Chapter 18
On Tuesday, Jonah dressed before the detective called. He’d found a shirt without a mark on it and shaved carefully, pulling his skin taut beneath his jaw. Summer was still on the phone to Macy when he came downstairs. She looked at him, then ended the call.
“Have they said something?” she asked. Her bag was open on the table, the hospital papers inside it.
“Not yet.” He checked that his phone had sound. “I don’t want to go in looking like I just got up.”
At the station, Summer kept her coat on. Jonah took his off and held it on his lap while they waited for the detective, trying to think of anything he’d forgotten to tell her.
The results from the hospital blood tests had come back.
They hadn’t identified anything that established anything Summer and Jonah might have been given.
The detective explained the limits of the tests, the possibility that a substance wouldn’t show, the difference between an inconclusive result and proof that nothing had happened.
Jonah listened for the part where she would tell them what came next.
Kylie had given another account. She admitted being with him and said he’d wanted it, that he’d been the instigator. According to her, the accusation of being drugged had only begun when his wife walked in; he was embarrassed, frightened of losing his marriage, and lying to save it.
Jonah looked at Summer. She had stopped trying to get her sleeve out from beneath the strap of her bag.
There were the hospital records, the messages, the photograph of the dresses.
But the glasses had been cleared before anyone understood why they needed them.
Nobody had seen anything put into the wine.
His father had seen him go upstairs; Ruth had arrived after Summer opened the bedroom door.
Kylie was calling the dress a foolish attempt to impress an old boyfriend.
Her messages, she said, were an effort to explain a mistake they’d made together.
“Together?” Jonah repeated. His voice sounded too loud in the little room. “She said together?”
Summer leaned forward. “You saw the pictures,” she said to the detective. “You saw what she was wearing. She planned this!”
The detective had looked at everything they’d sent, but she wasn’t making an arrest on the evidence they had.
It wasn’t enough. it was ‘he said, she said.’ The complaint would remain on file, and anything further evidence could be reviewed.
At present, she said, there was nothing more she could do to move it forward.
Jonah had expected to be asked another question. He waited, ready to answer it better this time.
“I was in an ambulance,” he said. He looked from the detective to the folder in front of her. “We both were. The EMTs could see how out of it we were.”
The detective referred again to the inconclusive medical records. Summer began talking over her. Her voice broke in the middle of his name. Jonah couldn’t watch her trying to persuade someone that he’d been unable to pick up his own telephone.
“Summer,” he said. He touched her sleeve. “The detective already knows that.”
“Then why are we here?” Summer asked. She was looking at the detective. “Why did you ask us to come?”
The detective apologized for how little she could offer them.
There were avenues to ask for further review and a separate process for seeking an order to keep Kylie away; she gave them the information in writing.
Jonah took the papers. He had spent the morning imagining a phone call to his parents in which he could finally tell them something definite.
By the time they reached the parking lot, Summer had pulled her phone out. She was searching for something with both thumbs, standing so close to a parked car that its mirror caught her bag.
“What are you doing?” Jonah asked. She moved the bag without looking up.
“Finding someone who can tell us what to do.” She tried the screen again. “Someone else.”
“You heard her.” He reached for his keys, then remembered Summer had driven. “There’s nothing.”
“She said that.” Summer looked up. “I want to ask someone who isn’t her.”
He wanted to believe there was a person who would read the same papers and understand them differently. He wanted to sit down more. Summer unlocked the car, and he got in while she was still searching.
At home, he asked her to send him the photographs again.
He enlarged the one taken before the party until the screen held only his own face: smiling, chin tilted toward her, pleased to have her close.
At the edge was a piece of her dress. Nothing about the man in the photograph suggested that he would need help standing before the evening was over.
He went through the messages next. There were years of them with Kylie, although the phone only showed part of that at a time. Plans he’d forgotten making, photographs of things she thought he’d like, an argument about whether he’d said he’d call. He kept reaching October and going back.
