“What did you guys do?”
Henry clears his throat, scratches off a speck of mud on his thigh with a fingernail. “First, I need you to know it was an accident. And I have lived with the pain and guilt of it every single day since then. And sometimes I wonder…” He trails off, scrunches up his face like whatever he is wondering is too painful to imagine. “Nah. There’s no use, and it wouldn’t absolve me of anything anyway.” He studies the pale spot he’s left on his pants. Along with the dirt, he scratched off some of the khaki color too. “Sarah did not drown herself in Seneca Lake.”
It takes me a second to process this utterly explosive statement. “How do you know that?” I ask tremulously.
Henry closes his eyes and shakes his head. Shakes, shakes, shakes his head.
“Oh my God,” I hear myself say. “Henry. Oh my God.”
Henry heaves an agonized sigh. Opens his eyes. Stares unblinking at the fire. “We were driving.Iwas driving. It was five in the morning? I don’t know. We were going home. Or I was trying to. But Campbell wanted to go somewhere else. He wanted me to drop him and he wanted my coke and I told him no, you know, you need to fucking call it. We both did. And he started reaching, like, into my pockets. Trying to find my cigarettes, my shit. And I was pushing him off me and I didn’t see her. Obviously,” he groans, lightly, “I didn’t see her. But that was what time the crew team met for practice, and Sarah always walked.”
I wish I had my hands. I wish I could cover my mouth.
“She was gone. You know. No question. But we could see. In my headlights. We could see that along one side of my car, the paint was,like, sheared off, and she was covered in it. It was in her hair, under her fingernails. That fucking yellow paint. Everyone knew I drove that car.” Henry lifts his foot to the edge of the coffee table. Pushes it away, then hooks his toes under to pull it back. He can’t quite make it fit in the grooves of the rug and he leans forward and tries to line everything up with his hands, then makes a tossing motion, like throwing something out in the trash. What’s the point? It will never look as it was again.
“I wanted to call the police,” he continues, a defensive edge to his voice, like I have asked why he did not immediately get Sarah help, “but Campbell knocked the phone out of my hand. He said she was dead. It wasn’t like there was anything we could do at this point, why ruin our lives on top of it? I was…” He looks at me, his dark eyes utterly haunted. “I couldn’t breathe, Faye. I was a mess. I just clung to Campbell, who kept promising me everything would be okay. We put her in my car and then he said let’s think about this. PT was in LA for the week. We had a key to the house. We knew she wanted a baby and it wasn’t happening. There was a fucking negative test in the trash like it was ordained by God. Campbell wrote something short and sweet on her computer and we pushed her scull into the water. Then we started driving for the lake. This area, it’s so vast, but it’s someone’s, you know? The land either belongs to the government or some off-gridder who will shoot you if he finds you trespassing. You can’t leave a dead body in the lake—it will float. I mean, that’s why they searched for her. Because bodies float. It doesn’t always mean you find them, but we couldn’t take the risk. It was safer—it was smarter—to bury her on our land. But you will never, ever believe what happened when we got here.” He lets out a brittle-sounding laugh. “The lake was frozen, but only onourside. It’s not like it had never happened before, our side is slightly more elevated, but not since our parents were kids.” Henry stares hard at his hands a moment,turns them over in his lap, and frowns at them, like he is looking at an imposter’s hands. “We weren’t trying to be cruel, burying her on PT’s land. And I chose a nice spot. The little tear-dropped clearing by the Dorothy Parker tree. I mean, it’s eleven thousand acres, he was never going to find her. He never should have found her.”
I’m aware of my breathing suddenly. Short, hot breaths, in and out, like I’ve just been sick over the toilet.
“A week ago,” Henry says. “Two weeks ago? Who fucking knows anymore. PT called. He needed to speak to me, in person.” Henry runs his hands down his face, pulls at the skin under his eyes so that I can see the pink, moist membrane underneath. “I thought he was going to tell me he was diagnosed with cancer or something.”
