If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  He looked at Pearl. She met his shadowy gaze and said nothing.

  “He was a hero,” Ryan said.

  The sergeant nodded. Turned the tape recorder off. Then they all got in their cars and headed off to get the villain.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS far from crowded. Gunfire or not, this was still Havenkill, and so Connor wound up with a room of his own in the pediatric wing, two nurses moving him there shortly after Bill left. Jackie followed the gurney as they wheeled him down the hall to the elevators, holding Connor’s bag of bloody clothes. His coat too, as though somehow he’d need it there. “He’s a strong boy,” said one of the nurses as they lifted Connor into the bed. “He’ll do great.” She said it as though it were something out of a script, but Jackie was thankful anyway. Connor was sound asleep, so she knew it was for her benefit.

  As the nurses were leaving the room, Jackie’s phone chimed. Wade, she thought, her spirits lifting. But when she checked the screen, she saw Helen’s name. She slipped into the hallway and answered fast. “Helen? Why are you awake? Is everything okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just didn’t take my Ambien,” she said, though her voice sounded frail, the psychologist-calm sucked out of it. “Honey, I went onto Facebook. Someone posted about gunshots on Maple. They thought . . . one of your boys might . . .”

  “Connor.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “No, no. Connor’s going to be fine . . . I’m at the hospital now and—”

  “I’m coming.”

  “What?”

  “I’m joining you. I’m your friend. It’s the least I can do.”

  “Wait. Helen. Can you please check on Wade?”

  “Wade?”

  “Just . . . Before you come to the hospital, drive to my house and see if his car’s outside. Okay?”

  She exhaled, a deep, draining sigh. “Yeah,” she said. “Yes. Of course.”

  After she hung up, Jackie went back into Connor’s room. It was painted a cheery yellow, balloons dancing across one of the walls. She listened to her son’s deep breathing as she put the bag down for a moment, thinking about laundry. How on earth was she supposed to get out bloodstains that thick? Maybe Helen would know.

  Jackie sat down on the chair across from her son’s hospital bed, draped his coat over her lap. She slipped her hand into the pocket and removed Connor’s phone in its Minecraft-themed cover, the battery long dead. The other pocket was full of gum wrappers, a business card from a game store, ficus leaves from his science project—artifacts from before tonight, before this past weekend, a happier time. Why can’t someone let us know when things are going to get worse, so at least we can enjoy the before? Jackie’s eyes clouded with tears. She cupped the ficus leaves in her hands, inhaling the scent of them, glad only for the fact that her son was asleep, that she was alone in this room, no one around to see her doing something this ridiculous.

  The breast pocket was buttoned closed—odd for Connor, who even on the coldest days had to be held down and forced to zip up his jackets. Jackie unbuttoned it and removed what was inside. A piece of paper, carefully folded. She unfolded it, saw the sketch marks. A drawing of Wade’s. She could tell his work anywhere, the carefulness of it, those graceful lines . . .

  She unfolded the drawing all the way and looked closely at it. Her breath left her.

  And when Helen showed up ten minutes later with bottles of water and a bag of apples, all she could do was hand her the drawing, then watch silently as Helen’s mouth opened and closed, trying to form an excuse that didn’t exist.

  BOBBY UDEL’S PARENTS’ home was a quiet little ranch house much like Wade Reed’s, with a neat lawn illuminated by garden lights, a row of rosebushes under the windows, dutifully trimmed back for the fall.

  Ryan had called Bobby. Told him he was coming over. “There’s complications, man,” he’d said. “You have to help me. Meet me outside your house in ten minutes.”

  “It can’t wait till tomorrow?” Bobby had said over the speakerphone in a whining voice that made Pearl want to break glass. Pearl had driven over in Ryan’s car, Tally in the backseat, Ryan still cuffed, in case he suddenly changed his mind. Romero, Sergeant Black, and an older cop named McHugh had all taken cruisers and parked blocks away, out of the house’s line of view, lights killed, radios on, guns loaded.

  In theory, this was overkill. But Bobby Udel was so easily underestimated, it was better to be safe. Pearl clicked on the dome light, tapped Bobby’s number into Ryan’s phone, and put the speaker on. Waited.

