Her father reached for her, then pulled back. Her mother sank to the floor, trying to get the pieces. Her father said, “No, Susan, your hands,” and something in Catherine shivered loose from the whole and she ran from them, nearly slipping on the remnants of the canister before bolting out the door.
There was more activity outside Amy’s house now; she could hear raised voices, see more movement than before. Then she noticed the large brown dog amid the crowd of police officers, and, to her utter disbelief—Henry. He was looking shamefaced, and even from this distance she could tell he was apologizing to the officers before tugging Molly back up the road. A moment later, Catherine realized what must have happened: a slim German shepherd was standing at attention by its handler. As she watched, the dog walked behind its handler’s legs, eyes fixed on Molly, then back again to the other side.
“Henry,” Catherine called as he made to cross over to the median. Then she lowered her hand: What was she doing? Just yesterday, after her walk, she’d sent him a long text message apologizing for snapping at him, saying she wasn’t in a good place right now and just needed to be alone. It sounded stupid even as she typed it out, and it made her wonder where the words even came from, these weird phrases she used to make sure everyone around her didn’t worry, didn’t get upset. But she’d used them all the same to tell him to leave her alone.
So no, she didn’t really understand why she was calling out to him now, watching him turn and see her, then walk back up the street, Molly in tow. All she knew was that she didn’t want to go back inside and face her parents. And that shivering had started again.
“Hey,” he said when he reached her. “Do you know what—Hey, what happened to you?”
She blinked.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing.
Dimly, she touched her cheek. Felt the blood like grit under her fingers. “Sugar,” she said, by way of explanation, then asked, “What did you do?”
“Not me.” He grimaced down at Molly, whose sides were heaving. “Other dogs, I told you. She jerked the leash right out of my hand before I could even try for the peanut butter.” Frowning, he turned to look back down the street. “Do you know what’s going on down there? Some kind of drug bust or something?”
She opened her mouth, but the shivering got worse, making her teeth snap back together, her arms cross at her waist. She bent double, feeling like she was going to throw up. Through blurring eyes she saw Molly move closer to her, put her face right up to Catherine’s. Catherine clutched at the fur on Molly’s back, hands tight, sure she must be hurting the dog, but Molly didn’t move. Catherine didn’t know how long she stood there, trying to make herself loosen her grip on Molly’s fur, but she had this feeling she was tipping over the edge of something terrifying and all she wanted was to grab something, fist it in her hands, and scream. But the sound wouldn’t come. Her teeth were bared, and there was a low keening whine coming from her throat. She knew Henry must be wondering what the hell was going on.
She heard her front door open behind her. Catherine released Molly and stood straight, wiping her face of tears and blood at the same time. When she turned, her father was standing on the porch.
“I got your mother upstairs,” he said. “She’s—she’s lying down.”
Catherine wiped her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Okay,” she said, though she knew her mother would be unlikely to stay there.
Her father hitched a sigh and put his hands on his hips. His face was angled toward Amy’s house. “They found her at Lookout Point. That’s what…they said. What the police told them.” He ran a hand down his face. “I’m going back inside. Make some calls. See what—what we can do. Catherine—”
He looked at her. Something sparked between them and she felt a burst of goose bumps down her shoulders before he turned and went back into the house.
“What,” Henry said slowly, and she turned just as slowly back to face him, “the hell is going on?”
Catherine stared at Amy’s house.
If I go there, she thought, if I walk in, I’ll find Amy in the kitchen. The oven light on because she always had to watch. The counter spilling with spices. Thin lines of flour in the hardwood.
If I go there…she’ll be there. I know it.
She began walking, had actually made it four or five steps before Henry suddenly appeared in front of her, blocking her way.
“Let me through,” she said.
He shook his head.
“Let me through,” she said again.
“Catherine—”
“I told you to leave me alone.”
Henry frowned at her. “Okay. I can do that. But I’d suggest not pissing off those cops any more than Molly just did. Jesus fucking Christ.” He ran a hand through his hair and then glanced at Amy’s house before turning back to Catherine. “What is going on?”
“Amy,” Catherine choked out. “She’s dead.”
Henry looked at her like she was crazy; then he seemed to see something in her face, and his own features fell.
“You’re serious? She’s dead?”
Catherine swallowed. Nodded.
Henry shook his head. “But I thought…the dog. Drugs.”
Catherine had the bizarre urge to laugh. “Who here sells drugs?”
Henry seemed to consider this for a moment. “James Pechman sells Adderall,” he said finally. “But actually, I don’t know if dogs can smell prescription pills.”
Catherine couldn’t summon up the energy for a response. Thankfully, Henry didn’t seem to expect one.
He walked around her, sat on her porch steps, and blinked up at the sky, as though trying to see something on the air. The mist was wetter now. She could feel it on her skin, see it darkening the edges of Henry’s hair.
“Do you know how?” he asked.
Slowly, she shook her head.
“We have her bread on our kitchen table,” Henry said. “I made French toast with it before I took Molly out.”
