No One Knows Part 9

That's your fault, Aubrey. You know it is. You created him.

She shook off the thought and tried to focus on what he'd told her before he stormed out instead.

He'd always hated Josh, and she'd never fully understood why. Oh, she got it; Tyler had a thing about people he perceived as "better" than him, and he liked to play the role of the protective older brother. Hurt her and I'll hurt you, those sorts of empty threats.

Except for when the threats weren't empty.

She'd been attracted to Josh because he was Tyler's opposite, in every way. Where Tyler was brash and hurtful, Josh was kind and generous. Tyler had little use for morality; Josh spent years trying to teach Aubrey the right way to do things. Tyler was horribly jealous of Josh's goodness, seeing something inside Josh he would never possess.

Josh was a good man. Decent through and through. Even as a child he'd been gallant and honest and implacable, a source of strength, of honor. He'd grown into a man who wanted nothing more than to help people, which was why he was training to be a doctor.

She was well aware of her tendency to make Josh out to be perfect, a hero even. Her therapist had chided her when Aubrey started to immortalize him and his selflessness.

No one is perfect, Aubrey. One day, you'll start to remember Josh's faults, too.

Yes, Josh had a fault.

He'd died.

Dear Josh, Did I ever tell you that I see my death? It's nothing concrete, more of an overwhelming moment of imagination, like a dream, but I'm awake. Sometimes it's a plane spiraling down to earth. Other times it's a wave crashing over my head. The riptide pulls me out to sea, tumbling me against the sand until I open my mouth and scream water into my lungs. Sometimes it's a tree on the side of the road, and my car flies into it and my head cracks against the windshield and everything goes black. Sometimes, it's the handful of pills I want to take.

Oh, Josh, I can't go on like this. I miss you too much. We were supposed to be in this together. I know you're dead, but my mind can't believe that you're really gone. If I could just know for sure, I'd be able to make a decision about what to do next. But we're caught in this limbo, between the worlds, where you've disappeared and, frankly, so have I.

Always, Aubrey

CHAPTER 14.

Aubrey Today After Tyler's Camry backfired its way away from the curb, Aubrey felt her hands begin to shake, the anger coming in waves. Damn that man. He was forever forcing himself into her life, through coercion or intimidation or manipulation, whatever it took. Why wouldn't he just go away? He reminded her of the worst parts of her world, the parts she spent so much time locking away, screwing them down into the farthest bit of her soul so she wouldn't ever have to think about them.

Tyler must have been desperate to rush over when he got out of jail and claim he'd overheard Josh had been wrapped up in something bad. Trying to hurt her, to punish her for gaining her freedom when his was wrenched from him, or leverage the information for something. He was trying to drag her into his unhappiness again. Tyler's morass was all-encompassing.

Aubrey felt the rabbit hole closing in on her, so she did the only thing she knew to do. She took an Ativan and put on her running shoes.

One foot in front of the other. Again and again and again and again.

Pace became breath became her body, all of her parts working together to find some meditative calm. The hangover began to recede. She let the memories wash over her.

She tested her emotions. Thought about the previous night. Chase. She tried to ignore the warm flush of excitement that coursed through her, followed by anger and regret. It was wrong, wrong to think of him and Josh at the same time. She would have to find a way to separate the two in her thoughts.

Where was Chase now?

She didn't know anything about his life in Chicago. Did he have a woman? A house? Did he spend his Saturday afternoons mowing the yard so he could watch the game on Sunday in peace? No, he was probably combing the bars, looking for another strange woman to screw.

She pushed the pace, upped her flow.

Come on, Aubrey. You're making pretty big assumptions. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he did enjoy your company. Face it, nothing about the last twenty-four hours was normal, by any stretch of the imagination. You're under stress, and stress does wonky things to your mind.

Running relieved that stress and allowed her to think rationally. After a while, she was able to see there were two plausible scenarios for what happened last night.

