Page 42 of Still Beating

Blizzard must sense my presence because she careens towards me in the entryway, all sixty-five pounds of her, and promptly lands on my feet, rolling over for a tummy rub. I crouch down to scratch her belly, releasing my first genuine smile in weeks. Blizzard’s tail wags furiously beneath her. I can’t believe this old girl still has so much energy—she’s got to be twelve or thirteen by now. But her excitement at seeing me walk through that front door has never wavered over the last ten years. Not even a little.

As I rise to my feet, my eyes land on the figure standing in the kitchen and my breath hitches in the back of my throat.

Corabelle.

Mandy hangs her coat up on the nearby coat rack and clears her throat, leaning in close to her mother. “You said Cora wasn’t coming tonight,” Mandy mutters in a low voice as she tames her flyaways, her eyes dancing over to me with apology.

It’s true I wasn’t ready to face her yet.

Maybe I’ll never be ready.

“Sorry, sweetie, but your sister texted me a few hours ago and said she changed her mind.”

Their conversation begins to fade away as my eyes lock on Cora’s from across the foyer. Memories flow through me, making me feel itchy and slightly panicked, but there is also a profound comfort that stabs at my heart. She is a vision of life and light and survival. Her hair is golden blonde, shiny and healthy again, curled loosely over her thin shoulders. She’s always been petite, but her frame looks even more frail and willowy in a deep purple dress that probably fit her better five weeks ago. The neckline hangs low, revealing her bony collarbone and remnants of a few lingering, faded bruises.

Cora twists her hair over one shoulder and my eyes drift to her exposed neck. The same neck I peppered with sorrowful kisses and soaked with my tears of shame.

My jaw clenches and my heartbeats accelerate, my hands turning clammy as I swipe them along the front of my blue jeans. I’m not sure what to do, so I merely acknowledge her with a quick nod and swallow down all the things I cannot say.

But I don’t miss the flash of hurt and dismissal in her eyes before she spins around and busies herself in the kitchen.

I flinch when Mandy’s fingers begin tugging the sleeve of my winter coat, yanking me out of my messy thoughts. “Take your coat off. Stay a while,” she beams at me, then follows her parents into the family room, chattering on about her shift at the hair salon like it’s another ordinary day in Normalville.

I stay rooted to the snowman welcome mat, staring at Cora’s back as she leans over the kitchen counter, facing away from me. Her head is bowed, her shoulders taut. She is gripping the edge of the countertop as her hair falls over the sides of her face in waves.

I want to run to her. I want to take her in my arms and whisper into her ear that everything is going to be okay. We survived. It’s over.

But I don’t.

I can lie to Mandy and her parents and my friends and my boss and my therapist… but I can’t lie to her.

We all sit around the formal dining table, and for a moment, everything feels like it used to. It’s easy to pretend between four walls adorned with pretty paint colors, lace drapes, recess lighting, and holiday decorations scattered throughout. It’s easy to pretend in the company of the family I’ve come to care about over the past fifteen years while they discuss politics and trending Netflix shows as if nothing is amiss.

But the façade cracks when my eyes float over to Cora, sitting across from me, smashing her meatloaf into something unidentifiable with the tines of her fork as the candlelight illuminates the dark circles under her eyes. I push my own mushy meatloaf into my mashed potatoes, realizing I’m doing the exact same thing. I reach under the table to give Blizzard my dinner roll so it appears that I’m actually eating the meal that probably tastes delicious.

“… about the pregnancy.”

Mandy’s voice pushes through my fog, and I lift my head, turning towards her.Pregnancy? A silence washes over the dinner table, and I feel incredibly out of the loop. “What?” I glance from face to face, but everyone is looking down at their plates like they’re in the midst of a riveting crossword puzzle. My eyes shift back to Cora, but she’s not looking at her plate. Her eyes are wide and accusatory as she stares down a sheepish-looking Mandy.

Mandy presses her lips between her teeth, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “Sorry. I-I didn’t mean to blurt that out. We were talking about our cousin’s new baby, and it just triggered… you know. I suck at thinking before I speak.”

I blink. Cora’s fork clinks against the dinner plate as she folds her hands in her lap, but she refuses to meet my eyes. I don’t think she’s looked at me once since our stare-down from earlier. I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, putting two and two together with a hard knot twisting in my gut. “Are you pregnant, Cora?”

Her head finally jerks towards me, alarmed by the sound of my voice addressing her for the first time in weeks. I watch her haunted eyes swirl with grief and confusion and sadness and everything in between. But the eye contact doesn’t last, and she ducks her head with fluttering lashes. “I was,” she says softly, so soft I almost don’t hear her. Then she pins her eyes back on Mandy. “I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to talk about any of this.”

Cora pushes back from the table and stands up, scratching at her wrist and making a quick escape from the dining room to the staircase.

I follow, not caring if it looks strange or inappropriate—my instincts tell me to follow her.

I can feel their eyes boring into my back, trying to understand why I’m chasing Mandy’s sister up the stairs, but they have toknow.

They have to know we’re different now.

The image of Cora and me standing together, our hands interlocked, dappled in blood stains and dirt with an identical far-off look in our eyes, has made the rounds on the internet. In fact, it went viral as soon as the photo was released by the media. It has over two-million shares and hundreds of thousands of comments ranging from, “Sending prayers to those poor souls” to “This looks like the movie poster for the next Quentin Tarantino film” to “Following for future wedding announcement”. Mandy delicately questioned me about the photo, hoping for insight into our shared nightmare. Hoping for answers I wasn’t able to give her. She doesn’t know all the details of what transpired in that basement—only what she’s seen in news articles and TV broadcasts.

All I told Mandy was that we formed a friendship out of survival and fear and boredom and loneliness. It was necessary. It was inevitable. It was all we had.

She’ll never know the things I was forced to do, the lines that were crossed, or the guilt I’ll carry with me until the day I die.

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