Ashes, Ashes

18 - Confessions {TW rape mention}

Dawn walked close to me on our way back to the cabin, leaning into my body like a frightened dog during a thunderstorm. I didn't mind, even though it was hard to keep balance on the frost-slick earth with her pressed in so close. 

"I wish I had one of Richard's cigarettes," I muttered. I frowned. "Where is he, anyway?" 

Dawn shook her head. 

"I'm sure he's fine," I added, not sure if it was for my comfort or hers. I wasn't sure of anything at this point. But at least Richard had a gun. He wasn't defenseless. 

What good would a gun do against a trap, a nasty voice in the back of my head wondered. Would having a gun have saved Abby? 

"Logan." Dawn slowed to a stop, and lingering now just a few feet from the cabin door. "Do you...do you really think it's Parker doing all of this?" 

Not long ago, she had been certain of her husband's innocence -- and who could blame her? But there was hesitation in her now, just enough uncertainty to peel at the edges of her disbelief. 

"I don't know," I admitted. 

My voice came out in the monotone of shock, the flat affect left behind when a body's started shutting down its nonessential, complicated functions. I'd observed it plenty of times in the hospital, a fly-on-the-wall eavesdropper to the family fear and grief. In the movies, reactions are all melodrama, tears and theatrics, screaming and fainting. In real life, more often than not, people take bad news in stunned silence. Training takes over, people falling back on rote politeness. 

From the outside, it looks like keeping a cool head in a crisis. 

From the inside, it feels like nothing. 

"Do you remember the fight last night?" Dawn asked, hesitantly, and I could tell  that she was really asking a different question than that. 

"Yeah. Mostly." 

"So you remember. What...what Richard got so mad about." She circled around the topic, and then seemed to crumple, exhaling and letting out some of the tension in her shoulders along with it. "Did you know? About Laurel and Parker?" 

That was a hard question to answer. It would have been hard enough without the visions of corpses every time I closed my eyes. There had been so much death between who I was in that moment and who I had been, years ago, when Laurel had come home in those first gray hours after daybreak looking disheveled and haunted. 

She hadn't wanted to tell me what was wrong. Her initial response, as always, was anger; Laurel had always been one to lash out when she felt threatened. But pieces came out, eventually, details getting added and adjusted, like getting a glimpse of a yard through the gaps in a fence, and years later I was never sure I'd gotten the whole story. It was all just a series of paradoxes, a confused jumble of unhappy contradictions. 

But it didn't matter, not really, because it wasn't my story to know. I didn't have any rights to it. And unlike Laurel, I wasn't in the business of stealing other people's pain to weave into my own sort of narrative. 

"She tried to tell me," Dawn continued, taking my silence as an invitation. "Laurel, I mean. She tried to warn me about...what kind of person Parker was." 

She broke from where she had been frozen in place and led the way into the cabin, and I had to fight back a momentary, terrified certainty that another axe was waiting on the other side of the door. My gut clenched and I held my breath until she was inside, then I hurried to follow her. The fire we'd carefully tried to resurrect in the hearth had burned down to embers, and I thought about how lucky we were that a spark hadn't strayed while we were all distracted; how easy it would have been for the whole cabin to burn to the ground, tragedy compounded by further tragedy. 

"I didn't know that," I said, trying to keep up with Dawn's faltering confession even as my brain threatened to splinter off into a half-dozen doomsday scenarios. 

"She told me that they were both drunk, and they'd hooked up. But she didn't want to, anymore. She told him to stop, that she'd changed her mind, that it wasn't what she wanted. And then...later. She was asleep, or passed out, or whatever. And she woke up, and he was...." she trailed off, breath hitching into a hiccup of a sob. 

"Jesus." I didn't think anything could still send me reeling, not after what I'd seen, not with the after-image of Abby's twitching body still burned into my memory. Not after what I had done for Laurel -- what Laurel had made me do. I didn't think there could still be unplumbed depths to my horror. But even nothingness can tremble, and I noticed my hands shaking as I tried to snatch a blanket off a mattress. I felt puzzle pieces, bits of things Laurel had once said, bump uneasily together, trying to match up the edges but not quite succeeding. 

Things had started to fall apart, piece by piece, before Dawn came onto the scene. She'd been a convenient scapegoat, an obvious catalyst, the outsider who broke into the impenetrable fortress of our friendship and tore it all apart. But maybe she'd just come in at the end, the culmination of a storm: Laurel and Richard, Laurel and Parker, Laurel and her secrets. 

"I didn't believe her," Dawn said. "Why would I? I knew they had a history together. I thought she must just be jealous, like she wanted to chase me off. I figured there was no way she'd still be friends with him if he had actually...you know. Raped her." 

The words took effort for her to get out. 

"I don't...I don't know," I admitted, and hated it, knowing it was an unacceptable answer. You should have an opinion on something like this. You should be able to say, definitively and without question, where the lines of morality get drawn, like human monstrosity is something with hard edges. But there I was, floundering, because if the rules were drawn in black and white, then I was a murderer. 

"Is that the story she told you?" Dawn turned to me, her expression pleading. "Did you...did you invite Parker here, knowing?" 

I shook my head, blankets bundled in my arms. We needed to get moving. We didn't have time for this conversation. But, at the same time, it felt life-or-death important to have it -- and not just from the intensity in Dawn's face, but because of the motive underlying her question, because it was suddenly the only question that mattered in the moment. "Laurel never told me what happened," I said. "Not really. I knew...something happened. But I never heard the story." 

Dawn's gaze traveled to the floor, downcast and cloudy. It wasn't the answer she wanted to hear. I didn't blame her; it wasn't the answer I'd wanted to give. 

"Laurel kept a lot of secrets," I said, and bitterness crept in at the edges of that monotone that had co-opted my voice. A confession of my own threatened to rise like bile, burning at the back of my throat, and if Dawn had stayed silent it might have spilled out of me. 

But instead, she asked: "Do you think he did it?" And, on the heels of that, bundled as if they were a single thought, "Do you think he could really be a killer?" 

And there we were, back at the beginning, the question that was obviously circling round and round in Dawn's head like water down a drain, and I didn't know how to answer her. I couldn't imagine how it must feel to be her, wrestling with the possibility that the person she loved most in the world could be the worst kind of monster. 

Then again, a part of me knew maybe all too well how that might feel. 

"Let's focus on getting out of here," I said, instead. "Let's just find Richard and go get some help and we can figure it all out when we're safe." 

The words felt right, but they sounded hollow, and I wished I had something better to offer.