Tess Sharpe - Far From You

I keep staring at the wall. I can’t look at him. Not now.

“I don’t want to talk anymore today.”

“Okay,” David says. “We’ll sit here just a few minutes longer, in case you change your mind.”

When I get into the car, my phone vibrates. I’d turned it off during my session, but now I see that Rachel has left me a message.

I call my voice mail and freeze in the act of turning my keys in the ignition, listening to the message play: “It’s me. I got the drive open. You need to call me. I think I know why Mina was killed.”

TEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“We’re lost,” I insist.

“No, we’re not.” Mina navigates Trev’s truck down the dirt utility road we’ve been on for the past thirty minutes. It’s dark outside, and the Ford’s brights cut through the forest as we rock back and forth on the rough road. “Amber said off Route 3, down the second road to the right.”

“We’re totally lost,” I say. “No way there’s a campground out this far. There’s nothing here but trees and deer.”

Mina sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll turn around. Maybe we missed a turnoff or something.”

The trees are too thick to get a signal, so I can’t call Amber to tell her why Mina and I are so late to join her and Adam at the campground. Mina backs the truck up slowly—the road we’re on is cut out of the mountain, hugging a cliff that’s so steep, I can’t see the bottom in the darkness. The wheels skirt close to the slope and Mina bites her lip in concentration, her knuckles white against the wheel. After a few false starts, she finally gets us turned around, but we only get a half a mile before a thunka-dunk, thunka-dunk reverberates through the cab, and the ride gets even bumpier.

“Crap.” Mina slows to a stop. “I think we have a flat.”

I grab the flashlight from the glove box and follow her out of the truck, shining the beam on the tire.

Mina frowns. “Do you know how to change it?”

I shake my head and look down the road. It’s at least three miles back to the highway. I rub absently at my leg, thinking about how much it’s gonna hurt, walking that far.

Mina pulls her phone out and stomps around, trying to get a signal. I don’t tell her it’s useless, because she’s got that determined look on her face and she keeps throwing glances at my leg, like she knows the hurt I’m anticipating. I lean against a big piece of slate that’s embedded in the mountain looming over us like a gray giant, and wait for her to admit defeat. It’s August, but it’s still cool at night, and I like the little shiver that goes down my back, the prickle of goose bumps over my skin. It’s nice being out here in the forest; loud in its own way, the rustle and cracks in the undergrowth—hopefully a deer instead of a bear—the groan of the branches in the wind punctuated by the steady crunch of Mina’s boots against the road. I close my eyes and let the sounds fill me.

“You don’t have any signal?” Mina asks hopefully after about five minutes of walking back and forth, waving her phone around.

“Nope. We should start walking,” I say. “It’s not like we’re blocking a main road. We’ll get Trev to come change the tire in the morning.”

“Don’t be stupid. I can’t make you walk that far. I’ll go get help and come back for you.”

“I’m being stupid? You’re the one who failed the wilderness skills part of Girl Scouts. You’ll probably get eaten by a bear. You go, I go.”

“It’s a road. I can’t get lost following a road. And anyway, you couldn’t walk that far,” she says.

“Sure I can.”

“No way,” she says, her mouth set mulishly.

“You can’t tell me what to do. I’m coming.”

“No!” Mina says.

“Yes,” I say, starting to get annoyed. “What is up with you? Stop treating me like I’m—”

“Weak?” she finishes for me. “Disabled? Hurt?” Her voice rises with each word, trembling and high-pitched, like they’ve been stuck in her forever, now finally free.

I jerk back from her, like she’s hit me instead of just telling the truth. Even though she’s standing ten feet away, I need more distance from her. I stumble, achingly aware of my clumsiness in that moment. “What the hell, Mina?”

But I’ve inadvertently unleashed something in her, and she keeps talking, the words spilling out in the night. “If you walk that far, you’ll use it as an excuse to take more of those stupid pills. And then you’re gonna be all dopey and zoned out, like you always are lately. I know you’re in pain, Soph; I know that. But I also know you. You’re hurting yourself, and either no one else has noticed or they’re not saying it. So I guess I’m going to say it. You need to stop. Before it becomes a problem.”

Panic and relief twine inside me. Panic, because she knows, and relief, because she doesn’t realize how bad it is. She thinks I’m still at the edge of the hole, ready to throw myself off, instead of in it so deep that I can barely see her at the top.

There’s still time to fix this.

To lie my way out.

I don’t even think about taking her seriously, because I’m fine. I’ve got it under control, and it’s none of her business.

It’s partly her fault.

“Please, Sophie, I need you to hear me,” she says. Her eyes are wide and concerned in the glare of the headlights, and I stifle a wild urge to tell her, for a second, about how far I’ve gone, what I’ve done, what I’ve become.

But then the love she has for me—whatever kind that is—will be gone. I know it. How could she love me when I’m like this?

“You’re right,” I say. “I’ll talk to my doctors about it, okay?”

“You will?” she asks, and she seems so small. She’s tiny, of course, but right now she sounds it. “Really?”

“Really,” I say, my stomach turning at the lie. I tell myself I will ask them, that I’ll do it for her.

But deep down, I know I won’t.

I can’t.

She gallops back to hug me. The scent of vanilla floods me, the smell of damp and green from the forest mingling with it to make the best perfume. Her hands are warm, looped around my waist, her face pressed into my neck as she breathes, the relief pouring off her.