Catherine joined him on the steps. Molly sat between them, warm and yawning.
“I got pumpkin,” Catherine said. She twisted her hands in her lap, rolled a ring around her right finger: a Christmas gift from her parents, gold and sapphire. When she and Amy baked, they never wore rings. “You got eggnog, right?”
He nodded, and Catherine suddenly felt very, very tired. A wave of exhaustion so complete she didn’t even feel cold anymore. Her hands stilled in her lap.
“Can I put Molly inside?” Henry asked her. “Just for a little while. The other dog, you know…”
“Yeah, sure.”
Once he’d closed the front door with a few murmured words, he sat back down, and she said, her voice drowsy and quiet, “I’m sorry. About yesterday.”
But Henry shook his head. “That’s not…not even on my radar right now. Are you—are you okay?” Then he closed his eyes, as though embarrassed. “Forget it. Stupid question.”
Her eyes found Amy’s house again, Amy’s yard, and she felt something tighten behind her eyes, something come into focus, that brief tiredness ebbing from her. Even the mist seemed to clear slightly; she could see the grass more clearly, remember when it was warmer. No mist. Just sun.
She’d never thought it could happen in the sun.
“I know who it was,” she said. She could tell Henry was watching her strangely but she didn’t care. “There was this guy. I don’t know who. It was last summer. I was with Amy in the front yard and…” She blinked, that hard weight on her chest again, but she forced herself to keep talking. “He came up to us. Amy didn’t see him. I didn’t either, at first.”
A car was driving up the road, on the other side of the median that divided their wide street. The pressure on her chest intensified as she remembered Amy suggesting they could try the median next as she poked the front yar
d grass with a stick, then wondering aloud if the rain had sent the caterpillars underground there, too. “Or maybe they have their own weather service like people do, and can prepare ahead of time. With little caterpillar umbrellas or something. What?” she’d added, in response to Catherine’s dubious stare. “It could happen.”
“A guy?” Henry asked her now. “What guy?”
“If you’re asking me for a name—”
“Well, what did he look like?”
“Homeless,” she said frankly. The car she’d been watching was now rounding the median, turning in the direction of the other vehicles grouped near the Porters’ house. “Older. Twenties. Maybe even thirties. Dark hair, but it was so dirty it might not have—”
The car—a gray Honda sedan—stopped at her house, right on the curb in front of the walk. She and Henry stared.
A guy got out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of his car to her yard. He’d put the hazards on, and the headlights flashed red in the direction of Amy’s house.
“Catherine Ellers?” he said. He looked roughly her age, but he had a quiet, uncertain voice, which, coupled with his milky skin, thin build, and violet under-eye shadows, made it seem as though he was sick, and not just with a cold.
Henry stood up. “And you are?” He glanced down at Catherine, who hadn’t moved from the step, as though hoping she might answer. But she couldn’t; she’d never seen this person before in her life.
She opened her mouth to say something along those lines, maybe even ask the guy a question, but then she noticed he was carrying a coat under one arm. It was black and plain and if not for a slightly ruffled hem might have been his.
But it wasn’t. It was hers. The coat she’d left in the dorms that night, and—she saw with a sense of complete unreality—he was holding it out to her on her front walk, as though trying to give it back.
Terror made me cruel.
—EMILY BRONTË, WUTHERING HEIGHTS
“Catherine Ellers?”
He was still standing there, not even ten feet away on the walk, holding out her coat, the damp haze misting the fabric. His face was a show of confusion, of uncertainty. She heard him say her name again.
Henry shot her another glance and then stepped directly in front of her, one arm outstretched. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What do you want?”
Catherine stood up. Over Henry’s shoulder, she could see the boy still holding out the coat. He looked like a ghost, like something the winter mist had borne along.
Was it you?
Was it you?
“My name’s Andrew,” the boy said, glancing between them. When his eyes met Catherine’s again, she felt her heart jump into her throat. “Andrew Worthington. Do you—do you not remember?”
blacksleep wake up water go hallway run bare legs blood shower no claim Mom Mom pick up pick up please
* * *
—
“Remember.”
She said it aloud, her voice almost lost in the low wind. Henry turned to her but before he could say anything she stepped down from the porch and walked forward, until she was closer to this person—this Andrew—than to Henry. She looked him slowly up and down, as though he were something to study, to make sense of, and then it fell into place in her head like a gate slamming down, and she struck out, hard, with one bare hand.
He jerked back but it wasn’t enough, his reflexes too slow, and her closed fist hit him along one cheekbone, sending a shock of pain up her hand and arm to her shoulder even as he twisted and fell onto the frosted grass.
“Catherine!” Henry grabbed her by the arms, trying to pull her back, but she was a match that had been begging to be lit for a week and she fought, spitting like a cat, yelling words that were more pain than language, raw as the winter, so bitter and hoarse they seemed to claw their way up her throat.
“Catherine! Shut up, stop it, the police are right there. Stop!”
