The Pact (46 page)

Melanie covered her face with her hands. “No,” she murmured.

“Isn't it possible that the pregnancy triggered the suicidal feelings? That if she couldn't live up to your expectations, she didn't want to live?”

The blame squarely set on Melanie's shoulders, she began to crumble. She sank in the witness stand, curling into herself the same way she had when she'd first found out that her daughter had died. Jordan, realizing he could not push any further without looking bad, walked toward the witness stand and put his hand on Melanie's arm. “Mrs. Gold,” he said, handing her his own clean handkerchief. “Ma'am. Allow me.” She took the paisley cloth and wiped at her face while Jordan continued to pat her on the shoulder. “I'm very sorry to upset you like this. And I know how devastating it must be to even consider these possibilities. But I do need you to answer me, for the record.”

With a supreme effort of will, Melanie drew herself upright. She wiped at her nose and tucked Jordan's handkerchief into her clenched fist. “I'm sorry,” she said with dignity. “I'll be all right now.”

Jordan nodded. “Mrs. Gold,” he said. “Isn't it possible that Emily's pregnancy was what caused her to feel suicidal?”

“No,” Melanie said firmly, in a voice that carried. “I know the kind of relationship my daughter and I had, Mr. McAfee. And I know that Emily would have told me everything, in spite of the lies that you're trying to spread. She would have told me if something was bothering her. If she didn't tell me, it was because she wasn't upset about it. Or perhaps she didn't even know for certain, herself, that she was going to have a baby.”

Jordan tipped his head to the side. “If she didn't know about the baby, Mrs. Gold, then how could she tell Chris?”

Melanie shrugged. “Maybe she didn't.”

“You're saying he might not have known she was pregnant.”

“That's correct.”

“Then why,” Jordan asked, “would he want to kill her?”

There was a stir in the courtroom as Melanie got off the stand. She walked slowly down the center aisle, escorted by a bailiff. As soon as the doors closed behind her, a volley of questions and comments broke out among the gallery, as pervasive and quick as the spread of a fever. Chris was smiling as Jordan took his seat again. “That,” he said, “was awesome.”

“Glad you liked it,” Jordan said, smoothing his tie.

“What happens next?”

Jordan opened his mouth to tell Chris, but Barrie did it for him. “Your Honor,” she said, “the prosecution rests.”

“Now,” Jordan murmured to his client, “we put on a show.” November 7, 1997

Emily rubbed the towel down her body and wrapped it around her hair. When she yanked open the bathroom door the cold air of the hall rushed in. She shuddered, careful not to look at the flat plane of her stomach in the mirror as she left.

There was no one in the house, so she walked to her bedroom nude. She straightened her bed and tucked Chris's sweatshirt, the one that smelled like him, around her pillow. But she left her dirty clothes piled on the floor, to give her parents something familiar to come home to. She sat down at her desk, the towel loose now around her shoulders. There was a stack of art school applications-Rhode Island School of Design, and the Sorbonne, right on top. A blank pad, used for homework.

Should she leave a note?

She picked up a pencil and pressed the tip to the paper, digging hard enough to leave a mark. What did you say to the people who had given you life, when you were about to intentionally throw that gift away? With a sigh, Emily threw down the pencil. You didn't. You didn't say anything, because they'd read between the lines for what you left out, and believe that it was all their fault. As if that reminded her, she dug in her nightstand for a small, clothbound book, and took it over to the closet. Inside, behind the stack of her shoe-boxes, was a small hole, eaten away by squirrels years ago and used, when she and Chris were little, for the stash of secret treasures. As she reached inside, she found a folded piece of paper. A lemon-juice message, invisible ink that had been revealed when held over a candle flame. She and Chris must have been about ten. They'd passed notes in a tin-can pulley system linked between their bedroom windows, before the fishing line had tangled in the branches of the trees. Emily ran her finger over the torn edges of the paper and smiled. I am coming to save you, Chris had written. If she remembered right, she'd been grounded at the time. Chris had scaled the rose trellis on the side of the house, planning to enter the bathroom window to spring her from her cell-but he'd fallen and broken his arm instead. She crumpled the paper into her fist. So. This wasn't the first time he'd be saving her by letting her go.