Either she'd been used by a player on the road who had no intention of ever calling her again, or he'd actually liked her and his note stating he wanted to see her again was sincere. That was all. There were no machinations, no clandestine insights to be gained. They were just a man and a woman who'd had sex. All the weirdness in her life aside, it boiled down to that. She'd gotten paranoid. She read into everything, looked for ulterior motives, unspoken statements, danger.

And her mind had finally played the biggest trick of all on her. She'd wanted to believe he was Josh so badly, she'd almost convinced herself last night it was his arms she slept in.

Her feet pounded the pavement, and she felt more settled. The grass of Dragon Park ended, and she veered off onto Blakemore. She'd run through the Vanderbilt campus, look at all the happy kids, and pretend she was one of them. She put Tyler and Chase and Josh and Meghan and Daisy out of her mind, and let her legs take her into oblivion.

She didn't see the dark blue sedan following her around the edges of the park.

CHAPTER 15.

Aubrey was done in, her legs shaking from the exertion. She needed to go home, but she veered away from her turn. She didn't know what possessed her to take one more lap around Dragon Park and return to the tree.

That was a lie. She knew exactly what drove her there. And though she didn't want to indulge the demon, she did it anyway.

It had been years since they'd played the game. It was a childhood fancy, something silly. As teens it had become the most singularly romantic thing that Aubrey could ever imagine. But once they were together-dating, engaged, married-there was no reason to continue. They had instant access to each other anytime they liked. They didn't need to arrange illicit assignations.

But after Josh went missing, the lovers' oak called to her. It seemed fitting, since they were separated, that she resurrect their old method of communicating. When they were kids, the tree's hidden hole had probably once been the home of a squirrel, or some birds, but when the city started spraying for mosquitoes, the tree had been vacated.

She wrote him a letter and stashed it in the oak's trunk, in the little indentation that seemed made for their missives.

For the first year, after the media shit storm died down, after she went back to work, when she was trying to return to an even keel, she'd run to the tree every night, put her hand in the small hole, and feel for a new piece of paper. Hoping. Praying.

There never was one. The crevice was always void of anything but the pages she'd laid there.

Aubrey coped the only way she knew how. She wrote more letters. And more. But now she did it on the computer and clicked the Send button when she was finished. She'd left Josh's email account open, hoping against hope that one day he'd see her notes and write back.

Insanity is filled with wishful thoughts.

Of course, she knew that was impossible. The blood at the house confirmed it. He'd been gravely injured the night he went missing. Injured enough that the DA tried his best to hang a murder charge on Aubrey's slender shoulders based on the blood pool alone.

The letters were her one link to the world in those first maddeningly scary months. Especially the time she was incarcerated, before the trial, when she'd lost her temper and punched the investigating cop and they'd tossed her in county overnight. She'd mouthed off to the judge and he'd given her three more days to cool her heels while they decided whether to make things official. She couldn't sleep, not a wink. The jail's doctor had finally given her Ambien because they were afraid she was going to get psychotic without proper rest. She slept. The sleep of the dead. Every night for two months, they gave her the pills.

When she got out, she couldn't sleep without them. She liked the deep oblivion of the pills. They kept her sane. Every night, she'd write until the pills washed her brain clean of thoughts and sleep dragged her under.

The letters didn't take a cohesive form. Some were long, rambling accounts of her moments, some short snippets. Some were angry, some full of longing. Some pleaded, some accused.

But none were ever answered.

As the days stretched into months stretched into years, she continued the habit. Her therapist had suggested it as a way for her to cope, and Aubrey found the idea appealing. It made her feel and look weak, so she didn't tell anyone what she was doing. After a while, she realized she was using the letters to hold on to her sanity. Even during that time, the time she didn't like to remember, when she'd slipped, she kept writing. The letters became her lifeline, a way she could talk to Josh again.

They added up. Pages and pages and pages. She printed them out and kept them all in boxes, coded by year, one through five. There were hundreds. Details of her life without him, of what he was missing. Of what she missed about him.

