Three Quarters Dead (16 page)

“This is the part you’re not going to understand, Kerry. The part you’re so not ready for, but try to keep up. If I could have stopped time in the second before I hit the tree . . . but it was too late, and I couldn’t. I broke the windshield, and the windshield broke me. Still, I get what I want, and I wasn’t ready to—walk away from my life. I was dead, against the tree in all that bent metal and broken glass and tree bark. I was dead, but it wasn’t what I
wanted.
Don’t you see that? It wasn’t
my decision.
So I was standing beside the car too, just a little safe distance away. By that ditch, in the weeds with my phone still in my hand. The me that matters.”

She put her hand out in the dark and touched my bare arm. I flinched, but it was to show me which me she meant. “Not the ghost of me. Me. The me who doesn’t negotiate,” she said. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re not there yet.”

No. But somehow I saw it. She made me see it. The soft, sunny Saturday afternoon out on the Country Club Road and the mangled car totaled around the tree like all the pictures. I saw Tanya sprawled there at the end of what had been the hood. The buckled hood. Her head against the apple tree, her forehead . . . embedded. I saw her arms flung out, woven into the branches, and the apple blossoms still falling in her hair. And some blood. Not a lot.

I saw that like a witness on the scene. Then I looked beside the crumpled car, and there Tanya stood, with that mark on her forehead like a dark star, but perfect otherwise. Always the best-looking girl anywhere and the first one you noticed. She stood there with her phone in her hand, and it rang. It was me, trying to call her back, but she didn’t have time for that, for me.

“I’d snubbed death like you snub a teacher,” she was saying with her eyes on the road. “But this was the first real moment of my life I hadn’t shaped for myself. And I couldn’t afford another one. I could feel the life leaking out of me. I could feel myself being pulled back toward the car, to the tree. Like . . . undertow.”

She needed Natalie and Makenzie, I thought. She had to rule to live.

She heard me knowing that. “I looked all around. Cars were beginning to stop. I found Natalie first, in high grass, farther than I could believe. She’d been in the front seat beside me, where you are now. But then she was way over there in the grass. All arranged, of course, with her purse in her hand. You know Natalie. Not a mark on her. It was like she was just asleep.

“But there was something wrong with the way her head was, like a little crooked on her neck. And I saw she was dead. I came as close to panic as I ever do. ‘Natalie, come back here, right now,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve never done a thing on your own, ever. You wouldn’t know how. You wouldn’t know the first thing about it. You couldn’t find the food court without following the crowd.’

“And she opened her eyes and was looking right up at me. Those big violet eyes. Her neck hurt. She put her hand back there. ‘Never mind about that,’ I said to her. ‘We’ve got to find Makenzie.’

“And when she stood up, the Natalie who’d broken her neck when she was thrown all that way—
that
Natalie was still there in the grass, perfectly arranged. You know Natalie. She could make even breaking her neck look like the Joffrey Ballet. Natalie reached down and took the purse out of her own hand. Then she tucked her hair behind her ears, and we went looking for Makenzie.”

Ahead of the Cadillac, something small with four legs scurried out on the highway. The creature turned its reflector eyes on us, and Tanya tapped the brake. It darted away into darkness.

“We found her right away, facedown in weeds,” Tanya said. “She was just then dying. A shudder was going through her. Like a tremor. ‘No, you don’t, Makenzie,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t even
think
about it. You’re—what? Sixteen? You’re not going anywhere. You’re so totally not ready.’

“I was down on my knees, turning her over. I didn’t know how she’d look, but she was perfect too. Not even the beginnings of a bruise. Nothing but grass stains. I think it must have been her heart. She’d slipped away, and her eyes were fixed and staring, so I’d just missed her.

“‘No, Makenzie, keep your eyes right here. Right here.’

“‘Where?’ she said from somewhere down deep—somewhere else. Then she blinked away her dead girl’s stare and saw me. She did what I told her to do.

“‘Focus,’ I said, and she did.

“‘Crikey, that was close, wasn’t it?’ she said in that accent of hers. Then she got up from herself.”

We were driving deeper in the dark now. We hadn’t met a car for a long time, and I was looking for the turnoff. It was time for the turnoff.

“We brushed ourselves off, and I told them to start walking, away from the road,” Tanya said. “Away from the . . . scene. ‘And don’t run, for Pete’s sake. Don’t draw attention.’ More cars were stopping. People were getting on their phones. Golfers were coming off the course. But we kept walking, and everybody was looking the other way, back at the . . . tree.

“But so what? What if they’d seen the three of us? Nobody knew there’d been three of us in the car. It could have been just me, there on the tree. They didn’t find Natalie and Makenzie till later.

“We skirted around the ninth hole of the golf course and just kept going. Natalie’s neck was bothering her, but basically she was all right. And she’d hung on to her purse, which was lucky because we’d need train tickets.

“We walked and walked, mostly across yards and parking lots. Parking lots are fine. You could be anybody in a parking lot. Then we were on a sidewalk somewhere. It must have been Hartsdale. We took the train from there. To New York and Aunt Lily’s. We had to be someplace.”

Tanya flipped the turn signal, and there just ahead, past the massive hood, was the turnoff. Westchester Road, then across the Metro-North tracks and the intersection with Harper Street—Alyssa’s street. Then on up to—

“Aren’t we there yet?” came Makenzie’s voice, half asleep from the backseat. “Aren’t we getting close?”

We were. We were coming up to the light at Linden Street. My street.
If the light was red and we had to stop, I could snap myself out of the seat belt and—

But the light was green. It
would
be for Tanya. We gunned on up the hill, through the sleeping town. Nobody’d be up at this hour except for the after-prom people. Everybody else would be safe at home.

