Page 44 of Water's Edge

“Try being in a wheelchair,” she says. “See how that ruins your life.”

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? Am I supposed to think that your playtime photo sessions were the result of some deep-seated anger you hold at the world because your spinal cord was cut? Get real, Marie.”

I stop and gather my thoughts. I know what comes next, but I have to hear it one more time. It’s a compulsion I can’t abate.

Me: “You’re not getting out of here alive,” she says. The blade has been dulled by its use as a stair climber, but it can still inflict fatal damage if I give her the chance. Which I won’t. I take the desk chair and I spin it hard and fast in her direction. Marie lifts her torso from the floor with those powerful arms—arms that were mighty when she was a swimmer, when she could hold her breath for a long time. She balances herself with her stump and tries to lunge at me. I throw my body on the chair and it smashes into her, sending her screaming backwards down the stairwell. When she lands, I see the tip of the knife. During her loud tumble, the blade found its way behind her, entering her neck and protruding through her mouth like a carbide tongue as she fell back. I can barely breathe. I stand there for a beat, watching as red oozes from Marie’s gaping mouth.

I don’t have to stop the tape. I picture Leann Truitt’s body laid out in a staged pose, neck broken, tortured, raped.

Me: Her light pink shirt is now a bloody red tie-dye. I hear sirens and I know I have to get out of there right away. I gather photos from the floor and skirt past Marie’s slumped body, her withered legs, her tree-trunk, arms and that pie-cutting knife protruding from her mouth. By the door I see my mom-style purse. I grab it, stuff the photos inside, and run out of the door and through the hedge to the street. I know my fingerprints are all over the house, but I’ve never been arrested and there’s no trace of me in anyone’s system. At least, not yet.

* * *

I put my gun in the safe. My tongue still smarts. I take the bottle of Scotch and the used plastic tumbler out of the desk drawer and pour a little, then a little more.

Before I listen to any of the other tapes, I click on my email and scroll downward.

Wallace has written another message.

My heart sinks. It’s like a sleeping snake and I don’t want to disturb it.

But I do.

It’s brief.

I doubt you know what it’s like to be hurt so deeply you’ve lost a part of yourself. I know what it feels like. Soon, Rylee, you will too.

My head spins. It’s not the alcohol, of course. Although it could be. It’s the sentiment. It’s the hate. Someone out there knows my secrets. Someone out there wants me to be made to suffer.

Twenty-Two

I slot in another tape, rewind a little and hit play. My voice comes over the tiny speaker in the player.

Me: Courtney is my mom’s real name. She hid that from me as well as everything else. Aunt Ginger said my mom was scrunched up in the hospital bed after she delivered me and didn’t look at me right away. Mom said she was glad I was a girl. My aunt Ginger said to my mom that she was hoping for that too. She told Mom to look at me. She said I was beautiful. My mom wouldn’t look. She was afraid to look. Afraid that if she looked she would see him.

Dr. A: Him?

I fast-forward the tape a little.

Me: So much of what happened in my life was orchestrated turmoil. Orchestrated by my mother to cover the tracks of one lie with another lie and another and another. I remember one time when we were watching an episode of Teen Mom on TV and the girl who’d just had a baby was talking about giving it up for adoption.

Dr. A: Your mom considered giving you up.

Me: Yeah. I guess she did. Of course, Aunt Ginger said it was to protect me from him. She pretended to be hidden from him for so long that he didn’t know she was pregnant. It was all a lie. While we watched that show, my mom and me, I told her that I could never do that. Never give a baby up like that. She said if it was what was best for the child, it might be what’s best for me. She said she knew people who had considered it because it was the only right thing to do.

The tape is quiet for a few moments.

Me: Ditching your kid—how could that ever be right? I mean, they shouldn’t have got pregnant in the first place. My mom just said mistakes happen sometimes. Sometimes pregnancies are anything but planned. I knew my mom was young when she had me. She said she was eighteen but now I know she was sixteen. I thought she’d been married to my father. The one that died fighting for his country, a war hero. That was all lies too.

The tape hisses and ends. I eject it and turn it over, insert it, and think of the case. Leann Truitt had given her baby up. My mother had almost given me up. I wonder now where I fell on the spectrum my mother had laid bare.

Had she regretted keeping me? Had I ruined her life?

I hit “play” and wait for the blank portion of the tape to catch up.

Me: Aunt Ginger told my mother that I look just like her. She told my mother that I was her baby and not his. A nurse heard her say that and remarked that it was none of her business, but sometimes it’s good to have a man around. For child support if nothing else. My aunt said that would never happen with this man.

Aunt Ginger was right. This man, my biological father, was a monster. As a dad and as a person. Maybe Leann Truitt’s kid was lucky to get far away from Jim Truitt. Maybe my mom was right about a baby sometimes being better off…

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