Emily wound her hair into a French braid and went to lie down on the bed. And she stayed that way-naked, the message tight in her palm-until she heard Chris start his car in the driveway next door.

When Chris turned fifteen, the world had become unfamiliar. Time moved too quickly and impossibly slow all at once; no one seemed to understand what he was saying; ebbs and surges tingled his limbs and stretched his skin. He remembered one summer afternoon, when he and Em had been lazing on a raft in the pond; he had fallen asleep in the middle of one of her sentences and woke up with the sun lower and hotter and Emily still talking, as if both everything and nothing at all had changed.

It was like that, again, now. Emily, whose face Chris could trace with his eyes shut, was suddenly unrecognizable. He'd wanted to give her time to see how crazy this idea was, but all the time had run out and the whole nightmare had snowballed, huge and unwieldy, impossible for Chris to stop in its path. He wanted to save her life-so he was pretending to help her to die. On the one hand, he felt powerless in a world too big for him to alter; on the other hand, his world had shrunk to the head of a pin with room for nothing but him and Emily and their pact. He was paralyzed by indecision-believing with all the unshakable drama of adolescence that he could handle something as enormous as this, and at the same time wanting to whisper the truth in his mother's ear so that she could make it go away.

His hands shook so much he had taken to sitting on them, and there were moments when he was convinced he was losing his mind. He thought of this as a competition he simply had to win, and in the same moment reminded himself that no one died at the end of a race.

He wondered how time had moved so quickly since the night Emily had told him. He wished it would move faster, so that he would be an adult, and like all other adults, would be unable to remember this time of his life clearly.

He wondered why he felt like the road was crumbling beneath him, when he'd only been trying to drive slowly through a safety zone.

She slid into the passenger seat, in a motion so familiar that Chris had to close his eyes against the sight of it. “Hi,” she said, like always. Chris pulled out of her driveway feeling as if someone had changed the plot of a play he was acting in, forgetting to mention it to him. They had just rounded the curve of Wood Hollow Road when Emily asked him to pull over. “I want to see it,” she said.

Her voice had that high note of excitement, and her eyes, now that he could see them, were glassy and bright. Like she had a fever. And Chris wondered if this wasn't, after all, something that was running through her blood.

He reached into his coat and withdrew the gun, wrapped in a chamois. Emily held out her hand, hesitating to touch it. Then she ran her forefinger down its barrel. “Thank you,” she whispered, sounding relieved. “The bullet,” she said suddenly. “You didn't forget it?” Chris patted his pocket.

Emily stared at his hand, covering the heart of his shirt, and then at his face. “Aren't you going to say anything?”

“No,” Chris said. “I'm not.”

It had been Emily's idea to go to the carousel. In part, because she knew it was likely to be deserted at this time of year, and in part because she was making a conscious effort to take with her all the best things about the world she wanted to leave, just in case memories could be car-ried in one's pockets and used to plot out the course of whatever it was that came next.

She had always loved the carousel. The past two summers, when Chris had run it, she'd met him here often. They had christened the horses: Tulip and Leroy; Sadie and Starlight and Buck. Sometimes she'd come during the day and help Chris hoist the thick, damp weights of toddlers onto the carved saddles; sometimes she'd arrive at dusk to help him clean up. She'd liked that best. There was something impossibly lovely about the big machine running itself down, horses moving in slow motion to the creak and whir of the gears.

She didn't feel frightened. Now that she'd found a way out, even the thought of dying didn't scare her. She just wanted to end it before other people she loved were hurt as badly as she was. She looked at Chris, and at the small silver box that contained the mechanism that activated the carousel. “Do you still have your key?” she asked.

The wind whipped her braid against her cheek, and her arms were crossed in an effort to keep warm. “Yeah,” Chris said. “You want to go on?”

