No One Tells Everything

by Rae Meadows

“I shut all the shades and sat in the dark. I watched a lot of pornography on the computer. I gorged myself. Donuts in the morning, fast food in the afternoon, alcohol at night. It felt like the world was swirling. Sometimes I would drive around campus looking for her, to make sure she was okay. But I never saw her.”

  “What about the motel?” Grace pushes ahead. “Why were you there? Why was she?”

  He lets out a low sound from deep in his throat.

  “Tell me,” she says.

  “I went to that awful motel because—I went there because I wanted to kill myself. I was finally going to do it, for real this time. I took a knife and a bottle of vodka. I didn’t want to do it in the condo because the manager was nice to me, so I drove around until I found that disgusting place. I checked in. I set the knife on the bedside table and started drinking. And I couldn’t even do it.”

  “You were alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charles. What happened?”

  Grace hears his labored breathing.

  “My cell phone rang. It was Sarah. She wanted me to pick her up.”

  CHAPTER 28

  You told your father that you couldn’t concentrate in the dorm because of all the partying. You wanted to move away, and he made it happen. That’s something he’s good at. He increased your allowance by a thousand a month to cover rent. You have never been a huge fan of the beach, having to go without a shirt is reason enough, but you want to be able to say you’re living large, to be able to say, “You should hang at my crib at the beach.” You imagine Sarah arriving at your door and how you’ll walk with her down to the water’s edge at the end of the day and hold her in the sand that still hums with warmth from the sun. She hasn’t come to visit yet but your hope is a dormant seed waiting for water in the dark soil. You are infinitely patient even though she is so mad at you she hasn’t talked to you in weeks. Or maybe she never thinks about you at all, there’s that option, but it just can’t be, can it?

  You have never kissed a girl. Yes, there was the transaction with the prostitute that helped alleviate something for a moment, but there was never a girl who liked you, who closed her eyes and leaned her face toward yours with dreamy anticipation. You tell the guys here that there’s a girl from home—blond, nice rack—who’s at Ohio State and who’s coming to visit soon, who’s killing you, man, because there are so many hot chicks running around Emeryville. And you tell your old classmates at Hunter High, via an online post, that you have a girlfriend at Emeryville who rocks your world.

  You drive your Land Rover around Campus Drive when you’re supposed to be in Western Civilization discussing The Sorrows of Young Werther. You don’t see Sarah but you do see Amy waiting for the shuttle and she flags you down. You slow to a stop and quickly eject a Sade CD, winging it into the backseat, and you turn on the rap station.

  “Hey, Raggatt,” Amy says. “Can you drop me off at the mall? I need to get a birthday present for Megan.”

  “Sure, no problem,” you say, as you always do. She gets in and slouches down in the seat. “Did you change your hair?” you ask.

  Her natural red has been bleached. She flips the ends between her fingers.

  “For fun,” she says.

  But she’s clearly self-conscious about it. It’s too obvious, too out of character. You recognize something familiar in Amy. She watches the popular girls with a hunger akin to lust.

  “Do you mind?” she asks, reaching for the radio.

  She turns it up and you can feel the bass in your feet.

  “Where have you been, anyway?” she yells.

  “I moved to the beach,” you say. “I have a sweet setup. You should come hang out some time.”

  “That’s cool,” she says, nodding, knowing she never will because you have already been deemed uncool and she can’t risk it. Using you is fine and easily explained away, as long as she doesn’t get caught being your friend. “So John gets a single then?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  You underestimated your roommate. You thought he was a math nerd but he found a pretty girlfriend within weeks. You never get it right.

  “Lucky bastard,” she says, turning down the music a little. “I guess that means no more happy hours.”

  She smiles wanly since you both know people stopped wanting to come to your room. Even free alcohol wasn’t enough to lure them in.

  “Rush starts next week,” she says, trying to sound upbeat, but her voice betrays her anxiety.

