Chapter Ninety-Three. Melanie #2
But Iggy stopped by the auditorium that day to practice her gymnastics routine one last time.
Cat and I, lying belly down on the catwalk above the stage, watched her from the rafters as she went first to her vanity.
I could see her reflection in the mirror, her name spelled out above in glued-on glitter letters, pulling her hair up into that high ponytail she always wore, tying it with a long blue scarf.
She riffled through the drawers and pulled out the lipstick.
I squeezed Cat’s arm. Her eyes were wide.
This wasn’t the plan. If she did it now, no one would see.
No one would be there to make her feel embarrassed, make her feel ugly, make her curl inside herself like a dark and nasty thing.
We watched as Iggy uncapped the lipstick, slid it slowly across her lips, puckered them, then made a kiss.
She turned her face in the mirror, this way and that, like she was trying to look at herself from the outside.
Then she slipped out of her letterman jacket and draped it over the back of the vanity chair.
She took the stage, doing cartwheels and back tucks and roundoffs, her dark, sleek ponytail spinning like a ribbon behind her.
The sounds of her hands and feet paddling the floor echoed in the empty auditorium—thwip, thwip, thud.
Replaced by the sounds of her breath when she stopped, when she put her hands to her knees, and took fast, sharp inhales that turned into a wheeze, a narrow whistle as she dragged the air in, the sound of a corpse waking from death, of wind through cracks in stone.
Cat tensed, craning herself forward to get a better look.
Iggy’s face was flushed, red creeping up her neck onto her cheeks in angry blotches. Her hands went to her throat, like she was trying to claw off a pair of hands that wouldn’t budge.
We have to get down there, Cat said, turning and scrambling to get down from the rafters.
I looked back to see Iggy slump forward, tip over the edge of the stage, and fall the four feet, headfirst, off it.
She landed with a dull crack. I scurried after Cat, who was already down beside Iggy by the time I made it to the bottom of the ladder.
I looked down at the two of them from the stage.
Iggy lay with a gash across her forehead, the skin split, blood dribbling down to the floor.
Her face was mottled, her lips swollen, and eyes shut.
Her hands were still at her throat, pawing weakly.
Then her forearms locked in tight, and she began to convulse, vomit spilling from her mouth, down her neck and onto her chest. I know now, being a nurse, the poor thing was in anaphylactic shock.
What do I do? Cat asked, voice flooded with panic.
I was frozen solid, an ice carving. The only thing I could feel was the adrenaline jittering through my veins.
This couldn’t be real. I couldn’t be watching Cat press her hands, one over the other, palms down onto Iggy’s vomit-covered chest and pump. Oh, fuck, Cat said. Fuck, fuck.
That snapped me into action. I ran back to the dressing area, grabbed her tiny black purse and dumped the contents out onto the vanity, spreading her wallet and her ChapStick and her car keys, looking for an EpiPen.
There wasn’t one. I swept it all back into the purse, grabbed her letterman jacket, and, at the last second, opened the drawer and found the lipstick too, which I shoved into my jeans pocket.
I raced back to Cat, who was using her sweatshirt sleeve to wipe Iggy’s lips before pressing her own to them.
We gotta get her to the hospital, Cat said, squatting to loop her hands under Iggy’s armpits.
Help me, she said, panicked and out of breath herself.
Together, we carried her through the halls, hollering for help.
But the school was empty. Not having a car of our own, we dragged her into the back seat of hers.
I sat with Iggy’s head in my lap while Cat drove, and I watched the blotches on her face darken to a mean purple.
I felt the faint tugs for air subside, the blood on her forehead slow, then stop.
It’s okay. It’s okay, Cat kept saying as she sped down Ranch Road 20.
Cat, she’s gone, I said.
No, she’s not, Cat said, pressing her foot harder to the pedal, as if the engine revving louder could revive her. I could feel the world slipping away faster, rumbling like it was breaking apart underneath us.
She’s dead, I said. We can’t just drop her off at the hospital.
