Nothing Else Occurs To Me

Chapter 15

The knight climbed on the horse, who started prancing. The knight lost the reins and hung on to the horse's neck. Laughter rose up and floated across the lake. Faintly.

And so Elizabeth told Michaela. She sat there, letting Michaela hold her hands, pouring a little cool water on them, rubbing them gently. She told her about her friendship with Kevin. About how they worked so well together, about their coffee shop meetings, and how that day on the lake it took a turn into more than friendship, and how the past few months, they'd gotten so close, and she'd felt so okay with everything, really, the first time she'd ever felt that way, that Kevin said he needed her. That they were best friends.

"Did you have sex?"

Elizabeth shook her head.

"Close?"

Elizabeth didn't say anything. She was remembering, trying to think what it was, what she did. What you would call it.

"What a prick." Elizabeth looked up. Michaela's tone was sharp. Blunt. Angrier than she'd ever heard before, and most of what Michaela said to almost everyone was angry and sharp. This was different. It was like the knife she usually carried had turned into an ax.

"I'm sure he didn't mean to – I mean, he's a good person – "

"No. He's. Not." Michaela looked as if she might shake Elizabeth. She nodded to her hands. "Good people don't do these things. Good 30-year old guys don't exploit and abuse – "

"-it wasn't abuse- "

"-abuse fifteen year old girls."

"He cared for me."

Michaela held up Elizabeth's own hands in front of her face. The red was turning to purple, and they were swelling. "No he didn't." She leaned back. "You have to tell," she said matter-of-factly.

The idea shocked Elizabeth. Even though she'd threatened herself a few minutes ago, it was as if someone else had said those words to Kevin. She tried to imagine it. She tried to imagine telling her mother, Brittany, Erin. She tried to imagine the whole parish knowing what she had done with Kevin. "No," she whispered. "Oh, I can't – he's leaving anyway. He's going to be a priest. I can't ruin that – it would be wrong – "

Michaela just looked at her. As if she were waiting. That she would just let Elizabeth keep talking and talking, and she would just wait.

But Elizabeth couldn't think of anything else to say. She was standing, paralyzed on a path cutting sharply through darkness, bending.

Michaela closed her eyes, thinking. She put her head in her hands. Now Elizabeth waited. 

"It would ruin everything for him," she said quietly. 

Michaela looked up.

"My mom was raped," she said.

Elizabeth waited, still. What could she say?

Michaela breathed in, several times, like she was preparing to run a race, to lift some heavy weights.

"She was 17 – our age. And she was living here, with my grandparents. Her dad was still alive." She gazed past Elizabeth at the woods behind. "I sort of wonder if it might have happened around here. She always said it was some wooded place outside of town. That's part of the reason I was here. That reunion made me want - I don't know. I was trying to see. I was trying to listen, to hear her. To help her." She sighed and shook her head. "I felt something, but I don't know what it was."