She knew the words to all the communiques. One of her favorite pastimes was opening the boxes and reading through them. Sometimes it was a good exercise, a measurable gauge that she was moving on, getting by. Other readings would devastate her for days. She could conjure them in her mind as if she had the photocopies sitting in front of her, and often ran them through her head while she jogged. There was a section of letters she didn't like to revisit, from the time before she found the physical outlet, but the rest she had memorized. It was obsessive, yes, but it helped her cope.

She stroked the carved initials on the tree. She could almost fit her pinkie finger into the edges of the heart.

The sad segments of her life: Before, During, After-seven, seventeen, and five. Happiness, bliss even, replaced by shock and isolation and fear. Aubrey knew the exact moment when Before turned into During. And when During became After. When the blur began to focus, and she woke, half a woman.

She fingered the scar on her lip and pulled her cell phone from inside her running shirt's zipper pocket. It was an outdated iPhone, no longer manufactured, but she didn't want to get a new one because it had the text messages she'd sent Josh the night he'd disappeared. The police had given it back to her when the trial ended; they had no use for it.

The last text was at 11:59 p.m. the day of Sulman's party. That's how she knew the exact moment her life changed forever. A little gray screen with a green bubble that read You are the best husband EVAH! with a string of x's and o's, four of each, followed by quieter, more desperate messages as the night progressed, culminating with Josh, we can't find you. We're going to the house. Arlo wants to call the police. Please, please call me.

She didn't have the heart to delete the texts.

He was dead. She knew he was dead. It was wishful thinking that he could be alive somewhere. Hurt, forgotten, unable to return . . . that was fantasyland, a fantasy Aubrey discarded when the police slapped the cuffs on her and threw her in jail, and she stood before the judge, all alone.

But she could still dream.

Unhealthy as it was, she could conjure Josh at will: the smooth skin of his forearm, the feel of his hands across her neck. The way he smiled at her, without reservation, always happy, always willing. The way he teased, and the way he loved. She'd been with him for so many years that she didn't really remember the time before, when she had a mother and a father to tuck her in at night.

A college kid in a black-and-gold Vanderbilt ball cap ran by, stared at her crying by the tree. She could see the hitch in his step as he decided whether to stop and see if she was okay. She gave him a little shake of her head, and he jogged on toward campus, clearly relieved.

You're getting maudlin, Aubrey. Best get going.

As she ran back toward the house, with Josh's face and the words that tied her to him fresh in her mind, she realized she hadn't written him last night. It was the first time in years she'd skipped the ritual.

She kicked up the pace a notch. Something was wrong with her. First she'd forgotten to put on her ring. Then she'd met a man, brought him home, and slept with him. Now she'd forsaken the one ritual that had given her a lifeline back to the real world.

Maybe she'd just been waiting, in suspended animation, for the official ruling of death. Maybe her subconscious was doing its level best to protect her, to keep her from harm, and it somehow knew there had finally been a last line written in the book of Josh and Aubrey.

She struggled against the rising tide of fear and relief that coursed through her brain. For five years the thought of Josh had been an open wound, one that Aubrey touched nearly every day, ripping off the meager scab so she could feel the pain fresh and anew. Yet somehow, some way, when Daisy gave her the letter, things had suddenly felt different.

It's you who are different, Aubrey. You've finally come to terms with his loss.

The realization hit her hard. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. All she knew was she needed to say good-bye properly. It was time. It was finally time.

The sun was just beginning to slide toward the horizon. She propelled herself back to the house, to her haven, her refuge. She'd sweated out all the booze and bad feelings, was left with the euphoria she always felt when she finished a run. It was a high-no different than the one she got from the consumption of alcohol or the ingestion of drugs, just comprised of natural endorphins instead of chemical ones-and her mood was suitably lightened.

She put Winston out in the backyard, then mounted the stairs to her office. That was a rather grand term for the room; it was a large closet she'd converted, just big enough for a small desk, a chair, and a computer. No storage, no shelves. Very minimalist. But it served its purpose: it was a sanctuary for her thoughts to run free.

With a deep breath, she pulled up her email and hit Compose.