Cat raised her eyes to the rearview mirror, and we caught each other’s terrified looks, held them for a long moment.
Fuck, Cat said, Fuck, slamming the meat of her palms against the steering wheel. What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do, Mel?
When I spoke, my voice was eerily calm, like it was coming from a me just over my shoulder: I know where we can put her.
“Time to reapply,” Kennedy Claire says, pulling the sunblock from the cooler.
She sprays the length of her long legs, and I can feel the aerosol mist, cool to my sun-scorched skin, and smell the coconutty sweetness.
She hands the can to me, and I spritz myself as we float on past The Hollow.
People don’t stop here much anymore. They’ve migrated on to different spots farther down the river, places where the bank slopes gently down or a limestone shelf creates a ledge for picnicking and sunbathing.
None of them are as good as The Hollow, but they aren’t haunted either.
We parked the car by the river entrance, right next to the Sherman land, the entrance everyone used.
There were always discarded tire inner tubes littering the bank for kids to make use of.
They were black and sun-beaten, the kind that got sticky hot in the blistering heat.
But that day was dark and damp, and it was getting close to suppertime, so the spot was empty.
Not a single car in the gravelly patch of dirt people used as a parking lot.
Not a single voice coming from out on the water.
We dragged Iggy to the bank. The dead weight of her was heavier than when we’d carried her out of the school.
We flopped her down, bottom first, in a tube, hid her face with a sunhat we found in the trunk.
Stuffed the jacket in to float down with her.
Cat tied all our tubes together, and the three of us floated down the river.
I flinched at every sound, every squirrel rustling the leaves, every turtle dipping below the water’s surface.
Cat kept her head on a swivel too, eyes as wide as my Oma’s Blue Willow saucers as she scanned the banks, sensing things that weren’t there from every direction.
The river moves slow, but that evening it crawled.
The sunset was unjustly beautiful, the cloud-covered day melting into vibrant striations of pinks and oranges, into purples and midnight blues, so that it was dark by the time we stopped at The Hollow.
It was then that I realized her blue hair tie was missing, that it must have slipped off somewhere along the river, but there was nothing we could do about that.
We pulled her into the cave still in the tube, sloshing over rocks, through the darkness to the back, to the crevice where I had wedged myself to hide not a week prior, where the rough limestone had serrated my bare skin.
Iggy’s body was less pliable by then, her skin clammy.
We shoved her in, our fingertips pruney and waterlogged, forcing her rigid limbs to bend again, to fit into the space.
It took the full weight of our bodies, fighting her down like a mannequin into an overstuffed trunk.
It wasn’t until we saw her pale blue skin tear open that we finally stopped pushing.
She fit wholly inside the crack. We filled the extra space, wedging rocks into the folds of her, then on top of her, until she was properly tucked away, and no one would ever see her from the outside looking in.
But Cat kept going, reaching down into the water and pulling up handfuls of mud and sticks and pebbles, filling in all the little gaps, sealing her tomb.
We let the tubes float on down the river and walked back home in the cover of night, staying in the trees so no one would catch sight of us from the road.
The next day came, and all of Anhalt was frazzled, looking every which way for Isabelle—not Ingrid—Whitmore, and a new type of sickness hit Cat and me, when we realized just what we’d done.
I’ve spent the rest of my life making up for that mistake, and Cat, well, she spent most of hers tearing herself up about it, a kind of self-flagellation.
Always scratching at her neck in welts like the ones that ringed Izzy’s throat, checking over her shoulder for eyes watching from every corner, just like we’d done on the river, waiting for the hammer she was sure would eventually fall.
Heaven help me, I was always there to bring her back to her senses.
Honey, just calm down, I’d said to her in the model home.
When Cat had told me, all wide-eyed at orientation, about those boys poking around at The Hollow, I had an inkling that she might start spiraling again.
Then I saw that note she’d written to Iggy.
I saw the scratches on her neck. When the kids found Izzy’s bones—twenty-five years of this river rising and falling had finally shaken her loose—well, that when I went to Abel for help.