Take Your Breath Away

Sixty-Three

Andrew

We gave returning to a normal life our best shot.

Jayne went back to her job, Tyler still had his, and I went back to seeing those people who were hoping to hire me that I never got to that day Matt took me into the woods and made me dig up Brie.

Each of us had something to get over. Tyler’s wrongful arrest and the memory of discovering that poor dead woman didn’t appear to be having any long-term traumatic effects, but Jayne and I were both worried about what might be going on under the surface. In many ways, he seemed like a different kid. He wasn’t getting into any more trouble, and had ended his friendship with Cam. He’d also picked up a second part-time job. Well, not a paying gig. He went to the people who maintain the nearby cemetery and said he wanted to do some volunteer work. Cutting grass, weeding, that kind of thing. Didn’t want any money for it.

Jayne didn’t want to smother him with concern the way his aunt had done after their father’s death, but she suggested he might want to talk to a counselor about what he went through, and he seemed open to the idea.

And Jayne’s pregnancy was going well. She was ever so slightly starting to show. No bleeding, and no morning sickness, at least so far. She’d been to see the doctor, who was pleased with her progress. An ultrasound was conducted, and I was in the room as the doctor rubbed that gadget across Jayne’s jellied abdomen and we looked at the blurry image on the screen of the baby that would one day join our household. The doctor wasn’t quite sure about the sex, and that was okay with us. We were happy to be surprised when the big day came.

And I’m coming to terms with Brie’s death. After six years, I know what happened. I can now, officially, mourn her passing.

So that’s the good news.

Jayne hadn’t been sleeping well. At first I thought it was the pregnancy, but it was clearly more than that. It was stress, and trauma. She was, of course, relieved that Tyler’d been released, that no charges had been filed. We even had a little celebration one night. Ordered in pizza, got a cake. But her mood darkened as the days passed. She tossed and turned in the night. I’d try to engage her in conversation and she’d say nothing, as though she hadn’t even heard me.

The truth was, I knew what had to be on her mind, but I didn’t want to press her. But when she spent time standing at the front window, as though expecting someone to arrive, I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking.

She was waiting for Detective Hardy.

Tyler had noticed that something was off with her, too. He went up to her a couple of days ago, put his arms around her as she watched the street.

“It’s not going to happen,” he told her. “They’re not coming back to get me.”

One night, after we had both gone to bed and the lights were off, I could sense that she was awake. I rolled over, saw her lying on her back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I had a feeling that she was finally ready to talk about it.

“I know you’re lying,” she said.

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I know that everything you told Detective Hardy was bullshit.”

“Not everything,” I told her.

“I know Greg never confessed to you before he died.”

“Everything he told Isabel and me turned out to be true,” I said.

“Not that stuff. I’m talking about his so-called Candace DiCarlo confession.”

Of course she knew it was bullshit. She knew it was bullshit because she had killed Candace DiCarlo. Her rush to confess to Hardy, to spare her brother, had been genuine. Hardy, confident that Tyler was the killer, wouldn’t listen to a word she had to say.

But I knew, very soon, that Jayne’s admission was the real deal.

I knew, or at least strongly suspected, as much when I got to the police station and went to lock up her car before driving her home. When I opened the door I saw the blood on the brake pedal and the accelerator. There was even a little on the steering wheel. I found a rag tucked down between the seats and did my best to wipe it all away, and took the rag with me.

Later, when I left the house to head to Isabel’s, I had borrowed Jayne’s phone so that I could return Norman’s. But there was actually something I wanted to check.

The app that Jayne used to track Tyler worked both ways. It recorded Jayne’s location history, and a quick review of the app revealed Jayne had been to the DiCarlo house between the time Tyler first arrived and the time he went back. She’d probably been worried about him, had been checking to make sure he was really at Whistler’s and wasn’t just skipping school to get into mischief.

When she discovered he’d fled work and ridden his bike across town, she must have wondered where he’d gone.

