The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Someone took it,” she was saying. “I put the rock and the branch on top of it. I know I did. But now the rock is over there”—she pointed toward the hollow under the tree—“and I don’t even see the branch.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Christopher muttered. He turned and started scurrying up the other side of the washout, heading back toward the dump site and the road, and he felt Emily’s hands on him and almost screamed, which was stupid, because she was just a dumb girl with a crush on him, a weird girl who made up shit about dead bodies because she was that screwed up in the head about how to make a boy like her back, and what could she do to him? Hurt him? Outrun him? Even if she told people he’d come here with her, he’d lie and say he didn’t, and that’s what people would believe.

  “Wait, Christopher,” she said, blubbering like a baby, and he was sick at her touch. She even smelled bad, he realized—really bad—like she hadn’t bathed in weeks. He hadn’t noticed that about her before, but like her hint about her parents, how hard they were on her, he quickly incorporated that detail into his understanding of her, how Emily-like it would be for her to not take regular baths, being poor and weird and gross. “Christopher, you have to believe me, it was here. It was really here. Somebody must have moved it.”

  “I need to be back home,” Christopher said. “I’m going to be in a crapload of trouble over nothing.” He backed up again, pulling his arm away from her grasping hand. “I guess we’re even now.”

  “It was here! Somebody moved it.”

  “Bullshit!” Christopher shouted, now near tears despite himself. She grabbed at him again and he didn’t think—he just pushed as hard as he could, and she went flying and landed roughly on her backside, her sobs coming to a sudden stop as if the wind had been knocked out of her. He thought of how all of his friends would have laughed at the sight, how they would have cheered him on. “It’s bullshit, Emily. You’re lying and you know it. Just cut it out.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said, so softly he barely heard her. She was a sight: hands grimed with dirt, the knees of her blue jeans brown and wet, eyes red from crying, and hair hanging in strings over her cheeks. “You have to believe me. I’m not lying to you.”

  “Then you’re crazy,” Christopher said. “Either way, I don’t want you to ever speak to me again. Leave me alone, and leave Leanna alone. Don’t talk to us, and don’t spy on us, and maybe I won’t tell people that you’re a nutcase ranting about made-up bodies in the woods.”

  It felt good to talk to her this way, to use his words like fists. He almost hoped she would keep arguing with him so he could say more. It was confusing, how much he felt pulled between pity and contempt, how one emotion flowed so easily into the other.

  “All right?” he said.

  She didn’t speak, and she didn’t nod. Her head dropped, and she covered her face with her hands, shoulders shaking silently.

  “All right, then,” he told her, and he scrambled up the embankment toward Hill Street.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1.

  Sarah’s day passed in a fog. She did her job. Mr. Anderson narrowed his brows at the needle as if preparing to give her grief, saw something in her face, and pinched his lips shut. She drew his blood without saying more than a perfunctory “Good morning” and “Thank you” to him, then moved on to the next room. At lunch she ate too much in the cafeteria, taking helpings of both the Salisbury steak and the lasagna, plus a banana pudding for dessert, then rushed to the bathroom half an hour later to vomit. It was stupid, she kept telling herself—stupid to be this upset, to succumb to this despair. She didn’t know anything for certain yet. But she had by now read the article in its entirety, seen the fact that the man was spotted with the missing woman at Nancy’s the same night Sarah had met Wyatt there. Between this detail and the similarities in the drawing, there was no disputing the fact that the image was of him—that Wyatt was the man the police were looking for. She couldn’t kid herself; she wasn’t the type. And so Wyatt must have also been the man at the gas station with Veronica Eastman, and what did that mean, exactly? If Sarah weren’t the woman who had just spent the night in this man’s bed, lacing her arms and legs with his—if she weren’t the woman who had nursed him back to life, to the desire to live, and seen how sweetly sincere he was, how thoughtful, how tender—would she believe there was a chance he wasn’t connected somehow to the woman’s disappearance?

  No. She wouldn’t.

  Back at the nurses’ station she reread the article surreptitiously, not wanting Jan to notice her, hoping to find some detail that changed things, that made all of her darkest suspicions groundless. There was nothing. She thought back to that night at Nancy’s, to the group of young men that Wyatt had accompanied there, and realized that any one of them could be making the same connection she was now making—or had perhaps made it already. She wondered if she should call Wyatt at home, to see if he was still there and how he sounded, but her hand kept faltering short of the telephone. What would be worse? Hearing the phone ring and ring and ring, or hearing his voice, trying to decide what she could say in response to it?

  The patient call alert sounded loudly, but no more loudly than it always did, and yet Sarah jumped. The newspaper fell out of her hand and onto the floor.

  “What’s with you today?” Jan said. “You want me to get that?”

  Sarah nodded silently.

  “All right, then.” Jan put down the fashion magazine she was reading and rose. “But if someone filled his britches, you’re getting the next five.”

  “That’s a deal,” Sarah said softly.