When Henry arrived, he found Campbell already there. PT had bandages all over his hands. His skin had a gray tint to it. He told them to sit at the dining room table and he turned his laptop around and there it was, the title page.The Accidentby Emma King. He made them read the story of what they did to Sarah, and he watched them with his small, kind eyes, his breathing growing ever more shallow.
PT had decided he would not speak to anyone until he knew if it was true. He canceled class to drive to the lake and dig. He dug and he dug and then, he hit bone. He fucking found her. Not all of her. But a piece that was most definitely human. He drove back to campus in a daze.
“He wanted us to be men and own up to everything,” Henry says with this stunned, distant look in his eyes, like he is remembering something from a very long time ago. “He wanted to know how Emma knew about this and why the fuck she would choose to write about it.”
I find I am regarding Henry with anger, with disgust, but not necessarily for what he’s done. I resent that he is telling the story in a way that forces me to pepper him with questions, like some kindof wide-eyed damsel tied to the train tracks, like a female character written by a man not that long ago. “But how did she know?”
Henry taps out an irregular rhythm on his knee, trying to decide how to answer. “She used to go out with Win, Corrine’s younger brother. Did you know that?”
I did not. But I should have. The tit-for-tat way they spoke to each other that night at the fraternity house. I was so focused on my own history with Henry that I could not see they had one of their own too. “So, what, Campbell told Win? And then Win told Emma?”
Henry stops tapping his knee. He goes very still and he holds my eye. “Emma knew because Campbell told her. Because he was fucking his brother-in-law’s mistress for the last year.”
I gasp. A sharp, stereotypical inhalation. In a flash, I remember looking over at Emma that night at the fraternity house and finding she had reapplied a coat of lip gloss sometime between when we spoke to Win outside and when he took us to the room where Campbell was. She was trying to look nice for him. And—oh my God. Oh myGod. That voice. Calling out to me on the lake. I knew I knew that voice. “She’s here,” I say, and there is a pressure in my ears, a piercing whistle in my skull, like a kettle come to boil.
Henry sighs heavily, like he wishes he could tell me otherwise.
“What the fuck? What does she think happened to Campbell? What are we going to do?”
“I have it under control for now.”
My laugh is shrill. “You call thisunder control?”
“I went to see her,” Henry speaks over me, but he somehow manages not to raise his voice, to sound like the reasonable one. “After I got you back here.”After I stripped you naked and tied you up, he cannot say, certainly not in the excessively calm tone he’s affected. “I explained Campbell had to head back home unexpectedly and thatI’ll take her to the train station so she can get back to the colleges in the morning.”
I am irritable and impatient that I still do not understand. “But why would Emma write about this? Why would Campbelltellher about this?”
“You know what he’s like when he’s fucked up. He blabs. He tells you things to keep you close. He took Emma for a ride. One day he loved her, he was confessing his deepest, darkest secrets to her, he was leaving his family for her, the next he was dodging her. She was hurt. She wanted to hurt him back.”
Fine. Passable answer. Next terrible question. “Did PT die in front of you?”
Henry bows his head as though the answer itself is a holy one. “He was crying. We were all crying. In one breath he would be gasping how much he hated us for letting him think Sarah had taken her own life, and in the next he would ask us what he was supposed to do now. If he was supposed to go to the police and send us away from our children, and if he didn’t, what kind of husband did that make him to Sarah?” Henry stares into the black hole of hurt he created a long moment, looking lost and resigned to staying that way. “It was late. He told us to go get a hotel. Get some rest. We’d have to figure this out, some way, somehow. He’d have to talk to Emma. He had to see where her head was at, what she was thinking, just, how the hell to handle this.”
“How could you leave him alone like that?” I am seething with disdain. “You knew he had a heart problem. You knew he had overexerted himself, that he had just had the shock of his life. You knew what would happen.”
Henry does not look away from me. He takes it—my judgment, my scorn. “It is one of two things in my life,” Henry says, “that I will never forgive myself for.”