So she decided to find out for herself.

And met Candace DiCarlo.

I’d thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to save her from this. I already knew by that time that Greg had hired a hit man to kill Brie. Was there a way to pin DiCarlo’s murder on him, too? Or at least cast enough suspicion his way to have Tyler freed?

So I went to the crime scene that day.

Before I got out of my truck I donned those gloves and picked up the cigarette butt Greg had let fall down by my feet when he talked to me through the driver’s-door window that morning when he came by the house to see me.

I distracted that cop who was guarding the scene long enough to flick that butt — rich with Greg’s DNA — off the bottom of my thumb with my middle finger onto the driveway by the Volvo wagon. My nervous habit finally had a practical application. I prayed that the guys in the hazmat suits would find it.

Evidently, they did.

When Isabel and I arrived at the deserted mall, I tucked that bloody rag — loaded with, presumably, DiCarlo’s DNA — under the seat of Greg’s pickup truck.

I knew what Hardy was referring to when she said they had been able to connect my former best friend to the scene.

Sometimes, long shots pay off. There were a hundred ways it could have gone wrong, but we’d won the lottery. The thing was, when I left those woods with Matt’s gun, I had in my head that I would kill Greg. As the afternoon progressed, and it became clear to me what had happened with Candace DiCarlo, a plan began to take shape that would make it even more important that Greg died. I would concoct a confession from him that he’d never be able to retract. If I ended up getting charged and going to jail, so be it. At least I’d have been able to save Jayne and Tyler.

And Greg did die. It just didn’t happen the way I thought it would.

Jayne would know my story to Hardy was a total fabrication, but I was naïve enough to think maybe she’d see that things had worked out in the best possible way. That she’d relax, move on.

And so there she was, standing at the window every day, waiting for Detective Hardy to come and take her away.

In bed, staring at the ceiling, she whispered, “You made it up. Everything you told Hardy about what Greg supposedly said to you, you invented it.”

I whispered, “Hardy’s happy. She’s satisfied. Isabel backed up my story. It worked. It’s over. Case closed.”

“Not for me. I have to live with this. I tried to do the right thing. I told her I’d done it. She didn’t believe me, but she’d believe me now.”

“You can’t tell her. Not now. If you did, you could go to prison. For making up that confession, I could go to prison, too. And for planting evidence.” I explained to her what I had done with the cigarette butt and the bloody rag. “And what about Tyler? And our child?”

Jayne thought about that. Weighing everything.

Her voice breaking, she said, “I didn’t mean for it to happen. She came to the door, didn’t know who I was, and I... I forced my way in. It was... I want to say it was an accident, but I pushed her. I thought — I believed when I got there that it really was Brie, with some new identity, and I told her I knew who she was and she was not going to ruin our lives, that she had to leave us the fuck alone, and—”

“Stop,” I said, encircling her with my arms. She was shaking. “I don’t need to know.”

“And she started screaming at me to get out of her house, that I had no idea what I was talking about, and she came at me, and I shoved her back, even harder, and she hit her head on the counter, and then—”

I kept holding on to her, hoping that if I did it tightly enough she would stop trembling.

“I couldn’t believe she was dead. I tried to wake her up, and then... then I guess I just panicked and I got out of there, and I had no idea Tyler was going to go back there, that someone would see him, but no one ever saw me, and—”

“Shh, shh,” I said, and, slowly, her trembling eased and she turned and put her arms around me.

I wasn’t going to judge her. I’d killed one man and watched him die. And I had been prepared to kill another.

But just as Tyler had been given a second chance when he came to live with us, this was our second chance.

We had to accept the things that we had done, accept that there was no way we could undo them, and accept that any attempts to set things right would only bring about greater heartache.

This was as good as it was going to get.

“We’re going to be okay,” I whispered into her ear. “Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to have a baby.”

Jayne looked at me, and, even in the midnight light, I could make out a tear running down her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb.