You are helping. Keep talking. It makes me stronger.
“No matter what has happened, I can get us out of it. I know I can. Trust me. It’s what I’m trained to do. It’s what I have my expertise in. There is no problem too big that we can’t extricate ourselves from, working together. Didn’t we learn that tonight?”
Hope reached over and brought the piece of paper and pen in front of her. She crooked the phone between her shoulder and her ear, so that she could continue to listen.
“Hope, we can manage. We can win. I know it. Just tell me you know it, too.”
Not this. Too many questions. We will all be in jeopardy. I need to do this. It’s the only way I can be sure we’re all safe.
Sally was quiet, and Hope wrote on the page, There is too much sadness in my life.
She shook her head. The first lie of many, she thought. She continued writing.
I have been unfairly accused at the school I love.
Sally whispered, “Hope, please, I know you’re there. Tell me what is wrong. Tell me what to do. I’m begging you.”
And the woman I love no longer loves me.
Hope shook her head slightly as she wrote these words. She bit down on her lower lip. She needed to find some way to indicate that this was all a bunch of lies, find a way to say this so that only Sally would know the truth, not the park ranger who would find the note, nor the detective who would read it.
So I have come to this place that we once loved, so that I could remember what it once was like, and what I know the future would be, if only I were stronger.
Sally, tears flowing down her face, gave in to something that went way beyond terror. It was the sensation of inevitability. She wants to protect us.
“Hope, love, please,” she coughed out the words between gasps of complete despair. “Let me come be with you. Always, since the first, we relied upon each other. We made each other right. Let me do that again, please.”
But, Sally, you are.
I tried to stab myself with a knife but that only made me bleed all over the place, and I’m sorry. I wanted to stab myself in the heart, but I missed. So, I’ve chosen another route.
There it is, Hope thought.
The only route still open to me. I love you all, and trust you will all remember me the same way.
She was exhausted.
Sally’s voice had diminished to a whisper. “Look, Hope, my love, please, no matter how badly you are hurt, we can just say that I did it to you. Scott said you were cut. Well, we’ll just tell the cops I did it. They’ll believe us, I know it. You don’t have to leave me. We can talk our way out of this, together.”
Hope smiled again. It was a most attractive offer, she thought to herself. Lie our ways out of all the questions. And maybe it would work. But probably not. This is the only way to be sure.
She wanted to say good-bye, wanted to say all the things that lovers and partners would whisper to each other in the dark, wanted to say something about her mother and Ashley and everything that had happened that night, but she did not. Instead, she merely touched the END button on her cell phone to disconnect the line.
In her car, still parked on the street outside Michael O’Connell’s apartment building, Sally gave in to all the emotions cascading within her and sobbed uncontrollably. She felt as if she were shrinking, that she had abruptly grown smaller, weaker, and was only a shadow of the person she had been at the start of the day. Whatever they had done, she wasn’t sure that it was worth the cost that had been paid. She bent over, kicked her feet, and pounded on the wheel, flailing her arms about wildly. Then she stopped and moaned as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth, slinking down in her seat, in total agony, and completely oblivious that Michael O’Connell, cursing loudly, openly enraged, glowing with red anger and black bitterness, and blinded to the world around him, had passed by only a few feet away as he stomped his way toward his own front entranceway.