  By five o’clock she was a nervous wreck. She had told Wyatt she would come to his house as soon as her shift ended, to make him dinner but also to check his blood pressure, which had been better this morning but still not good. Even now, as torn up as she felt about what she had seen in the paper, she couldn’t just shut off feeling concern about him. If he had not continued to show improvement over the course of today—and she had insisted that he stick to his bed and easy chair, not exerting himself—then her plan had been to insist he go back to the hospital immediately. But now, with Jan’s curiosity piqued, could she? And more important: Did she want to?

  She went to her car in a daze and sat behind the wheel for a while; when she finally turned her key in the ignition, the digital clock read 5:20. He would be wondering about her by now but not yet concerned. He would think she had swung by the grocery store on the way to his place, that she was picking up ingredients for dinner. That was, in fact, what she had intended to do. A heart-healthy romantic dinner: she’d originally planned, driving in to work, to buy fish, brown rice, salad greens. Wyatt had mentioned to her that he would miss the catfish at Gary’s Pit Barbecue, and so she was going to whip up her almond-coated, oven-baked tilapia, a recipe she’d happened upon years ago in a Ladies’ Home Journal and trotted out whenever she was making a new go at a diet. She had even thought that she might splurge on some candles. How absurd this all seemed now.

  She started driving toward his place. It was cold out, but she rolled down her window halfway and hoped the brisk air would clear her head, would make her see the right course of action. She could confront him, demand an explanation. Perhaps she owed him that. Perhaps she owed herself that. She could go to the police. Her thumbs tapped out a beat on the steering wheel, her breath hitched. She imagined the conversation with him: I saw you in the paper. I know it’s you. What happened? Don’t lie to me. She tried to script for him a response that would explain everything, that would make it all right for her to love him. She just gave me a ride home. I honestly don’t know what happened to her after that. Or maybe the man in the sketch wasn’t him, it was all a ridiculous coincidence, and he had an alibi proving that he wasn’t with Veronica Eastman at the gas station.

  Her car wheezed as it climbed Hill Street. There was, she was realizing, another part of her operating, a more coldly logical part, and it was taking inventory. Who could conne
ct her to Wyatt? How drawn into this situation was she? She had danced with him at the bar, but she left early, without him—even that blond-headed shit with the trashy girlfriend would have to acknowledge this was the case. She had tended to him at the hospital, but that was her job. Perhaps she had given something away on Sunday in front of Wyatt’s work friend, the one who drove him home from the hospital—but it couldn’t have been too much. They didn’t kiss. She had been keenly aware, before she had an obvious reason to protect the secret of this new relationship, that it would not be wise for her to let her work life be too evidently influenced by her personal life. That was why she had not yet even spilled the beans to Jan and Shurice: she had wanted to make sure this thing was real first. A part of her had wondered if what was developing between them wasn’t just some kind of Florence Nightingale thing; it was a cliché, but she had been hurt before, and so she had decided to tread quietly and cautiously.

  She imagined how her parents would react if it got around that she was dating the man from the police sketch, the “person of interest.” The police might say that Wyatt was just wanted for questioning, but the subtext was clear, and the newspaper had spelled it out in fifty-point font: SUSPECT. They would tell her she was being foolish, kidding herself; they would tell her that she was hurting the family, her brother and nieces, who didn’t have a say in whether or not Sarah attached them to a killer. And they would be right, goddamn it—but did she really believe that Wyatt was capable of this? Wyatt, this good, gentle, loving man who answered her brash posturing with sweetness and patience, who kissed her as if he were the lucky one, as if she weren’t the kind of woman that other men stood up or walked out on?

  A kid ran across the street as she started her ascent of Harper Hill, and Sarah braked hard—too hard, really; he was a good twenty feet ahead—her face slick with sweat. “Get it together,” she whispered to herself, easing the car forward and cutting the boy a hard look as he passed. He waved absently, backpack bouncing against his shoulder. Sarah wiped her forehead with the hem of her blouse.

  The fact was that she couldn’t conceive of Wyatt doing harm to another person. The idea was ridiculous. She might not have known him well yet—they hadn’t even gone on a date—but every day she was forced by her work to see people at their most frightened and humbled, which meant that she saw people at their worst. She had treated abuse victims and spoken curtly to the men by their sides, the men whose heavy brows and set jaws implied a threat that they wouldn’t come right out to her and say aloud. She had treated half a dozen people who were arrested in their beds for DUIs, one of whom awoke to the knowledge that she had hit and killed a ten-year-old boy riding his bicycle home from a friend’s house. She had treated two participants in a fight, big men with lacerated lips and broken noses and shattered bones in their hands, one with a ruptured spleen, the other a punctured lung, and listened mildly as they cursed each other and the woman who’d driven them to it. She knew something about the darkness of human nature. She thought she could recognize it when she saw it, and she did not see it in Wyatt.