She heads off into the night with a flashlight and a water bottle, and I stay obediently in the truck like a good girl.

I wait until she’s out of sight before fishing out the container of pills in my bag.

I shake out four and swallow them dry.

NOW (JUNE)

I can’t get hold of Rachel. After a half hour of pacing my bedroom, I toss the phone (six unanswered calls, five texts, three messages) in my purse and head downstairs. She must be at her house. I’ll go there.

But when I pull my front door open, Kyle is standing on my porch.

“What are you doing here?” I want to push past him, get him out of my way, out of my sight.

What had Rachel found? Why isn’t she calling me back?

“I want to talk to you,” Kyle says.

“Now is really not a good time.” I step outside, lock the door behind me, and head down the porch stairs.

“You ambush me twice, and now you don’t have five minutes?” He follows me down the driveway, so close it makes the back of my neck flush with anger.

“You lied to the police, sabotaged a murder investigation, and got me locked up in rehab—all because you were jealous. Forgive me if I’m still pissed at you.”

I open the car door and he slams it shut, making me jump. I look up, and for the first time, I see the circles under his bloodshot eyes.

I remember what Adam had said about Kyle crying the night before Mina died. How thick Kyle’s voice had gotten when he’d revealed that she’d told him the truth.

He had loved her. It made me queasy, but I didn’t doubt it. And I understood too well the frustration, the evisceration, of loving and losing her.

“I have to go. If you want to talk, get in,” I say, against my better judgment. “If not, get out of my way.”

He glances at my purse. “You’re not gonna spray me in the face with that bear repellent, right?”

“In or out, Kyle. I don’t care.” I climb in the car, turning the key. He sprints to the other side and opens the door, throwing himself in as I hit the gas. “Put on your seat belt.” It’s an automatic order that’s given to anyone who gets in my car. Trev does it, too, a tic that neither of us can break.

After a few minutes of silence, Kyle’s leg jiggling up and down, I roll my eyes and switch the radio on. “You choose,” I say.

He turns the dial as I speed down the street, heading toward Old 99, east of town.

“So where are we going?” he asks, settling the radio on the new country station and looking out the window.

“I have to meet someone. You’ll stay in the car.”

Kyle rolls his eyes.

“You gonna tell me what you want?” I pass an old lady in a Cadillac crawling twenty miles below the speed limit and press harder on the gas as we turn down Main to get to the on-ramp. We pass the old brick building City Hall’s been in since the town was founded back in the gold rush days. Hanging over the entryway there’s a banner advertising the upcoming Strawberry Festival. Mina used to make me go, play those stupid rigged carnival games, eat way too much shortcake.

“I really didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” Kyle says.

“If you’re gonna lie to me, you might not want to do it to my face.”

“Okay, I did want to get you in trouble,” Kyle admits. “But that was only when I thought you were already in trouble. I wouldn’t have done it if knew you were being set up. I think I screwed up. Because…if it wasn’t about drugs, that means it was something else, right?”

“Duh.”

I turn onto the highway. This time of year, Old 99 is a gray line cutting through a sea of yellowed grass and barbed wire fences, speckled with the dark green of scrub oaks. Cows dot the fields, dirt roads branch off the highway, tumbledown barns and ranches are set away from the cars’ searching headlights. It’s peaceful. Time seems to move slower.

I know how deceptive that can be.

“And it wasn’t a mugging,” Kyle continues. “I know he took your purses and stuff, but if it was a mugging, why would he shoot just one of you? Why would he shoot anyone, if he got what he wanted? Why wouldn’t he take the car? Why would he leave you alive? Why would he plant drugs?”

He’s really been thinking about this. I wonder if the circles under his eyes are a result of staying up too late to page through articles about Mina’s death. If he has a copy of the police report, like I do. If he has it memorized yet.

I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “That’s what I’ve been saying for months. But, weirdly, people haven’t been listening to me.”

“I told you I screwed up,” Kyle says quietly. “I apologized. I explained why.”

“It’s not that easy,” I say. “You helped derail the entire police investigation. You helped lock me up in rehab, where I got to sit and think about how Mina’s killer was walking around free and clear, with nobody looking for him. An apology can’t change any of that. We’re not in first grade anymore. Admitting you screwed up is not going to fix it or catch the killer. So all I can do now is pick up the pieces and try to put them together myself.”

“I want to help.”

A squirrel dashes out onto the road, and I jerk the wheel to avoid it, overcorrecting into the next lane. For a horrible second, I think I’m going to lose control of the car and crash.

“Shit, Sophie.” Kyle’s hand is on the wheel, and he’s half leaning over me, pulling the car off the road, onto the shoulder as I bring the car to a shaky stop.

I whimper, bite at the inside of my mouth, trying to get my lips to stop trembling as I twist the key and the engine shuts off. I suck air in through my nose.

“Hey.” Kyle frowns and pats my shoulder clumsily. Weirdly, it makes me feel better. “We’re okay. It’s fine.”

I’m gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles are white. My lungs are tight; my heart hammers inside my chest. I’m not getting enough air. I want to sag against the wheel, press my face against the cool glass of the window, but I can’t do that in front of him. I won’t. So I just focus on breathing. In and out. In and out.

When I’ve finally gotten myself back to normal, Kyle asks quietly, “Should I drive?”

In and out. In and out. Two more deep breaths, and I release my death grip on the wheel. “I’m fine,” I say.

I turn the engine back on and push on the gas, kicking up dirt clouds as I turn back onto the road.