Page 29 of This is Why We Lied

“I got a little overwhelmed by everything.”

“Bad overwhelmed?”

“Good overwhelmed.” She looked up at him. “Happy overwhelmed.”

Will nodded. She gave him a soft kiss before resting her head on his chest again. There was room in this conversation for him to speak. She could tell he had been feeling slightly overwhelmed, too. Though Will was more likely to go for a ten-mile run up the side of a cliff than sit on the bed and cry.

He asked, “Did your sister pack everything you need?”

“Including a ten-inch, bright pink dildo.”

Will was quiet for a second. “I guess we could try it out if you wanted something smaller?”

Sara laughed as he pulled her closer. There was a complete absence of sound inside the marble bathroom. Not even a drop of water came from the faucet. Sara listened to the steady rhythm of Will’s breathing. She closed her eyes. She lay in his arms until the water started to cool. She hadn’t planned on falling asleep, but that’s exactly what happened. When she came to, the mist of rain had slowly moved across the mountain.

She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “We should go do something, right?”

“Maybe.” Will started slowly stroking her arm. She resisted the urge to purr like a cat. He said, “I have a confession.”

Sara couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “What is it?”

“There’s a guy here at the lodge who lived at the children’s home when I was there.”

The information was so unexpected that Sara needed a second to process it. Will rarely mentioned people from the home. She looked up at him, asking, “Who?”

“His name is Dave,” Will said. “He was all right in the beginning. Then something happened. He changed. Kids started calling him the Jackal. I dunno, maybe he came up with the name himself. Dave was always giving people nicknames.”

Sara rested her head back on his chest. She listened to the slow beat of his heart.

He said, “We were friends for a while. Dave was in the same classes as me. Remedial stuff. I thought we got along pretty well.”

She knew that Will had only been in remedial classes because of his dyslexia. He hadn’t been diagnosed until college. He still treated it like a shameful secret. “What happened to him?”

“He was sent to live with a really bad foster family. They gamed the system. Made up all kinds of things that were wrong with Dave so they’d get more money for treatment. And then he started getting infections. So …”

Sara listened to Will’s voice trail off. Recurrent urinary infections in children could often be a sign of sexual abuse.

“They took him out of the placement, but Dave came back mean. Only, I didn’t realize it at first. He still pretended like we were friends. I kept hearing all these bad things about him, but everybody said bad things about everybody else. We were all screwed up.”

Sara felt the rise and fall of his chest.

“He started trying to bully me. Picking fights. I wanted to punch him a few times, but it wouldn’t have been fair. He was smaller, younger than me. I could’ve really hurt him.” Will continued stroking her arm. “Then he started going around with Angie, which—I’m not an idiot. It’s not like he dragged her into the basement. She was with a lot of guys. It made her feel like she had some control over her life. I guess Dave was that way, too. It hit me different when Angie did it with him, though. Like I said, I thought he was my friend, then he turned on me. And she knew that and did it anyway. It was a bad situation.”

Sara could not begin to understand the warped dynamics between Will and his ex-wife. The only good thing she could say about the woman was that she was gone.

“Dave kept messing around with her. He made sure I knew about it, kept rubbing it in my face. It’s like he wanted me to beat him up. Like it would prove something if he could break me.” Will was silent for a long while. “Dave’s the one who started calling me Trashcan.”

Sara felt her heart sinking. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for Will to run into this awful man right after his wedding, to have every bad memory about his childhood dredged up. The nickname in particular would’ve been like a kick to the teeth. Over the last few days, Will had made some passing jokes about his side of the aisle being empty, but Sara had seen the truth in his eyes. He was missing his mother. Her last act of love toward her child was to place him in a trash can so that he would be safe. Then this loathsome asshole had turned that fact into a means of torture.

“Dave tried to apologize,” Will said. “On the trail just now.”

She looked up again in surprise. “What did he say?”

“It wasn’t a real apology.” Will gave a dry laugh, though nothing about the situation was funny. “He said, ‘Come on, Trashcan. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll apologize if it’ll help you get over it.’”

“What a fucker,” Sara whispered. “What did you say?”

“I started counting down from ten.” Will shrugged. “I can’t tell you whether or not I was actually going to hit him, but he scampered off when I got to eight, so we’ll never know.”

---