Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at.” I dig a third hole, lift another seedling out of the tray, and set the fragile roots into their new home.

“Aren’t you glad I made you get a hobby?” Mina asks, grinning. “When you become a world-famous botanist, I can say I’m responsible whenever I brag about you.”

“I think out of the two of us, you’re going to end up being the world-famous one,” I say, laughing.

“Well, that goes without saying,” Mina answers. “I’ll make sure to thank you when I win my Pulitzer.”

“I’m honored.”

Mina goes back to her chair and book, and I go back to my tomatoes. She flaps the neck of her tank top back and forth. “It’s so hot,” she complains.

I grind my good knee into the dirt, spacing the seedlings evenly apart, neat rows of three across, four down. “The twentieth’s coming up,” I say finally. “You okay?”

Mina shrugs, eyes glued to the page. The sun beats down my back, and I wonder if I’ve gone too far.

For a moment, I think that’s all I’m going to get out of her. But then she looks up at me. “I’m going to spend the day with Mom and Trev. She wants to go to Dad’s grave in the morning.”

“Do you…do you go out there a lot?” I ask. I’m curious, all of a sudden, and she seems willing to actually talk about it for once. I know that Mr. Bishop is buried in Harper’s Bluff, that he grew up here and that’s the main reason they moved back after his death. And the only reason I know that is the first time Mina and I got drunk, she’d slurred it out against my shoulder and cried and didn’t—or just maybe wouldn’t—remember the next morning.

“Sometimes,” Mina says. “I like to go and talk to him. It makes me feel closer. Like, I don’t know, maybe it’s easier for him to check on me there.”

“Check on you from heaven?” I ask, and I don’t mean it to be there, but there’s skepticism in my voice.

Mina frowns, sitting up straighter in her chair. “Of course, from heaven,” she says. “What—you don’t believe in it?”

I look away, shy under her scrutiny. We’ve never talked about this. I’ve avoided the subject. Mina isn’t devout like her mom, but she’s someone who believes. Who goes to Mass when her mom asks her to and wears the little golden crucifix that her dad gave her.

And I am me. I would’ve lost my faith after the crash, if I’d had any to lose.

“Not really.” I won’t lie about this when I’m already hiding more urgent things from her: the crushed-up pills and the dirty straws, the need for numbness that eats more of me up each day. She’s starting to notice how often I nod off in class. I make excuses, but she’s watching me closer.

I brush the dirt off my hands, standing up to find her staring at me like I’ve declared the sky is green. “Soph, you have to believe in heaven.”

“Why?” I ask.

“You just…you have to. What do you think happens when we die, then?”

“I don’t think anything happens,” I say. “I think this is it. All we get. And when we’re gone, we’re gone.”

She shifts in her chair, and the unhappy curve of her lips makes me wish I’d never answered the way I did. “That’s a crappy way to think. Why would you want to believe that?”

I’m quiet for a moment, rubbing my fingers against my knee, tracing the scar by memory. I can feel the bumps of the screws that lay under my skin through the material. “I don’t know. It’s just what I think.”

“It’s horrible,” Mina says.

“Why does it matter? I’m not an expert.”

“It matters,” she says.

“What, are you worried that I won’t end up there if there is a heaven?” I ask.

“Yes!”

I can’t stop the smile that stretches across my face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Mina says angrily. “Like you think it’s cute or something. My dad missed everything, all of my and Trev’s lives. The idea that he’s here still, that he’s keeping an eye on us? That’s not cute—that’s faith.”

“Hey.” I reach out to grasp her hands. She doesn’t pull away, even though my fingers are still dirty. “I didn’t mean…I’m—I’m glad it makes you feel better. But I don’t have that in me. It doesn’t make me right or you wrong, it’s just how it is.”

“You have to believe in something,” Mina protests.

I squeeze her hands and she grips mine back, tight, like I’m going to disappear any second.

“I believe in you,” I say.

NOW (JUNE)

Trev’s late by almost twenty minutes. I’ve almost given up hope he’ll show when the doorbell rings. My parents are out on their weekly date night, so I let him in the house and we stand awkwardly in the foyer for a moment. I don’t know what to say to him now that he knows.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I say.

He follows me up the stairs, and I pause at the top, my back aching at the injection points. When we get to my room, he hovers in the doorway as I walk over to my desk and sit down.

He closes the door behind him and stands at the edge of my bed, waiting.

“Kyle filled you in on Mina’s notes?” I ask.

Trev nods. “We looked at the time line and some of the articles she saved.”

“There are three interviews,” I say. “Mina talked to Matt Clarke, Jackie’s grandfather, and her little sister, Amy, all in December. Mina dropped the case after talking to Amy, because she got those threats. Something made her go after it again in February, but I’m not sure what.”

“She was always bad at leaving things alone,” he mutters. “She probably figured the risk was worth it.”

It’s almost a relief, his frustration. It makes me feel less guilty about my own.

“Did she ever mention Jackie to you?” I ask. “Even in passing?”

“Not since you guys were freshmen. She was really into figuring it out back then. Remember? It was kind of creepy.”

“She wanted to know what happened. People were still talking about it when I got out of the hospital and back to school. She was curious,” I say.

“She was too curious,” Trev says, and his voice cracks on the words. “She was fucking reckless.”

“You can’t blame her,” I say, and it comes out low and shaky. “Yes, she was stupid not to tell anyone what was going on. But it isn’t her fault. It’s his fault. He killed her, whoever the hell he is. And he’s going to pay.”