“I don’t know how I did it,” Tanya said quietly. “But I’m not surprised I did. They rose up because I said so—Natalie and Makenzie. I raised them from the dead.”

THE GATES OF the Haverkamp estate stood open, and the gatehouse glowed. Gas torches flamed up in the dark. Big, billowing silk flags flanked the gates. One flag in blue and silver, Pondfield High colors. The other in Harvard red—crimson—because Chase Haverkamp had gotten in there. The road was lined with cars. SUVs were pulled off on the shoulders.

We crept past the front gates in the hulking Cadillac. Only a few stragglers were walking up the private drive to the house. Late arrivals to the A-list party.

Tanya drove on past more cars and turned up a little side street, deeper into darkness. Up here all the lights were out in the McMansions, except for the little pinpoint gleams from the security systems, like sequin stars.

She pulled in under a tree. When she shut off the engine and killed the lights, my seat belt felt tighter. I was having trouble breathing. But I didn’t have to meet her gaze in the inky night. I couldn’t see the arch of her eyebrows.

“Why are we doing this?” I said. “How can you go to the party? You can’t.”

“No.” One of her hands seemed to rest on the bottom of the big metal steering wheel. “But you can, Kerry. That’s what you’re for.”

“I don’t want to,” I said, though when had whining ever helped? “I want to go—”

“It doesn’t matter what you want, Kerry. It never has. There’s something you’ve forgotten. You have a very convenient memory, even for somebody your age. Try to remember.”

I sat there, strapped down by the seat belt. She’d hear if I tried to unsnap the clasp, make a run for it. In these heels? I tried to remember what I was supposed to remember. Maybe if I did, she’d let me—

“The phone call, Kerry—when I called you . . . from the car. If you’d picked up on the first ring like you should have, maybe—just maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe you wouldn’t have our blood on your hands.”

“But I—”

“But you didn’t pick up on the first ring. You don’t know the first thing about responsibility. About what you owe other people. But tonight’s the night you learn.”

I was numb now, all over, and she owned me. She owned every corner of my mind.

Then just as Tanya was unfastening her seat belt, Makenzie said—suddenly from the backseat—“She’s gone.”

Just those two words.

We were both out of our seat belts and heaving open the huge, heavy old car doors, Tanya and I. There was nowhere to run now. I couldn’t find my feet, in the ditch, in the dark. The dome light inside the car was on, making everything outside blacker than before.

Tanya was yanking open the back door on her side, the street side. I was pulling on the back door on mine. Makenzie was jammed against it, as far from Natalie as she could get. Now she tumbled out and was clutching me, clinging. I could feel her hands all over me, and we were staggering in a ditch. Doing this dance.

The dome light was ghastly, glaring, and Natalie was sprawled against the big overstuffed backseat. And for the first time ever, there was nothing graceful about her. She still wore her gloves. I saw that and I was glad about it. Relieved or something. The red satin of her dress glared back at the dome light.

Her head had fallen forward, Natalie’s. It hung down from her broken neck.

“Natalie,” Tanya said, but there was something hopeless in her voice, so it wasn’t quite Tanya. “Natalie, come—” She was reaching into the car with both hands, to take Natalie by her satin shoulders, give her a shake. Natalie’s head lolled back against the seat in the awful light.

And she had no face.

Her hair was tucked, smooth and blue-black, behind her ears. But she had no face. I can’t tell you more. I can’t tell you more than that. She’d been dead for weeks.

And the satin of her dress was settling against—nothing. Bones, maybe. Maybe not even bones. But not Natalie.

She was dead. This was real. I staggered, blind and crazy, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Where do you go in a nightmare? Makenzie had me in a grip, stronger than I could believe.

“She couldn’t help it,” Makenzie whispered in a rushed way against me, against my sequined front. “Natalie couldn’t. She’d stayed as long as she could. We all stayed as long as we could.”

The spikes of Makenzie’s hair brushed my face, and that hideous smell of burning—burning flesh—cut my eyes and filled the night. That suffocating smell that I breathed in before I could stop myself.

I pried her off me, and pushed her as hard as I could back onto the car seat. I got rid of her, but I could still feel the clutch of her hands on my bare arms. And the smell of her on me.
That
smell. It was a coffin inside the car now, where I pushed her. It always had been—a tufted, overstuffed coffin, with ashtrays. I wouldn’t look. I couldn’t. Besides, the car was full of swirling smoke now, cremation smoke. Makenzie was smoldering. And that death smell, all mixed up with Arpège and apple blossom.

I whirled around, ready to run now, even if I broke both legs. Even if I ran off the edge of the world. I was gasping for air. And there—right in front of me in the dark—was Tanya. Somehow she was on this side of the smoking car, with something in her hand. Tanya there, between me and . . . escape.

Chalky pale in the smoky light, dark-starred Tanya. It was my backpack she was holding.

“They’re gone,” she said. “I’m going. It won’t be long now.”

Go now,
I said, inside my head. I was screaming in there.
Go now and leave me in—

“I only have minutes more,” she said. “That’s as far as the evening will take me.”

Only minutes. But you couldn’t trust Tanya with time.

“It’s party time,” she said.

AND YOU COULD hear it behind her in the dark, the sounds of the after-prom party. There in the distance the clink and babble and splash of an A-list party around a pool.

“Don’t worry,” Tanya said, looking right through me to the next thing she wanted. “I only need to say good-bye to Spence. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fun. He won’t even remember it later. It won’t make sense, so he’ll think somebody spiked his drink or something. He won’t remember a thing.”

We were walking in the dark now, away from the street and the Cadillac. She didn’t even have to hold on to me. Not with her hand. It was my backpack in her hand.