“Please.” She climbed onto the carousel, passing her hand against the noses of the sturdy horses. She picked the one she'd named Delilah, a white horse with a silver mane and paste rubies and emeralds set into her bridle. Chris stood by the silver box, his hand on the red button that started the machine. Emily felt the carousel rumble to life beneath her, the calliope jangling as the merry-goround picked up speed. She slapped the cracked leather of the reins against the horse's neck and closed her eyes.

She pictured herself and Chris, little children standing side by side on a backyard boulder, holding hands and leaping together into a high pile of autumn leaves. She remembered the jewel tones of the maples and oaks. She remembered the yank of her arm against Chris's as gravity tugged at them. But most of all she remembered that moment when they were both convinced they were flying. He STOOD ON LEVEL GROUND and watched Emily. Her head was thrown back and the wind had pinked her cheeks. Tears were streaming from her eyes, but she was smiling. This, he realized, is it. Either he let Emily have what she wanted more than anything, or he let himself have what he wanted. It was the first time he could remember those two things not being the same.

How could he stand by and watch her die? Then again, how could he stop her, if she was hurting so badly?

Emily had trusted him, but he was going to betray her. And then the next time she tried to kill herself-because there would be a next time, he knew-he wouldn't find out until after the fact. Like everyone else.

He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Was he really considering what he thought he was?

He tried to clear his head the way he did before a meet, so that the only thing in his mind was the straightest, fastest path from here to there. But this time, it would not be that easy. There was no right way. There was no guarantee that both of them would make it to the other side. Shivering, he focused on the long, white line of her throat, the beat at its hollow. He kept his eyes on her pulse as she disappeared out of his range

of vision to the far side of the carousel, holding his breath until he saw her coming back to him. They SAT ON THE CAROUSEL BENCH where mothers rode with the tiniest babies, the wood bubbly and thick beneath their hands from consecutive coats of paint. The bottle of Canadian Club rested between Chris's feet. He felt Emily shaking beside him, and preferred to think that she might be cold. Leaning over, he buttoned her jacket all the way. “You don't want to get sick,” he said, and then, considering his words, felt queasy. “I love you,” he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do.

When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own.

No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

He did not realize he'd begun to cry, partly in shock and partly in acceptance, until he tasted himself, slick and salty, on Emily's lips. It was not supposed to be this way; oh, God, but how could he be a hero when saving Em would only make her hurt more? Out of comfort, Emily's hands began to stroke his back, and he wondered, Who is here for whom? Then suddenly he had to be inside her, and with an urgency that surprised him he found himself ripping at her jeans and shoving them down her thighs, wrapping her legs around him as he came.

Take me with you, he thought.

Emily straightened her clothes, her cheeks flaming. Chris could not stop apologizing, as if the fact he'd forgotten a condom was something she'd hold against him for eternity. “It doesn't matter,” she said, tucking in her shirt, thinking, If you only knew.

He sat a few feet away from her, his hands clasped in his lap. His jeans were still unbuttoned, and the smell of sex carried on the wind. He felt unnaturally calm. “What do you want me to do,” he said, “afterward?”

They hadn't talked about it; in fact, until this moment Emily was not entirely sure that Chris wasn't going to do something completely stupid, like throw the bullets into the shrubbery when he went to load the chamber, or knock the gun out of her hand at the last minute. “I don't know,” she said, and she didn't: She'd never gotten this far in her thoughts. There was the planning, and the organization, and even the act itself-but the truth of being dead was not something she'd pictured. She cleared her throat. “Do anything,” she said. “Whatever you need to.” Chris traced a pattern on the floorboards with his thumbnail, a sudden stranger. “Is there a time?” he asked stiffly.

“Just not yet,” Emily whispered, and at the reprieve Chris buttoned his jeans and pulled her onto his lap. His arms closed around her and she leaned into him, thinking, Forgive me. His HANDS WERE SHAKING as he snapped open the chamber of the gun. The Colt would hold six bullets. After one was fired, the shell remained in the revolver. He explained all this to Emily as he fumbled in his shirt pocket, as if reciting the sheer mechanics of the act would make it that much less painful.