The Never List

I took a step toward her, but she waved me off.
    “He walked into the lake somewhere along here.” She pointed to a small beachlike area about twenty feet from us. “They found some shoeprints in this direction; his tent was back in those trees. He’d been living out here with a couple of our friends who were homeless. He stayed out here with them, drinking beer. One of them had a guitar. I used to come out here too, a couple of nights at a time. It was quite a party.
    “And then one night, late, after the other guys had gone to sleep—or passed out, more likely—he got up and headed into the lake. Just went in and kept going. One of his friends heard a splash and tried to run out to save him.
    “But there was no saving him. Ben just went right under and didn’t come back up. They dredged the next day and found his body. He had weighted himself down with some iron chains he’d found. No doubt about it. He meant it.
    “I come out here every couple of years. I try to talk to him. Try to ask him why he did it. It’s hard, but I feel closest to him here.” She stepped into the water a few inches, then walked in deeper, slowly putting one foot in front of the other. For a second I wondered if she too was going to keep going. She seemed defeated in that moment, her shoulders slumped, eyes downcast, mouth slack.
    “I shouldn’t have left him alone. I shouldn’t ever have left him alone. At that time I was so deep into the club scene, looking for an escape. But it didn’t help. And then I wasn’t around, and I lost Ben. The only one I ever loved.”
    I said nothing. I knew from experience there isn’t anything anyone can really say to help you through your grief. You just have to let the pain wash over you over and over again, until the tide of it drifts back and away, slowly and gradually. I stood there quietly, looking out over Lake Pontchartrain and the sunset dazzling before us.
    I also knew, without her saying it, that the chain of events thatstarted here ended for her in Jack’s cellar. If Tracy’s grief hadn’t driven her to take that hit of heroin, would she have ended up as Jack’s prey? Seeing her now, I wondered which was worse—all that Jack had inflicted on her, or this?
    We stood there for a long time, until it got late enough for me to get nervous. It was getting hard to see clearly in the dusk.
    Then something nearby stirred. It wasn’t much more than a crackling twig, but suddenly all my nerve endings were prickling. I looked at Tracy, who was still lost in thought, sitting on the ground now, hugging her knees.
    There was the sound again. This time I could tell Tracy heard it. I was startled by how familiar all her bodily signals were to me. As if we were still down there. We listened, without any sign to each other, but I knew we both knew. Just like when we were in the cellar and our bodies tensed when we heard Jack’s car approaching from the bottom of the driveway. The way the muscles in the back of our necks and the set of our jaws tightened almost imperceptibly when he entered the house. We both waited, alert, listening for it again.
    “Tracy,” I whispered. “Can we go?” I looked at my phone, automatically making my usual check. Tracy nodded and got up, fast. As soon as we got into the car, she hit the button to power-lock the doors. I hadn’t even had to ask. She turned on the lights, and we drove, slowly at first, then eventually faster and faster, out of the camp.
    There, up ahead of us on the road, we saw the shadowy figure of a man. Tracy hit the brakes, and we both uttered a sharp cry at once. He was wearing a plaid shirt, unbuttoned, with a white T-shirt underneath. He had long hair and a goatee. He spread his arms wide—I couldn’t tell whether it was a sign of surrender or attack—and started moving toward the car.
    I double-checked that the car doors were all securely locked andquickly looked around to make sure there was no one else out there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move and watched in horror as another man rushed out of the shadows. He ran straight to the car door on my side and pulled on the handle.
    Tracy and I screamed in unison, and she gunned it, her foot pushing the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The man in the plaid shirt dove into the bushes on the side to avoid being plowed down. Tracy drove faster, even long after we’d lost sight of the men in the rearview mirror. The car bounced hard as the tires hit every bump in