Forget Me Not Page 18

  “Did you get anything out of those guys, yesterday? Mike and Johnny?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you think one of them hurt Elle?”

  I noted that she said hurt rather than killed; dancing around the reality of it still. “I don’t think so to be honest.”

  She nodded her head and stamped her feet against the cold a little, small bits of snow falling from her shoes onto the ground. “Yeah, I don’t think they did it either. I kinda-I kinda think it might have been the same person who killed Nora.”

  I jerked my head back in surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Do you … do you think so too?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Leia cleared her throat, finally meeting my eye. “Back when Nora disappeared, she-she couldn’t really understand what was going on, you know? Elle, I mean. Neither of us could, I guess. But she was sad for so long. I know that sounds really stupid, like of course she was sad. It was just all so weird but then she seemed so much better, so much more like Elle, and now this.”

  “How did she seem before she died? Did she seem any different to you? Jenna said she seemed distracted somehow.”

  Leia brushed some tears from her eyes and took a deep breath. “Yeah, she’d been quieter than usual, I think, but that’s not all that weird.”

  “Do you think she might have been seeing someone else?”

  Leia’s eyebrows pinched together. “Other than Jenna?” I nodded, and Leia shook her head “No. I don’t think so. She wouldn’t … I think I would have known.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be, I guess. She wasn’t secretive. And I genuinely don’t know who it would have been.”

  “When did you notice her getting quieter?”

  Leia shrugged. “It happened gradually. To be honest I put it down to a couple of things. College applications, her birthday back in August. And Christmas and New Years were always hard, with the lead up to the anniversary.”

  “By her birthday do you mean because she was turning seventeen?” I said, thinking about those messages from John Smith that had started on her seventeenth birthday.

  “Yeah. We talked about it a couple times. About the fact that she was now as old as Nora when she … went missing.”

  I’d sent Elle a text the day she turned seventeen telling her “Happy Birthday” but it had been almost midnight by the time I remembered and Elle had clearly been drunk, or rapidly heading towards it when she texted back:

  Thanks, Mads. Made it to 17. Now just gotta hope I make it 18.

  Thinking about it now sent a river of cold sweat down my back, but even then the text had taken me aback, not because we never talked about Nora, because we did, but because it sounded so bitter, so angry. I’d never seen or heard Elle talk that way about Nora, but maybe she had actually been scared, scared of never making it past seventeen, scared of turning into her sister and ending up exactly where Nora had: lost and gone to us one snowy January day.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The house was crowded but strangely quiet by the time Ange and I arrived at the Altmans’. Almost everyone who had been invited was there already, and although the crowd was significantly smaller than the congregation at the church earlier, there were still a few more people present than the house could comfortably hold.

  I looked around for Noah, peering around people’s bodies and into crevices and corners for his bright, brown hair but couldn’t spot him anywhere. I was worried that, in it all, he was going to get lost. I felt lost.

  Nate was stood in the corner of the living room. His Aunt Rebecca, who was talking to Louden and Bright, stood next to him, but Nate’s eyes were focused, unseeing, on a spot straight ahead of him. He wasn’t hearing anything anyone had to say, and his eyes didn’t even flicker as I tried in vain to catch his gaze.

  There was a heavy knot of déjà vu growing in my stomach as I stared around the room. Everyone looked older and significantly more tired but this could have been ten years earlier. I looked down the hallway to the big open-plan kitchen and spotted Serena, Cordy, and Leo laying out food, plastic plates and napkins on the trestle table that had been set up next to the Altmans’ wooden kitchen table.

  Ange took her coat off, and sort of pulled at the arm of mine as a reminder for me to take it off. I gave it to her and stepped through the crowd, stopping to say hi to my parents, kissing Nate’s aunt on the cheek when I arrived at their group.

  When Nate seemed to finally realize I was there, he looked as though he’d just woken up from a dream. He blinked once or twice at me and then said in a hoarse voice: “Hey Mads.”

  “Hey, you okay? You need anything to drink?” I hadn’t spoken to him since I’d left him at his parents’ lake house but that didn’t matter. At least not today, I thought.

  He shook his head but Rebecca reached over to him, patting his shoulder. “I think maybe you could do with some coffee, young man. I need to check on the food anyway.”

  She stroked his cheek as she left, something I recognized as a very Katherine Altman thing to do. Nora used to do it too.

  “Nice to see you, Mads,” Louden said, “it’s been a while.”

  “I saw you on Sunday,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t get a chance to say hi. I hear you’ve been catching up with Hale though.” Louden’s posture was rigid; his eyes, which were almost identical to his sister’s, stared down at me, not giving me the option to ignore him.

  “Yeah, we went for a drink.”

  Louden made a sound at the back of his throat, and Bright kind of elbowed him and gave him a look that said not here. Nate remained silent. He’d gone back to staring into the middle distance; he could have been anywhere. I had a feeling he’d rather have been anywhere but there.

  “I was actually wondering if we could talk sometime.” I looked around the room, faces of people I’d known my whole life blurring together. “Maybe not here, but sometime soon.”

