Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,46
finally nodded. “What’ll you do when you leave here tonight?”
“Go back to Lisa’s. Go to bed. Sleep. Come back here in the morning and start all over again.”
Rebecca hesitated as though there were something more she wanted to say, but she simply nodded toward the mural. “All right, then,” she said. “Keep up the good work.”
Rebecca left and I stood in the middle of the foyer trying to decide what to do. Work or go back to Lisa’s? Rebecca had disrupted my flow. I carried the container of water and the cotton-wrapped dowel to the small kitchenette at the rear of the building. Opening the cupboard beneath the sink to throw away the cotton, I was greeted by the yeasty smell of beer from a few crushed cans in the recycling bin. One or more of the guys were drinking on the job, I guessed. The scent took me back to my party days at UNC, only a little more than a year ago, a year that felt like a lifetime. I suddenly yearned for something I couldn’t name. Not the beer. Not my old friends. Trey? The perfect Trey I’d thought him to be? Maybe. But I knew it was something bigger that I longed for. My innocence, maybe. I wasn’t sure, but I stood in the small kitchen, my hands across my chest in a sad little hug. Whatever it was I wanted, I knew I could never get it back. I thought again of Emily Maxwell and imagined that she, too, yearned for her life before the accident. Before so much had been stolen from her. Oh God, how I hated thinking about her! Surprising tears burned my eyes and I was suddenly back in my car on that hideous night, remembering what we’d done to her. Yes, we, because even though Trey had been driving, it could just as easily have been me behind the wheel. It could have been me who T-boned Emily’s little Nissan at that dark, wet intersection. I’d been as toasted as Trey when we left the party and it was only at the last second that I turned my keys over to him. I would always remember the awful moment when I realized what we’d done, the sickening image of the totaled car in front of us, its headlights still piercing the darkness, the deafening, continuous sound of the car horn that filled the air after the crunch of steel against steel. The instant sobriety. Omigod, did we kill someone? The shock when Trey flung open the driver’s side door and said, “I wasn’t here! Got it?” I watched him leap from the car and take off into the dark woods. Even through my shock, I understood what he meant. His scholarship. Georgetown Law. He was brilliant, and he’d worked so hard. He had everything to lose. I loved him. I’d protect him.
I’d sat there numb and paralyzed for a few seconds before I’d climbed out of the car myself. Slowly, heart pounding, I’d walked toward the Nissan, its horn still blaring. The darkness of the night stole my breath. There was just enough light for me to see that my car had impaled the driver’s side of the Nissan. I couldn’t see inside the car. Couldn’t possibly get to the driver through that door. Battling nausea, I climbed through brush and leaves around the front of the Nissan and mustered my courage to force open the passenger side door. The overhead light came on and I knew in that moment that the image in front of me would haunt my dreams forever: long black hair and blood, twisted limbs and bones. I screamed and screamed and screamed until someone showed up next to me and someone else called the police. Even when I was surrounded by sirens and flashing lights, wrapped in a blanket, and being treated for a cut on my forehead I hadn’t known I had—even through all of that, I screamed.
“Is she dead?” I kept shouting, my arms wrapped across my chest, my whole body tightened into a ball of horror. “Is she dead? Is she dead?”
I remembered, with painful clarity, the words of the cop standing next to me. “You didn’t kill her,” he said, “but you sure as hell ruined her life.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered now, standing in the gallery’s kitchenette. I pressed my fingers against my eyes as if I could block out the images of that night. The memories. I thought briefly of