by A. M. Taylor
Nate leaned forward, his elbows on the table. The kitchen was dimly lit, half the lightbulbs blown out long ago, and the orangey light made his eyes glow amber. “Who else would I want to talk to?”
I felt as drained as my wine glass. I was too tired. I poured myself another glass, uncertain at this point of how many I’d had, but pretty sure I’d drunk most of the bottle we’d just polished off. I tried to think of the last time I’d got drunk with Nate and couldn’t remember. He’d been a big drinker when we were in college but I had no idea if he’d toned it down at all in his twenties. Something told me he probably had. I wanted to ask him questions, to listen to him talk about Emmaline, his work, to maybe even talk a little about his parents’ divorce, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to claim that space between us that had grown so wide.
So, instead I said: “You could talk to Leo, or Bright, or anyone, really.”
Nate looked at me, his head tilted to the side. “Come on, Mads. You know I’ve never really talked to them. Not about this stuff anyway.”
“What ‘stuff,’ Nate? We’re not talking about anything, not really. You’re just asking questions and I’m answering.”
“So, you ask some questions.”
My tongue and lips had gone fuzzy from red wine and I licked them to try to rectify it, failing miserably. “What do you think happened to Elle?” I asked.
Nate’s shoulders slumped, his eyes drawn away from mine. “Not that. Don’t ask me that.”
“You don’t think it’s worth talking about?”
“Of course I do. I just don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“Then when?”
“I’ll let you know, shall I?” he spat out, his eyes flashing as he squared his shoulders and stared me down.
It was hard to believe we’d ever been anything more, words like daggers flying past one another’s heads. Even before Nora went missing, Nate and I had been able to communicate in the kind of shorthand you spend a lifetime building. But we’d traveled so far from that time, and now that easy lexicon was like a dead language: untranslatable and incomprehensible to me. Maybe once I would’ve known instinctively what to say to bridge this unpassable gap, but not at that time. So, I didn’t say anything, just looked right back at him, my back a little straighter than usual, my hand curled into a fist.
Nate passed a hand over his face and shook his head at me. “I’m sorry. We’ve had reporters calling all day, photographers outside the house. It’s bringing back bad memories. All these questions. And then that fucking article.”
“You said I could ask you questions, Nate.”
“I know, I know. I meant about … I just didn’t mean Elle. I thought maybe we could pretend for a little while, you know? That none of this had happened. That it was just us again.”
“Even if it was just us again there’d still be Nora.”
“Yeah,” he said and took a long drag from his wine glass, “I guess you’re right.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After dinner, Nate fell asleep on the couch and I watched him for a while, uncertain. Did he expect me to stay the night? Eventually I shook him awake, kneeling down beside him, my hand clenched around his arm.
“Hey,” he said, sleepy, “what’s going on?”
“I’m heading out. I just wanted to say goodbye,” I whispered.
“You’re leaving?” Nate went to sit up, his eyes only half open but his voice suddenly loud.
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t have a car.”
“It’s fine. Ange came to get me. She’s waiting outside.”
“You rang Ange?”
“Yeah. I need to get home. I’m tired.” I’d had to use the ancient landline because the cell reception was so shitty out there. Luckily the number for Ange’s parents’ house was one of the only phone numbers I still knew by heart, and her dad had picked up with a cheery “hello.”
“So, stay here.” He was lying beneath an ancient wool blanket, the fabric worn and torn, and from beneath it his hands reached for and then wrapped themselves around mine so that they were pressed against his chest.
“I can’t.”
“Sure, you can. It’s fine. There are plenty of beds.”
“I mean I don’t want to, Nate.”
I watched his face clear of sleepiness, the drowsiness wiped away by realization. “I didn’t mean that we—”
“I know.” I felt like taking a deep breath, like taking a few deep breaths, but there didn’t seem to be enough air in the room, not for the two of us, so I said very quietly: “I can’t do this. I can’t be your buddy. It’s not fair, Nate. There’s too much … too much of everything for me to just hang out with you like this and have it not mean anything.”
“Maddie.” Nate’s hands tightened around mine, but I shook my head and disentangled myself from him. He let me go.
“If you need me to look after Noah or something like that, then I will. But I can’t do this. Whatever it is.”
“You mean you can’t just be my friend?”
It was horrible to hear him say it like that, so bluntly. Because that was what I was saying, effectively, I just wouldn’t have phrased it that way: If I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be his friend now, then when could I be? All I knew was that if I stayed there even a minute longer, I’d be wandering down a path I couldn’t find my way back from. “I have to go,” is all I said in response.
“Fine. Don’t forget about the high school memorial happening on Friday night.” I’d got the Facebook invite earlier that day; the school was going to hold a small memorial for Elle just before the hockey game on Friday. “You know, if you can be bothered to make it,” Nate said as I closed the door behind me.
Ange didn’t say anything as I slammed the door of her Jeep shut and she continued not to say anything until we’d pulled out onto the old highway and had passed the purple ribbon tied around the tree trunk. All of the candles lit for Elle had gone out.
“So, what was all that about?” Ange asked finally.
“I wish I knew.”
Ange turned to look at me and then quickly back at the road. It was snowing still, and she was going slow, careful. “He just made you dinner out of the blue? Why?”
“I think he wanted to be distracted.”
Ange nodded, her face dimly lit by the lights from the dashboard. “You know there’s already rumors that it was Nate, right? That Nate killed Elle.”
“I read Lewis’s most recent article if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, that is what I mean, but I also mean in town. People are already talking about him as if he did it. As if it’s a foregone conclusion.”
“All because he was arrested when Nora went missing? That doesn’t mean anything; he was released almost immediately.”
There was a short pause as Ange turned the car slowly onto my street. “Yes, but then he moved away and nothing happened for ten years until the night of Nora’s memorial when her younger sister was killed and Nate happened to be in town.”
Her words were clear and efficient, cutting through the soft dark of the car; a bloodless litany of why Nate should be suspect number one, and suddenly I hated her professionalism at a time like this. She was Nate’s friend too, had known him almost as long as I had, and here she was accusing him of murder alongside everyone else in town.
“But Nate’s been in town plenty of times since Nora disappeared and no one was killed or went missing.”
“I’m not saying the logic isn’t severely flawed, but that’s the theory everyone’s running away with.”
“What about Louden? He was here that night too. And he was arrested when Nora went missing.”
Ange pulled to a stop outside my house where the porch light was still on, emitting a dusty circle of light. “I don’t know, Mads. He was arrested for Nora, sure, but he doesn’t have any connection to Elle. Before Sunday, the last time he probably saw her was when she was ten. Why would he kill her? What would his motive be?”
/> “What would Nate’s motive be? Why would he kill Elle? Or Nora?”
Ange switched off the engine and turned to look at me in her seat. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know anything. I just thought you should know what everyone’s been saying.”
I stared out the windshield, the world turned a menacing monochrome. Ange had left the headlights to the Liberty on and snowflakes danced there, two small beams of light in the dark night. “What do you think?” I asked quietly. “Do you think he killed her? Do you think Nate killed Elle?”
“I think it’s way too early to say. But my editor likes him for it.”
I pulled my gaze from the spotlit dancing snow and made a face at her. “What does that mean?”
“Just that if nothing comes to light soon, if no one’s arrested, then the media is going to come up with a perpetrator and that person is probably going to be Nate.”
Nate. The image of him asleep on the couch mere minutes before flashed through my mind. I had never once suspected Nate during Nora’s disappearance, but plenty of others had, and it wasn’t as though I was surprised by most of the town thinking he might be involved in Elle’s murder too. I still couldn’t get there though. Nate was difficult, a forest I couldn’t see my way through, and yet I knew the path so well, knew it almost by heart, I felt sure my feet would lead me to the other side eventually.
Or at least that used to be the case. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Not Nate, not how I felt about him, and certainly not what had happened to Elle. I was worried the need to know, the call for resolution and even revenge, would become too strong though, and would maybe, possibly, probably, lead us down the wrong path altogether.
“Do you really want to be doing this, Ange? Raking over the loss of your best friend’s family? Is that really what’s best for you?”
“I can handle it, okay? I can do my job and deal with Elle and Nora at once. I’m not you.”
Her words hung in the air, stranded between us. When I’d woken up that morning I’d had three missed calls from my manager at work, as well as an inbox full of emails I was hoping would go away simply by my not opening any of them. I knew I’d already stayed there too long. And not just because if I wasn’t careful, I was going to get fired, but because if I wasn’t careful then that metaphorical freefall I’d been trying to describe to Nate earlier might decide it was ready for me again, and I wasn’t so sure I’d survive the landing this time.
Ange had always managed to hold things together a little more securely than I had, even before Nora went missing. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know she was hurting when Nora disappeared, I guess maybe she was just better at living with that hurt than I was. I could count the number of times on one hand I’d been the one to comfort her. She’d called me in tears once when we were still in college, and I could still remember my surprise when I realized I could hear the breathy, jagged edges of her voice. She’d just broken up with her girlfriend, the story choked out in between sobs, her mood oscillating between anger and despair. I wasn’t used to her like that and I wondered if she’d been hiding this part of herself from me, out of some kind of misguided protection. People were always lowering their voices around me, shielding me from the more knotty and thorny parts of life back then, as if I wasn’t well acquainted with all those parts already. But the thought of Ange doing that too, side-stepping around certain subjects, walking on eggshells around me, made me realize that when we’d lost Nora we’d lost so much more than just her.
“I know you can handle it,” I said at last. “It’s just whether or not you should.”
Ange let out a bark of mirthless laughter. “Are you serious, Mads? Imagine if I’d said that to you.”
She was right, of course; in fact, I was practically parroting what my mom had been telling me the night before, and it wasn’t as if I’d paid her any mind. “Okay, fine.” I said finally. “Just … just don’t write anything you don’t believe, okay?”
Ange took her time, staring out the window at the snow. “I don’t know what I believe right now, Mads.”
“Yeah,” I said, “me neither.”
My sisters came home on Friday evening, Serena having taken the afternoon off work and Cordy having missed her last lectures of the day. I was scrolling through Adrian Turney’s Facebook—one of the boys Jenna had told me was always hitting on Elle—when they arrived, their voices chasing their footsteps up the stairs and along the hallway towards my room. Cordy tumbled in first, followed by Serena, who, because of the way she carried herself, always appeared to be gliding somehow.
“Hey,” Cordy said, immediately pulling back my bed covers and crawling in beside me while rearranging the pillows to better suit her comfort. She tucked herself up neatly next to me, her head on my shoulder. “I can’t believe it, Mads. What the hell happened?”
Serena sat at the end of the bed, looking at us both. “You okay?” Serena asked in a low voice when I didn’t answer Cordy’s question.
“Yeah … I mean, no.”
“How’s Nate doing?” Cordy asked.
“Not great. No one’s doing great, let’s be honest.”
Serena raised her eyebrows. “Have you been over there? We need to send them something. Flowers maybe.”
I nodded, thinking about the bare kitchen I’d made Noah lunch in days before and almost began to cry. All three of us looked at each other for a while. I knew their faces so well, the sound of their breathing. I could feel Cordy’s feet begin to twitch next to mine; she was terrible at sitting still for too long, whereas Serena was perfectly named; perfectly serene, practically sphinx-like.
It was Cordy who broke the silence, hating any one thing to go on too long. “Who … who do you think did it?” she said, her eyes wide, teeth biting down on her bottom lip. “Who would kill Elle?”
But I didn’t have an answer for her. I was beginning to think that, just like Nora, maybe we never would.
Serena looked at her watch. “We should leave soon for the memorial if we want to get a parking space. Maybe you should shower, Mads?”
My high school class had planted a tree in Nora’s honor upon graduating. It was a maple. I have no idea who chose a maple, or indeed why. I always thought that if Nora had to be memorialized in arboreal form it should have been one of those trees that grew really tall and wide and was covered in spikes. A monkey puzzle tree. I’d watched while they planted it, that little sapling. It would be over ten feet tall now, I thought.
I closed my eyes, wished that I could stay in bed and then pushed back the covers. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll shower.”
“Good girl,” Serena said. She even managed to sound sincere.
We met Ange at the school, after struggling to find somewhere to park. I had never seen the arena so full of people. Ice hockey was a big draw in the town and whenever there were games at home the place would fill up, but I’d never seen it like it was that night. I wondered how many of them were reporters, how many of them were rubberneckers, here to get a glimpse of genuine grief before going home to expound their theories about Elle and Nora on the internet.
The crush of bodies built up a crushing feeling inside my chest, and I tried to take a big breath to steady myself, just to get some oxygen to my brain, but the air was heavy and almost wet with life. Ange turned to me, raising both her eyebrows, and breathed out the word “wow” before pressing on through the crowd.
“Can you see Nate?” I asked the others once we’d pushed our way through the crowd to find the best available spot. After the way he and I had left things the night before last I wasn’t sure why I was so concerned to see him; maybe I just wanted him to know that I was there. That I had bothered to show up.
“No,” Serena answered before placing her hands on both my shoulders and slowly pivoting me around, “but I have seen Louden Winters.”
Louden Winters. He must have come back especially for the memorial, because the last I’d heard, he’d left town the night of Nora’s memorial on Sunday. Sto
od next to him, and only a few inches shorter, was his sister Hale. I hadn’t seen her in years; their family still lived in Waterstone but as far as I knew both Louden and Hale were living in Chicago, meaning we never really crossed paths. I’d been a little surprised not to see her on Sunday but here she was, turning up for Elle. I turned back to Ange who was standing on her toes, craning her neck through the crowd trying to keep an eye on the Winters, which was difficult considering she was all of five foot five.
“Everyone here knows about the memorial the family is holding tomorrow as well though, right?” she asked, catching my eye.
I’d got a call from Katherine’s sister, Rebecca, earlier in the day, explaining that although a small funeral would be held at a later date, the Altmans wanted to hold “a larger memorial for Elle tomorrow.” I’d been taken aback, at first, but I think after Nora, after all the waiting and the hoping, the wondering, the all-night vigils, the uncertainty, maybe the Altmans needed a certain level of finality when it came to Noelle.
Cordy just shrugged, her eyes darting around the room, but Serena put a hand on Ange’s shoulder and said in a low voice: “I’m sure plenty of people know about tomorrow, Ange, but the Altmans wouldn’t want this many people showing up anyway. This is for the school, you know? So everyone gets to grieve.”
There were vigils held for days after Nora disappeared, with hundreds of people standing around in snowdrifts close to where her car was found, clutching at flickering candles until they burned down to stubs and the wax papered over their skin. As her best friend I suppose I should have been there every night, burning every candle I could lay my hands on down to the wick, but I couldn’t go.
In fact, the first time I went to the roadside vigil was also the last.
***
The car is gone of course. Long gone. Taken for evidence, never to be seen again. But for some reason—because there’s no body, which means there’s been no funeral, which means there’s no grave, which means there’s no place to go and mourn—everyone has taken to gathering by the side of the road where Nora’s dad’s ancient Volvo was found. It’s like one of those crash sites you see next to highways, moldering bunches of flowers bought in gas station forecourts tied to lampposts or tree trunks to mark the spot someone left this world forever, except there aren’t even any bunches of flowers.