  Amy will want to get into Pi Phi but will probably have to settle for a sorority where the girls are nice but not as hot or popular.

  “Good luck,” you say.

  The SAEs still chant “Ra-ggatt, Ra-ggatt” when you roll a keg in from your car or when they fake-box with you, but at some point you realized that you weren’t one of them, just the butt of their jokes, so you won’t humiliate yourself further by trying to become official. You tell them you’ll help with hazing and they say, “Yeah you will, Raggatt,” and laugh and give you high fives.

  “Which side do you want?” you ask, pulling into the mall parking lot.

  You have lost your desire to even feign jocularity.

  “In front of Macy’s is good,” Amy says, checking her lip gloss in her compact mirror.

  You feel pressure in your temples and heaviness in your limbs. Your mouth is too rubbery-limp to smile.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she says, hopping out. “See you at casino night on Friday?”

  You nod and wave, your eyes behind your sunglasses blurring out of focus.

  You drive back to the dark, bare-walled condo where your clothes are still in garbage bags and your computer is on the floor and your TV takes up one whole wall, like a giant mouth waiting to swallow you up. Your mother sent you a box of things for the kitchen, which you haven’t opened. It sits on the counter with your unused textbooks. You crawl into the corner of your bedroom.

  You have been asleep for hours when a door slamming in the parking lot startles you awake. It’s dark and you are on the floor, your head under the bed. You had your chance with Sarah and you blew it.

  “I thought we were friends,” she said.

  Maybe the money was not what made her say it. Maybe you really did hurt her feelings. Maybe it is you who is the jerk.

  You skulk over to the computer and go to a bestiality website where you have gone before but it doesn’t do much for you. You try other porn sites but the colors and images flash without much effect. You might as well be dead, you think, and then you think it again, over and over: you might as well be dead. It could be a lot better than all this. It might even be nice.

  In the kitchen you open the box from your mom. There is no note. There is a silverware organizer, six mugs, some dish towels, a nonstick frying pan, a set of knives in a wooden holder. Your parents were going to help you move but something came up and they stayed home. You dump the contents of the box into the sink, breaking two of the mugs.

  You look through the slats of your blinds at the dark and empty backyard and the barbecue pit that no one uses. You slump down to the kitchen floor—gravity is too strong a force to combat—and you wonder how long it would take someone to find you if you never moved again. But then you think of the knives, a serrated one for bread, a large one for chopping, a paring knife, and the small one with the curved tip to separate meat from bone.

  The hotels in town are too nice or too busy, so it takes a while to find the right location, an isolated, decaying place that will take you in and leave you alone. You find the Econo Lodge way out in Hickton.

  Underneath the smell of synthetic air freshener, the room is dank with mildew. Next to the bed you place the knife and a bottle of Stoli, and you pick up the phone to call Caroline one last time, but you’re afraid one of your parents might answer so you don’t. You turn on the TV to an old repeat of Law & Order and drink as much vodka as you can before it starts to come back up. When the show ends, you stare at the pale undersides of your wrists and ima
gine the knife going in, popping through the skin, vertical lines from your hands up to your elbows. You want to prolong it, that moment when you first press the blade in. The guy at the counter was nice so you think you will do it in the bathtub to make cleanup easier. You doze.

  When your cell phone rings and jerks you awake, you see it’s 1:02 a.m. on the clock radio and you scramble for your phone, lost within the folds of the slithery, stiff bedspread. Your heart is uncontainable. The name on the caller ID gives you the shock of your life.

  “Sarah.” Your voice cracks.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, hi, how are you? I thought you hated me.”

  “Of course I don’t hate you.” There is a staticky pause. “Could you come get me? So we can talk?”

  “Um, yeah. Totally,” you say.

  You know you sound too eager and loud but you can’t help it. Sarah Shafer has said she needs to see you. You are not crazy. You leave the knife and the bottle and pull the flimsy door behind you.

