Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

May

The next morning I’m sore. My whole body aches. I wake to Josh’s lips teasing mine. My eyes open and there he is, suspended above me. “You were supposed to wake me up when you got home,” he razzes me. “We had a date.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. My saliva is thick, my mouth like cotton. It’s hard to swallow.

“Don’t tell me you forgot.”

“I’ll make it up to you.”

I have trouble getting out of bed. It takes time. The room spins. I have a headache, one that creeps up the back of my neck.

Josh, watching me, laughs. “Looks like you and Bea had fun after we left.”

My cheeks flame. Josh doesn’t know the half of it. All he knows is that Bea and I stayed at the bar and had another drink after he and Kate left. He thinks I’m hungover.

“What time did you get home? I tried staying up for a while,” he says, and I tell him that I don’t know, that we lost track of time.

“Bea didn’t want to leave,” I say.

What I wouldn’t give to go back to last night, to go home with Josh instead of staying with Bea.

I push myself from bed. I think that when Josh looks at me, I must look different, changed. Last night, after I let myself in, I showered in our first-floor bathroom. I couldn’t risk waking him or the kids. I went to bed with my hair still wet. That was only four or five hours ago. If he looks closely enough, he’ll see it’s still wet.

“You want coffee?” Josh asks, standing at the mirror, fixing his tie. I say yes, though I’m not sure I can hold anything down. “Just give me a minute. I’ll brew a fresh pot.”

I’m no sooner on my feet than I have to rush past Josh and to the toilet. I fall to my knees before it, grasping the seat with clammy hands. The three or four drinks I had last night are not enough to make me sick. It’s what came after that lays waste to my insides.

“Wow,” Josh says, coming up behind me. He stands in the bathroom doorway, smirking proudly as I wipe the vomit from my mouth with the back of a hand. “That was a heck of a birthday celebration. You sure showed Bea a good time. She’s lucky to have you.”

I’m not known as being the life of the party. I’m more of a wet blanket when it comes to nights out. I’m typically the first to want to go home. This is uncharacteristic of me. Josh is relishing the idea of me being hungover because it doesn’t happen often.

He fetches a washcloth from the vanity. He soaks it in cold water and hands it to me. As I take it, I see mud still buried beneath my fingernails, despite my scrubbing last night.

I hide my hands from Josh. My telltale heart is beating.

Word begins to spread later that day. It starts on Facebook. It starts as a plea. Shelby and I are Facebook friends, as I’m Facebook friends with many of my clients. Shelby is tagged in another friend’s post. That friend is looking for her.

That evening, Shelby makes the local news.

Josh and I watch together. The kids are in bed; it’s the ten o’clock news. I freeze up when the story breaks, barely daring to breathe as the anchorwoman talks about Shelby. I should tell Josh that I know her. I should tell Josh she’s a client.

But I get cold feet. I hesitate because I’ve never been much of an actor. I worry my reaction would come off as unauthentic and give me away.

And then, because I didn’t do it right away, I can’t tell him later. Because he’d want to know why I didn’t tell him before. It’s the same as what happened with Marty. As the days go on, I can’t tell him about the malpractice suit or Dr. Feingold or any of it, because it would all look so dodgy and dishonest.

I brood over the police coming by, asking if I know Shelby, and me having to decide whether to lie. If I lie, I’d never get away with it. But if I told the truth, it might get back to Josh, and then he’d discover the lie by omission. It’s a catch-22. I can’t win.

The next day, Bea comes to the house. I’m alone when she comes.

“Should we be seen together?” I ask when we’re behind closed doors.

“Why would that matter, Meredith?” she asks.

“Because of what we did,” I hiss under my breath.

“And what was that?” she asks. “Go to the bar and have a good time?” She tells me that to avoid suspicion, I have to act normal.

I recoil, offended. “I am acting normal,” I say, though I’m not. I’m far from it.

Bea asks what I would do if a client of mine ever went missing. “I don’t know,” I say, controlling the sudden urge to cry. Bea, before me, is impassive, tall. She looms over me in the foyer of my home. She didn’t bring an umbrella and so she’s wet. She drips onto my entry rug. “It’s never happened before.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she says, deadpan. It comes as a slap to the face. “Theoretically, Meredith, what would you do?”

I swallow hard. “I’d call her husband. Express my condolences. See if there’s anything I can do.”

“Then do it,” she commands. “Do it today.”

She leaves the same way she came. I walk to the front window to watch her go, to be sure she’s really gone.

Outside the world is charcoal gray. It’s foggy. I can only see to the other side of the street. The world beyond evanesces into clouds.

---

In the coming days, police descend upon our neighborhood like snow in winter. I watch from a distance. No one comes to our house asking questions, though I obsess over what I’ll do when and if that happens.

What we learn, we learn from word-of-mouth and the news.

Josh is all worked up about it. “How does a grown woman just disappear?” he asks no one in particular. He’s pacing the house. He tells me that he doesn’t want me out after dark for anything, not until they find the person who did this to her.

“You’re going to drive me to and from my births?” I challenge. “Wake the kids up in the middle of the night and make them come?”

