The End of Our Story Page 18

  “I know. I know. I know.” He tilts his seat back and closes his eyes. His lips are moving, and suddenly, he punches the dashboard. I close his door gently and sprint around the truck to the driver’s side, my heart pounding. I roll down the windows, because this space can’t contain us.

  “It’s the station on Seminole,” Wil instructs me. He turns away, toward the window.

  “So the guy tried to break into another house? Did anybody get hurt?” I peel away from the curb.

  “I don’t know yet. She didn’t—”

  “But they know it’s the guy, for sure?”

  “Bridge!” Wil sags out the open window. “Can you just—”

  “Sorry.” I keep my eyes on the road.

  The station is a low concrete rectangle only a few blocks away. When we pull into the parking lot, Henney is standing outside, pacing in front of a set of double doors.

  “Mom? Mom.” Wil jumps out before the truck comes to a stop. I park and kill the engine, watch him envelop her in a hug. Guttural sobs rumble in her, or in him, I can’t tell. I look away. I take my time rolling up the truck windows. Closing the door quietly. Locking the doors. I wander in a wide arc around them. I pretend to read a plaque near the door in memory of a K9 officer.

  Finally, Wil releases Henney to the ground. Both of their eyes are red-rimmed. He smoothes her hair and I read It’s okay on his lips. He steers Henney through the double doors and I trail a few steps behind. Inside the station, the chilled air makes my skin pucker. I take a seat in the first of a line of plastic chairs near the door. It is unremarkable: white walled and quiet. It doesn’t seem like the kind of room where entire lives can begin again or end. There is an officer sitting behind a desk, and behind him is an American flag. To the left of the desk is a door. Wil goes to the desk and asks for Detectives Porter and Yancey.

  “Just a moment.” The front desk cop makes a call, and in a few minutes, Detective Porter steps into the waiting room. She’s taller than I remember. Her gun gleams under the sterile lights. I wonder if she’s ever killed anyone, and then I try to un-wonder.

  “Good morning, folks. So, this is a big day.” Porter shakes Wil’s and Henney’s hands. “A good day.” She catches sight of me near the doors and presses her lips together. I do the same.

  “What, ah, what’s next?” Wil can’t stand still. Henney hangs from his arm. She is suddenly, instantly an ancient woman. “Is he back there?”

  Porter nods. “He is. We got a call through the Crime Stoppers hotline this morning. A woman in Jax Beach saw this guy and thought he matched the description on the flyers.”

  I watch the muscles in the back of Wil’s neck go taut. My body twitches with every tick of the second hand on the clock over the doors. The man who killed Wilson Hines is in this building. It feels unreal, impossible. I imagine Wil staring through one-way glass at the man who has changed his life.

  “What, ah—” Wil’s face goes dark. “What happens next?”

  “In terms of next steps, we’ll need you to make an identification.” Porter speaks slowly. “We don’t have much to hold him on yet, so we need you to confirm that this is the man who broke into your home and killed your father. If we can get a positive ID from your mother, we can hold him while we investigate.”

  “Wait. Will she have to see the guy?” Wil blanches.

  “You can be with her. And you’ll see him, but he won’t see you,” Porter says gently.

  “Wil. I—I can’t,” Henney bleats. “We can’t.”

  Wil buckles under his mother’s weight. Detective Porter steadies them both.

  “I don’t think she can do this.” Wil’s voice is full, a rushing current. “It’s too much for her right now.”

  “We can take our time.” Porter tilts her head and nods at Wil.

  She learned that in cop school, I think.

  “Could I get you both some water?” Porter offers.

  “I said, she can’t do this,” Wil says again, his voice dangerously soft. “We’re the victims, right? We don’t have to do it if it’s too much.”

  “You’re under no obligation to make an ID.” Porter’s features calcify. “However, I would strongly encourage you to at least take a look at the lineup. If we don’t get an ID, we won’t be able to hold him.”

  “Wil?” I’m on my feet, confused. “If it’ll help them keep the guy in jail? Your mom got a good look, right?”

  “It was dark, and she was fucking scared.” Wil doesn’t turn around.