  You find her outside the dorm where she sits on the curb in the dark. She looks a little burned-out in her sweatpants and old T-shirt, her hair disheveled, her face gaunt, but she’s still pretty in a way that buoys your spirit. When she gets in the car she doesn’t look at you but that’s okay, because she’s really there.

  “Are you okay?” you ask.

  “Have you ever taken GHB?” she asks, tapping her finger against the window.

  “No, I don’t think so,” you say.

  “It’s kind of cool, I guess,” she says with an unfamiliar spaciness. “A little mellow for my taste.” She laughs.

  You drive for a while and then you say, “When you called I was in a motel room. I was going to kill myself.”

  “What?” she turns to look at you in the red glow of the stoplight. “Shit, Charles. You poor thing.”

  You shrug, but you want to weep at her show of concern.

  “You have to always think about how awful it would be for your parents, you know,” she says. “Even when there don’t seem to be any options left.” She takes her hair and ties it in a knot on top of her head but it quickly falls. “Let’s go there,” she says. “To the motel.”

  You will do anything for this girl.

  “Sit next to me,” she says, patting her hand on the bed. She picks up the knife and traces the blade across her fingertip. She sets it down on the bedside table. “Come here,” she says with a soft purr, her eyelids heavy.

  You feel so light, weightless, and amazed by what is happening that for an instant you think you might already be dead. Her hand, small and soft, is on yours. It pulses. She seems a little out of it, a different kind of Sarah, but right now, you don’t give a shit. You want to take in every detail. The lock of hair that has slipped from behind her ear, the bitten-down cuticles, the yellow shadow of a bruise on her slender forearm. Your life has led to this moment and you want to slow it down, wrap it around you, feel its soft underbelly.

  “You are so beautiful,” you say.

  She half-laughs and shakes her head.

  “Don’t,” she says, with a dryness you don’t expect.

  “Sarah,” you say, your voice trembling.

  She pets your arm.

  “Shh,” she says.

  She takes off her shirt, just like that, and straddles you, and there is her lovely warm skin inches from your face. She grabs the bottle and drinks, then kisses you, her lips warm and boozy.

  It lasts no more than a few minutes, Sarah rushing you forward, you trying to hold it in, awkwardness you might have feared bulldozed over by your want and incredulity. There is something mechanical in Sarah’s actions, something listless in her eyes that you ignore, knowing it is a projection of your nerves.

  When you are inside, you lose your breath. You let yourself believe that you have found the person who can solder all these parts of yourself into a whole. That song she likes floods your head in full stereo, “Sarah, oh Sarah, loving you is the one thing I will never regret.” You grin like a mad hyena, and let go.

  You are afloat in the afterglow, so happy you want to burst.

  “I love you,” you say, opening your eyes and turning to her.

  Sarah sits up and pulls on her shirt. She rubs her face, then her nose. Her hand shakes.

  “So the money?” she asks quietly.

  “What?” you ask, propping yourself up on your elbows, your smile fading as the words form their meaning.

  Your paunch is white and puckered. You are turning back into yourself.

  “Please, Charles. Don’t make it harder than it already is. I don’t know who else to turn to.”

  Your mind races and skips, lost in thorny branches. You feel your fragile porcelain heart start to crack and fall away, until there is nothing left but rage, black and shiny-smooth like obsidian.

  “You got what you wanted,” she says, trying to smile to make it seem less brutal, but that only makes it worse.

  She pulls on her underwear.

  You reach for her but she scoots away to the edge of the bed.

  “Sarah,” you say. She doesn’t answer. “I thought…” but you can’t finish because it is such a tired refrain: once again, you are the fool.

  You sit up. Your penis lolls to one side, deflated and pink.

  And there it is, that cool glint of metal from the bedside table, answering a question you haven’t yet asked. The knife is in your hand then and you press the blade into your neck.

  “I’ll do it,” you say, through clenched teeth.

  She looks at you and through drugged, half-closed eyes says, “Come on, Charles, don’t be so dramatic. I just need the money.”