He thinks it through. His answer to this is, “You’ll take a cab. The driver can drop you off and pick you up at the hospital door.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” I say, trying hard to control the tremor in my voice. “You do hear what they’re saying, don’t you, about the husband? How he killed her? I think I’m safe, unless you have plans of killing me,” I say, fleeing the room. I’m more contrary than I should be.

The guilt ravages me. Not only Shelby’s death, but that Jason may take the fall for it.

“Are you mad?” Josh asks when he finds me later in the bathroom getting ready for bed. “Did I upset you?” He comes up behind me. He lays a tender hand on my lower back. He wraps around me from behind, so that his arms circle my midriff. He knots his hands. He lowers his chin to my shoulder. He says, “I couldn’t live without you.”

I don’t deserve Josh after what I’ve done. Josh is a good man.

I can only stand it a few seconds before I free myself of his hold. “What’s wrong, Meredith?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I snap at him. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t seem fine.”

“I am fine.”

I find myself searching things online. How exactly does one die in an auto-ped accident? Head trauma is often to blame. So, too, is organ damage, internal bleeding, damage to major arteries. I get sucked down a rabbit hole of information. Shelby’s body should have ricocheted off the hood of the car when we hit her, because of the force of impact, and because of Newton’s laws of motion. She shouldn’t have toppled over in front of it. This leads me to believe she wasn’t standing upright. That she was hunkered down, doing something as innocuous as tying a shoe. Who’d ever think you could be killed while tying a shoe?

Another thing I look up: Do corpses make sounds after death? The answer is yes. When a body is moved after death, the air left in the windpipe can escape. The result is a groan or a moan.

I obsess over this. I try to replay the sound I heard as we laid Shelby in the trunk of Bea’s car. Was it the contents of her trachea leaving? Or was she still alive?

Did Shelby ricochet off the hood of the car and land in front of it? Or, like a domino, did she fall over?

It doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s still dead.

The rain won’t let up for anything. I’m tormented by images of Shelby cold and naked, lying in the rain, shivering, soaked to the bone. I can’t stand it.

One morning, I stand at my closet looking for something to wear. My mind screams at me to pick something. Just pick something. The indecision paralyzes me. It’s like this every day. But it isn’t just the clothes. It’s every one of the seemingly million inconsequential decisions I make every day. The kids are at my feet, arguing. I don’t have the energy to react. Their voices sound muffled, as if I’m underwater and they’re up above, as I stare into the endless abyss that is my closet. It’s all too much.

I settle on something. I get in the car. I take the kids where they need to be, though Leo begs and cries as I leave him with Charlotte. I can’t go on with this guilt. I can’t live like this, thinking of nothing but what Bea and I did. All day and night I replay the moment of impact in my mind. I feel it still, the car crashing into her, and then, seconds later, the repulsive sensation of driving over her body, not once but twice.

I’m snowed under by what-ifs. What if I’d gone home with Josh? What if Bea and I hadn’t had that last drink? What if I’d insisted on driving? What if Shelby had been on the sidewalk? What if her shoe hadn’t come untied, if she hadn’t been bent down tying it, if that’s even what happened.

The guilt is a heavy burden to bear. I feel battle-scarred.

I go to the store. I no longer enjoy driving. I’m overattentive. I drive below the speed limit. I step on the brakes when I see even the slightest movement in my peripheral vision. My heart races the entire time. It’s not that I think I will be hurt. It’s that I think I will hurt someone else. My hands on the steering wheel are slick. I can’t get a good grip of the leather. Cars honk at me. I’ve become a danger, because of my extreme caution.

At the store, I buy a blanket. It’s plaid and fleece. I take it to the woods alone, where I last saw Shelby. I have to search awhile because the trees, the riverbank all look the same to me, though the river is higher than it was the last time I was here.

The days have become squally. We no longer see the sun.

I find Shelby. It’s been days since her death. The sight of her wrecks me. She’s still mostly buried, but the rain has washed much of the forest floor away. I see parts of her. A single bloated leg, lying on a bed of miry leaves. Strands of her dyed hair.

I wear gloves as I take the blanket out of its packaging. I use care not to touch it. I go to her, lay the blanket on what’s visible of her body. I don’t want to look. But I can’t tear my eyes away. What I see is unspeakable. Where the blood has settled, Shelby is purple. Gravity has taken its toll, pulling the stagnant blood down. Her lower half is entirely bruised. The flies have discovered Shelby’s body. They buzz around; they land on her. I try to dispel them. But they’re not scared of me. They leave, and then they come back.

When I look closely at Shelby’s body, there are maggots.

What I don’t think about is my shoe prints left in the mud. I see them only as I’m leaving. I’ve seen enough cop shows to know that this is how people get caught. For a split second I think about leaving the footprints there. Then it’s out of my hands. If I’m meant to be caught, I will be.

I think somewhere deep inside that’s what I want: to be caught.

But I can’t do it. I step out of my shoes. I retrace my steps. I sink to my knees, smear the shoe’s tread away with my gloved hands, moving backward. By the time I’m done, I’m bathed in mud. I let the rain rinse me clean. I carry what remains into the car with me.

Halfway home I have to pull to the side of the road to hurl.

Now when I think of her, she’s alone, but at least she’s not cold.

It’s the only thing that gets me through the night.