Then suddenly, Felicity was there, driving my car. She stopped and scrambled over the front seat of Molly’s car, somehow managing to shove the back door open, hauling Molly, limp as the corpse she would soon have been. When she huffed at me to help her, I did, tugging on Molly’s feet.
She coughed a little but didn’t even wake up.
Without a word, we lugged and shoved Molly into the back seat of my car and drove her home. Finally, she moaned, and her eyes fluttered open as we draped one of her arms over each of our shoulders and half carried her up the curved rustic stone front walk, ringing the bell to the right of the huge carved red door, until her mother answered, in pajamas and a robe, her hair flat, her cheeks creased, clearly prepared to be outraged but then abruptly rueful, mortified, and relieved, choking out the words “thank you” as she pulled her daughter inside.
Felicity and I went back to the reservoir, where we tied ropes from my trunk onto the bumper of Molly’s car and began to haul it out. We hadn’t gotten too far when Felicity stopped. “Let’s leave it this way. It looks like she was so drunk she drove too close. And we just got here in time. That’s sort of lying by omission, I guess. But I can’t figure out anything else.” She went on, “I want you to promise that we will never speak of this again.”
I began to cry, hard. You didn’t hug Felicity, but I grabbed her then, and she allowed it, gently patting my back a little. “I don’t blame you if you don’t care about me anymore,” I said.
“I care about you just as much as I ever did. I didn’t do this for Molly, I did it for you. I’m just glad I followed you. I’m just glad you left your keys.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Something was strange. It was like when something wakes you up at night and it’s not a sound? Like the quietness is the sound? Or like a storm is coming and it’s just holding its breath?” I was crying so hard that I couldn’t speak. “You’re not that person, Reenie.”
“I almost was.”
“Thinking about it isn’t the same as doing it,” she said.
We got into my car and went home.
As I talked, I watched Sam. I heard him thinking, as if he had spoken the words aloud, that his hunch might be correct and, despite all the indications to the contrary, Felicity might be entirely innocent—just as I, despite all the indications to the contrary, was very nearly guilty. There was a break in the storm, but the sky was signaling a second act, smears of gray clouds hanging low, lightning flickering in their fat depths, like lamps snapped on and off.
Something was wrong in his face. Something was changing. He didn’t say a word. Minutes. A minute is a long time if your life depends on it.
Somebody’s done for.
Sam finally said, “That is a hell of a story.”
Now he would leave me, I thought.Now for sure. Could you blame him?I thought.If the tables were turned, as it were, wouldn’t you leave him?
“Felicity was right. Thinking about it is not the same as doing it. You would have stopped.” He made a tent of his two hands and pressed his index fingers against his eyes. “I just don’t know...”
The tables have turned, with a vengeance. Whoever said that? Who the fuck cared? I was sick of being the woman with the suitable quote for every occasion. I was losing the only man I ever loved.
How many nights had I asked myself, had I truly wanted to end her life? Or to humiliate and terrify her as she humiliated me? Was my brain back then even formed enough to fully encompass the enormity? A seventeen-year-old still doesn’t possess the long view. How smart you are doesn’t matter. I still lived as a teenager lives, in dog years, in which each week is a month, each month a season, each season an era. There were nights when I almost forgave myself. There were nights when I was certain that I should never be forgiven.
It was long ago.
But not really. I was still wearing the same Shinola Bixby watch my grandmother bought me for high school graduation.
An anemic sun was out by then. The stolen night, at the end of the stolen weekend, was gone. Sam got up to make coffee. Then his phone rang.
“It’s the jail.”
“Is it Felicity?”
He didn’t answer. But moments later, he was slipping into jeans and a white shirt he left untucked. I admired the curve of his hip as I pulled on my own clothing. He was as beautiful to me as a statue, my own shrine.
He is mine, I thought.
He was mine, I thought.
“Are you okay staying here alone?”
“I’ll come with you.”
Sam stopped, regarding the screen of his phone like an oracle. “You can’t. It would be inappropriate. You’re not part of Felicity’s defense team. You’re just a reporter writing about her...”
