Eddie sighs.
‘Is everything you say a lie?’ Portia asks.
‘Eddie,’ I say. ‘What did you do?’
‘That’s the thing. Sometimes you don’t have a choice,’ he says. ‘When someone tries to hit you, you have to hit back. It was a reflex … I mean, it’s not like I had an option.’
I take a deep breath. ‘So you hit her.’
He nods.
‘And then what?’
‘She fell on the ground. Hard.’ Eddie looks away from me, toward the rocks. I want to crawl into his mind and see what he sees. ‘But she wasn’t unconscious. She kicked me.’
I wait.
‘So I picked up those ashtrays and I hit her.’ His eyes refocus, they turn back to me. ‘On the head.’
Nikki on the ground, hurt, fighting, kicking. And my brother hits her on the head with glass ashtrays.
Imagining this makes me want to vomit.
‘She’s dead,’ he says.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No, no, no.’
Eddie straightens up, squares his shoulders. ‘Don’t worry, it was quick.’
The world spins. It already does, I know, and now I feel it. Just like I can feel those ashtrays hitting my head.
‘Grandpa knew she was dead?’ Portia says.
‘Of course he did! Why do you think he refused to call the police?’ Eddie stops and shakes his head. ‘I know you guys think he was a monster, but he wasn’t. He was protecting us. Nikki was going to ruin everything. We were all going to get blamed for her death, and for what she did to Grandpa. For drugging him, stealing his money … all of it.’
I feel tears on my face. ‘No.’
‘That’s why you killed Calvin,’ Portia says. ‘You didn’t want him calling the police, because you killed Nikki.’
‘Because she was attacking me. Don’t forget that part.’
‘So that’s why we’re here? So you could get this stuff?’ Portia says.
Eddie nods. ‘It was a loose end. I had to get it. If not for this, Grandpa would’ve just given me all the money and we wouldn’t be here.’
No road trip. No answers. And I never would’ve known what happened to Nikki.
‘What did you do with her?’ I say. ‘Did you bury her?’
‘I dragged her into the lake,’ Eddie says.
Now Felix is with her. Not that anything would be left of her body after twenty years.
I look at him, my mind on that camera. ‘Eddie,’ I say.
‘I had to do it,’ he says.
‘Eddie.’
‘What?’
‘Did you take a picture of our dead sister?’
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t have to.
‘You’re a monster,’ I say.
‘Stop it,’ Eddie says. ‘She was a bitch. That’s all Nikki ever was. A selfish, lying, scheming bitch.’
He’s wrong. We’re the selfish, lying, scheming bitches. Not Nikki.
Once again, I consider revealing Nikki’s secret and telling Eddie that he didn’t just kill Nikki; he killed her baby. But I can’t, I just can’t. And there’s no point in revealing Nikki’s secret now. Eddie wouldn’t even care.
I take a step closer to him. ‘If she was a selfish, lying, scheming bitch, what does that make you?’
‘Alive.’
Asshole.
‘So is this your plan, psycho?’ Portia says. ‘Come out here, gather up the evidence of your murders, and then kill us?’
It sounds ridiculous, but for a moment, I’m surprised to find that I don’t care. My mission was Nikki, first, last, always.
The money distracted me, yes, because it’s a hell of a lot of money. After I heard about the job cuts at work, it became even more important. My husband distracted me, yes, but at least I learned it was never going to work out. However, since the beginning, before the trip even started, it was about Nikki.
It’s been a month since Grandpa died and was cremated. That’s how long it took for all of us to rearrange our schedules and get time off work for a two-week road trip. During that time, I prepared. I bought one of those poster maps of the United States, and I hung it up in the closet of our extra bedroom. The one Felix never used. I plotted out the whole trip, double-checking to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, hadn’t forgotten anywhere we stopped.
I called each one of the museums and attractions we had visited, making sure they were still in business and would be available during the trip. I even called some of the motels I remembered, just in case we ended up staying in the same places.
Something in me knew this would be the end of my search. I’d find Nikki, I knew I would. I could feel it like it was a living thing inside me. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be pregnant. I liked thinking of it that way. It was one more connection to her.
Have you ever wanted something so much, you go ahead and pretend you have it?
Like maybe your house isn’t perfect, but you tell people it’s your dream home so many times you start to believe it. Or perhaps you hate your job but you won’t give it up, because maybe the next one will be worse, so you convince yourself it’s not that bad. It is. You’re just pretending it’s not.
This is how I’ve convinced myself Nikki is still alive, because I can’t face a world without her. And I can’t face what I did. Moving to Florida, following Cooper, writing the journals – it was all because I wanted to find her. Had to find her.
My fault, my fault, my fault.
One time, I thought about telling Felix everything. It was when we were engaged. He knew nothing about Nikki and he thought my parents had died in a car crash. It sounded so commonplace that he didn’t question it.
We had just been to the movies, one of those Oscar-nominated dramas that’s all about family secrets and regrets and no one ends up happy. I guess that’s what made me want to say something – the fear of ending up like that. During the drive home, I thought I should tell him everything. Well, most of it. Not the part where Eddie shot the private investigator.
As fate would have it, Felix’s favorite song came on the radio. It probably won’t surprise you to know Felix was a big fan of eighties music. There he was, belting out Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me,’ and I knew the moment was gone.
I never tried again, but that doesn’t mean the guilt has gone away. If anything, it has grown over the years – multiplied by a billion after I saw my mother. It was just like one of those melodramatic movies.
But, finally, the second road trip would let me fix what I had done.
That’s what I believed, as much as I believed Nikki was out there. Watching. Waiting. Knowing she would one day get her chance at revenge, maybe against me, but definitely against Eddie. It’s why I’ve never stopped looking, why I moved to Florida, why I wrote that diary in her words.
It’s why I’ve done everything.
I fall to my knees on the ground, in front of Eddie.
A lie, all of it. The worst kind of lie, because I made up an entire story about Nikki being out there, still alive, and then I convinced myself it was true.
I look up at Eddie, that shiny gun in his hand, and I know I’m ready. It doesn’t matter if I die now. I don’t even care now that I know Nikki is dead.