by Riley Sager
When we reach my building, Coop stops just shy of the maroon awning that shields the front door. The building is prewar, elegant and spacious. My neighbors consist of blue-haired society ladies and fashionable gay gentlemen of a certain age. Every time Coop sees it, I’m sure he wonders how a baking blogger and a public defender can afford to rent an apartment on the Upper West Side.
The truth is, we can’t. Not on Jeff’s salary, which is laughably small, and certainly not on the money my website takes in.
The apartment is in my name. I own it. The funds came from a phalanx of lawsuits filed after Pine Cottage. Led by Janelle’s step-father, the victims’ parents sued anyone and everyone possible. The mental hospital that allowed Him to escape. His doctors. The pharmaceutical companies responsible for the many antidepressants and antipsychotics that had clashed in His brain. Even the manufacturer of the hospital door with the malfunctioning lock through which He had escaped.
All of them settled out of court. They knew a few million dollars was worth avoiding the bad PR they’d get from going up against a bunch of grieving families. Even a settlement wasn’t enough to spare some of them. One of the antipsychotics was eventually pulled from the market. The mental hospital, Blackthorn Psychiatric, closed its faulty doors within a year.
The only people who couldn’t shell out were His parents, who had gone broke paying for His treatment. Fine by me. I had no desire to punish that dazed and moist-eyed couple for His sins. Besides, my share of the other settlements was more than enough. An accountant friend of my father helped me invest most of it while stocks were still cheap. I bought the apartment after college, just as the housing market was recovering from its colossal pop. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen with a breakfast nook that’s become my makeshift studio. I got it for a song.
“Do you want to come up?” I ask Coop. “You’ve never seen the place.”
“Maybe some other time.”
Another thing he always says but never means.
“I suppose you need to go,” I say.
“It’s a long drive home. You going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Once the shock wears off.”
“Call or text if you need anything.”
That one he definitely means. Coop’s been willing to drop everything to see me ever since the morning after Pine Cottage. The morning I, in the throes of pain and grief, had wailed, I want the officer! Please let me see him! He was there within half an hour.
Ten years later, he’s still here, giving me a farewell nod. Once I return the gesture, Coop shields his baby blues with a pair of Ray-Bans and walks away, eventually disappearing among the other pedestrians.
Inside the apartment, I head straight for the kitchen and take a second Xanax. The grape soda that follows is a rush of sweetness that, coupled with the sugar from the tea, makes my teeth ache. Yet I keep on drinking, taking several gentle sips as I pull the stolen iPhone from my pocket. A brief examination of the phone tells me that its former owner’s name is Kim and that she doesn’t use any of its security features. I can see every call, web search, and text, including a recent one from a squarejaw named Zach.
Up for a little fun tonight?
For kicks, I text him back: Sure.
The phone beeps in my hand. Another text from Zach. He’s sent a picture of his dick.
Charming.
I switch off the phone. A precaution. Kim and I may look similar, but our ringtones differ wildly. Then I turn the phone over, staring at the silvery back that’s smudged with fingerprints. I wipe it clean until I can see my reflection, as distorted as if I were looking into a fun-house mirror.
This will do nicely.
I finger the gold chain that’s always around my neck. Hanging from it is a small key, which opens the only kitchen drawer kept locked at all times. Jeff assumes it’s for important website paperwork. I let him believe that.
Inside the drawer is a jangling menagerie of glinting metal. A shiny tube of lipstick and a chunky gold bracelet. Several spoons. A silver compact plucked from the nurses’ station when I left the hospital following Pine Cottage. I used it to stare at my reflection during the long drive home, making sure I was actually still there. Now I study the warped reflections looking back at me and feel that same sense of reassurance.
Yes, I still exist.
I deposit the iPhone with the other objects, close and lock the drawer, then put the key back around my neck.
It’s my secret, warm against my breastbone.
3.
