Dark Places

you came to my
house
that day.”
    “I’ve never been to your house,” I said, confused. “I don’t even know where you live,” I said.
    “No, not now, back then. The day your family was killed—you and your mom came to my house.”
    “Mmmm,” I said, squinting my eyes, trying to think. That day hadn’t really been that big a deal—I knew Ben was in trouble, but not why or how deeply. My mom had protected us all from her growing panic. But that day. I could remember going with my mom and Diane to look for Ben. Ben was in trouble and so we went looking for Ben and I was sitting in the backseat alone, uncrowded and pleased with myself. I remember my face on fire from the salami Michelle fried. I remember visiting bustling houses, a birthday party my mom thought Ben might be at. Or something. I remember eating a donut. We never found Ben.
    “Never mind,” Krissi interrupted. “I just—with everything that’s happened, I forgot. About you. Could I have a refill?” she held her glass out to me, briskly, as if a long time had lapsed with it empty. I filled it to the brim so she could keep her story going.
    She took a sip, shivered. “Should we go somewhere?” she said.
    “No, no, tell me what’s going on.”
    “I lied to you,” she blurted.
    “Which part?”
    “Ben never molested me.”
    “I didn’t think so,” I said, again trying to make it gentle.
    “And he definitely didn’t molest any of the other girls.”
    “No, everyone dropped their story but you.”
    She shifted on the sofa, her eyes rolling back toward the right, and I could see her remembering her house, her life, way back when.
    “The other stuff was true,” she said. “I was a pretty girl, and we had money and I was good in school, good at ballet … I always just think, just think if I hadn’t told that one stupid lie. That one goddam lie, if it just hadn’t come out of my mouth the first time, my life would be totally different. I’d be like a housewife, and have my own ballet studio or something.” She pulled a finger across her belly, where I knew her caesarian scar was.
    “You have kids though, right?” I said.
    “Sorta,” she replied and rolled her eyes. I didn’t follow up.
    “So what happened? How did it start?” I asked. I couldn’t figure out the significance of Krissi’s lie, what it had done to us that day. But it felt big, relevant—ripply, to quote Lyle. If the police wanted to talk to Ben that day, because of what Krissi had said, that had meaning. It had to.
    “Well, I mean, I had a crush. A big crush. And I know Ben liked me too. We hung out, in a way—and I’m totally serious here—that wasn’t probably right. I mean, I know he was a kid too, but he was old enough to … not have encouraged me. We kissed one day, and it changed everything …”
    “You kissed him.”
    “We kissed.”
    “Like?”
    “Inappropriately, grown-up. In a way I definitely wouldn’t want my fifth-grade daughter to be kissed by a teenage boy.”
    I didn’t believe her.
    “Go on,” I said.
    “About a week after, I went to a slumber party over Christmas break, and I told the girls about my high school boyfriend. All proud. I made up things we did, sex things. And one of them told her mom, and her mom called my mom. I still remember it, the phone call. I remember my mom talking on the phone, and me just waiting in my room for her to come and yell at me. She was always pissed off about something. And she came to my room, and she was, like, nice.
Sweetheart
and
Honey,
and holding my hand, you know, ‘You can trust me, we’ll work this out together,’ and asking me if Ben had touched me wrong.”
    “And you said, what?”
    “Well, I started out with the kiss, and that was all I was going to say. Just the truth. And I told her and she, she seemed to move away, like ‘OK, not that big a deal. No problem.’ I remember her saying,
Is that all? Is that all that happened?
Like she was disappointed almost, and all of a sudden, I remember, she was already standing up, and I blurted it out, ‘He touched me here. He made me do things.’ And then she was back.’”
    “And then what?”
    “It just kept getting bigger. My mom told my dad when he got home, and he was all,
my baby, my poor little girl,
and they called the school and the school sent over a, like, child psychologist. And I remember he was this college guy, and he made it impossible to tell the truth. He wanted to believe I was molested.”
    I frowned