PROLOGUE
Ten Years Earlier
The crackling flames feel close.
Too close.
The heat licks my face.
“She’s gonna fall in,” I hear someone say.
Not me.
They can’t be talking about me.
Because I’m floating.
Floating people can’t fall.
Gyrating to the rhythm of the blaring music, I want to be one with the flames. They dance in a way I envy, shooting up and down in sharp angles, casting shadows over the partiers, giving them a ghoulish look. Some of the people I know. Many I don’t. We twist and writhe and merge with the music.
Nirvana.
So fitting.
The smell of burning wood permeates my nostrils, mixing with reefer and patchouli oil. Embers float down like sparkling rubies in the twinkling night sky. A red-hot one lands on my shoulder. I bat it off, singeing the hairs on my hand, but I don’t flinch.
This is what the afterlife must feel like. When you become a bodiless bundle of energy, no longer tethered to the corporal world, free to roam around the atmosphere.
A blood-curdling scream comes from…somewhere.
Something bad is happening.
But we don’t stop.
We can’t stop.
We keep dancing and laughing and soon the flames are too hot and it’s not fun anymore and I think maybe, just maybe, that was my scream I heard in the woods.
ONE
Reagan
“Please, just leave him for a little while, Mom. He’ll settle down.”
My mother rolls her eyes.
It’s going to be one of those days.
I want her help. I need her help. And I resent the fact that I need her help. It’s always been like that with us. Maybe it’s like that with all mothers and daughters. If she’d only take it down a notch, perhaps we’d find our groove. I’m thirty-one, though, so I don’t hold out much hope. Radical acceptance, my therapist tells me.
Accept what you can’t change.
Change what you can.
So, I take a deep breath and try to appreciate the fact that my mother’s willing to drop everything and come to my rescue, and I don’t push back when she ignores me and lifts my squalling four-month-old infant out of his bouncy seat and walks him around our living room for the millionth time. She started this, and now he expects it all the time.
They say I’ve got postpartum depression, but I think that’s just another label society slaps on people like me, trying to fit us into a neat little box with a clear set of instructions about how to fix us and get us back on track.
The patronizing bothers me the most.
We’re here for you, Reagan.
You’re strong.
You can do it.
But what if I can’t?
***
My husband comes home, eager to snatch the baby from my arms. He used to kiss me hello, but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Matt’s a great guy. Everyone tells me that. But they say it in a way that implies I should be grateful.
He’s a catch, Reagan.
Subtext?
Don’t screw this up.
“Where’s your mother?” Matt asks.
“She went to the store,” I reply, trying not to read too much into his wary intonation. Trying not to feel like he was worried that I was home alone with our baby.
He hands me a stack of mail and finally gives me a peck on the lips. “Can you sort this?” he asks.
We used to be a hot couple, before I turned into a baby vessel and a milk machine. I miss our old life. I miss us. And I feel guilty about that. I had one session with a postpartum specialist, and she says my feelings are common and totally understandable, which is good to know. But it doesn’t fix the problem, does it?
I look through the stack of mail while Matt cuddles baby Danny.
A hospital bill.
A credit card offer.
An envelope postmarked Saratoga Springs, New York, addressed to Reagan Hansen.
It looks like some kind of invitation.
My stomach clenches, a strange mixture of dread and excitement zapping some life into me. It’s been ten years since I graduated from college. Ten years since the night that derailed my life and plunged me into a very dark place. Before I even open the envelope, I have a sinking feeling that I know what it is. Tossing it in the trash would be the right thing to do. I know this. But of course, I don’t.
I rip it open.
A surge of energy courses through me.
It’s an invitation.
For a weekend gathering.
At Ella’s family camp.
Everyone’s been telling me to take some time for myself. And I think it’s about time I listen to them. Is this insane? Dropping everything and leaving my family to return to the place that landed me in a very troubled state of mind?
But I have to go. I have a pressing need to go. Because I know that somewhere in my memory of that night is the key to unlocking what’s eating at me. Something I need to face, so I can heal and fully move on.
