It feels cold, floating inside my own body like this. I turn to him and tell him the truth. “Maybe I was.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cole
I hold her against me while she tells me what she knows for sure: Jillian Paige Kearns drove a 2009 blue Honda Civic off of Beatty Pass at 1:29 AM. The time can be nailed down precisely because a woman—a forty-one year old grocery store cashier named Angela Sharpe—was on her way home from the night shift and witnessed the entire thing. By the time that Angela reached the scene of the accident, the Honda was almost completely submerged in water. Later, she told police that she helped Aimee—barely conscious and bleeding—climb up the steep bank out of the water but had no idea that there was a second girl trapped in the car.
In a small, steady voice, Aimee strings together a series of memories so painful for her that I can hardly bear to listen. She tells me about the panicked moments after the car slammed through barrier and went off the side of the pass. Then she describes the intensity of the impact and the water and the thick flashes of pain and the blood that burned through her vision.
“I still don’t know exactly why the car swerved off the road that night,” she says. “The police asked me about the details of the accident a hundred different ways but I couldn’t tell them anything that made a difference because I didn’t know. All I could say for certain was that we were listening to music, talking about our hair… I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second and then—like I’d blinked myself into a nightmare—the car was skidding off the bridge into the water.”
“The thing is that it doesn’t really matter if Jillian missed the curve and overcompensated, or if she thought she saw something in the middle of road, because she never should have been driving my car in the first place. If I had kept my keys or let Brian take us home… Every single thing would be different. Jillian would be alive. She’d be at college now and she’d fall in love and she’d travel and she’d get married and have babies. I took that from her. And if I could just do it all over again… I—” Her words break off, collapsing into her mouth.
“You can’t…”
Aimee moves. Her hand comes up to cup my cheek. “She was my best friend, Cole. They did tests after the accident and determined that she’d taken a bunch of pills—Vicodin, Valium—I don’t…” Aimee’s voice teeters and she shakes her head. “I don’t know how she got the pills or why she took them. I had no idea. They told me that after… after the accident they found a stash in her room. She never said anything to me about it and I still can’t understand that. I thought that I knew everything and it turns out that I knew nothing! I-I feel like if I could… I don’t know… If I could understand why she was taking the pills then maybe things would make more sense.”
She keeps going. “You know that they told us that she probably could have lived. I mean, they didn’t say it like that. They just said that the official cause of death was drowning. Drowning. I know what that means. It means that she was alive after the car crashed and I—I left her there, Cole. I saved myself and left her.” She shudders. “Jillian was the best swimmer that I knew and she drowned in the dark all by herself. Every day…” The last word cracks as it leaves her mouth. “Every single day of the rest of my life I have to think about that and wonder if she woke up and knew what was happening to her. I have to wonder if she called my name or cried or tried to save herself, and I…”
“That’s not fair. You can’t blame yourself.” I hesitate. Aimee’s guilt is tangible. It pulses beneath her pale skin and seeps out through every pore on her beautiful body.
“I don’t even remember the lady that found me. The doctors told me that she saved my life and that I was incredibly lucky.” She laughs, but it’s humorless. “Lucky was their word, not mine. They said that if Angela Sharpe hadn’t called for an ambulance then I probably wouldn’t have made it. I was in shock—losing blood from here,” her finger touches her scar, “and my spleen was ruptured. After I was discharged from the hospital, my mom wanted me to meet Angela in person. When I said no, she tried to get me to at least send her a note. I agreed to it but every time I tried to write the words, I couldn’t finish… Do you know why?”
“No.” I squeeze her, not sure that I want to hear the answer.
“Because I didn’t feel lucky at all, Cole. I didn’t want to thank the woman who saved my life because secretly I hated her. I hated her for saving me because I wished that she had just let me die along with Jillian.”