I spend the afternoon avoiding the unfinished cupcakes. They seem to stare at me from the kitchen counter, seeking the same treatment as the two decorated ones sitting a few feet away, smug in their completeness. I know I should finish them, if only for the therapeutic value. After all, that’s the First Commandment on my website—Baking Is Better Than Therapy.
Usually, I believe it. Baking makes sense. What Lisa Milner did does not.
Yet my mood is so dark I know that not even baking can help. Instead, I go to the living room, fingertips skipping over unread copies of The New Yorker and that morning’s Times, trying to fool myself into thinking I don’t know exactly where I’m heading. I end up there anyway. At the bookcase by the window, using a chair to reach the top shelf and the book that rests there.
Lisa’s book.
She wrote it a year after her encounter with Stephen Leibman, giving it the sad-in-retrospect title of The Will to Live: My Personal Journey of Pain and Healing. It was a minor bestseller. Lifetime turned it into a TV movie.
Lisa sent me a copy immediately after Pine Cottage happened. Inside, she had written, To Quincy, my glorious sister in survival. I’m here if you ever need to talk. Beneath it was her phone number, the digits tidy and blocklike.
I never intended to call. I told myself I didn’t need her help. Considering that I couldn’t remember anything, why would I?
But I wasn’t prepared for having every newspaper and cable news network in the country exhaustively cover the Pine Cottage Murders. That’s what they all called it—the Pine Cottage Murders. It didn’t matter that it was more of a cabin than a cottage. It made for a good headline. Besides, Pine Cottage was its official name, burned summer camp–style onto a cedar plank hung above the door.
Other than the funerals, I laid low. When I left the house, it was for doctors’ appointments or therapy sessions. Because a refugee camp of reporters had occupied the lawn, my mother was forced to usher me out the back door and through the neighbor’s yard to a car waiting on the next block. That still didn’t keep my high school yearbook photo from being slapped on the cover of People, the words “sole survivor” brushing my acne-ringed chin.
Everyone wanted an exclusive interview. Reporters called, emailed, texted. One famous newswoman—repulsion forbids me from using her name—pounded on the front door as I sat on the other side, back pressed to the rattling wood. Before leaving, she shoved a handwritten note under the door offering me a hundred grand for a sit-down interview. The paper smelled of Chanel No. 5. I threw it into the trash.
Even with a broken heart and stab wounds still zippered with stitches, I knew the score. The press was intent on turning me into a Final Girl.
Maybe I could have handled it better had my home life been even the slightest bit stable. It wasn’t.
By then my father’s cancer had returned with a vengeance, leaving him too weak and nauseated from chemo to help soothe my ragged emotions. Still, he tried. Having almost lost me once, he made it clear my well-being was his first priority. Making sure I ate, slept, didn’t wallow in my grief. He just wanted me to be okay, even when he obviously wasn’t. Near the end, I began to think I had survived Pine Cottage only because my father had somehow made a pact with God, exchanging his life for mine.
I assumed my mother felt the same way, but I was too scared and guilt-
ridden to ask. Not that I had much of a chance. By that point, she had descended into desperate housewife mode, determined to keep up appearances no matter the cost. She had convinced herself that the kitchen needed remodeling, as if new linoleum could somehow blunt the one-two punch of cancer and Pine Cottage. When she wasn’t grimly shuttling my father and me to various appointments, she was comparing countertops and sorting through paint samples. Not to mention continuing her strict, suburban regimen of spin classes and book clubs. To my mother, bowing out of a single social obligation would have been an admission of defeat.
Because my patchouli-scented therapist said it was good to have a stable support system, I turned to Coop. He did what he could, God love him. He fielded more than a few desperate late-night phone calls. Yet I needed someone who had gone through an ordeal similar to Pine Cottage. Lisa seemed to be the best person for the job.
Rather than flee the scene of her trauma, Lisa stayed in Indiana. After six months of recuperating, she returned to that very same college and earned a degree in child psychology. When she accepted her diploma, the crowd at her graduation ceremony gave her a standing ovation. A wall of press in the back of the auditorium captured the moment in a strobe of flashbulbs.