  Bobby answered fast. “Dude. Text. Don’t call. You know my mom is a light sleeper.”

  “Whatever,” Ryan said. “I’m outside.”

  “You getting smart with me?” There was a threat in Bobby’s voice. A menace. Pearl glanced at Ryan, the hint of fear in his eyes.

  “No. Sorry, man.”

  Pearl and Tally slipped out of the car, guns drawn. They helped Ryan out and onto the sidewalk. “Wait,” Ryan said. “I almost forgot. My sweatshirt pocket. Left side.”

  Pearl and Tally looked at each other. Tally removed a Baggie from Ryan’s pocket. Held it up. Inside was an iPhone, the case encrusted in fake rubies that matched Amy Nathanson’s lipstick. “Evidence,” Ryan said. “It’s got my fingerprints all over it. Bobby’s too.”

  “WHOA, WHOA, WAIT,” Bobby said once he saw Tally and Pearl on either side of Ryan, and heard Tally reading him his rights. “You’re shitting me, right? This is some kind of joke?”

  “No joke,” Pearl said. “You framed an innocent kid for manslaughter. You had stolen prescription drugs planted in his locker. You also sent harassing messages to a young girl from his Instagram account . . .”

  “Did Ryan tell you that?”

  Ryan looked at him. “You know it’s true.”

  Tally said, “I’m not even going to start on you covering up the CVS break-in. What kind of horseshit is that?”

  “I can’t believe this. At my parents’ house. We’ve been so good to you, Ryan. My whole family.”

  “Let’s go, big guy,” Tally said flatly. “As they say in the movies, the jig is up.”

  Bobby was wearing boxers. A Giants T-shirt. And, as Pearl saw now, he held a gun in his right hand. “He’s carrying,” she said.

  Tally said, “Jesus, Bobby.”

  “Drop it,” Pearl said.

  Bobby didn’t drop the gun. His eyes darted from Tally to Ryan to Pearl. “Get the fuck off my mom’s doorstep.”

  “Hold up, hold up,” Tally said.

  Pearl slipped her gun out of her holster, but he was too fast. Within seconds, she felt the barrel of Bobby’s gun pressed against her forehead.

  Ryan breathed in sharply.

  She was aware of Tally unholstering his weapon and aiming it at Bobby, of the cars down the street pulling up, doors slamming, everything moving in slow motion, a type of strange, sad choreography. “Put the gun down, Bobby!” shouted the sergeant behind her. “Drop it and raise your hands.”

  “Bobby,” Ryan said. “Please.”

  Bobby kept his eyes locked on Pearl’s. She felt almost as though she could see into them, through them, into the cold dullness of his mind. “All my life I’ve been taking care of you, Ryan. Every single fuckup, every crappy grade I’ve helped you hide from your parents. Every time I’ve covered your sorry, spoiled rich ass and this is what I get. You team up with her. Do you even know who she is?” His eyes flickered at Tally. “Do you know who she is, Ed?”

  “She’s a police officer,” Tally said slowly, carefully. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “She’s a murderer.” Dabs of sweat on his upper lip. A sheen of it on his forehead and those eyes like the gun barrel, cold on her skin. “I have friends in Poughkeepsie. They told me. She killed her own mother.”

  Pearl felt something deep within her snap in two. She was aware of Ryan’s shallow breathing, of Tally shifting on his feet, both hearing those words, not knowing what to do with them. The truth hurt. It always would. The way
it hung in the air, changing everything. Pearl felt it in the weight of her own gun in her hand, in the metal at her forehead: the knowledge of what she was.

  It doesn’t matter who shoots first, said the voice in Pearl’s head. He’s done anyway. And you’ve been done since you were three. “You were right, Bobby. You do know everything about me,” she said. Then she fired her gun at his foot, ready for him to pull the trigger.

  “I DIDN’T WANT to hurt my family,” Helen said. “I thought for sure the truth would come out about who really ran Liam over, without Wade or me having to . . . I mean . . .”