She did, panting, glancing down the street, but she was lucky: only one person was outside Amy’s house now, and by the looks of it, he was on a cell phone. The few neighbors who had trickled onto their front porches to watch the scene unfolding at the Porters’ house seemed to glance over, but Henry waved at them, an it’s fine reassurance, and they turned away, probably unsure exactly what they’d seen through the fog.
She looked back at the boy called Andrew, who by now was pushing himself up onto the grass, holding his cut cheek, and noticed her own knuckles were red, a smear of blood across her small ring. She wiped it off, a lurch of disgust in her throat, and snatched up her coat, which the boy had let fall. She scoured the pockets and pulled out her driver’s license, her debit card, her school ID.
“What did you buy?” she said.
“What?” He was holding his cheek, slightly slumped. His car behind him still flared its hazards in a leisurely sort of way.
“What did you buy?” Catherine said again. “With my card? Video games? Beer?”
The boy took his hand from his cheek and examined it before applying pressure to the cut again. “No. I didn’t touch your card. What is this? Why did you attack me? And who are you?” He directed this last question to Henry, who smiled and crossed his arms.
“Just a friendly spectator,” Henry replied. “Catherine’s usually pretty friendly too. Doesn’t seem too fond of you, though.”
“He raped me,” Catherine said.
She didn’t mean to say it, actually couldn’t believe she’d said it, but the truth was there: in the sound of the words, in Henry whirling around to stare at her, in the hairs that stood up along the backs of her arms.
“You raped me,” she said. She was looking at the boy, this thin, sickly boy with a cut on his cheek she’d given him, and wondered what he would say in response. But then, a moment later, she was kicking herself for even wondering.
“I didn’t rape you!”
She flung the coat back at him, and then for good measure, her license and debit card and school ID. The coat fell in a heap to the stone walkway, and the cards clattered with a sound that reminded her of the grinding roll of that stupid plastic cup—
“So what was it?” she shot at him. “What would you call it? Me leaving without my coat and my dress on fucking backward and blood all down my l-legs—” She broke off and wiped her face, furious at herself for losing control, for shaking so hard where she stood that Henry had to steady her like an invalid.
But he was already protesting. Andrew. His name wouldn’t fit inside her head even as he sputtered in protest.
“I didn’t rape you! You really don’t remember? You ran into me. In the hallway. Right? You were freaked out, I could tell something was wrong. You—There was blood, it got on the floor….” He trailed off, then seemed to gather himself. “I saw what room you came out of. I went to knock….I don’t know, it just seemed…Anyway, I saw a coat on the floor when the door opened. I figured it was yours and grabbed it, but then you’d…you’d gone.” He rubbed his cut cheek. It wasn’t that bad, actually, barely bleeding, but the skin around it was red. “I went outside, but I didn’t see you. You must have run or something. So I looked in the pockets. Your driver’s license, it had your address on it—”
“Jesus,” Henry muttered. “You didn’t think, maybe a Snapchat message? Or, I don’t know, FedEx? It’s just a coat.”
“It wasn’t,” Andrew said, “just a coat.” He looked back at Catherine. “I did find you online. I sent you a message a few days ago, but you didn’t respond.”
“I haven’t…” Catherine swallowed. “I haven’t been on it. Not since…” She looked him up and down again, trying to remember: that bump-brush in the hallway, but she hadn’t looked up, even when she heard someone ask if she was okay. And yes, she had raced across campus. In fact, she’d run as fast as possible until she’d slammed into the entrance of her own dorm, one p
alm flat against the window—which was when she realized her student ID was in her coat. No way to swipe in. So stupid. So many times over. Freezing on the steps of the dorm, pacing and jumping and crying until a girl saw her through the glass and when she got inside she’d let out a gasp that was more a cry than anything else. She wondered if that girl had asked her if she was okay too.
“I swear,” Andrew said. “I just saw…I saw you, and it…clearly something had gone down. So I got your coat and—”
“And he gave it to you?” Henry interrupted, his voice patently disbelieving. “This guy? Just gave it to you? Oh man, the girl I raped left her coat? Why didn’t you say so? Here, don’t want her to be cold!”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Yeah? Then what was it like?”
Andrew looked from Henry, who was glowering, to Catherine, who was doing that thousand-yard stare again. “Listen. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. But I live about an hour from here, so I thought, after Christmas, might as well…just to check, you know…” His voice trailed off again. Slowly, he bent and picked up the coat, the cards. He held them out, like it was a few minutes ago and he’d just pulled up. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. About what happened.”
She took them from him. Questions burned at the back of her throat, but she saw the cut on his cheek when he stepped back from her, and the red of his skin there took the words away. She thought she might never speak again.
Andrew shoved his hands in his pockets and then glanced back toward his car. “I think I’ll head out.”
She still said nothing, but he didn’t seem to expect her to. He gave her a kind of nod and then began walking to his car.
“You should drive out the way you came,” Henry called to his retreating back, with the air of someone getting the last word. “You won’t get through the other way.”
Andrew half turned. “What?”
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