Oliver’s mouth hung open, tiny movements in his lower jaw, up and down, and Red imagined she could hear it, creaking at the hinges, creating the sound out of the emptiness of the static.
Oliver still didn’t say anything, so Reyna did.
“His name was Jack Harvey, not Jack Something, and I knew him,” she said.
Oliver blinked, slowly, the only muscle that moved anywhere on his body. “Why did you never tell me?” he said with a low growl, voice catching in
his throat. But that wasn’t the right question. “And how did you know Jack Harvey?”
There it was, the right question. Red’s head flicked toward Reyna, waiting for the answer. So was everyone else: Arthur, Simon, Maddy, all looking Reyna’s way, backing her into the corner by the front door with their eyes.
Reyna hugged her arms around herself, picking at the wrinkles in her sleeves.
“I knew Jack,” she said, slowly, carefully, like her words might cause an explosion if she said them too hard. And, looking at Oliver’s face, they just might. “Because we were together.”
Simon blew out an awkward puff of air, hanging back, running his hands through his disheveled hair.
Reyna chewed her bottom lip, waiting for the explosion. But it didn’t come.
“Together how?” Oliver said, overenunciating the words, sharpening the consonants.
“Together like…” Reyna’s voice cowered, shrinking beneath an outward breath. “Please don’t make me say it.”
“How long?” Oliver was too calm, too still, and Red shivered, the hairs standing up across the back of her neck.
“I’d known him a couple of years.” Reyna sniffed. “Met him at the bar when I went with friends.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Reyna shook her head. “Since September. When we went back for fall semester.”
Oliver’s eyes spooled in his head, working something out.
“Four months,” he said, not a question. “You were with him for four months behind my back.”
“I’m sorry,” Reyna cried. “I shouldn’t have done that to you. I know it’s awful, and I’m so so sorry.”
“And you’re telling me now,” Oliver continued, still too calm, a clouded look in his eyes, the pupils too large and beetle-dark. “In front of everyone here, in front of my little sister.”
Maddy shrank in the booth.
“I’m sorry.” Reyna hugged herself tighter. “I wish I could have told you at a better time, just you and me.” She shook her head, strands of black clinging to her cheeks, wet with tears and sweat. “No, I wish it never happened in the first place. If I hadn’t been such a coward, if I had just…” Her words failed, lips pressing together while she tried to get them back.
“If you had just what?” Oliver pressed, and Reyna winced, like he was pressing down on her neck.
“Broken up with you.” She said it quietly, almost a whisper, staring at Oliver like there was no one else in the RV. And there wasn’t, not really.
Red’s mind was quiet for once, watching the scene, a strange feeling in her gut. Not guilt, or shame, or hunger, it was something older. Ancient. A primal instinct telling her to keep out of Oliver’s way. There was danger outside the RV, and now there was danger inside it.
A low bark of laughter from Oliver as he slapped his hand on the table, making the kitchen knife jump and the flashlight roll toward Maddy. “What?” he said, a deep smile splitting his face, crinkling the skin by his eyes. “You would have chosen him over me?” Another quick burst of sound from his throat, halfway between a laugh and a shout, the smile across his face twisting in at the ends, turning cruel.
“I’m sorry. I loved him,” Reyna whispered, a pair of silent tears. Red backed up another step. Maybe Reyna shouldn’t have said that, not right here right now, but clearly she’d been holding this in for a very long time. It only took a man with a rifle to bring it to the surface.
Oliver was still smiling. Why was he still smiling? “We’ve been together two and a half years,” he said.
“I know,” Reyna cried. “And I do care about you, Oliver. A lot. But it was different with him. It was easy.”
“Easy, huh?” Still smiling. Hand resting on the table where he’d smacked it, fingers splayed, just a little too close to that sharp knife there. Red tensed.
“Different,” Reyna said, with a wet sniff. “Jack didn’t feel right about it, what we were doing. I told him I was going to break up with you, I said I’d do it any day now.” Her breath hitched in her chest. “I didn’t know we were going to his bar that day. If I had I would have tried to get us to watch the game somewhere else. I know that’s not the problem here, it’s me, what I did…” She trailed off, taking a new breath to come back stronger. “That’s what he was saying to me in the parking lot. He said he’d waited long enough and I had to choose. I had to break up with you because it wasn’t fair to keep doing this.”
Oliver didn’t speak yet, just that same smile, blinking for her to keep talking.
“And then you came out and saw us, and I panicked. It wasn’t how I wanted everything to come out, with both of you there. But I knew it was the
moment, whether I wanted it or not, and I had to make a decision, there and then. I had to decide. And, I don’t know…” She wiped her nose on the other sleeve this time. “I loved Jack, I knew that, but in that moment my head was telling me he wasn’t the smart choice, the practical choice, because he worked in a bar and that’s all he ever wanted to do. Whereas you…” She paused, daring a glance at Oliver.
“I’m going to be somebody,” Oliver said, showing too many teeth on that last syllable. “So what, Reyna, it was a battle between your head and your heart, was it?” he mocked her, but Reyna nodded, slowly, up and down.