  They’d moved from Connor’s room into the waiting room, Jackie wanting Helen nowhere near either of her sons, even her younger one, even sound asleep. The drawing was on the table, spread out atop a Nickelodeon Magazine—naked Helen, front and rear views, with her C-section scar, the tattoo on her lower back, T for the Fury Tisiphone, every inch of her middle-aged body, faithfully re-created by Jackie’s son.

  Helen had been doing most of the talking. All of it, actually. Ever since she’d arrived, Jackie had said one word to her, the only word she could get out: “Why?”

  “It was a mistake,” Helen was saying now. “Stacy had invited him and stood him up. Back in April. He really did have a crush on her, and she can be so cruel that way, and I just . . . I tried to make him feel better. I didn’t intend for anything to happen, but . . . Jackie, I’m weaker than you know.”

  The name in Wade’s notebook. “Tristesse.” Written back in April. The girl’s profile. Stacy’s profile. It all made sense.

  “I was lonely myself. I still am. Garrett’s never around, and Stacy’s more interested in her friends. And that loneliness was something the two of us had in common. Something he understood.”

  Jackie found her voice again. “You were lonely together. You and my son.”

  “It was only a few times.”

  “You gave him a burner phone.”

  “It was the summer. I was crazy. Midlife crisis. He’s an artist. Like no one I’ve ever known and he drew me, Jackie. He drew me so beautifully.”

  Jackie stared at her. Perfect Helen, with her pretty, lineless face and her psychologist’s voice, her yoga breathing and her kind, giving nature. Helen, who believed so deeply in the fairness of life, that everybody only got out of it as much as they could take . . . Funny how you can be friends with someone for more than thirty years but never truly know them until they slip up. Teenagers are terrible at keeping secrets, Helen. You ought to know that. You’re the mother of one.

  “We just went for a ride that night,” Helen was saying. “That’s all. I was trying to tell him it was over. I’d been trying to tell him for weeks. For the sake of my family, I said. He wouldn’t listen. He bought me a necklace and wanted to run away with me and he kept trying to see me, even in the hospital. Stacy was right there . . .” Her voice trailed off, Jackie’s eyes pinning her. Silencing her. “I’m sorry,” she said. The only thing she could say.

  Jackie stood up. “Tell the police,” she said. She walked out of the waiting room and headed back down the hall to Connor’s room, leaving Helen to find her own way out.

  Jackie watched Connor sleep for a few moments, his slow breaths calming her, when she heard her phone ping. Her first thought was, A text from Wade. But then it pinged again, and again, and she realized it wasn’t a text at all. It was her Facebook notifications. Please let this be about Wade. Please let him be safe, with a friend.

  She clicked on the icon, but when she opened up the app, she saw that it wasn’t Facebook Messenger that was pinging. It was people liking her post. “I didn’t post anything.” She said it out loud, to her sleeping son.

  She checked her page, and saw that someone had posted as her at 2:45 AM. Just about fifteen minutes ago. She read the first line:

  By the time you read this, I’ll be dead.

  She read the rest quickly, thinking, No. No please. It isn’t fair. This can’t be happening, with the night caving in all around her, her entire world falling apart. With shaking hands, she reached into her purse, fumbled around, looking for her bottle of Xanax. It was gone. She moved into the hallway, headed for the elevator. Think, think, think, she told herself as she pushed at the buttons, getting off at the first floor, running out of the building, through the grounds toward the parking lot, pushing toward her car. There’s a clue in there about where he is. There’s got to be a clue. But what she saw in her mind was the Eiffel Tower, the black-and-white one from the picture in Helen’s bathroom. She saw it crumbling, collapsing into itself, leaving only a pile of dust.

  Thirty-Four

  Wade closed his eyes. He inhaled the scent of the old cabin—mold and cedar and a deep earthy smell, like being buried alive. He liked it here. It reminded him of the safety cones in his room and the dead birds and glittering rocks he liked to take pictures of—things nobody else would ever notice, but that made them more special to him.

  Helen was like that in a way. She’d complain about it all the time, how no one ever noticed her, not Stacy or Garrett or the people she worked with. Even guys on the street. She’d talk about how they looked right through her, as though she were a ghost. Helen called it the “middle-aged vanishing act.” Or “disappearing before one’s time.” But he’d never met an older person who cared about it as much as she did. “You’re the only one who sees me, Wade,” she’d once said. As though that was his best quality. Maybe it was.

