it back, would it? Like we agreed, we need to take stuff into our own hands. We can deal with her. We’ll take control. This weekend? When we all have the day off? We’ll go down there and see what the hell…” The sentence slipped away.
“Yeah, I want to know what the fuck happened,” Dan agreed.
“Me too.” Jen’s words eddied in my milky brain.
“The body must be somewhere. And my guess is? It sure as hell isn’t at the bottom of Ragged Point.”
Their sentences spun together like cotton candy turned to a sticky, sickly mess. I had to get out there! Dig it up before they did. Shit! This weekend? What day was it?
I tried to heave myself out of bed but was pinned down by some invisible force, dull and heavy like an opiate. I couldn’t move, not even wiggle my toes.
“But you know what? I kind of feel bad.”
“Jen! How can you feel bad when…” Kate’s words turned hazy. A gust of wind stole them clean away.
“Because I’ve grown to love her,” Jen said. “Even after what she did.”
Birds of a feather flock together.
Birds of a feather flock together.
Birds of a fea…
That’s when the fever took hold of me and robbed my thoughts. Like a cleaver.
If only I’d put two and two together.
But I was too out of it to see sense.
Twenty-Nine
Awake, my brain lived in a deep freeze. But asleep, in my dreams, it thawed. Slowly defrosting… dripping into coherent memories.
Two weeks before Juan’s accident:
I am beginning to see the light. Not all of it, but a sliver, like when you spy through a keyhole, squinting one eye shut, and a gust of air blows into your iris. Then, because you can’t resist, you peer through again. You see a fleeting glimpse, a flash, a flash of something dangerous, or terrible, or too sexy to repeat, but you can’t stay for long because someone might catch you and shame you.
I know all about shame.
That sliver of light was revealed to me today. I should have suspected something all along. Whatever did Juan see in a girl like me? Well, he picked the wrong girl. I am the wrong material. The bullies at school knew it. And Juan should’ve known it too.
It was past midnight when he came home. Like an eager child, I waited up for him, anticipating the crunch of tires on the driveway, the familiar smell when he walked through the front door. The woody aroma that gusted with him from the outside, of the surrounding woods, the ocean, the musk of his neck. I swear I could smell it all, even from where I was in the bedroom.
He poked his head round the door. Spoke to the bed, where I lay, because it was so dark he couldn’t make me out, nor I him. Whispered, “Honey, are you awake?”
My heart picked up a beat. I groaned. He would know exactly the meaning of that groan, he’d be able to read the tone of it, its velvet desperation. He shook off his shoes and took a step towards the bathroom, but I stopped him with my voice. “Juan,” I said, my pulse racing with desire. He’d been away for a week.
“I’m going to take a shower first,” he said.
“No, please don’t rub the you off yourself,” I begged. It was a beg, he would have heard the plea of my voice.
He blew me a kiss from across the room. “Shower,” he said. “Trust me, babe, I need one.”
“No!” There was another whiff, a whiff of something alien to me mixed with his own Juan scent. Sweet. Not cloying or cheap, but definitely, possibly definitely—I just couldn’t be sure.
Female?
I wanted to get up out of bed. Race across the room and embrace him. Inhale the telltale story of him, right then and there. But I didn’t. Instead, I lay petrified between the sheets like a jagged stone. I dared not invite any more doubt into my already suspicious mind. I heard the shower’s spray, his hands slapping on the soap, the same hands scrubbing himself clean, his long fingers massaging the scalp that carried his crown of thick black hair. I had in my mind’s eye the white lather on his head frothing down his taut muscles, the water running its course like a waterfall over rocks, his pectorals hard, his mouth catching the water, the same mouth that may have run itself over the nape of another neck, a neck scented with something that smelt