  “Take me home.” Henney is sucking short, horrible breaths that are not enough. “I can’t breathe, Wilson. I can’t breathe.” Her hand flies to her throat.

  “I’m getting her out of here. I’m not putting her through this anymore.” Wil wraps his arms around Henney’s waist and guides her back through the waiting room, past me without even a glance.

  “Wil!” I push through the doors, run after them. “What the hell?”

  “Go home, Bridge,” Wil yells over his shoulder. “I’ll call you later.” He jerks open the passenger side door of Henney’s sedan and scoops her into it.

  “Hey. Hey. I’ll take both of you,” I argue. “You can’t drive like this.”

  “I’m fine, Bridge. I just have to get her home.” Wil’s brow is sweat-soaked.

  “Just—tell me what happened in there,” I plead. “Don’t you want this guy locked up? This is your one chance!” I smack my palm against Henney’s back window. Inside, she shrieks. “Fuck! I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t mean it.” Wil’s jaw pulses. “Of course I want him locked up. But it isn’t that easy, Bridge.”

  “I know it will be hard for her, but—”

  “I can’t force her, Bridge. It’s just too hard for her right now.”

  “Wil,” I protest.

  “I can’t. She can’t.” He pulls me close. Kisses the top of my head, and I let my eyes flutter closed to the sound of his heartbeat. It’s unfinished, like the jagged edge of a knife. Like a truth only partially spoken.

  WIL

  Spring, Junior Year

  SHE’S lying. Or maybe this is some kind of sick joke.

  “I want a divorce,” she says again.

  I laugh, and the musty air around me smells like stale beer. My laugh is this awful, bleating sound that shoots out of me and pins my mother to the oven. She takes a step back, like she’s afraid. Maybe she is, and I don’t blame her. I am Wilson Hines, after all.

  “What? You what?” Her outline goes grainy in the dark. “Mom. What are you telling me?”

  She moves around the island, murmuring, weak, until I slap the countertop with the kind of force that should crack it and me.

  “Don’t,” I tell her. “Don’t.”

  “Wil,” she says, pleading. “I didn’t mean for it to happen like this.”

  “You didn’t mean for it to happen like this?” My voice is not my voice. “Like what, Mom? Like right after he plans the best anniversary of your life? Like months after he’s been trying to make things better?” I am bigger, sadder, angrier than my body can contain. I am going to burst. I imagine little bits of my flesh on the floor, scattered like confetti.

  “I didn’t know,” she says, and when she starts to cry, I hate her deeper than I ever thought I could. “I had everything packed this afternoon, and I didn’t know that you and your dad . . . And then I came outside, and Ana was here, and I just . . . I couldn’t.”

  I am not hearing this, these impossible words that she’s saying. “So you went along with it? You fucking went along with it? Do you have any idea how insane that is?” I have to find my father. He is everywhere here: leaning against the walls in small, contained stacks. But I need the real him. I dive from one room to the next, searching. “Where is he? Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s not here, Wil. He went out,” she says behind me. “I don’t know if he’s coming back.”

  My breath comes in gasps, so short and shallow that the room is starting to spin. “He was tryi
ng,” I say to the living room wall. “We were getting better. What have you done? What have you done to fix it?”

  “It can’t be fixed, Wil.” Her voice is too steady. “He showed me that when he hit me again, after all those years. He cannot be fixed. He is an angry man who does not love me.”

  I turn and we’re so close that I could just—

  “I deserve better than that,” she says as if she’s trying to convince me . . . or herself.

  “You’re a liar,” I tell her. “You don’t want him to be better. You’re giving up.” I feel so stupid! Why didn’t we know? The smiling and the power walking and the new jeans: Those weren’t for us. She was gone months ago.

  “I have waited for your father to change my whole life,” she says sadly. “Don’t you dare.”

  I shove past her. This house is a maze, walled in with his things, and I can’t find my way out. “I can’t wait to get out of this sick, fucking house.” I toss the words over my shoulder like tiny grenades. She doesn’t try to stop me.

