69 ~ Annie is Okay-1

I spent a few weeks at my parents’ newly renovated lake house, slowly adjusting the changes in the furniture and paint colors, the hardwood floors that didn’t creak and the screen door that didn’t slam when it closed, the door hinges that weren’t rusted and the mattresses without the sharp springs, but it began to feel like an actual home after a week and I discovered that my mother had saved one of the picnic tables in the garage, unvarnished and with the red paint still chipping on the seats and an abandoned bee’s nest in the corner, and my father carried it out into the front yard, and I spent my evenings there despite the slowly descending temperatures, bringing my meals out there or studying for my GED, both much to my mother’s pleasure. I was still learning how to finish a meal or how to take more than a few bites of some kind of meat that wasn’t turkey, but it was a start, according to my therapist, who was a woman in her early forties with brunette hair with a few streaks of silver around the hairline and crow’s feet around her smile when she smiled, and she was a bit of a hippie with her tie dye shirts underneath her black blazers and a multitude of plants in her office so it always smelled like dirt, which I didn’t really mind. It felt less like a therapist’s office and more like a biology class room and she took her notes down on a hot pink legal pad, something she said made her clients feel a little more comfortable for some reason. “It makes it all seem less official and more like they’re talking to a really good friend,” she explained, but although how she got that from the color of a legal pad was beyond me. Today, though, I decided that I would leave the lake-house and told my mother as she weeded her garden, still trying to preserve the last few flowers before a late October frost came and caused them to wither into brown stalks, that I was going back to Shiloh to do a few things, everything already planned and ready to execute in my mind, and that I would be back for dinner, and asked if we could have pork chops with green beans, and I could still see the wide smile blooming on her face whenever I closed my eyes, her enthusiastic nod causing a few strands of hair to catch on her lips, and she waved me goodbye with one gloved hand, clutching a muddied trowel with her thumb and pinkie, and I waved back to her as I drove away, earning the gravel crunch underneath the tires. My heart was pounding when I thought of the faces I was going to see, the tactics I was going to deploy, and I said a small prayer that I wasn’t about to screw this up. The first place I stopped was so familiar that it was almost a natural instinct to crawl out of my Smart Car and hear my footsteps pound against the front porch, creaking the wooden planks, and open the door without knocking, shouting out her name and glancing around the first story for her blond hair or blue eyes. But this time I was tentatively to the front porch, my footsteps barely squeaking on the wooden boards, and I pressed my finger into the doorbell, hearing the chimes echoing inside and bouncing off of the walls as I waited, glancing around and glimpsing the worn wicker patio furniture with sun-faded cushions strapped to the undersides, and there was a ladybug crawling on the arm of one of the wicker chairs when I heard the footsteps come tumbling down the stairs, as if she were falling, and I recognized them immediately as her mother’s. I felt a small twinge of fear then, realizing that this was actually happening and that she was actually coming, actually gripping her hand around the doorknob and unlatching the lock, and that I was actually here, and I thought about running away, ducking underneath the wicker coffee table, but I remembered what I held in my hands, grasped it a little tighter, and waited for her to answer. Her blond hair was damp, I noticed, when she opened the door, the strands a shade darker than they normally would be dry, and I could see that I had interrupted her as she was applying her make-up, her foundation smeared on half of her face and her breath smelled minty as she exhaled when she saw me, but it wasn’t necessarily an exasperated sigh, but maybe more like she was surprised to see me there. I didn’t know if she knew that I had been in the hospital or that I was bulimic or that I was seeing a therapist, but I knew that she probably knew that I hadn’t been in Shiloh in almost a month and that here, on her front porch, was the last place anyone would expect me to return. She opened her mouth to say something but I held up my hand, stopping her. “I know that you’re probably busy or that you don’t want to see me but,” I said, blurting out these words quickly in case she decided to interrupt me herself or close the door in my face, rolling her eyes at my hurried sentences before ambling back up the stairs to finish applying her make-up, but she didn’t—she just stood there, looking at me as I spoke, “the night that Roxanne died, she sent me something.” I paused, and gripped my phone a little tighter, and took a deep breath. “And I think you should listen to it.” . . . I decided to let Roxanne’s mother to handle the message, what she had said happened that night between her and Evan Dillinger, gave her my phone, and told her that it was up to her if she wanted to tell the police about it or to let her daughter’s last words stay between me and her but I had left the police station an anonymous tip that Evan might have been raping teenage girls at parties and hoped that they would look into it, maybe find someone who actually had a voice against him. I held onto her mother’s hand as she listened to the message, watching as she blinked, listening to her daughter’s voice as she sputtered and coughed, pretending as if she weren’t scared too, and I told her that I thought Roxanne really did love her, even if it was quietly and distant, which was how Roxanne did a lot of her loving. I let her last words drift toward her mother and left them there, and decided to keep them there. I wouldn’t relay the message to Orion or Debbie or even Reese, because I felt as if their guilt was large enough without wondering why he didn’t say something sooner, why she said anything at all, or why she never pushed to regain her friendship with her.