  What she would never know was that he hadn’t seen her either. Not at first. And even as he tried to force Helen’s image into his mind, it was Stacy’s that kept coming to him, Stacy last spring, in the park after school, that smile of hers, cigarette smoke curling from her lips and the perfume she wore that smelled of vanilla. “You’re the only one who listens to me, Wade.”

  For three weeks, Stacy Davies had met with him in secret. She’d told him her hopes and her darkest fears and her real name, which meant “sadness.” She’d told him he was unlike anyone she’d ever known, and she’d said that like it was a good thing and she’d made him think maybe this town wasn’t as shitty as he’d thought and she’d kissed him. Just once. But it had all been a lie. Those three weeks had started on a dare and ended with a video of that one stupid kiss, posted on a message thread that included practically every kid at Havenkill. Kissing sounds behind his back in the hallways; laughter that made his face burn. Stares and grins and attention that felt never-ending. And the one to dare Stacy. The kid who’d said, “Let’s mess with Reed.” That kid had been Liam Miller.

  Helen didn’t know that. She didn’t know any of it when Wade had shown up at her house looking for Stacy, unable to stop shaking. She’d comforted him out of her own loneliness, and when that comforting took a turn, Wade had thought, Good. Because he could think of no better way to hurt Stacy.

  Of course, that plan had failed, like every other plan of Wade’s. He was still mad at Stacy. He’d die mad at her, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. And he could never hurt Helen.

  Wade’s arms and legs felt heavy and pointless. He’d taken Mom’s entire bottle of Xanax, swallowing a few at a time to keep from throwing up. Washed them down with a beer he’d bought from the Lukoil—the only place where they didn’t laugh at his fake ID. When he started to feel sleepy, he posted his note on Facebook, trying to think of his orange cones, of his dead birds, of Helen rather than Stacy or Mom. He didn’t want to think of Mom right now, what his death might do to her. He wished she hadn’t worked so hard to get him to tell the truth.

  Wade had picked this place to take the pills because it was a special place to him. He’d come here with Helen before. He’d taken Connor here when he was a little kid. His friends too, back when he had them—though they’d mostly thought of it as a place to party. These days, Wade came here alone, whenever he needed to calm his mind.

  What kept bringing him back was the ghost—the girl who had come here to slit her throat. The official story was that she had slaughtered
her entire family, but Wade thought that she was probably like him—a kid accused of something horrible but unable to tell the truth about it. That’s when you kill yourself: when you aren’t allowed something as basic as honesty.

  Wade rested his head against the wall, his phone next to him. He was getting really tired now, with a weird headache, like lead weights on his eyes, and little white sparks when he closed them. He lay down on the floor and crossed his hands over his chest and tried to think of nothing.

  But he kept seeing the ghost. The deeper he slipped into the dream, the clearer he saw her, the falsely accused murderer draped in a gauze shroud, her pale face splashed with her own blood. She spoke to him.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Same reason you did.”

  “Nope. That’s wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did it because I lost my family. You have one. A good one. They’re looking for you.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Whatever your reason is, I bet it’s a dumb one.”

  “Hey, that isn’t fair.”

  “You’re a dumb guy, you know. You notice shit like candy wrappers because you think that makes you an artist. But you don’t pay any attention to people who love you.”

  Wade’s hands scraped the wooden floor, his fingernails digging into it, trying to stay awake. This is wrong, he thought. This is stupid. I shouldn’t have done this. I shouldn’t . . .

  “You also feel way too fucking sorry for yourself.”

  His breathing slowing, blackness closing in, Wade thought of bad decisions, how he kept making them, over and over again. I like my family. I like the Kill. I like drawing and breathing, but I got rid of all of that.

  Wade drifted down further, darkness curling around him like black water, Wade sinking into it, lights glowing on the surface. At one point, he could have sworn he felt cool hands on his face, Mom’s voice saying his name. Just a dream, he thought, letting go. My last dream. He knew he would haunt this place forever.