too. He was sheriff at the time, and he was the one who’d fired the shot at Chill. Carla had been woozy and confused from a severe concussion, but she had roused herself in time to watch Chill stagger and fall, blood bubbling from his perforated torso.
For the next few years, things had been okay. She had dealt with the memories. Pushed them back. Locked them away. She was helped by a good counselor, a woman her dad had found for her. Carla saw her twice a week. Three times, if she needed it. And a lot of times, she needed it. Being away from Acker’s Gap made a difference; that was Carla’s theory, anyway. She was in a new place with a new life.
She graduated from high school. She had good friends. She had a serious boyfriend—his name was Greg Balzercak—but neither one of them was sure about where things were going, or where they wanted them to go. So they were taking a break. He was in Paraguay now, in the Peace Corps. They kept in touch. Sort of. Who knew what would happen when he got back? She had decided that college was not what she wanted right now. Maybe later. Half-sick with apprehension, she had told her mom about her decision. She knew Bell wasn’t happy about it, but she did not argue. Same with her dad: disappointment, but no fireworks. Your life—your call. That was the essence of what both of them said. It was a relief.
She had moved into the house in Arlington. She had an okay job. Eventually she quit that one and got a better one. Everything was going fine.
And then, as of four months ago, it wasn’t. It wasn’t going fine at all.
The symptoms hit: the headaches. The insomnia. The feeling-flashbacks. With no warning the world would lurch sideways, and when it did, she ended up doing odd things to try to shock it into getting upright again. Things she had never done before. Bad things. One especially bad thing. She knew better, but she could not help herself; she was desperate, and she had to do something to steady herself. Something outlandish. Something to knock her crazy spinning thoughts back into a normal rhythm. Something wild and shocking and hard.
Something that would serve as a sort of emotional defibrillator. That was how she rationalized it. She needed something to stun her back toward normalcy.
She lost weight, because she could not eat, because the thought of food revolted her, and instead of expressing concern, most of her friends asked her what her secret was: Atkins, South Beach? Vegetarian? Vegan?
Many times, out of the blue, she could not catch her breath. She would be at work or hanging out with her housemates and she would start sweating. She could not focus. She thought she was going to pass out. She was barely twenty-one, but the first time it happened, she was pretty sure she was having a heart attack. The second time, too. And the third and fourth. The moment eventually passed, but that did not matter.
The fact that it wasn’t a heart attack the last time it happened did not mean that it wasn’t a heart attack this time. Or maybe a stroke. Or something.
Saturday afternoon, she had crawled under the thick down comforter on the bed in her tiny room. She closed her eyes. She waited to die.
She did not die.
A few hours later, she got out of bed and fired off an e-mail. About a job she’d seen advertised. A job in Acker’s Gap. And then she called her mother and told her she was coming home.
* * *
Sunlight smacked the peaks of piled-up snow lining the road, bouncing back into her eyes and momentarily blinding her. Carla adjusted the visor. She hadn’t brought her sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a lot of things. In fact, she had left a ton of junk behind. More than just sunglasses. She’d only taken her laptop and a makeup kit and a couple of books and some bras and panties and an extra pair of jeans and a few sweaters. She’d just stuffed everything into her backpack and thrown it onto the passenger seat and taken off. She’d text Skylar later. Skylar had the room next to hers. Skylar would dump the rest of her stuff in a box and ship it to her in Acker’s Gap. No rush, she had told Skylar. Whenever.
This was a rare straight stretch of road. Carla was