Tess Sharpe - Far From You

I blink hard. Suddenly, all I want to do is cry. “This was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, I know. Come on.”

We’re quiet all the way back to the truck, and it’s not until we’re inside the cab that Rachel speaks.

“I don’t think you should come out here again. Not by yourself.”

I can’t look at her. I stare out the window.

“What you need is a plan,” Rachel goes on. “Having a plan makes everything better. If you think about what you need to solve Mina’s murder, the next step will become clear. Obviously, talking to Kyle isn’t going to work. So what’s the next step?”

Forcing my thoughts away from the past and into the present is exactly what I need. I’ll never find Mina’s killer if I keep falling apart. Rachel’s right. I need a plan that involves a lot more than dousing Kyle in bear spray.

“I have to start from scratch,” I say, grateful for Rachel’s reboot. “From the source. Mina was working on a story. I need to go to the Harper Beacon ’s office and talk to her supervisor. If anyone knows what she was chasing, it’d be him.”

“Okay, good. What else?”

“I need to find her notes on the story. The police searched her computer and didn’t find anything, so that means they’ve got to be somewhere else. Maybe in a notebook. Her mom was always going through her room and reading her diary, so Mina hid stuff. I bet the police missed some of her hiding places.”

“How are you going to get in her room to look?”

I sigh. This is the part I’ve been avoiding. “I’m going to have to use Trev.”

Rachel lets out a sympathetic hiss. “Ouch.”

“There’s no other way to get into the house. If I asked him if I could search her room, he’d slam the door in my face. He doesn’t want to see me. But I have some of her things. I can put a box together, use it as my excuse to get in.”

“Has he even talked to you since you got back?” Rachel asks. “When you were at Seaside, your letters said he wasn’t writing back to you.”

I shrug. “He doesn’t believe me.”

“Well, he should,” Rachel says hotly.

“Rachel, why do you believe me?” I blurt out.

She leans back in the seat. “Why shouldn’t I?”

I shrug. “Sometimes I wonder, if you’d known me before…if you’d think I was lying, like everybody else does.”

“Anyone who saw you in the middle of that road…” Rachel pauses, and then goes on. “Anyone who saw you the way I did that night, they’d understand you weren’t capable of coming up with a lie—you could barely talk. And then in the hospital…” She pauses again, and I know we’re both thinking about it. How I’d yelled and thrown things when the nurse tried to make me take off my bloody clothes. I can still feel the prick of the needle against my skin, the sedative moving through me as I begged, “No drugs, no drugs, no drugs,” when I really meant, “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.”

“But you didn’t have to stick around. At the hospital, or after. I mean, you barely knew me.”

“You went through something horrible,” Rachel says quietly. “And it isn’t fair that everyone blames you. Even if you had been buying drugs that night, it wouldn’t matter. The only person who’s guilty is the guy who pulled the trigger. And we’ll find him. I bet you. Ten whole dollars.”

She smiles determinedly at me, daring me to smile back.

I do.

ELEVEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

I don’t mean to steal the prescription pad.

I really don’t. It never even crosses my mind until the Saturday I take Dad lunch at his office. It’s hot that summer, topping 110 some days, and I should be out at the lake or something, but I like to spend time with Dad. He does free teeth cleanings for kids on every fourth Saturday, so I usually grab some takeout to share on his lunch break.

“Give me a second, sweetie?” he asks after one of his dental hygienists lets me into his office. “I’ve just got to check on some things. Then we can eat.”

I set the bag of pastrami sandwiches on his desk, next to the burl wood clock that Mom got for him for one of their anniversaries.

He closes his office door behind him, and I sit down in his swivel chair, wincing when it leans back too far.

Dad’s desk is orderly, everything in its right place. There’s a picture of me and Mom, standing side by side, our shoulders nearly touching, framed in silver, and one of Dad on the sidelines, from before the accident, when he coached Mina’s and my soccer team. There’s a black-and-white one of me when I was eleven or twelve, my hair long and tucked behind my too-big ears. I’m smiling at something off camera, my eyes lowered, almost hopeful as my hand reaches out. For Mina, of course. Always for Mina. She’d been making faces at me while Dad took the picture. I remember how hard it was to not let my face scrunch with laughter.

I brush my fingers across the top of Dad’s stash of pens, neatly grouped together by color. I pull open his top drawer. There’s a bunch of Post-its, color coded again, and underneath that…

Prescription pads. A stack of them.

And suddenly it’s all I can think about.

I’d always have enough pills. I’d never have to worry. Never have to keep count, just in case the doctors noticed. It’d be so good. So right.

The paper tickles my skin as I thumb through one of the pads like it’s a flip book. I’m giddy, almost high on the mere thought of it.

I don’t plan on stealing them.

But I do.

I don’t even think about the trouble it could cause as I shove them in my purse.

I’m too in love with the idea of more and numb and gone .

NOW (JUNE)

When I hear the front door open, I think it’s Mom checking on me. She came home yesterday during lunch, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, silent as I picked at my food and she drank a cup of coffee, shuffling through legal briefs.

I stop at the top of the stairs. I catch sight of him before he sees me, and I have a second, just a second, when I can hope.

But then his eyes fix on me and the awkwardness sparks in the air, as it has every time since he found my stash and the triplicates I’d stolen from him.

Dad isn’t disappointed in me like Mom is. He doesn’t have that mix of anger and fear that’s fueling her. Instead, he doesn’t know what to do or how to feel with me, and sometimes I think it’s worse, that he can’t decide between forgiving and blaming me.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Sophie.”

I stay at the top of the stairs, hoping the distance will protect me. “Did you have a good trip?”

“I did. How have things been? Have you settled in?”

I want to tell him everything. How Trev looks at me like he’s a masochist and I’m the embodiment of pain. How Mom and I are stuck in this sick game of who’ll break first. How I should go out to Mina’s grave but I can’t, because I’m afraid if I do, it’ll make it so real that I’ll slip. I’ll fall down and never get up.

Once upon a time, I’d been a daddy’s girl. I loved him wholly, preferred him to the point of cruelty. But that girl is gone. I rotted away what was left of her with pills and loss.

I’m not the daughter he raised. I’m not the daughter my mother wanted.

I’ve become something different, every parent’s nightmare: the drugs hidden in the bedroom, the lies, the call in the middle of the night, the police knocking on the door.

Those are the things he remembers now. Not the time he took me to The Nutcracker , just him and me, and I’d been so scared of the Mouse King that I’d crawled into his lap and he’d promised to keep me safe. Or how he had tried to help Trev build me raised flower beds in the backyard, even though he kept slamming his fingers with the hammer. A dentist has no business hammering things, but he’d done it anyway.