head, shaking off this vision.
But you hadn’t killed her, Danny, Sutter said. She was still breathing when you pushed her into the water. And that right there—that’s not manslaughter. That’s not even vehicular homicide, Danny. That’s murder.
Sutter watching him, no expression whatsoever on his face, in those blue eyes. The camera watching. The men behind the glass watching.
The room spun. His stomach pitched. He thought he might be sick.
Sutter picked up his pen again and tapped it twice on the notepad.
Talk to me, Danny. Tell me about that night. Tell me what happened.
The room came to rest. Danny took a breath and let it out slowly.
I’m ready for that lawyer, he said. Either that, or I walk out of here right now.
And in the few seconds you had before she stepped into your room—Danny, we had a deal!—you pinched the cloth up from your jeans pocket and opened up the textbook and laid the cloth flat between the pages and put the book up on the shelf and you can’t even say why. Just down the hall sat the perfect solution: a contraption that filled itself with water and emptied itself with gravity into a four-inch waste pipe as dark and forever as the bottom of the sea.
Instead you put the thing in your textbook. Knowing full well it was the one thing that could end your life. That could flush you down some dark and forever hole yourself.
Because, at the same time, in some new part of you that did not exist an hour ago, not even fifteen minutes ago, you knew that the same piece of cloth that might end you might also save you. If only you had the time to figure out how.
39
She slept and woke, slept and woke, through day and night, or many days and many nights. She might’ve been in the river again, but now there was heat—hours of heat that set her skin on fire, and then hours of cold so deep her jaw chattered, and she slept and woke and did not know one from the other because everything she saw in either state was equally vivid and equally unbelievable and equally ordinary. She saw glass beads swaying in a river of color and lights, and the colors smelled of fruits no one had ever tasted before and the lights played on the bare shoulders of three young women who stood on the bottom of a lake with their toes in warm sand and their hair rising and falling in cool passing currents of light. She saw a corona of light around dark curtains, the light pulsing and blooming like a living thing, and she saw the bedroom where she lay and it was not her bedroom and it was, and she knew everything she would find in the closet down to a pair of high black boots that zipped up the back and she knew if she got up and looked in the mirror she would see her new face, her new hair, and there was a silver brush on the desk and she knew how the brush would feel in her hand and how it would feel in her hair, and she felt a new heart beating in her chest and this heart broke just to feel all that it felt all at once, all its love and pain and want and fear all at once.
She saw the curtains open on their own and a figure appear in the dark of the glass and she saw this figure put its hands to its face and peer in through the air bubbles and the tiny cracks and when it stood she saw the soles of its boots as it walked off into the night. Pale hair moved in the water like silky smoke, and she smelled smoke, and her father was sitting with her, Here, Deputy, drink this, and he raised her head with his hand and tilted the cool water to her lips, then he cleared the hair from her forehead and said, You have to help him now, sweetheart, and she said, Help who, Daddy? but he was gone.
She saw the faces of boys she did not know all lined up in picture frames and they were all the same boy, and the images darkened and sank away until all she saw was their teeth like the grins of skulls. She watched a large bird like a hawk or an owl glide soundlessly across the ceiling. She saw