“I was a coward.” She bit her lip. “I made my choice and I pretended not to know him, that he was a random guy bothering me in the parking lot, like you thought. And then everything happened.” Reyna winced, like she was seeing it all again, playing just below the surface of her red-raw eyes. “I couldn’t find the courage to do it, to choose him. And he was so hurt after, he texted me that night, saying he couldn’t believe I’d pretended not to know who he was. And then I didn’t hear from him, until…until…” She didn’t need to finish, they knew the rest. “He’s dead, and it’s my fault, because I was a coward and let it all happen.”
Red shuffled, flinching as she made a rustle that drew Oliver’s eyes, thinking over it all, sifting through. Reyna hadn’t killed Jack, though, had she? It was Oliver who hit him, who caused the slow bleed in his brain. Neither of them meant for him to die. But no one could say Reyna was the one who’d killed him, right? She loved him, and she blamed herself, and that must be a terrible weight to carry. Almost like—
“Yes, Reyna, it is all your fault,” Oliver replied after a long pause, voice clipped and flat. “It’s all your fault. You made me do it.”
“I didn’t, I didn’t…” Reyna puffed out her cheeks to control her staccato breath. “I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” She looked away from Oliver, eyes skipping from Maddy to Red, as though seeing them for the first time, stepping away from that horrible dark memory into the horrible dark here and now, in this RV. “He had four brothers,” she explained. “I never met them, but it could be them. He said one of them liked to hunt deer. Maybe they found our messages on his phone, wondered why I
never reached out, or went to the funeral. Or maybe they suspected there was more to the story, about how he’d hurt his head, about that last message he sent me. That’s the secret they want: how Jack died.”
The static seemed to grow louder then, in Red’s grip, even though it couldn’t have. She was keeper of the voice, and did they now know whose voice it was? Waiting for them on channel three.
Oliver brought his hands together, like a crack of thunder or the clap of a rifle. Twice. Two shots. The sound burying itself inside Red’s bones.
He pushed up from his booth. “Well, Reyna, you don’t have to worry about finding the courage now.” He coughed, a smile still stretched across his lips, splitting the near-red flesh into seams. “You and I are over. I could always do better than you.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry, Oliver. I really am.”
He brushed off her apology, looking away before she was finished. Reyna was no longer welcome on his side of the RV, in the us of us versus them. A cold shiver passed up Red’s spine, even though it was hot in here now, sweat prickling by the seams of her shirt where they pressed into her armpits. The six of them cooking inside this tin can. But the shiver meant something, a realization that Red could put into words. Now there was no one left who could control Oliver. Unless Maddy…Red tried to catch Maddy’s eyes, but she wasn’t looking, picking at the loose skin by her fingernails.
“If that’s why we’re here”—Reyna was speaking, looking between Arthur and Simon now—“I will face the consequences. I’ll tell him what happened, what I did. I’ll end this.”
“Oh no you won’t,” Oliver snapped. The smile was gone now, but his mouth wouldn’t close, hanging open between words. Pupils still too large in his once-golden-brown eyes. “You’re not the one who hit him, I am. If they’re looking for a killer, then it’s me they’re looking for, not you. And I’m not dying because you decided to fuck a bartender, Reyna.” A globule of spit flew out with her name. He pointed at the walkie-talkie in Red’s hands. “We’re not telling him anything. This is your fault, Reyna, no one else’s. If anyone should have to walk out of this RV it should be you. But I am not, are you listening?! We don’t tell them a thing.”
“We have to,” Reyna said, a quake in her lower lip. She bit down on it. “It’s the right thing to do, tell him what he wants to know. He said he’d let the others go. He might let us go too, if he knows it was all an accident, that Jack wasn’t supposed to die.”
“I don’t know,” Simon said, uncertainly. “He killed Don and Joyce out there for nothing. I don’t think he’s the forgiving type.”
“No,” Oliver growled. He moved past Red, toward the kitchen, glancing at the timer on the oven. “It’s three-forty-five now. We are going to sit here until sunrise, until six a.m., and then his game is over. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“I can’t, Oliver,” Reyna said, keeping her tone steady, treading around the explosion again. “Someone might get shot. I can’t live with that. Red, can you pass me the walkie-talkie, please?”
“No, Red,” Oliver barked. “Give me the walkie-talkie.” He stretched out his hand, open and waiting.
Red looked, from Reyna to Oliver, the walkie-talkie hissing in her cupped hands, like a coiled snake, like a warning.
Here she was again, standing in the middle of them, trapped in both lines of sight. She clutched the walkie-talkie to her chest.
“Red, don’t be an idiot,” Oliver hissed, trying to lower his voice. “Give me the walkie-talkie. I’m in charge here. You know me. You don’t know Reyna. None of us do, apparently.”
“Red, please.” Reyna’s voice in her other ear. “I’m trying to do the right thing. To save us.”
Red’s eyes jumped to Maddy’s, but there were no answers for her there, only fear, widening, widening.
“Red?”
“Red?”
Left or right.
Move or don’t move. Reyna or Oliver.