***
Ella Parker is the only person I’ve kept in touch with from that period in my life, although we’re pretty much down to social media posts and yearly Christmas cards. I suppose it’s Ella Williams now, but she’ll always be Ella Parker to me. We were closer once. Not best friend close, but closer than we are now. That was a long time ago, though. Before everything changed. Ella’s always had the upper hand in the friendship, and that might be one of the reasons I’ve distanced myself from her. I’ve always been a bit intimidated by her, and that’s not a great basis for a healthy friendship. My insecurities had consequences, too. Big ones.
Her parents own a family camp near Lake Placid, New York, in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, a collection of forty-six peaks in the northernmost part of the range. Calling it a camp is a stretch, since it’s basically a large cabin plus a few storage buildings, but that’s what they call it. Wealthy city dwellers started building these “Great Camps” in the Adirondacks during the Gilded Age, when they needed a respite from the rat race, some of the bigger ones now serving as inns or tourist attractions. During our college years at an upstate university a few hours away, a group of us would meet there, at her camp, at the close of the school year for a weekend-long celebration.
Her family’s rustic cabin provided the basics: a toilet, a shower, a well-equipped kitchen facility. They also own about ten acres of wilderness surrounding the structure. Some of us would spread out on the mountain and camp out under the stars, some would sleep in the cabin. All six of us in our little gang, plus the locals she knew who sometimes joined in for the partying but never stayed over. Ecstasy-infused mini-ragers interspersed with deep, philosophical musings around the fire pit about the meaning of life.
Random hook-ups.
Fractious friendships.
One lasting marriage.
And one tragic death.
Ella’s couching this as a memorial for Lanie Martin. A gathering of remembrance, healing, and reflection, she’s calling it. A chance to come together and pay tribute to a life cut way too short.
It’s not being billed as a weekend of partying, trying to recreate the good old days, ala The Big Chill. It’s supposed to be a time for reflection and healing, which is likely the reason she’s not calling it a college reunion, although that’s pretty much what it is. A ten-year reunion, at Ella’s camp. But rather than marking the anniversary of a joyous occasion—our college graduation and a new beginning in life—it’s forever marking the tragic death of our friend at the very same location ten years ago.
We’d promised, in those alcohol-infused days, that the six of us would meet at the camp every year, no matter where life took us, for one weekend of bonding and abandon. After Lanie’s accident, that plan went by the wayside. Sobered us right up. We never spoke of reunions at the camp again.
But here’s the thing. I’m not sure that Lanie’s death was an accident. The working theory is that she walked into the woods to pee, drunk, and stumbled off the mountainside and down into a ravine, snapping her neck in the fall.
Which is possible.
Sure.
But I saw something that night, and I didn’t tell the police about it, at Ella’s insistence. For that, I feel guilty, and my bad decision still haunts me. Then there are the nightmares, and this strange feeling in my gut that I know more than I can recall. Visions and snippets of memory that sometimes visit me in my dreams and are now invading my conscious mind.
I was wasted that night, I’m sorry to say, and because of that, I’m not sure if it’s the power of suggestion or the guilt causing these vague flashes, or if something traumatic happened and I’ve blocked it out.
All this time, I thought the dreams were a result of my drug and alcohol-induced state, or some kind of PTSD aftermath. The faint memories that sometimes crossed into my conscious mind, I figured for hallucinations. But in my postpartum state, I’ve been starting to remember things. Little flashes here and there that seem more authentic. These memories are clearer. More fully formed. Something important is hovering on the edge of my consciousness; I can feel it.
Perhaps it should stay there.
But I have a feeling it could be the key to straightening my head out. To being able to take care of my baby and stay married to Matt the Great Guy and finally get everyone to lay off of me.
Because I think something happened to Lanie that night.
And it’s possible that I know more than I think I do.
Is it a bad idea?
A potentially dangerous idea?
Like in a horror movie when the star hears a noise in the basement and goes down to check instead of calling the police?
Yes. Just like that. It’s a very bad idea.
But just like the lead in a horror movie, I can’t help myself.
I’m heading down the stairs.
.png)
