Page 81 of Stranger in the Lake

“That’s because it’s in Shady Grove.”

A pretty name for a hideous trailer park off Highway 73. Not so much a grove as it is a muddy clearing lined with a few dozen trailers, all of them run-down and propped up on grubby cinder blocks. They surround a cluster of cracked picnic tables and a rusty swing set, the seats and metal chains long gone. Any rental contract should come with a free tetanus shot.

“I’ll take the couch, and I promise not to hog the bathroom or leave my crap all over the place.”

Call me thickheaded, but that’s when the realization hits. This move is for me, too. I’m moving from this place to a trailer. I’m ending up right where I began with a baby in tow.

Chet reads the look on my face, and his voice softens. “It’s only for a little while. We’ll be out of there by the time the baby comes. I swear.”

“How?”

He shrugs. “We’ll figure out a way. We always do.”

He’s right, even though a real McCreedy would be packing up all the valuables right now. She’d swipe the silver, stuff the cash from the safe in a bag and take off into the wind. She’d put this ridiculous sham of a marriage in her past, bail on this accidental pregnancy. If I were anything like my mother, I’d be long gone by now.

But I’m not like her, which is why I’m leaving here with what I walked in with all those months ago. Two pairs of threadbare Levi’s, five polyester sweaters, some underwear and T-shirts and my most comfortable pajamas, stuffed into a Hefty bag by the front door. As far as I’m concerned, this part of my life is like Vegas: what happened here stays here, hanging from velvet hangers upstairs in the closet.

All but one tiny memento, a little seed sprouting in my belly.

I shimmy the diamond off my finger, place it on the counter next to the sink and turn to Chet. “Okay. I’m ready.”

37

The average person can hold their breath for somewhere around a minute. That’s sixty seconds for the clock to tick down and the scales to tip in your body. Oxygen levels plummet while carbon dioxide builds in your bloodstream, blazing like fire in your lungs until instinct kicks in, and you suck an involuntary breath. Air. Water. Either one will put out the flame.

Paul or Bobby. That was the choice presented to Jax that night. His best friend or a drug dealer he barely knew. It wasn’t fair, and his decision wasn’t difficult. Jax chose his best friend, and if he had to do it all over, he’d choose Paul again in a heartbeat.

What Jax wouldn’t repeat are all the things that came next, after he’d dragged Paul to shore and blown air into his lungs. After Micah had quit puking his guts into the bushes. After everybody had stopped flailing around and bawling. After all that, when the reality of what just happened set in and Micah said they didn’t have to go to jail. Sit tight. Act normal. Say nothing. For the rest of his miserable life, Jax would regret making that stupid pact.

Micah made them seal it with blood like they were twelve or something, slicing a gash into their palms with the sharpest rock he could find. He made them swear on the lives of everyone they ever loved and everwouldlove. And they were just drunk and desperate enough to agree.

Especially Jax. The driver who wasn’t.

Even after all of Micah’s revelations out there on the hill, Jax can still only call up fleeting snippets of that night with Bobby. The earthy scent of tobacco leaves. Empty bottles rolling around the floorboards. Vomit surging up his throat and nose. A baby’s cries piercing the nighttime quiet. The rest is just a big black hole in Jax’s head, an empty void of nothingness until then suddenly, everybody was screaming and there were only a few inches of air left in the car as it sank in the lake.

Micah’s dad, when they showed up dripping on his doorstep, threw one hell of a tantrum. Jax still shudders when he thinks about it, the way Chief’s cheeks turned purple as he screamed and cussed and kicked a hole in the foyer wall. The words he said, the awful names he called his own son. Worthless. Pathetic. A retard. Micah just stood there, shaking from anger or embarrassment, maybe both. But he knew better than to say the first word.

It was Chief who fetched Jax’s car from the trailer park and covered up the tire tracks leading into Pitts Cove. Who made arrangements, quick and dirty, so the case was closed before any witnesses could step forward to say the man who was about to become police chief had a murderer for a son. For twenty years Chief Hunt sat on the truth, not to protect his son but to cover his own ass.

Jax meant what he said. It was a relief to finally tell, to clear Bobby’s black stain from his conscience. Only his confession got a woman killed. Not by Jax’s hands, just like Jax isn’t technically the reason Bobby ended up at the bottom of Pitts Cove.

Jax came so close to shooting Micah out there on that hill. His finger was taut on the trigger when it occurred to him that blowing a hole through Micah’s chest would be a gift, that it would serve him in the same way the woods had been a relief for Jax. Alone and unseen. Ignored. Jax fooled himself into thinking it was some kind of penance, when really it was an escape. When people stop looking at you, do you really exist? Fading away was the only way he knew to survive.

Stupid fucking Micah. Jax will never forgive him for what he did. To Bobby, to Jax and Paul. He can hear Paul crying in the next cell for his beloved Katherine. For Charlotte and their unborn child. The cruelest punishments don’t always come behind bars.

But Jax is still guilty. He still has to pay.

Maybe that’s what his sister, Pammy, means when she says everybody has their own cross to bear, a heavy burden that burns like a thorn in their flesh. Pammy’s thorn chased her to the church, Jax’s into the woods, his solitude a salvation and a damnation at the same time. In the quiet of the forest, Bobby only grew larger, louder in his mind. His laughter echoing in the trees, his shadow lurking behind every log. Every time Jax closes his eyes, it’s Bobby’s face he sees, floating behind the bubbles of his final scream. The desperation, the pleading, the terror when Jax went for Paul instead. The images will stay with Jax for the rest of his miserable life.

There’s a rattling at the door, a chinking of keys against the metal bars. Sam, coming for a statement.

Sacrifice.

Penance.

Atonement.

Justice.

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