  I slam my bedroom door. Dive into my bed face-first and suck hot, wet breaths through my pillow. The worst of this isn’t that she wants a divorce. My parents have been unhappy since the beginning of time. The worst of it is that I let myself believe for a minute tonight that we were a completely different family. A family who shared first date stories and ate cheese and crackers on a sailboat while the sun set over the water! What kind of a family does that? But I let myself believe it.

  I sock my pillow again and again and again. I hate her for doing this to our family. I hate myself for wanting us to be different people. I hate Ronnie Van Zant for convincing me that it was possible, to be a simple kind of man. I’ll leave this place, I decide. I’ll drop out of school. I’ll start my own workshop on another plot of land near another ocean. I will fix things for a living, without them. I’ll tell them tonight. She’s not the only one who can leave.

  I take my pillow and I drag it to the floor, next to my bedroom door. I lie down and listen past my heartbeat, past my storming brain, for the vibrations of his work boots on the hardwood. Waiting for life as I know it to end.

  I feel him in the house. My breath catches with the door slam. He’ll come this way. I sit up and lean against my bed, and I try to make sense of the glowing red slashes on my clock. They’re a foreign language, I think, until I flip the clock over and then I understand: 3:28. I hear my father say my mother’s name and I hear my mother say my father’s name. I wait to hear him coming for me.

  Instead, I hear their underwater voices getting louder, louder until I can make out some of the words. I hear: “You fucking bitch,” but it’s warbled, like he’s having trouble getting the words out (Oh no, my body feels). I hear: the shattering of glass on the kitchen floor. I hear: my mother screaming, “Wilson, don’t, Wilson, you’re drunk, Wilson, I’ll call the cops.” I hear: the soft sounds of water lapping the bottom of a boat, and then I hear: the crack of a skull against the wall. The sharp intake of breath, like the fizz of a just-lit match.

  BRIDGE

  Summer, Senior Year

  TOO early the next morning, I take the turn into Sandy Shores. I haven’t slept. I snuck out of the house as soon as the tiniest bit of light crept into my room, Mom and Micah still sleeping on the couch with last night’s Chinese takeout containers open and the television blaring.

  I need Minna. I need to talk to her, to let her untangle the word webs in my brain. I need her to tell me that I’m being paranoid, that the way Wil and Henney bolted from the substation yesterday was a normal part of grief. But still, I don’t understand it. If I were Wil, if a strange man had ended my family, I’d want him locked up. I’d want him dead. How could Wil and Henney just let him go? Trust him, I tell myself. But the feeling I had yesterday remains: doubt twisting in my gut. Something was strange. Something was wrong.

  I roll to a stop at the guard’s cottage and tilt the rearview toward me. Minna will tell me I look like shit, which is accurate. I should look better than this on the morning of graduation rehearsal. I should look fresh-faced and excited and ready for The Future. My hair is swept into a nest on top of my head, and I’m so pale that I can see the tiny purple veins branching across my eyelids.

  I look out the window. It’s too early for Rita, too: She’s curled up in her folding chair in her tiny fake cottage, her salt-and-pepper bun rising and falling with her breath. On the black-and-white Today show, Matt Lauer is staring into the camera, reporting a shooting on a military base in Texas. He is trying to give it the gravity it deserves—people are dead, and that means something—but he’s read the same story hundreds of times, replacing the words military base with school or department store or bedroom at high-school party; replacing armed assailant with suspected terrorist; with bullied teen or frat boy asshole. Minna was right. Violence happens everywhere.

  “Welcome to Sandy Shores!” Rita sleep-blurts too loudly. I sit up. “Oh,” she says with a yawn. “Bridge. I thought it was somebody.”

  “Nope. Nobody. Just me.” I give Rita a weak smile. “I know it’s early, but do you think she’d mind? More than usual, I mean.”

  “Enter at your own risk is what I always say.” Rita leans over to flip the switch, but she stops halfway. “Oh,” she says, and her face gets cloudy.

  “What’s up?”

  “I, ah . . .” Rita’s mouth pinches into a frown. “I can’t let you in, actually. Miss Minna came up here last night and told me.”

  “What?” I shake my head.

