Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen such a raw display of status since I left New York. An overnight bag like that costs about twenty grand, but it’s not about the exorbitant cost. It’s the fact that you can’t walk into a mall and buy that bag. You go on a list. You wait. It takes commitment as much as it takes money. But I know that about Rob already. When he wants something, he’s willing to wait.
I slide out of bed and move silently to my desk. Even my skin is listening to Rob’s breathing. I don’t want to wake him. Some things are meant to be done in private, I guess.
My journal is waiting, pages open. I sit and read, really taking in the depth of my sickness. The first entry begins back in the hospital, when David was still alive. The last entry is from before Bo and I had sex, I’m assuming because it was lost.
But it wasn’t actually lost. Rob said he found it right here. Some part of my fractured mind must have placed it on the centre of my desk without informing either the part of me who wrote in my journal or the part of me who had no idea about the journal writing.
How many me’s are there?
I skim through pages, checking the dates. Trying to pin down exactly when I started writing behind my own back. I had thought I’d stopped writing after Dr Jacobi killed herself, but I hadn’t. After her suicide, my style of writing changed dramatically, though. It went from the third-person past-tense voice that I used to tell the ‘story of me’ like it was happening to someone else long ago, to close first-person present tense, where I am narrating my life as it happens.
And as if that isn’t confusing enough, later, after I’d been out of the hospital and living with my grandparents for a week, a new voice appears. It’s written in first person, past tense, and I seem to be looking back at what I’ve done. The first entry like that begins, ‘I was not the most popular girl in school. That was Jinka Pritchett.’
Now that I think back, I remember writing in my journal and telling myself this was the last time. When I left the hospital, I must have convinced myself that I’d kept that promise to myself and really stopped, but I hadn’t.
It seems so odd. Now I can remember sitting here, at this desk, writing furiously every night before I went to bed. I can even remember spreading out my blanket in the woods and filling a few pages before Bo met me there.
Stop.
He’s not real. I’m not allowed to mourn the loss of a fictional character. Anyway, deep down, part of me always knew he was too good to be true. I kept thinking it was all like a dream.
I need to figure out what I was doing all those hours I thought I was with him. That leaves a lot of hours. I couldn’t have been writing all that time or I’d have filled volumes. I could have been killing people. That almost seems like the most obvious possibility at this point.
But I need to remember.
First, I need to sort out how many personalities I have. There is the me who I was aware of all along, the me who wrote and who I remember now, and a third who is still hidden from me. She’s the me who took my journal and left it sitting here on the desk. She’s the me who did something while the other two me
’s believed we were with a boy who doesn’t exist.
My eyes shift to the closet. The door is cracked open.
There are three bloody outfits in there, and there have been three women found cut to pieces since I arrived in this small town. I have no memory of doing violence to anyone, not even now that I’ve been confronted with that possibility. As soon as I was forced to see my journal, I remembered writing in it. So I guess I need to force myself to remember killing them.
Rob simultaneously came to the conclusion that I’m the killer and excused me for it by reading my journal cover to cover and realizing that I believed I was killing deer. But is he right? Do the dates match up?
I was extremely faithful to my journal. I’m writing in it right now. I wrote about everything, it seems – everything that happened to me at home, with my friends, at the shelter, with Bo and his family, my attempt to quit the drugs, and the subsequent hallucinations. In between these present-tense daily reports are the bursts of past-tense storytelling.
I page back through my journal, looking for the days I came back bloody. The first time I met Bo, I thought I fell asleep and woke to a boy and an injured deer falling on me. The next evening, I found out about Chelsea Oliver, the dead hunter, while playing mini-golf.
Then, I thought I’d killed a fawn by accident and chased it through the brush, only to get covered in blood. A few days later, Sandy Crosby’s body was found.
And finally, Mila. She went missing the day I killed the buck and butchered it in the woods. I don’t need to look that up. I remember coming back here to my grandparents’ house. How everyone was waiting for me. I was the last person to see Mila alive. The police must not know that, or Officer Longmire would have questioned me. Or the FBI would have. Maybe my friends are protecting me.
They really shouldn’t.
I close my eyes and try to edit the images in my mind. I force Mila’s face and her body under my knife because I know if I make myself see it, then I’ll remember what the third me did. I need to remember it.
And when I remember, I’ll . . . what? What will I do? I can’t go back to the hospital because if I really did do these atrocious things, and Dr Holt let me out, she won’t just lose her licence. She’ll go to jail for the rest of her life. So I can’t turn myself in.
I know Dr Holt hates me, but she has every reason to. Because of me and my journal, the other doctors at the hospital stepped in and had her moved to another floor when she was probably managing David’s attachment just fine. I can almost picture Dr Weinbach waving my journal around, insisting that Dr Holt had lost her professional detachment and needed to be removed. Because he wanted her job.
Of course Dr Holt blames me for David’s death. If it weren’t for me and my journal, she might have been allowed to help David work through his feelings when he was ready to. She’s a good doctor. She cares. I won’t ruin her life by going back to the hospital.
This time I’ll do the right thing. Probably the thing I should have done as soon as I found out about Rachel.
But I don’t remember. Not the way I remember writing in my journal. It won’t come back to me, no matter how hard I push.
Something is still hidden from me. There’s got to be a missing piece, something that will trigger the memory. I have to find it. I have to. Because there’s also another thing I know for certain. Dr Goodnight started killing people at least twenty years ago, and I definitely wasn’t killing people before I was born. There are two murderers running around the same few square miles of woods. If I’m one them, there is a chance – even if it’s just a slim one – that a buried side of me knows who Dr Goodnight is and where he’s camping.