I lie awake all night staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling. A long rift, like a winding river, snakes across it and I lie there all night, waiting for chunks of plaster to come raining down on us while we’re in bed.
There is a streetlight outside in the parking lot that shines in through the window. It makes a loud humming noise that makes it impossible for me to fall asleep.
Daniel Clarke is no longer a suspect. Because by 6:00 p.m. on the night that Emily and Reese had that fight, the night that Emily and Nolan were killed—as the four of us, Emily, Nolan, Elliott and me, sat around playing cards and drinking—he was already in Stewartville, Minnesota, getting gas from a Kwik Trip before heading further west, which leaves only a handful of suspects.
Daniel Clarke didn’t kill them. He didn’t take Reese.
Wyatt sleeps on the floor. I see him out of the corner of my eye, his lanky body spread out face down on the quilt we dragged from Elliott and my bed so that Elliott and I sleep under only a thin sheet. We found an extra blanket in a drawer for Wyatt, which is pulled to his waist. He lies shirtless and facing away from me so that I wonder if he’s asleep or if he’s lying on the floor with his eyes open, staring at the blank wall. I listen to the sounds of his breath, trying to decide.
I’m going to kill you if I’m late for school.
Kill you.
It wasn’t so much what he said but the way he said it, the merciless look in his eye and his strength when he hit me.
Beside me, Elliott lies with his heavy arm around my waist, binding me to the bed. Earlier, he tried talking to me when I came back in from speaking to Detective Evans. He pulled me aside and said,We need to talk about this.
I asked,Talk about what?
He said,About why you don’t trust me.
I do trust you, I said, but it’s not true. He’s keeping something from me. I think about the blood on his shoes, about the picture of Reese on his iPad, and how Emily said she wanted to talk to him that night before we left. I find it too convenient that he doesn’t remember her saying that, just as I find it too convenient that he doesn’t remember what he and Reese were talking about that night in the kitchen.
I spend my night in a constant rotation of thinking about Wyatt’s cold eyes and the drops of blood on Elliott’s shoes, trying to explain them to myself, to justify them. There have been cases of people driving in their sleep, of them strangling and stabbing loved ones for no reason at all and not even knowing what they’d done. Stress (like the loss of loved ones, for example) causes people to have more vivid dreams—an excess of vivid dreams. So maybe Wyatt went from dreaming about a lost lunch to an intruder in a flash (though he only remembered one of these dreams), and maybe the blood did belong to the fish, and Emily didn’t want to talk to Elliott about anything more than his alma mater because Reese will be applying to colleges this year.
Maybe neither of them did it.
Or maybe one of them did.
I tell myself not to sleep, not to blink. To stay vigilant.
Only one thing keeps me from losing my mind: the girls.Their safety. They’re the only ones I know for certain are innocent in all this.
The buzz of the streetlight hums all night. Trucks pass by on the street, the rumble of their engines loud. At some point, Wyatt kicks the blanket off him all of a sudden. As I watch, frozen, not turning my head but looking out of the corner of my eye, he pushes himself up from the floor. At first, he stands in the center of it, and then he takes a few steps before reaching out to turn an imaginary knob, to open an imaginary door.
Wyatt is asleep.
He’s sleepwalking again.
He walks out of his nonexistent door. He goes to stand at the edge of Cass and Mae’s bed, on Cass’s side, and I start to grab for Elliott, to shake him awake, wondering what Wyatt is going to do and if he’s going to hurt her.
But then, before I can react, Wyatt turns around, swiveling his head as if lost and looking for something. He crosses the room, going to the far corner of it. I can’t see what he’s doing, but with his back to me, I hear the sudden, urgent spray of urine against the wall. He’s mistaken it for the bathroom. It goes on a long time and under different circumstances I might say something, I might try to stop him, to wake him up, to lead him to the bathroom instead. But I don’t dare because I’m afraid.
When he’s finished, Wyatt takes himself back to the floor, lying the opposite way as before with his head toward the door. A second later the smell of urine reaches me, and I know that I should get up and clean it, but I’m too scared to move.
In time, the sun rises. It slips through the flimsy, semi-sheer curtain panels and into the room with us, waking Elliott. I’m already awake and so I see him come to, the slow process of regaining consciousness, of opening his eyes, observing his surroundings, remembering where he is and that he’s in this shitty motel.
His words, when he speaks, are a whisper. “How’d you sleep?” he asks, his face so close I smell his dried-out morning breath.
“I didn’t,” I say softly.
“Not at all?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not at all.”
“You must have slept at least a little bit.”
“I don’t think so.”