  You are crying now, furious, devastated.

  You lunge at her and take her to the floor with your bloated girth. She slaps at you with her free hand, a frenzied, helpless animal, but she doesn’t call out or scream, not quite believing the danger that pushes through your every cell.

  “You fucking lunatic,” she spits from underneath you. “Get the fuck off me.”

  The knife is still in your hand and you bring it down to stop it all. Everything pours from you into the violence of the knife in your hand. The blade goes in with little resistance, right between her ribs. Sarah’s expression is shock and confusion, there is no time for fear. You know you hit her heart. She grunts, gasps, her flailing feet hitting the bed frame. You smell her blood before you even see it. Her eyes stay open; they are tunnels of vacancy. Her escaping breath, a sibilant hiss. You bring the knife down again, halfheartedly, losing will on the way down, redundantly, because she is already dead.

  It is quiet. And you are alone. You lay your heavy head on the dead girl’s still and bloody chest.

  In the fluorescent light, the blood on your hands looks purple. You have blood on your face, in your ear. The knife is on the floor, but you don’t have the guts to kill yourself, even now.

  You have split in two.

  You wash your arms, your face, your hair, your chest, the knife, with the little tan bar of soap, bathing the shower in pink and red. You scald yourself with the hottest water possible but it is not hot enough to burn you clean. You dry yourself and find your clothes, discarded with such abandon so little time ago.

  There are garbage bags and packing tape in your car, left over from your move out of the dorm. You retrieve them. The night is empty. You are not there. You can’t even blink your eyes. You fold Sarah’s slender, unwieldy body in on itself without looking at her face, bending her knees flat to her thighs, taping her arms around her knees, binding her into a compact form, her hair getting caught in the tape. You pull a bag over her, her body pressing against the plastic. You sheathe it with another bag and then another and another, wrapping it in more tape like a grisly Christo project. You carry the bundle through the dark parking lot to the back of your car.

  In the now-empty room, there is a glistening amoeba stain of blood on the carpet. You soak it up as best as you can with the threadbare hotel towels. You make the b
ed. You find a drop of dried blood on the sink, which you frantically wipe off with the hem of your shirt. There’s a smear of blood on the cuff of your jeans.

  When you check out you manage to make your voice even and uninteresting, pleasant enough, apologizing to the guy for staining the carpet and telling him to charge any cleaning to your card. You don’t meet his eyes, so he can’t see the wilderness beneath the surface. You drop a garbage bag with the bloody towels, her cell phone, and the rest of her clothes in a dumpster.

  ###

  It feels like your brain has been taken out and knocked around before being returned to your skull. Your eyes ache. You ignore what you did because it couldn’t really have happened. You stare at snow on the TV for ten hours straight. You drive around for days and forget there is a body in your car, even giving Amy a ride to the train station, even commenting on how weird it is that Sarah still hasn’t turned up, and apologizing for the bad smell in the car that’s maybe from when you hit a skunk. You are scared to look at your face in the mirror, afraid of what it might reveal. Your mind has broken apart like a green tree branch, fibrous and wet. The world warbles, and you move numbly through it in a stupor, reduced to a pile of jagged rubble deep inside.

  ###

  A week has passed. You bury Sarah in the middle of the night, quietly digging in the sparse grass and sandy soil fifteen feet from your window.

  You sleep for two feverish days, and then you pick up the phone and tell them where to find you.

  CHAPTER 29

  And now Grace knows too much. The seams she pried open for a glimpse inside have all come undone, leaving a large gaping hole. She feels heavy and used up. Now it’s the face of Sarah she sees when she closes her eyes, those brown eyes, startled, lacking any understanding that such a thing could happen to her. Those rich maple eyes like Callie’s.

  There has always been something else about her sister’s death, casting an inky shadow. It was quickly deposited away, stuffed down, buried deep. Unfathomable, it became maybe not true. It was easier to believe the story that everyone else knew.