Summer’s mother had left lunch in the refrigerator before they went out. Summer heated it, and he ate with the phone propped against his glass, reading while she told him about a lawyer she’d spoken to. The woman could help with a protective order. They would go to court in the morning.
“What if there’s something?” he asked. Summer stopped talking.
“Something where?” She looked at the phone, then back at him. “In those?”
“Something I’ve forgotten saying.” He scrolled too far and had to go back. “She’ll pick it out. She’ll say, look, he asked me to come over.”
“You did ask her to come over.” Summer pushed his plate nearer. “I was there.”
“I know you were there.” He heard how he sounded and put the phone down. Almost immediately he picked it up again. “That’s not what I mean.”
Summer left him to it for half an hour. When she came back, he had the laptop open as well, trying to put the messages beside the times from her calls.
He’d written the same few minutes two ways.
In one version he was sitting when Kylie came into the bedroom; in the other he was already lying back, though he couldn’t remember deciding to lie down.
“Which one did I tell them?” he asked. He turned the laptop toward Summer. “Everything is fuzzy.”
She read the lines. “I don’t know,” she said. “You spoke to them on your own.”
“I told you afterward.” He moved the page down. “Did I say I’d sat on the bed, or that she’d told me to?”
Summer stood behind his chair. He waited while she read it again, and the silence became something he couldn’t bear.
“It was Saturday,” he said. His hand slipped on the mouse. “How can I not know something that happened on Saturday?”
“I don’t know what happened to half my evening either.” She came around the chair. “I know you can’t get it back by doing this until you make yourself sick.”
“I need it to make sense.” He tried to find the version he’d sent her. The words had begun sliding into one another; every time he read them he found a different place where someone could stop believing him. “You can see how it looks.”
Summer put her palm on the table. “To who?” she asked. “Who are you talking about?”
He couldn’t say it while she was looking at him. He lowered the screen instead, leaving just enough room to see the light underneath.
“Jonah.” She crouched beside the chair. “Are you asking me?”
He looked at the part in her hair. She’d twisted it up without brushing it, and a pin had slipped almost free behind her ear.
“You’d stay,” he said. His mouth had gone dry. “You might stay anyway, even if you didn’t believe me. Because of how I am now.”
Summer sat back on her heels. For several seconds she said nothing, and he began trying to remember the last thing she’d said in the car at the station.
“I wouldn’t be sleeping beside you because I felt sorry for you.” Her voice shook. “I wouldn’t have you put your arms around me. I believe you.”
“You don’t have to decide anything now.” He hated the words as he said them. They sounded like something he would have prepared if he were guilty.
“I already decided.” Summer got up, catching the chair when she lost her balance. “What do you want me to do? I can’t go back and walk in sooner.”
He reached for her then. She let him catch her hand but stood where she was, crying with her face turned toward the window.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. He stood too, leaving the chair in her way. “Summer, I didn’t.”
“I know what you mean.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “But I was there too. You keep talking as if I’ve only got her story and yours, and I have to pick one.”
He tried to bring her closer. She came reluctantly, then put both arms around his waist and held on so hard that he couldn’t draw a full breath. He bent his head over hers. For a while he could only hear her crying and the little sound he was making whenever he tried to stop.
“I wanted the test to say it,” he said. The words were muffled against her hair. “I wanted something I could show you. Prove it.”
Summer moved her head back. “I wanted it too,” she said. “I wanted to make her look at it. I wanted to show people who doubted.”
That evening he canceled a call from his coworker, Ben and let his father believe he was asleep.
At three in the morning he was back at the laptop, checking whether the two versions really contradicted each other.
Summer found him with a printed page against the screen and his bare feet folded beneath the chair.
She didn’t ask what he was doing. She took the other chair and stayed until he closed the laptop himself.
In the morning he couldn’t remember where he’d left his shoes. They were beside the bed, where he always put them, but he’d looked there already and was frightened by having missed them. He sat on the floor with one in his hand while Summer rang the lawyer to say they were running late.
“I’m going to cancel tomorrow,” he said when she came back. She stopped in the bedroom doorway.