to clear her mind and focus on the knowns. The facts, hard-edged and inarguable. Cambry’s estimated time of death was 9:00 p.m.
This meant that, at the moment Raycevic pulled her over, she’d had less than an hour to live.
Chapter 4
Cambry’s Story
The cop asks her name.
“Cambry Nguyen.”
The cop asks how her day is going.
“Fine.”
The cop asks where she’s from.
“Seattle, originally.”
The cop asks for her driver’s license.
She fishes her wallet from her backpack on the seat beside her. Her hands are shaking, her fingers useless and numb.
“No need to be nervous,” the sunburned man says as he takes her license. “You’re not in trouble.” Then he turns and paces back to his black cruiser. He sits in the driver’s seat with the door gently ajar. One foot resting on the packed dirt shoulder.
He’s checking you for warrants.
Cambry knows her record is fine—spotty, but nothing outstanding. Maybe she should have filed charges against Blake back in Florida, but the money was mostly his. The .25-caliber mouse gun was his, too, if he even bought it legally. Again, she wishes she had it now.
The situation doesn’t feel real. Not yet.
Dusk has brought a chill to the air. The way a dream curdles into a nightmare. The sweat on her skin turns cold. She’s already forgotten the cop’s name, remembers only that it had two R’s.
She watches him in her rearview mirror. He’s not on his radio, which is strange. He’s just sitting there, silent, staring back at her in the cooling blue twilight. Through the windshield, his face is a shadow. But he still has one foot on the ground, like he’s ready to run. Ready to spring into motion. Ready for something.
Cambry places her right hand on the Toyota’s shifter. The cop can’t see this. Slowly, she closes her fingers around it, into a fist.
It would be easy to shift her car into drive right now. Her engine is still idling. Just a single metallic click downward. It wouldn’t even be the first time she’s run from the cops, technically. He’ll realize imm
ediately, of course, before she even accelerates, because her taillights will blink.
But still—You can drive away. Right now.
And he will chase her. Right? Of course he will—she’ll be fleeing a traffic stop. That’s a criminal offense. He’ll flick his siren back on and she’ll be the fleeing bad guy.
But . . .
At least if she drives long enough and fast enough, she’ll encounter witnesses. Other cops, even, would be fine. She’s almost okay with the thought of being dragged out of her car and handcuffed with a knee on her back and her face in the dirt, as long as it’s one county over. As long as it isn’t his knee on her back, here and now, with no witnesses.
She pulls the shifter downward. Slowly. The gears touch and rotate inside the framework, a tightening creak. The red line wavers between P and D. Park and drive.
Live or die. Do it.
She holds her breath.
Do it. Drive away.
She glances back up at her rearview mirror—the cop hasn’t moved. Still sitting in his seat, studying her, his face under a cowl of thick shadow.
Somehow, she knows he’s not a real cop. Not at all. He’s an impostor. A wannabe. Maybe he murdered some poor state trooper earlier today. Maybe he just rinsed the blood from a uniform that’s not his, and sat down in a car that’s not his, and I’m just the latest stop on his homicidal joyride.
She pulls the shifter farther down.
Farther. Farther still. The gears tighten and the lever touches the faintest invisible wall somewhere inside the mechanism. She can sense it, the knife edge. She’s close. One last ounce of pressure, just a little more muscle in her wrist, and the Corolla will slip into drive.
If you don’t drive away, right now, you will die.
This slips into her mind, a strange and distinct certainty. The same unwelcome feeling that made her petrified of Ouija boards, of asking if she was destined to die young. It was a strange phobia—not necessarily the fear of death, but the fear of being doomed. It was why that owl had bothered her today. How tragic, to journey all the way from Seattle to Fort Myers, and make it all the way back solo, only to die here in the homestretch, two states from home.