Trev looks at me with shiny eyes, and I can see it happen, the way he pulls himself together, seems to grow a foot, his shoulders squaring. “Play Matt’s first. We were friends. Maybe I’ll catch something.”

I click on Matt’s interview, keying up my speakers. There’s a bit of static, and then:

“Okay. You ready, Matt?”

The moment her voice fills the room, I’m flooded with it, the pain and relief that comes from hearing her again. Trev sinks onto the edge of the bed, his fingers knotted, eyes closed.

Hearing her, it’s not the same.

But it’s all we have.

“How did you and Jackie meet?” Mina asks.

I force myself to focus on Matt’s answer. He has a deep, slow voice, and he pauses between his sentences, like he’s thinking carefully about each word. “Our moms were friends,” he says. “She was always around, you know? Girl next door. I asked her out in eighth grade, and that was it.”

“That’s a long time to be together,” Mina says, and I can almost hear the encouraging smile in her voice.

“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “She was special.”

“It must have been really hard for you when she went missing.”

There’s a long silence, only broken by rustles and a clinking sound. “Yeah. It was horrible for everyone. Everyone loved Jackie.”

I look anywhere but at Trev as the recording continues. Mina asks Matt about school, about his and Jackie’s friends, about Jackie’s involvement in youth group and soccer; ordinary, unassuming questions that won’t make him suspicious. Slowly but surely, she gets him to open up to her, until she’s asking about the weeks before Jackie disappeared, about Detective James and how he’d treated Matt during the questioning.

“That guy’s an ass,” Matt scoffs, an edge in his voice. “He thought he had it all figured out. I wanted to let him search my truck, but my uncle Rob kept saying they had to get a warrant. Detective James spent so much time thinking I did it, he didn’t look anywhere else, and the case got cold. Everyone always says that the first three days are the most important when someone goes missing.”

“But he let you go.”

“He didn’t have anything on me,” Matt says.

On the recording, a phone rings. “Just one more question before you get that. You and Jackie—you guys were, you know, intimate, right?”

There’s another long pause while the phone rings and rings. I can picture Mina sitting there, baldly asking Matt if he’d had sex with his girlfriend, that calm smile on her face, like she wasn’t crossing some line.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Matt says. “And I think we’re done now.”

“Of course,” Mina says. There’s a rustling sound, and then the recording cuts off abruptly.

I look over at Trev, and my heart jackknifes in my chest at the sheen in his eyes. “We don’t have to listen to any more,” I say quickly.

His face hardens and he says quietly, “Play them.”

I press Play.

Mina’s interview with Jackie’s grandfather is focused on Jackie’s childhood. She doesn’t ask any questions about the case, but once Jack Dennings starts talking about Jackie’s teen years, Mina keeps steering the interview back to her relationship with Matt.

I can hear the whistle of the six o’clock train downtown as I grit my teeth and click on the final interview—the one with Jackie’s sister, Amy. As it begins to play, I realize the file’s less than a minute long. Both Matt’s and Jack’s interviews were more than fifteen.

“What’s that?” a girl’s voice asks.

“I was going to record the interview,” Mina says. “That okay?”

“No,” Amy says. “I told you, I’m not supposed to talk to you. Turn it off.”

“Okay,” Mina says. There’s a shuffling sound, and then the recording cuts off abruptly.

Trev frowns. “That’s it?”

“I guess.” I do a quick global search of Amy’s name to see if Mina had transcribed the interview somewhere instead of recording it, but all that comes up is the time line document. “She didn’t put the interview in here.”

“What do you think they talked about?”

“Well, when I talk to Amy, I’ll ask her. She’s friends with Kyle’s little brother; I’m gonna try to nail down her schedule.”

“You do that, and I’ll call Matt,” Trev says.

“Are you still in touch?” Trev had never spent much time with Mina or me at school. I knew who his friends were, but I’d never been around them much.

“I’ve seen him a few times since I left for college. Playing soccer with the old team, you know.”

“How bad was Matt into drugs?” I ask. “Are we talking a little pot, or pills or…”

“Meth,” Trev says.

“Shit.”

“Yeah. But that didn’t happen until after Jackie disappeared. Or at least, none of our group knew about it. I mean, he was definitely getting to a place where people were worried. His dad left when we were freshmen, and Matt got into a lot of fights after. The whole thing with Jackie just kind of pushed him over the edge.”

“Do you think he could’ve killed her?”

Trev gets up from my bed, walking over to my window and pushing my blue curtains aside to look down at the front yard. “Back then, I would’ve said no way.”

“What about now?”

Trev doesn’t say anything for a while, just stares out my window, his jaw tense. “I have no idea,” he says. “Maybe they were in love. Maybe she hated him. Maybe he killed her. I’m not really trusting my ability to judge people right now.”

I look away.

“I should go,” Trev says. “I’ll call Matt.”

“See if we can meet him tomorrow,” I say. “Maybe he said something to Mina off the record or talked to someone else about Mina’s interest in Jackie. Or maybe he did it.”

As I talk, I lean forward on my desk so I can push myself up and out of my chair. My back is killing me. After the shots, it’s always worse for a day or two before it gets better, and I can’t hide my sharp intake of breath when I get to my feet too fast.

Trev turns at the sound, but I make it to my bed and ease myself down belly-first before he can move to help me.