Thirty-Nine
The police swarm like someone kicked a wasp’s nest, making it hard to tell if there are a lot of them or if the few who came are moving exceptionally fast. They surround us, but more of them go into the motel room with the open door and the dead girl on the carpet.
A woman officer is the first one to actually talk to us, bending down to our eye level with the concerned look of a mother.
“I’ve got a tourniquet, okay?”
It takes a second for me to realize it’s Natalie. Natalie’s the only authority figure who bothered to treat Beck and me like anything more than two additional corpses who could be addressed later.
Natalie pulls something up my leg. I can’t breathe until she gingerly moves it up above the wound without actually touching the injury point itself.
“I have to apply a lot of pressure, so this is going to hurt,” Natalie says.
Beck gives my hand a squeeze, as if giving me permission to squeeze her back.
“One, two…”
Beck looks up at Natalie, an almost drunk-looking smile on her face. “We really thought you were the murderer.”
Natalie grimaces as she says, “Three.”
She truly puts her whole body weight into it, and god, is it some of the most intense, localized pain I’ve ever felt. I gasp into Beck’s shoulder and stay still through the accompanying wave of nausea.
“Paramedics are on their way,” Natalie says, scooting over to Beck.
“Let me see your side.” She inspects Beck, but seeing the blood is making me woozy.
“This isn’t lethal, but you may need some stitches.
” Beck nods. “I’m so sorry I came so late.
I had to go back to the station to get my gun, but by the time I got here… ”
It was long over.
A duller version of the pain remains as the tourniquet stays in place, but my head clears up ever so slightly.
“They’re gonna think we’re murderers,” I say.
Natalie breathes slowly. “What happened with the girl in there?”
More sirens join us.
Beck stares off as the ambulance arrives. “She killed the two who were found in the ravine. Your friend Evan killed the girl the FBI said was my sister.”
I don’t think we ever confirmed Natalie knew who we were, but I barely react. If she didn’t know before, now she does. It’s nice she knows. Numbness sets in to protect me.
Now Natalie stares off into the distance, pulling her knees into her chest. It somehow makes her look decades younger and in way over her head.
“You don’t believe us, do you?” I ask.
Natalie looks over to us, exhaustion creeping into her expression. “When you’re both stable, let’s talk.”
A pair of paramedics haul us both to the ambulance.
* * *
It never occurred to me how quiet small-town hospitals might be.
It almost felt like being in a normal doctor’s office, with only a handful of staff passing us by as Beck and I are moved from waiting room to exam room.
An old white doctor with a fluffy head of white hair stitches me up and gives me a blood transfusion, talking about fishing conditions the whole time.
Beck, it turns out, does need her one gnarly bullet graze sewn up, but the doctor jokes with her that she won’t be getting the “good stuff” I’m gonna get for the pain.
Now, she has two scars from her little sister.
The rest of our injuries are fixed with bandages and antiseptic.
Beck asks if she needs any new vaccines if she bit a human being and the nurses laugh.
Natalie is the first one in the recovery room, standing over Beck and me as the nurses administer the “good stuff” into my IV. Her shirt has bloodstains along the sleeves.
Beck’s and my blood, I realize with a turn in my stomach.
“Alright,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”
We tell her about the woman I saw in the parking lot back in October, about the texts Evan sent that lured us out here, about being followed through town and through the woods, about Evan’s confession in the cabin and how Beck had to shoot him, and finally about Paisley’s eight-month stay at the motel and how she ended up dead too.
The story spills out of Beck and me in a frenzy. By the time it’s Natalie’s turn to talk, I feel like I’ve run a marathon. The water bottle the hospital provided doesn’t have nearly the amount of water I want as I suck it down afterward.
As I lift the bottle from my face, Natalie’s expression is unreadable.
“So?” Beck asks. She scratches at the skin along her biggest bandage.
Natalie tugs at her stained sleeve, lip trembling a moment before she says, “This town thinks the only way they survive is through the suffering of people who aren’t from here.
I love nature, I love this park, but there’s something fundamentally wrong about thinking you have to protect nature with human blood.
I’m so sorry the witch story turned your friends against one another. I’m so sorry about your sister.”
Beck’s eyes go glassy. “She had other problems she should’ve gotten help for a long time ago. Something else would’ve set her off if not this place.”
My heart breaks for Beck. My heart breaks for Opal’s and Harlow’s families, who’re going to learn the ugly truth soon.
Natalie sighs. “And as for Evan, I’m not surprised.
Rangers are usually such decent people, and I let that cloud my judgement of him.
