Ashes, Ashes

20 - Something is Missing

I found a granola bar in the bottom of my bag, squished and crumbling, and split it with Dawn. We drank the remains of a 2-liter of flat soda, an abandoned mixer from last night; it tasted like something you'd put in a hummingbird feeder, sweet and sticky. There was a bag of chips, too, mostly crumbs, and I upended it into my mouth and grimaced against the salty dust. 

I'd have to wait to see if the food would stop my trembling. 

I contemplated a change of clothes. It seemed stupid to take a shower when there was a murderer prowling the woods, but it seemed stupider somehow to walk around coated in Abby's blood, brown-black and flaking off my skin, working its stinking putrefaction deep down into the fibers of my shirt.

"I'll watch the door for you," Dawn offered, offering a wry, twisted smile. "If you'll do the same for me." 

We lingered a while outside the bathrooms, hesitant. The knowledge of what was waiting in the Women's room -- Liza's body, with its tangle of guts -- loomed. The harder I tried not to think about it, the larger it grew in my thoughts, threatening to drown out everything else. I shivered. The tips of my fingers had gone gray-blue with cold, gooseflesh bristling my forearms. I tried not to look at the trail of dried blood staining the snow, scattered and stamped down by the footprints we'd all left behind while milling around outside. 

Crime scene contamination, I thought, an unpleasant familiarity bumping into my head, a half-sensation memory of coroners and EMTs and cops swarming over Dawn's house. 

"Suicide is selfish," I'd told her once. We'd been drinking, just catching up, and the conversation had strayed sideways as it usually did when we were together. I don't remember how we'd gotten onto the topic. The news, maybe, whatever most recent celebrity death had made the headlines. It hadn't been important. We'd been talking just to talk. You never realize that things gain meaning, not until later. "There's all this collateral damage, all the grieving loved ones. It's like spreading the pain out more instead of fixing anything." 

"It's an end to suffering," Laurel had insisted, squaring off against me in the posture of a challenge, jaw set and smoky eyes narrowed. "And people deserve to choose when they're finished suffering. You know, actual civilized countries have euthanasia laws. Old people and the terminally ill and whoever else can choose when to die with dignity." 

"That's different," I'd said, then, not knowing. 

"No one gets to define somebody else's suffering," Laurel had insisted. 

"Even if you're inflicting suffering on somebody else?" 

She had shrugged. "Everybody dies, Logan. It always hurts. What difference does it make whether it happens sooner or later, except to the person who's already suffering?" 

I didn't have an answer for her then. It would be years before I would, and by then of course it was too late to explain it to her. 

It's possible, maybe, that Laurel had never felt a drop of guilt in her life. If anyone could walk through life without feeling the burn of shame, it had to be her -- so cool and collected and utterly fearless 

(Logan I'm scared please) 

right up to the end. 

So maybe she wouldn't understand, or couldn't understand, that the fire that spreads after a suicide isn't grief, but guilt, the agonizing twist of culpability, and that -- the could, should, would -- is what destroys you from the inside. 

The shower never really got hot, but the lukewarm stream of water was enough to wash off the worst of the sludge. When I was done, though, the weight of the cold hit me, my skin shrinking against the knife-points of frosted air, my muscles tightening in protest. By the time I got fresh clothes pulled on -- a long-sleeve shirt, pants, my same blood-spattered sneakers -- I was shivering. My teeth ached with cold. 

"Dawn?" She wasn't outside when I stepped out, and my gut twisted. In my mind, I could see Abby's skull cracking open, her brains slithering out where the axe had been. I could see Liza's tangle of guts, purple-brown and glistening. 

I called her name again and was met with silence. 

I looked right and left, trying to make sense of the mess of footprints scattered across the snow. My gaze caught on the dark, empty doorway to the Women's restroom. I knew what was on the other side of it -- Liza's mangled body, a lump under a blanket, smears of brown-red blood on the tile. I didn't want to see that again. I could go my whole life without ever seeing it again. 

And yet, I had a sudden, intense need to look in there. Just to check. Just a reminder that this was real and deadly serious. 

"Dawn?" I called, a final time, leaning past the doorway and peering into the gloom. 

My eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, and at first I blamed that for what I was seeing -- or not seeing -- because it simply could not be real. 

The blood spatters were still there, still damp and shimmering, a congealed deep crimson flecked along the tile. 

But where the body had been, there was only an expanse of empty floor, blood-stained and barren. 

"What...?" 

I stared, uncomprehending, at the place where a body had been. I had covered it with a blanket myself. I had never been so certain of anything. 

But there was nothing here, now, which could only mean one thing: Someone had moved the body. But why? Just to fuck with us? 

I was still staring, trying to understand, when I felt a man's hand close over my shoulder, the other gripping my arm so I could not get away.