  “Talk to me?” Louden said, as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Just about Nora, and what you can remember from—back then.”

  Louden’s eyebrows shot right up and his eyes widened in surprise, but it was Nate, suddenly roused from his silence, who said: “Mads, are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “You’re talking about this here? Now?”

  “I’m sorry, I just wanted to be sure I caught Louden before he went back to … Chicago. You’re still in Chicago, right?”

  Louden looked at me through narrowed eyes, his mouth set in a rigid line and his jawbone pulsing rhythmically. “Yeah.”

  “Right, so, will you still be around tomorrow?”

  “Mads, seriously. Why don’t you just Facebook him or something?” Nate said, sounding exasperated.

  “Because he’d just ignore me, obviously.” No one disagreed with me, so I raised my eyebrows as if to prove my point. “Could we meet for a coffee or something?” I asked.

  Louden didn’t get a chance to reply, although he looked like he might be about to actually guffaw, before Nate grabbed my arm and steered me out through the living room, down into the kitchen, and out the back door.

  “What are you doing, Maddie?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “I want to get a sense of what was going on right before Nora disappeared. See if I can find out anything that might link it to Elle.”

  “Louden didn’t kill Nora. Or Elle.” I didn’t say anything, and Nate threw his arms up as if despairing of me. “Are you serious? You’re back on Louden?”

  “What are the alternatives, Nate? Have you got any idea what people are saying?”

  “Of course I do, I’m fucking living it. That doesn’t mean you can start pointing the finger at just anyone. You’re doing the exact same thing as Gloria Lewis and everyone else is doing to me, you ever th
ink of it like that?”

  I sighed, my breath frosting the air between us. It was freezing and neither of us was wearing a coat, so I crossed my arms in front of me, burying my hands beneath my armpits, trying to keep them warm. I started bouncing up and down on the balls of my feet, the jaunty movement completely at odds with the situation. “You’re not worried?”

  “About what?”

  “About everything, Nate. About fucking everything. Elle was killed almost a week ago and they haven’t named a single suspect. Doesn’t that make you wonder?”

  “Wonder about what? They’re just doing their job as best they can.”

  “They’re doing it badly.” I shivered, gluing my jaw shut to stop my teeth from chattering.

  “Don’t involve yourself in this, Mads, it’s not your place. You don’t have to figure out who killed Elle, or what happened to Nora and whatever else is bothering you. Just let the police do their jobs, and let everyone else get on with their lives.”

  “Get on with their lives? And how exactly do you suggest we all do that? I’d really like some tips, actually, because I don’t know about you, but I’ve been trying to do just that for an entire decade, and nothing’s seemed to take. I’m just so tired, Nate, aren’t you? Tired of being in the same place, and feeling the same thing for so long. Like nothing’s ever going to change. And now here we are.” I threw my arms up into the cold, cold air, taking the entire situation in, not saying Elle’s name even though the whole day, and this conversation, were about her. But Nate just stayed stoically looking at me, as if he had no idea what I was talking about, and suddenly all my energy was gone, and I sighed. “I’m just so tired of not knowing anything, Nate. How can you not get that?”

  “I do get it,” he said, and his face pinched a little, a frown beginning to form and I wondered what he was stopping himself from allowing himself to feel, or think.

  I shook my head, so unsure of him after all those years, hating that I had to try and decipher him like that when, at one point, he’d been the one person I never had to puzzle over. “I don’t think you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be so fucking sanguine about everything.”

  “Sanguine? You think I’m being sanguine? You have no idea what you’re talking about, not now. You don’t know me, Madeline. Not anymore.”

  The words hurt, even as I’d already admitted them to myself, even as I knew they were true, and it was all I could do to watch as he left me out there in the cold, the air burning my ears, gasping for breath.

  Hours later, back home, my phone rang. It was Nate.

  “Come downstairs,” he said. “I’m outside.”

  He was sitting on the steps up to our front porch. When I opened the door, the slice of warm, buttery light turned him from shadow to silhouette, but when I shut it behind me, the world was darkness, cut through only by the light of the moon, and the great tangle of stars above us.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down next to him.

  “I wanted to apologize. For being such an asshole earlier.”

  “Okay.”

  “This week’s been …”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  He shifted towards me, turning so that I could see his face a little better, even in the dark. “And I wanted to say sorry for Wednesday night. I shouldn’t have just assumed you’d be up for hanging out. Not after so long.”

  “It’s okay,” I said after a pause, “like you said, it’s been a week. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal out of it. I want to be there for you, you know? I’m just trying to figure out what that looks like now.”

  Nate nodded, and the movement made his coat make a rustling sound next to my ear. “I’m sorry I … pulled away. It wasn’t about you,” he said.

  I stared up into the great swathe of stars above us. Eventually all I could think of to say was, “It wasn’t?” the words cracking in my throat.

  Nate sighed, the sound of it almost animalistic in the dark. The night wrapped itself around us, a velvet darkness sharp with snow and secrets still barely covered, words left unspoken for so many years. It was early January, deep midwinter and the snow wouldn’t melt for months, but those secrets were all coming to the surface whether we wanted them to or not. I turned to him, but he wasn’t looking at me, his familiar face in shadow, still hiding, still hidden.