  “You sent a letter? To her daughter, without asking her first?” Rita studies her chipped manicure. “I didn’t even know she had a daughter.”

  “Well, yeah, but that was a good thing, actually.” My heart is lead. She couldn’t be angry. Maybe the Minna kind of angry, the kind that blazes fast and fades. But not a real, lasting kind of angry. “She hadn’t spoken with her daughter in years, Rita, and her daughter didn’t even know she was living here. So I wanted to—I thought—”

  “She didn’t even yell, Bridge,” Rita says quietly. “She just walked up here last night, real calm, and said to tell you not to come back again. Said your services were no longer required.”

  No longer required. I swallow the lump in my throat, but it bobs right up again. “Rita. You have to let me in. Please. I was trying to do something good for her. If she understood where I was coming from, maybe—”

  Rita shakes her head. “I can’t, baby. I’ll lose my job.”

  “Right.” A weird strangled sound is trying to force its way up. “I wouldn’t want—I get it.”

  “Plus she told me if I let you in, she’d come up here and personally kick my ass, and I think we both know she could do it.” She says it to make me laugh, but I don’t and neither does she.

  “Will you tell her I stopped by, though? Will you tell her this is all one big misunderstanding?”

  Rita nods. “I’ll tell her.”

  I have to do a nine-point turn to get the truck headed in the right direction, and I stop fighting the tears on the fourth point. Rita is sweet, and pretends not to see me coming apart.

  * * *

  I’m late for graduation rehearsal. Late enough that Señora Thompson decides to stop talking entirely and breathe into her wireless microphone like a phone stalker while I slap across the shiny gym floor. The walk to the bleachers is long enough that I have time to think about things, like how I never realized that the gym is thousands of miles long, or how flip-flops are much louder on buffed wood than any logical person would guess. I sweep the crowd for Leigh or Wil or even Ned Reilly or Susan, but all the student-blobs look exactly the same.

  “As I was saying. You’ll arrive here at school promptly at eight-thirty this Saturday morning.” Señora is staring at me, and I blink back, like, Nine-fifteen, then? “Caps and gowns will be distributed in classrooms M-102, M-103, and M-104, alphabetically by last name. We will line up just outside the double doors and process down the hall and into the gym. Mr. Reilly and Ms.
Choudry, your valedictorian and salutatorian, will lead.”

  “Ned Reilly!” someone hoots, and half of the senior class chants, “Ned. Ned. Ned,” until Señora Thompson thumps the microphone.

  “Followed by your senior class, again in alphabetical order. The faculty will bring up the rear.” She says something about how showing up bombed or naked underneath our graduation robes will seriously jeopardize receipt of our diploma, which everyone knows is bullshit. That kind of warning didn’t exist before the legendary Chaz Foster, who was a senior here when we were in middle school. Chaz reportedly showed up to graduation bombed and naked under his robe, and he flashed the crowd after the principal handed over his diploma. Now he works at his dad’s investment banking firm in New York City and makes quadruple Señora Thompson’s salary. So.

  “Here we go. Let’s see if we can line up in six minutes or less.” She releases us and we clog the exits immediately.

  “Hawking, right? So we’re probably next to each other.” Wil’s breath on my ear sends a molten shiver through me. I don’t mean to jump.

  “Ohmygod. You scared me.”

  He gives me a confused smile and slips his arm around my waist, tight. “You okay? I stopped by this morning, to see if you wanted a ride.”

  “I’m fine. It’s been a weird morning, so . . .” I study him. There is no trace of yesterday’s exchange in the parking lot. “Is everything okay . . . with your mom?” I ask carefully. “I’ve been thinking about you guys. I was kind of worried, actually.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” A shadow stains his features and then disappears as quickly as it came, like an afternoon storm. “I don’t think we realized how hard it would be to think about seeing the guy again.”

  “I’m sure,” I say carefully.

  “I just feel like I have to protect my mom, you know? Make sure nothing bad happens to her.” Wil’s brow furrows, drawing into familiar lines. They’re the same lines that surfaced when he cheated on a math test in fifth grade; when he invited me to his twelfth birthday party and conveniently forgot to tell me I was the only girl guest.