He played that innocent, do-gooder role so well, but there are always signs.
I should’ve taken the weird photos in his desk drawer more seriously.
I should’ve—” She squeezes her eyes shut.
“It makes sense, suddenly, why he never wanted me to visit his cabin for long. And god, I remember that night Vanessa went running through the parking lot. I saw what you saw, Emma.” She looks right at me, her brown eyes molten with emotion.
“I didn’t do anything. I might’ve been able to save her. ”
She bunches her fist to her mouth, but it doesn’t keep us from seeing her cry.
Part of me wants to reach out and assure her, but something besides the smell of hand sanitizer hangs in the recovery room. Despite still being here, despite being alive, defeat suffocates us.
All these deaths were so pointless.
“I’m going to vouch for you both,” Natalie says.
“Don’t worry about what the local police say.
Federal agents will step in and the case will be taken without all the weird town biases.
You two got a really good amount of evidence to corroborate your story.
Especially with that last video on Paisley’s phone. ”
She means the video Beck discovered in Paisley’s deleted videos folder, the Wi-Fi never having connected long enough for her to delete it eight months ago.
At least those words put a stop to the spinning top of my head. I can feel my anxiety slow down and quiet as the words sink in.
I’m going to vouch for you. I massage my stomach, the muscles sore. I’ve never in my life been this actively anxious for such a sustained a period of time.
We’re not going to prison for this.
A police officer enters the recovery room. “Natalie Medina?”
Natalie stands up and gives us a nod. “It’ll be okay. Seasons change. Everything heals eventually.”
Seasons change. As if the seasons could really keep coming when our worlds have shifted so deeply.
What would it mean for the world without Harlow’s light-up Hanukkah sweater, without Opal’s friendship boxes full of heart candy and handwritten cards for Valentine’s Day, without Paisley having us run lines with her for hours as she prepares for auditions?
I glance over at Beck. What does her graduation look like without her sister? With knowing what her sister did?
The sun sets through the recovery room window. It’s beautiful in a way that feels like it came from the wrong timeline, too lovely for the nightmare this weekend, this month, this year has been.
Now that we’re alone, I finally feel like I can talk to Beck.
We have so much to discuss.
“Did it make sense?” I ask. “When she first shot you, did it make sense?”
Beck takes a sip from a Dr Pepper can she got from the closest vending machine, buying time.
“It made sense in that I always knew Paisley was smarter than me. Just look at everything she did. She dumped her friends’ bodies into a ravine and set up a ritual with their body parts?
That she broke all her fingertips and ripped off the nails and left enough of her blood at the campsite to make it seem like she’d died?
Then hid out at the fucking motel for months?
All that while infected. Even if she was desperate and panicking and evil, she knew how to get shit done. ”
I swallow the bitterness in my throat. “And the other part?”
Beck snorts. “Paisley has always wanted to be an only child. And she couldn’t run away and start her new life with her lost duckling still out looking for her. Neither of us stood a chance.”
I reach for Beck’s hand as she settles it on the mid-console. “What do you think she would’ve done if we’d never showed up?”
“If she survived the infection, I don’t know. Leave and go to New York?”
Paisley in New York feels like a faraway dream.
Maybe she’d be doing that now if she weren’t burning in hell.
“I shouldn’t have let my parents off the hook,” Beck says. “I knew she was going into a dark place when she threw that trophy at me. I knew her apology was bullshit.” Beck squeezes her knuckles so hard they turn white. “Harlow and Opal would be alive if I’d said something.”
The nurses said both our parents are on their way. Mine will lecture me and hug me and be so grateful their brave, stupid daughter survived her first real acting-out experience. All their kids are alive.
But Beck’s parents are going to have to identify another body. This one may not be eaten down to the bone, but it will show signs of eight months of malnutrition and infection. It’ll have a bite mark in the shape of their other daughter’s teeth.
Their kid killed two other families’ kids in cold blood.
I can’t say it’ll all be okay.
“Can you come here?” I ask.
Beck does as I say, moving so close that the railing of the bed digs into her stomach.
I lean over and pull her into a tight hug. “You couldn’t have known, and it wasn’t just your responsibility to have seen. So many people failed her. So many adults failed her. Please don’t beat yourself up about that. These last eight months have been torture enough.”
We let Paisley die. We’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of our lives. I can’t pretend to know what guilt Beck’s dealing with even if she was the one who suggested it.
“My parents will—”
Her words are lost as she presses her face into my neck. Her skin is so hot against mine and I’d give anything to never let her go.
I hold her until our parents arrive.