  ***

  “Settling in okay?” Nate asks, walking into the small room and looking around.

  “It’s fine,” I shrug, shutting the door behind him and going to sit down on my twin bed. It’s the beginning of my senior year of college and I’m living off campus in a house full of quiet oddballs and introverted misfits. People who barely say hello when you see them in the kitchen, who get back from class or the library and head straight to their rooms, doors closed, headphones in. Not that I’m complaining. As far as I’m concerned it’s right where I belong, I’m right there with them. It’s the last place Nate would end up though, the last place I expect to see him, which is why I was so surprised when he texted to say he was in the area, could he drop by?

  “Feels kinda sad in here, Mads,” he says, kicking a box I have yet to unpack with the toe of his sneakers.

  “Yeah, I’ll get to it eventually,” I say, sitting back on my bed, getting comfortable.

  Nate’s eyes flick to my face, taking me in. “When did classes start?”

  “Couple of weeks ago,” I say.

  He lets out a gruff “huh,” and I know what he’s thinking: that it’s high time I got my act together and unpacked some fucking boxes. He pulls the chair out from underneath the desk and swivels it around, sitting down without me offering him a seat.

  “So, I came to invite you to a housewarming,” he says, rubbing his palms together like a cartoon villain. “It’s this weekend. Think you can carve some time out of your busy schedule for it?”

  “Ha ha. Come on, Nate, you know I hate parties.”

  “You didn’t used to,” he points out gently, “maybe it’s time to be getting out there a bit more. Get the old Maddie back.”

  I look at him, sitting innocently in my desk chair, eyes bright, face open. Is that what he’s done, got the old Nate back?

  “What d’you say? I’ll even buy you your own special bottle of vodka. Put your name on it and everything.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say eventually, the best I can offer him.

  But it’s not good enough, apparently, because Nate puts his head in his hands, shaking it back and forth, saying, his voice partially muffled: “It’s been almost four years, Mads. We have to move on, we have to move past this.”

  “We?” I ask, my voice almost breaking on those two letters.

  He gets up suddenly, moving to sit on the bed beside me, his hands resting right by my feet. “I stayed in Madison for you, you do know that, right?”

  His demeanor has changed entirely, no easy jokes, no good-natured cajoling. He is all seriousness, eyes dark, jaw set, face turned toward me. I want to ease into him, to fall into the soft landing stage he’s holding open for me, but I can’t. What he wants from me, what he wants from—and for—us, I can’t give him. I’ve thought about it, thought about him, thought about us every day for four years, longer even, but I just can’t let myself walk down that road. At least not yet.

  “I didn’t ask you to do that,” I say, my voice not much louder than a whisper. I meet Nate’s eyes, and there’s such disappointment there, but frustration too. It seems like I can’t help letting people down.

  Nate ended up leaving Madison and moving to Austin not long after that. He told me at the time it was because he’d got a job offer he couldn’t refuse, but I’d always wondered. As much as I’d always wanted him close, I’d continually pushed him away, until finally he took it upon himself to move thousands of miles away from me.

  “Well,” Nate said at last, “maybe it was a little about you. You didn’t want me the way I wanted you, so I thought it was better for both of us if I just took myself out of the equation.”

>   Even then, so many years later, I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him that I did want him the same way, I just didn’t think I could.

  “It doesn’t matter though,” he continued, “I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did. Should’ve answered your phone calls and emails. It wasn’t fair.”

  I shook my head, still staring up at the sky, closing my eyes against the tears. “Hey, if anyone can understand feeling like you have to drop out of everything it’s me, right? There are a couple of people in my life I’ve done the exact same thing to. So, I get it, okay? I get it. But you should never have been the person I called or wrote to in the first place. It wasn’t fair. You were going through your own thing, and just because it looked a lot like what I was going through, doesn’t mean I should have used you as some sort of security blanket. I should never have thought I could put you in that position.”

  “‘Security blanket’?”

  “You know what I mean. After Nora disappeared you were always the first person I wanted to call. Even when most of the time I couldn’t even bear to talk to anyone. But, you shouldn’t have been.”

  “I liked that I was,” he said, his voice low, and I turned back to look at him. Then, he was facing me, finally, and my eyes had adjusted to the dark so I could see his face clearly, still in shadow maybe, but no longer hidden. The moonlight made the scar on his jaw gleam, pearlescent almost, and the one that cut deep into his right eyebrow and skated past his eye glowed also. Nathan Altman had been a clumsy kid.

  Without stopping to think, I stretched out my hand and ran the pad of my thumb down over the scar by his eye, and as I did so he closed his eyes, and I listened as he slowly breathed in and out. It felt like everything I’d ever felt before was blooming in my chest, pushing out at my breastbone; it was painful, like a deep ache but also like being let loose, and as I drew his face down towards mine I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. I was thinking for a second about how many times I’d already cried today, but then I was kissing him and nothing I thought mattered much anymore. It had been years since we’d last done this, and it felt familiar and strange at the same time. His lips were so cold they tasted like snow. Like air.