So I read her book. I found her number. I called.
I want to help you, Quincy, she told me. I want to teach you how to be a Final Girl.
What if I don’t want to be a Final Girl?
That’s not your choice. It’s already been decided for you. You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.
For Lisa, that meant facing the situation head-on. She suggested I grant a few interviews to the press, but on my terms. She said talking about it publicly would help me deal with what had happened.
I followed her advice and granted three interviews—one to the New York Times, one to Newsweek, and one to Miss Chanel No. 5, who ended up paying me that hundred grand even though I didn’t ask for it. It went a long way toward buying the apartment. And if you think I don’t feel guilty about that, think again.
The interviews were awful. It felt wrong to be talking openly about dead friends who could no longer speak for themselves, especially when I couldn’t remember what had actually happened to them. I was as much of a bystander as the people eager to consume my interviews like candy.
Each one left me so empty and hollow that no amount of food could make me feel full again. So I stopped trying, eventually landing back in the hospital six months after I had left it. By then my father had already lost his battle with cancer and was simply waiting for it to make the knockout blow. Still, he was by my side every day. Wobbly in his wheelchair, he spooned ice cream into my mouth to wash down the bitter antidepressants I had been forced to take.
A spoonful of sugar, Quinn, he’d say. The song doesn’t lie.
Once my appetite returned and I was released from the hospital, Oprah came calling. One of her producers phoned out of the blue saying she wanted us on her show. Lisa and me and even Samantha Boyd. The three Final Girls united at last. Lisa, of course, agreed. So did Samantha, which was a surprise, considering how she was already practicing her vanishing act. Unlike Lisa, she never tried to contact me after Pine Cottage. She was as elusive as my memories.
I too said yes, even though the thought of sitting before an audience of housewives clucking with sympathy almost made me plummet back down the rabbit hole of anorexia. But I wanted to meet my fellow Final Girls face-to-face. Especially Samantha. By that point, I was ready to see the alternative to Lisa’s exhausting openness.
I never got the chance.
The morning my mother and I were scheduled to fly to Chicago, I awoke to find myself standing in her recently remodeled kitchen. The place had been completely trashed—broken plates covering the floor, orange juice dripping from the open refrigerator, countertops a wasteland of eggshells, flour clumps, and oil slicks of vanilla extract. Seated on the floor amid the debris was my mother, weeping for the daughter who was still with her yet irrevocably lost.
Why, Quincy? she moaned. Why would you do this?
Of course I had been the one to ransack the kitchen like a careless burglar. I knew it as soon as I saw the mess. There was a logic to the destruction. It was so utterly me. Yet I had no memory of ever doing it. Those unknown minutes spent trashing the place were as blank to me as that hour at Pine Cottage.
I didn’t mean it, I said. I don’t know what happened, I swear.
My mother pretended to believe me. She stood, wiped her cheeks, gingerly fixed her hair. Yet a dark twitchiness in her eyes betrayed her true emotions. She was, I realized, frightened of me.
While I cleaned the kitchen, my mother called Oprah’s people and canceled. Since it was all of us or nothing, that decision scuttled the whole thing. There would be no televised meeting of the Final Girls.
Later that day, my mother took me to a doctor who basically gave me a lifetime prescription for Xanax. So eager was my mother to have me medicated that I was forced to swallow one in the pharmacy parking lot, washing it down with the only liquid in the car—a bottle of lukewarm grape soda.
We’re done, she announced. No more blackouts. No more rages. No more being a victim. You take these pills and be normal, Quincy. That’s how it has to be.
I agreed. I didn’t want a troop of reporters at my graduation. I didn’t want to write a book or do another interview or admit my scars still prickled whenever a thunderstorm rolled in. I didn’t want to be one of those girls tethered to tragedy, forever associated with the absolute worst moment of my life.
Still buzzing from that inaugural Xanax, I called Lisa and told her I wasn’t going to do any more interviews. I was done being a perpetual victim.
