Chapter 42 #2
“What about him?” Her voice goes higher with fear, as if he’s in the kitchen grabbing a beer. Her eyes widen, her nostrils flare.
“It’s just—” I shake my head. Swallow hard. The cartwheels going on in my stomach make me feel like I might vomit.
“What?” Jess stares.
“It was my fault Railes shot him.” I spit it out.
“I was so angry when I found out who he was. I went for my gun too hastily. Railes saw me and pulled his.” But even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not quite right.
It is what happened, but Railes . . . he would have gone there anyway, regardless of my actions. I know it in my gut.
No, the real problem stands with what happened later. This is just warming up, trying to build on the courage of saying the first thing out loud.
“But it was self-defense,” she says. Confusion and shock scroll across her face. She pulls her head back like she’s already distancing herself from me before she even knows the full story.
I let a long moment fill the abyss to hell. And back. I don’t breathe. My stomach curls into an even tighter knot while my head goes dizzy. “Railes shot him in cold blood,” I say. “Railes claimed Mark had a knife, and when the investigator came to question me . . .”
“What?” The confusion changes to desperation, which alters her face into someone I don’t recognize.
I take a big breath like I’m about to leap off a cliff. My heart goes from a fast-paced thrum to a forceful bang. It’s too late to back out, to not say it now.
“What?”
“I lied.”
“You lied?”
“Yes. I wanted him dead. Because of what he did to you.” The words out loud in the quiet room seem to ricochet back to me and coat me in a film of slime. Jess’s shocked expression worsens the sensation. But I deserve every bit of her reaction.
But, but . . . I’ve finally done it. I’ve said it out loud for the first time ever.
She shakes her head, looks down, tries to take it in.
“And Leon, his boyfriend? He was distraught about Railes lying, but everyone kept focusing on Leon as victim of a rape. He wanted me to back him about Coleman not holding the knife.”
“But you didn’t,” Jess says. There’s so much shock and surprise in her eyes that I want to crawl into the couch cushions and disappear.
But still, it’s there. The tiny release of pressure. I can feel it. Just a small stream of release after keeping the secret pent up for so long. It’s there. My heart is still beating hard, but it slows a little.
“I didn’t.”
“But why? Why would you protect Railes? You don’t even like those guys.”
“I despised everything about them. And in a flash I joined them.” Speaking this part out loud makes my heart speed up again.
Shame prickles every inch of me. My cheeks burn with it.
“It’s incomprehensible. Reprehensible,” I say.
“I hate myself for it. I don’t know exactly how I came to it other than it was all twisted up in my anger at Coleman and what he did to you. And . . .”
“And what?”
I close my eyes. I can’t face her stricken expression a second longer, but I know I can’t stop short. I open them. “This part is hard to admit.”
“What part?” More horror is growing by the second in the flabbergasted intensity in her wide-open eyes. A new wave of shame builds and unfurls like a wave inside me, pushes up through me to my head.
I shake it to dislodge the rush of it. And to avoid saying it. I’m not sure I can say it out loud to her. Surely, I think, I’ve already told her enough.
“What part?” she presses.
I shake my head again.
“Crosbie, what?”
“That I didn’t want to screw up my chances of making detective.”
She pulls her head back again, more fully this time, like a turtle. But a turtle doesn’t show disgust, and her eyes swim with it. “But you ended up quitting anyway? After you lied for Railes?”
“Yes.”
“But why haven’t you told the truth about it since you quit?”
I thought I just said the hardest part, but I realize what I’m about to say is even worse.
This is the hardest thing to say to my sister.
But this part, it’s less about the shame.
The guilt. This is about the nuts and bolts of how it will affect me, her, and Sam altogether.
I’m going at my thumb again, and Jess swats my hand hard to signal for me to stop.
She could have slapped my face. It would feel the same.
“Cros? Why?”
“I’d go to jail, Jess. Obstruction of justice.
Lying to the independent law enforcement agent.
Not to mention that Leon took his life. Do you think one minute doesn’t go by when I don’t think that if I’d told the same story as Leon, that if we took on the swamp thing that is Billy Railes, that Leon might still be alive? ”
Tears push to my eyes. I press at the corners with my fingers. I’m tempted to grab Jess’s hand, but she must sense it and stands up from the couch. She looks at me with more revulsion and incomprehension.
“For God’s sake, you don’t even work there anymore.
” Her voice is high-pitched. Frantic but layered with hostility.
“You could have at least told me after the fact. If I’d known the whole story, maybe I’d be processing this a little differently instead of feeling like the rug got pulled out from under me not once by Coleman, but again by Railes for killing him and taking away any chance that I—or even that Leon—had to confront him or deal with our grief in our own ways. ”
I still feel like shit, like crawling into a hole, but my anger bubbles up through it all.
I want to yell back at her, No, no, I know you, and you wouldn’t have processed things any differently!
You’d be the same. Remember how you were after Mom died?
You wouldn’t get out of bed. You couldn’t function.
And maybe if you’d reported him from the get-go instead of being so afraid of how it would affect your popularity online, he wouldn’t have done what he did to Leon.
But I’m here to lay my sins down. To apologize, not make things worse.
“It was selfish. I was embarrassed that I’d covered for Railes. Ashamed. And I kept thinking that I handled the situation with Leon and Coleman so horribly not only because of my anger over what he did to you but also because of what happened to Sophie.”
“Enough!” Her voice booms so loudly I’m sure it’s probably woken Sam. “Enough about Sophie. That was years ago.” Her stare pierces me with daggers.
“Okay, okay, sure, yes, it was.” But the comment stings, burrows deep inside me. I have spent years roiling in guilt in the wake of her rape, of her suicide. Is it fate that I would create something even bigger in my life to feel shame about? Or have I been trying to make it right through Jess?
It’s the first time it’s hitting me . . . the question suddenly neon bright, pulsing around my head like a strobe: How much of my actions, all my attention to Jess, especially since we’ve been adults, has been shaped by my guilt over Sophie?
“Jesus, Crosbie.” Jess continues. “Would you listen to yourself? Who do you think you are? God? You don’t have that much power over people. You have no idea what Leon was thinking.” She sits back down, her shoulders hunched. “Can you please leave?”
“Jess,” I say. “Please, can we—”
“No. I’m tired,” she says, her voice firm. Drenched in dissatisfaction. In disgust.
The house is quiet, hushed, like it’s waiting with me. Waiting for more. My pulse ticks out a beat in my neck like my whole body is a giant clock.
But nothing more comes.
The shift from her anger to pure disappointment—the anticlimax of it all—makes me feel even smaller and more horrible, but I know it’s exactly what I deserve.