Chapter 62 Jillian
JILLIAN
“I spoke the words but never gave a thought / To what they all could mean”
— “Play Crack the Sky” by Brand New
I almost ignore my phone when it rings again. Until I see the caller ID.
F.T.
Forensic Tech.
It’s like being slapped in the face with the cold, dead fish of the past. I haven’t heard from F.T. since he handed me the lab report in that alley behind the crime lab three weeks ago. I assumed he’d gone to ground like everyone else who gets within spitting distance of the Lazarev family.
I snatch up my phone and answer the call.
“They logged something new from the burial site,” he says right away in a hushed mutter. “A journal or, like, diary or some shit. It was sealed in a plastic bag, buried right next to the remains. It’s been in evidence processing, but I got photocopies before it went into the system.”
I sit up. “How soon can you meet?”
“I’m in the parking garage at Queens Municipal right now. You have twenty minutes before my shift starts.”
I’m dressed, in Macy’s borrowed Honda, and hauling ass down the highway in four.
He’s leaning against a concrete pillar on the third level, smoking. He looks worse than last time. Nails chewed to absolute nothing. Bloody, scabby, ugly. He hands me a manila envelope without making eye contact.
“Photocopies,” he explains gruffly. “That’s the best you’re gonna get. The originals are shut up in an evidence locker and I’m not touching them again.” I start to open it, but he puts his hand over mine. “Read it somewhere else. I don’t want to be standing next to you when you do.”
He drops his cigarette and grinds it under his sneaker. I ask if there’s anything else. He shakes his head once, shoves his hands in his jacket, and walks quickly toward the elevator.
I retreat to the car, then sit in the driver’s seat with the dome light on and the envelope in my lap for a full minute before I open it.
Eventually, I work up the nerve. Then I dive in.
The handwriting starts neat and elegant. Blue ink on what looks like unlined cream paper, photocopied in grayscale.
March 3, 2007
He keeps begging me to try another round of treatment. He doesn’t understand: I’ve already decided. I just need to make him strong enough to do what I’m asking.
I turn the page.
March 9. Elena writes about the Swiss specialist Lukas flew in, and the argument afterward. She describes listening to her husband break down in the shower while pretending she couldn’t hear.
March 14. She writes about Kir. How she watches him do his homework at the kitchen table, the cowlick that won’t stay down no matter how much she licks her thumb and presses it. She’s memorizing him. Storing him up.
My sweet boy. He cannot watch me disappear by degrees. I won’t do that to him. Better a clean wound than a slow rot.
March 15. The last entry. The handwriting has deteriorated. The letters lean and stagger like they’re being written by a different person, or by the same person with very little left.
He finally said yes. I’ve never loved him more.
I set the pages down on the passenger seat and grip the steering wheel with both hands.
My article has been live for fifteen hours, and it’s already reshaping the world we live in.
But, as it turns out, it’s wrong.
Lukas Lazarev didn’t kill his wife. Elena killed herself, in essence; she simply asked her husband to help her do it.
Compassionate euthanasia. She made him promise their son would never know how it went.
And Lukas kept that promise for eighteen years, through a warrant, an arrest, and humiliation on national television, because that’s what she asked him to do.
What is that if not love?
I pull out my phone and text Rae.
I know you hate me right now. But they found something else with Elena’s remains. You need to see this before anyone else does.
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Where
I send her the address of a diner off the turnpike that I passed on the drive here. It’s nowhere either of us has ever been. Nowhere we’re likely to ever go again.
I don’t have to wait long in the back booth before Rae arrives. I wince when I see her, because the devastation is graffitied all over her face. She walks up and sits down, but she doesn’t look at me right away.
“Before I show you this,” I say, “I need you to know that I didn’t have it when I wrote the article. I got it an hour ago.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you to know that if I’d had it, I would have—”
“Jillian,” she interrupts. “Just show me.”
I push the manila envelope across the table. She opens the flap, pulls out the pages, and starts reading.
I watch her face. For the first page, nothing changes. The second page, her lips part slightly. By the fifth page, her hand is over her mouth. By the eighth, she’s crying without making a sound, tears rolling down her cheeks and dropping onto the photocopied ink.
She reads all of it. Then she goes back and reads the last entry again. When she’s finally done, she looks up. “Elena asked him to do it?”
“Yes.”
“She was dying anyway.”
I nod. “Acute myeloid leukemia. Terminal.”
Rae stares at the pages for a long time. Then she stacks them neatly, slides them back into the envelope, and stands up. She tucks the envelope under her arm. “I have to go.”
“Where?”
She doesn’t answer. She walks out of the diner, and through the window, I watch her cross the parking lot, then disappear.
I’m left all alone in the booth with two untouched coffees and a lifetime of regrets. I might’ve sat there forever if a green in the background didn’t snag my attention.
Squinting, I see, on the muted TV above the counter, a news anchor mouthing words beneath a chyron that reads: LAZAREV TO MAKE PUBLIC STATEMENT WITHIN THE HOUR.
I throw a twenty on the table and run.