I’m not a Final Girl, I told her.
Lisa’s tone was unfailingly patient, which infuriated me. Then what are you, Quincy?
Normal.
For girls like you and me and Samantha, there’s no such thing as normal, she said. But I understand why you want to try.
Lisa wished me well. She told me she’d be there if I ever needed her. We never spoke again.
Now I stare at the face gazing from the cover of her book. It’s a nice picture of Lisa. Clearly touched up, but not in a tacky way. Friendly eyes. Small nose. Chin maybe a bit too large and forehead a touch too high. Not a classic beauty, but pretty.
She’s not smiling in the picture. This isn’t the kind of book that warrants a smile. Her lips are pressed together in just the right way. Not too cheerful. Not too severe. The perfect balance of gravity and self-satisfaction. I imagine Lisa practicing the expression in a mirror. The thought makes me sad.
I then think of her huddled in her tub, knife in hand. An even worse thought.
The knife.
That’s the thing I don’t understand, more than the act of suicide itself. Shit happens. Life sucks. Sometimes people can’t deal and choose to opt out. Sad as it may be, it happens all the time. Even to people like Lisa.
But she used a knife. Not a bottle of pills washed down with vodka. (My first preference, if it ever comes to that.) Not the soft, fatal embrace of carbon monoxide. (Choice Number Two.) Lisa chose to end her life with the very thing that almost stabbed it out of her decades earlier. She purposely slid that blade across her wrists, taking care to dig in deep, to finish the job Stephen Leibman had started.
I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if Lisa and I had stayed in touch. Maybe we would have eventually met in person. Maybe we could have become friends.
Maybe I could have saved her.
I make my way back to the kitchen and open the laptop that’s mostly used for blog business. After a quick Google search of Lisa Milner, I see that news of her death has yet to hit the Internet. That it will soon is inevitable. The big unknown is how much its impact will reverberate into my own life.
A
few clicks later, I’m on Facebook, that insipid swamp of likes and links and atrocious grammar. Personally, I don’t do social media. No Twitter. No Instagram. I had a personal Facebook page years ago but shut it down after too many pity follows and friend requests from strangers with Final Girl fetishes. Yet one still exists for my website. A necessary evil. Through that, I can easily access Lisa’s own Facebook page. She was, after all, a follower of Quincy’s Sweets.
Lisa’s page has become a virtual memorial wall, filled with condolence messages she’ll never read. I scroll past dozens of them, most of them generic but heartfelt.
We’ll miss you, Lisa Pisa! XOXO
I’ll never forget your beautiful smile and your amazing soul.
Rest in peace, Lisa.
The most touching comes from a doe-eyed, brown-haired girl named Jade.
Because you overcame the worst moment of your life, it inspired me to overcome the worst moment of mine. I’m forever inspired by you, Lisa. Now that you’re among the angels in Heaven, keep watch over those of us still down below.
I find a picture of Jade in the many, many photos Lisa posted to her wall over the years. It’s from three months ago, and it shows the two of them posing cheek to cheek at what appears to be an amusement park. Crisscrossed in the background are the support beams of a wooden roller coaster. An enormous teddy bear fills Lisa’s arms.
There’s no question that their smiles are genuine. You can’t fake that kind of joy. God knows, I’ve tried. Yet there’s an aura of loss around both of them. I see it in their eyes. That same subliminal sadness always creeps into pictures of me. Last Christmas, when Jeff and I went to Pennsylvania to visit my mother, we all posed for a picture in front of the tree, acting as if we were a real, functioning family. Later, while looking at the photos on her computer, my mother mistook my rigid grin for a grimace and said, Would it have killed you to smile, Quincy?
I spend a half hour poking around Lisa’s photos, getting glimpses of an existence far different from mine. Although she had never married, settled down, and had kids, her life seemed to be a fulfilling one. Lisa had surrounded herself with people—family and friends and girls like Jade who just needed a kind presence. I could have been one of them, had I allowed it.