The blank square popped up. She stared at the empty subject line. Normally she didn't bother with a subject-these were pro forma emails-but she felt compelled to type a single word into this one: Good-bye.

Dear Josh, It is official. The letter has come from the state, and the judge on your case has declared you dead. Your mother took it well, as you can imagine. She will now fight to get the money from your estate, and honestly, I am fine with that. She needs that sense of control, of possession, and if it makes her feel better, so be it. You know money has never been important to me.

But something has happened to me as well. As if that letter unshackled me, and I didn't know I'd been chained to the floor with metal and locks.

Do you remember the first time I went away? The morning after we'd lost our virginity? Your mother came home and caught us naked in the living room and called the police? They came to Sandy's house to arrest me for breaking and entering, trespassing, the works. When they put the cuffs on my wrists, I felt like an animal in a cage, one whose sole purpose was entertainment. They laughed at me when I freaked out. I will never forget that-the sun rising in the background, being in the back of the car, Tyler banging on the window to have them let me out, Sandy standing on the porch, so disappointed, with the ring in her hand to give to them, and I got claustrophobic in the hot backseat and started to hyperventilate. I thought my heart was going to break out of my chest. A full-blown panic attack. And they just laughed, pulled away from the curb, and told me to shut up. And they ended up shipping me to that place . . .

Josh, that's how I've felt every day since you disappeared. I've been in a cage, panicked, desperate to find you, to figure out what happened. And suddenly, when the letter came, a peace filled me. The responsibility was taken from me. Someone else had made the decision for me.

You will always be my first and best love. I wouldn't have survived my childhood if you hadn't reached out to me, loved me, made me yours. But now it is time for me to say good-bye. To move forward with my life. To try and have the life you wanted for me. Without you by my side, it will not mean as much. But I'm going to try, Josh. I'm going to try.

I love you, darling. I always will.

Aubrey She was sobbing as she typed in her name and hit Send. Before she could change her mind, she hit Print, exported the Send folder and wiped the email account clean. She went to Gmail, created a new account, and sent out a message from her old Yahoo account with her new email address. She closed the Yahoo account, sent them a follow-up email requesting that the account be disabled, and repeated the process with Josh's address.

She logged out of the computer, deleted the bookmark, and breathed out a huge sigh. The tears stopped. She wiped her eyes and sat back in her chair.

She should have closed his email much sooner than this. That last tangible link to him, to his world, had been keeping her from seeing her future. She had finally, finally done the right thing. It was time to move on.

Aubrey suddenly found she was hungry. She decided to call Meghan and ask her to meet at Sam's. They could have some food, some drinks, a laugh or two. They could talk about Chase, and what he might hold in store for her. They would talk about everything, everything but Aubrey's dead husband.

CHAPTER 16.

Meghan didn't answer her phone, so Aubrey satisfied her burning desire to start over with a cup of chamomile tea, hopeful that she'd done the right thing. She was already starting to feel the small edges of regret, those lingering emotions that derailed her so often.

Don't fret, Aubrey. You're making strides, literally.

She finished her tea and was just heading up the stairs to take a shower when the phone rang.

She didn't recognize the number, so she let it go to the answering machine. A moment later, a man's voice spilled into the kitchen.

"Hi, uh, Aubrey? This is Chase."

She didn't allow herself to think, instead about-faced and picked up the receiver.

"Hi."

"Oh, you're home." He sounded much relieved, and she smiled. She'd forgotten what this kind of awkwardness was like. She'd only experienced it once before, when Josh suddenly realized he was in love with his best friend and became a shy, stammering, blushing fool for exactly one week before he finally got up his nerve to ask Aubrey out on a date. Their first official date.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and told Josh, firmly, to go away.

"You're still there, right?" Chase asked.

"Yes, I am. Sorry. How are you? How was your trip home? I hope everything is good in Chicago. Is the weather nice?"

Aubrey, you sound like a schoolmarm.

"Chicago is rather lonely, actually." His voiced dropped, became warm and conspiratorial. "It would have been much better if I'd stuck around."