The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,48

Or maybe it was being in this room—the inability to take a deep breath, to imagine the open air, a way out.

I backed to the stairwell, unable to imagine what had drawn me up here in the first place.

Had I opened the window that night?

At least now I knew why I’d been outside that evening. I’d cleaned up the broken glass, brought it outside, dumped it in the bin. Maybe I’d tried to get back inside before realizing I’d locked myself out.

The details were slippery, impossible to get a firm grip on. I felt like I was creating a story from scratch. It was a story that made sense, based on the pieces left behind.

But Thursday night felt like an entirely different lifetime.

It was getting harder and harder to pull the events surrounding Friday night into focus, even. Like, as with twenty years ago, something too large to process had happened, and the connection in my memory had snapped and twisted, and nothing looked the same anymore.

I was living clearly in the after, now. After Sean’s body had been found at the edge of my property. After the past had found me again.

These were the facts: Bennett had bought enough food for two but left abruptly the previous afternoon; and Elyse had never stopped at my house on her way in to work, like she’d told Bennett she would.

This was how it started.

Ten years ago, when the old interviews aired, there were the classmates and teachers who got closer, who wanted me to confide; who wanted to be part of the story, always willing to spin a new piece of gossip after. People who saw me as a conquest. Like something to be dissected and studied.

There was the other side, too. People who didn’t like that they’d missed something, who wanted to be the center of their own story; people who left, either abruptly or slowly. But the result was the same, and I could see the signs coming this time.

The facts made things bad enough; media attention would make it worse.

I blamed the media attention of ten years earlier for pushing my mother into a perilous descent. During the first handful of years after the accident, she was able to feign normalcy. Even though she wasn’t sleeping, not when she was supposed to. The lingering effects of trauma, in hindsight: how she’d check in on me every hour, every thirty minutes, every ten. Overinvolved in every activity, every interaction. Unable to still her mind from the worry of whether it might happen again.

The case made all of us, and then it unmade us.

My mother was tragic until she was neglectful. Tossed to the media with no training. Given money for her story and then torn apart for the very same tale years later. She was dissected, piece by piece, in articles and interviews and think pieces. And she dulled it with the most readily available remedy.

The only people who showed up for her were the ones who wanted something from her in return: a piece of the story or the money. An old boyfriend named Nick Valdene, who’d been in and out of our life since before the accident, and who, from the way they talked, may or may not have been my father. I hoped not, but it didn’t matter. He was gone again by the time she’d written a check to pay off his debts. And then new boyfriends, new friends, the wrong type; the very wrong type.

After the ten-year anniversary, and her talk-show appearance, the renewed attention, people started making contact of every kind. The calls began. The letters started coming. Every single kind, and you didn’t know which until you opened it. Messages on the answering machine, wanting to know how we’d put the money to use. The real question, implied underneath, was of course this: How had we put my miraculous survival to use? Was I worth it?

They wanted to see it, the physical manifestations of their generosity and hope.

They came from far away and close to home. High school was a minefield.

Around that time, I became something else: the girl who got attention. Who wouldn’t give interviews. Who wasn’t grateful enough. Who forgot where she had come from.

Who was still, years later, trying to escape.

We had to leave. My mother didn’t like it, either. Didn’t like the version of her reflected in their questions. In the things they would see in her answers. It was happening to both of us, this dismantling of