  She pulled onto his street and slowed her car almost to a crawl. Wyatt’s truck was in the driveway, and lights were on in the front room and kitchen. Nothing seemed unusual. Her yearning for him was a physical ache, as if the only thing she needed to do to fix her anxiety was to go inside that home and embrace him, to allow herself to love him and feel his love in return. She was forty-three years old. She had assumed for a long time that love would happen to her, then grown to assume it wouldn’t, and now here she was, a little over a week into this brand-new gladness, in which the impossible had suddenly seemed not just within her reach but within her rights. She hadn’t been unhappy before. She’d had her job, her family, her home, her good friends, and all of those people and things would still be waiting for her if she drove away right now, if she pretended these last two weeks of her life away. But it would never be the same, she knew. She exhaled, noting how her breath clouded, fogging the windshield. But her head was at last clear. The choice wasn’t between staying or telling; it was between a sorrow she couldn’t conceive of and a sorrow she could.

  She rolled up her window and hit the gas.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1.

  Christopher ran downhill most of the way to town and made it in half an hour, before full dark. Out of the woods, his thoughts had rebounded with a child’s selfish flexibility to home, its comforts, and even what punishment he’d endure at the hands of his loving, indulgent mother. He started plotting excuses, then just explanations, anything that wouldn’t get him into more trouble than he was already in: Mrs. Mitchell kept me after school—she wouldn’t even let me out of the closet until four o’clock today. That was pretty good, blaming her, but what if his mother got mad and went to the school again? I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I stayed to watch the basketball team practice. I’m sorry. His mother would buy that one, but maybe that was too safe a route; he’d almost certainly get another night’s grounding, and maybe more. It was like gambling, finding the right lie: risking just enough to minimize the extra punishment but not so much that he brought down on himself all of his mother’s wrath.

  He decided that the best bet would be a combination of things: Mrs. Mitchell kept me a few minutes after to have me finish some work, and I walked home extra slow because I was so messed up after being in that closet all day. You wouldn’t believe this room they put me in, Mom. It was like prison. It was prison, but it was worse than prison. I’m kind of claustrophobic. I couldn’t breathe. I kept thinking I might get sick. He nodded to himself, pleased, thinking that he could get his mother going on one of her rants about the local education system—how archaic it was to put a child in a storage closet! He was smiling a little coming into downtown, and he decided he’d made good enough time to walk the rest of the way, catch his breath. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and enjoyed the stroll, the way the trees on the square were still clinging to some red and gold, how you could see some straw littering the ground from the previous weekend’s Tobacco Festival. He passed Leanna’s dad’s law office and rolled his eyes, because her dad was such a joke—“Atticus Finch for the ambulance-chasing set,” his father had said a couple of times, and Christopher wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but he got the gist. “Hello there, young man,” Johnny Burke would call out in his deep drawl when Christopher came over to Leanna’s to hang out, eyeglasses pushed up on his head so that his gray hair stuck straight up, slurring a little over the drink in his hand. Or, if he were really sloshed, he’d say, “If it’s not our enemy from the North, come to steal our daughters,” and Christopher had learned to just bob his head sheepishly and grin in an aw-shucks, You got me, Mr. Burke kind of way. “Is your dad for real?” he always asked Leanna when they escaped to the basement rec room, and she always groaned dramatically. “God, Chris. Don’t encourage him.”

  What a strange town this was, a strange place to end up.

  He dragged his feet at the final approach to his house. The adrenaline from his run spent, he now felt heavy with dread, a dread that had nothing to do with the scolding he anticipated receiving from his mother. It was just sadness, a sadness like nothing he’d known yet in his life—abstract, physical. Like he was only getting most but not all of what he needed in a breath. Had he really been in the woods with Emily Houchens just moments ago?

  He sat on the steps of the house’s side entrance and crossed his arms against the cold. Both of the cars were gone. His dad would still be at work, but his mom? God, she was probably out patrolling the streets already, working herself into a tizzy. He thought that he ought to go inside to shed his coat and stow his backpack, make it look like he’d been there longer than he had, but he felt tired and numb; he couldn’t rouse in himself the momentum to stand up and unlock the door.

  Forty-five minutes later, he blinked against the approach of headlights. He was relieved, he realized. He hadn’t wanted to be in the house alone. And if his mother
would just give him a hug and stay close to him tonight—yes, he wanted his mother, what of it?—he thought that he could endure whatever she wanted to dish out.

  The car stopped shy of the garage, and his mother emerged. “What are you doing outside? Did you forget your key?” She was wearing nice clothes, dress trousers and a suede jacket, and she had on the red lipstick she only wore for garden club meetings and dinner parties. There was something brisk and distracted about her manner that made Christopher hesitate.

  “Um, yeah,” he said finally.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry. You must not have even gotten my note. How long have you been sitting here? Why didn’t you walk to the library or something?”

  Cheered that the exact right words were coming to him, he said, “I was afraid I’d get in trouble if I wasn’t here when you got home.”

  “Oh, honey,” she repeated. She put her hands on his cheeks. “You’re freezing cold. Let’s get you inside.” She dug around in her purse for her keys. “I didn’t know I’d be gone so long.”

  “Where were you?” He followed her into the kitchen. She flipped the lights and stowed her bag on the island, then scowled at a dirty coffee cup.

  “I swear,” she muttered. “Your father knows good and well how the dishwasher works.” She turned to put the mug in the washer, then grabbed a towel to wipe the granite. “There was a meeting at First Baptist about Veronica Eastman—trying to organize some kind of volunteer search effort.”