Page 31 of The Last House Guest
Shit.I wasn’t about to go back out there to reset the breaker. Not with Parker standing nearby, watching. Not with whatever was happening at the rental properties.
I pictured the shape of the shadow inside Sunset Retreat and shivered. Using only my phone for light, I circled the apartment, pulling all the curtains closed. Then I collected the tea lights from the bathroom, the ones at the corners of the tub, and lit them around the bedroom. I locked that door, too. Pulled the journal from my bag. Felt the familiar grooves in the cover and opened the notebook.
The cliffs,it began.
The road.
The bottle in the medicine cabinet.
The blade.
The writing was so angry, the pen leaving deep indentations in the page; I could’ve felt the emotion in the words, running my fingers over the lines in the dark. I turned the page, my hand shaking. There were more lists, page after page of them, just like this. The times death was right there, within reach. The times death had come so close.
Walked to the edge, balanced there.
Top of the lighthouse, leaning forward.
Woke up on the beach gasping for air, dreamed the tide had risen.
Slip of the blade. The blood in my veins.
I tried to see this as the police would, reading these pages. Pictured Sadie doing these things, writing these things. Staring at her veins, like Parker had told me. Listing the ways she could die.
I hadn’t seen this journal in years. Not since that winter. When the spark of spring never caught, and summer rolled in just the same as winter, empty and endless. It was the story of grief, of disappointment, of a soul obliterated.
It was the story of who I had been until the moment I met Sadie Loman, and I chose her. My life in her hands, restructured, recast. No longer adrift or alone.
This was my journal from a time in my life I would have rather forgotten—but which had colored everything that followed. When I had sunk beneath the surface and all I wanted was to slide deeper into it, like there was something I was chasing, waiting at the bottom. You could tell where I had been by the destruction in my wake.
Within these pages, I could see exactly where I’d lost Connor, where I’d lost Faith, and where I’d lost myself.
When had Sadie found this? I couldn’t remember where I had kept it. It had maybe been in my closet, at my grandmother’s place. It had been forgotten after I’d met Sadie and a new world had opened up to me. The world, through her eyes.
I wondered if Sadie had found it when she and Grant were helping me move. Even so, I didn’t understand why she’d kept it.
But the police had found it in her room and decided a person like this, she would do it.It was very, very dark.That’s what the detective had told me. A person like this, they believed, didn’t want to live. She existed in the darkness and would step off the edge.
This journal, sad and angry, was just a moment in time. Looking back at these pages, I knew that I had been trying to find my way through it.
Only now that I was past it did I see how close I truly came. The darkness that I was ready to dive headfirst into.
I kept looking at all the places death might be lurking. In so many lists, I ended with the blade. I remembered, then, the feeling of my blood pulsing underneath my skin. The image of a car crash, bodies versus metal and wood. The pressure of the blood in my grandmother’s skull. Staring at my veins, at the frailty of them, so close to the surface.
The blade, the blade,I kept coming back to the blade.
The sharp glint of silver. The empty kitchen. The impulse and chaos of a single moment.
I hadn’t anticipated the amount of blood. The sound of footsteps. I couldn’t get it to stop.
I hid in the bathroom, pressing the toilet paper to the base of my hand.
Thinking,No No. Until Sadie slipped inside.
You’re lucky,she’d said.You just missed the vein.
I BARELY SLEPT. FEELINGso close to the person I’d been at eighteen. Like my nerves were on fire.
At the first sign of light, I took my car down through town, at the hour when it was just the fishermen at the docks and the delivery trucks in the alleys. I drove up the hill, past the police station, up past the Point Bed-and-Breakfast, to where I could see the flash of the lighthouse beckoning, even in daylight. And then I turned down the fork in the road, heading for the homes on the overlook.
