Read an Excerpt
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***
Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Little
As soon as they processed my release, Noah and I hit the ground running. A change of clothes. A wig. An inconspicuous sedan. We doubled back once, twice, then drove south when we were headed east. In San Francisco we had a girl who looked like me board a plane to Hawaii.
Oh, I thought I was so clever.
But you probably already know that I’m not.
I mean, come on, you didn’t really think I was just going to disappear, did you? That I would skulk off and live in the shadows? That maybe I would find a distant island, a plastic surgeon, a white ceramic half mask and a Punjab lasso? Get real.
But I never meant for it to come to this. There’s attention and then there’s attention, and sure, the latter gets you fame and money and free designer shoes, but I’m not Lindsay Lohan. I understand the concept of declining marginal returns. It was the not knowing—that’s what I couldn’t stand. That’s why I’m here.
Did you know that the more you remember, the more you expand your perception of personal time? No, really. There’s, like, studies and shit. Even though we can’t outrun death, if we muscle up our memories the race, at least, will seem a little longer. That is, we’ll still die, but we’ll have lived more. Kind of comforting, right?
Unless, of course, you’re me.
Imagine how it would feel if, out of the blue, someone were to hand you a gold medal and tell you it was yours. Oh my god, you’d think. I am so super awesome! I won the Olympics. But, wait-what did I win? When did I win it? When did I train? Shouldn't my biceps be full-on Madonna? How could I possibly forget the defining moment of my life?
And what does it mean that I did?
Now imagine that instead of a gold medal you were given a murder conviction, and you'll have some sense of how it is for me.
When I think back on the night my mother died, it's like trying to adjust a pair of rabbit ears to pick up a distant broadcast signal. Every so often something comes into focus, but mostly I just get the scrape sound of static, an impenetrable wall of snow. Sometimes there isn't even a picture. Sometimes there isn't even a TV. Maybe if I'd had a moment to stop and think that morning I might've had the chance to imprint a useful detail or two, but the police hustled me out of the house and into a cruiser and over to the station before I could even think to worry about what I was wearing, much less what I might have done. By lunchtime I was in an interview room picking dried blood out from under my fingernails while two detectives explained what they wanted me to write in my confession.
Not that I blame them. I was always going to be the best story. Next was the trial, which didn't have anything to do with what I knew but rather with what other people had decided I knew, and soon enough I lost the ability to tell the difference between them. And now I 'm stuck with a mess of a memory, a hodgepodge of angry testimony, sanctimonious magazine profiles, made-for-TV movies-less linear narrative than True Hollywood Story highlight reel. I don't know what's mine anymore.
And then there's the evidence. The only fingerprints in my mother 's room: mine. The only DNA under my mother's nails: probably mine. The only name written in blood next to my mother's body: definitely mine.
(That's right. You probably didn't know that part, did you?)
It 's hard enough to maintain your innocence when so many people are so sure you're not. It 's impossible when you're not sure of anything at all-other than the awful, inescapable fact that you hadn't particu larly liked your own mother.
The uncertainty ate at me, maggots mashing the already-decaying corpse of my brain. And in jail, isolated from any real means of investigation, all I could do was wonder. I began to treat every action of every day like an omen, a crystal ball, a goat's intestines. How would a killer brush her teeth? How would a killer brush her hair? Would she take sugar in her coffee? Milk in her tea? Would she knot her shoelaces once? Twice?
Totally kidding. Like they would have given me shoelaces.
Of all the challenges of incarceration, this was perhaps the worst: I was a fundamentally rational creature reduced to rudimentary divination. I promised myself that if I ever got out I'd try to find out what really happened, to find out what I really was.
I ignored the voice that said killing again was the only way I'd ever know for sure.
Messages Noah Contact
Tuesday 5:14 PM
Testing. Is the new phone working? Did you get this? (It’s Noah.)
What the fuck is this
It’s called text messaging.
I know what it is I just don’t know why we’re doing it
I need to make sure I can reach you.
What people don’t actually talk anymore
Welcome to the future.
Can I go back to jail now
Adapt or die, Jane.
:)
