Ashes, Ashes

9 - Playing for Keeps

"Liza!" 

My eyes adjusted to the shifting light, my brain able to make sense now of what I was seeing, and it wasn't a skeleton at all. Just Liza: slender and dark and tall but not monstrous like the shadows had made her appear. 

My hand went lax, the flashlight slipping in my grip and tumbling to the tile, the plastic thudding dully on impact. Light bounced wildly around the room, spinning before the beam came to rest on a spot of ground past Liza's legs, an empty patch of brown earth that was heavily salted with snow. 

"You scared the shit out of me." 

"Sorry." She scooted against the door, holding it wide open. I couldn't make out her face in the darkness; the ambient glow of the flashlight didn't reach that far. "I just wanted to check on you." 

I pulled away from the sink and bent to retrieve the flashlight, trying to quiet my pounding heart. "I'm fine." 

"Nobody blames you," she said, and a hitch threatened her voice but she kept it quiet. "You were...there. You...tried." 

"Liza, I don't --" 

"It's more than anybody else did." 

I came even with her in the doorway, and she reached out a hand to clutch at me, missing my hand but hitting my arm instead. I wondered if she was drunk. I realized I'd never drunk with Liza before, that I didn't know her limits, didn't know if she'd be happy or angry or weepy or sleepy. 

"I really don't want to talk about it," I told her, because I couldn't bear the undeserved sympathy.  

Would she turn on me if she knew that I had been more than the too-late savior? Or would she -- would all of them -- forgive me if they knew the whole story?

Did I deserve that forgiveness? Did I even want it? 

"I should have been there," Liza said, still holding my arm. She gave it a small tug, pulling me forward over the snow-slicked ground. The sadness in her voice had hardened into anger, and that confirmed it for me: she was drunk, or teetering on that precipice, that hard edge where people started to be honest with each other if not with themselves. "I knew how she was struggling. I should have...I should have known it was different this time." 

I didn't know what to say to that, but my words formed the words anyway. "There was no way you could have known," I told her, and I stared at the ground ahead of us, and surprised myself with how genuine I sounded. I had expected the words to come out hollow. But I guess even platitudes can have teeth. 

"Laurel was always struggling with something." Liza made a sound that was not quite a laugh, and pulled her hand away from my wrist. "But she always seemed...content, I guess. That was what I loved about her. She treated unhappiness like a friend, and held it close. And I thought if I could do the same, I could be...like her." 

I gave her a startled look. Her words from earlier, at the top of the hill, rang in my brain: She saved my life. I realized, not for the first time that day, how little I knew about Liza. She had not been one of us, and I had never thought of her as a friend. I knew a lot about her, but it was all secondhand knowledge, facts with only the impression of emotions behind them. Laurel had liked her. She was a drama major and small-bit actress who had never gotten her break. The two of them had stayed friends, on and off, frequently long-distance as Liza moved from place to place chasing success. 

"That's a good way to put it," I said, something eerie creeping up my spine again, the ghost of the spooks I'd given myself in the dark bathroom. "No one was friends with unhappiness the way Laurel was." 

The cabin glowed in the darkness, light spilling from every window, and I sped up, eager to be out of the cold and dark and this conversation. 

"The prodigal son returns!" Richard said, too loudly and too cheerfully, as I came back inside, kicking frost from the toe of my shoes. 

They had fulfilled my request to keep playing -- or at least to keep drinking -- in my absence. Someone had switched over from beer to liquor, a big bottle of Tennessee Honey holding a place of honor on the floor between the semicircle of chairs and pillows. 

Richard handed me a plastic cup quarter-filled with the sick-sweet stuff, and my stomach turned, that unpleasant swell of pressure on the underside of my tongue threatening nausea. 

"I think we promised Laurel to get drunk, right?" Richard lifted the bottle, giving it a little shake. "Well. We figured it was time to hurry it up." 

Abby had already given up for the night. She was curled up in a puddle of blankets on a lower bunk, snoring softly, an overturned cup near the bed. 

"Never mind her," Parker said. "The party's still going." 

I settled back into my chair, cradling the cup Richard had given me, and tried to fall back into the rhythm, tried to slip back into that comforting nostalgia, pushing away the guilt that bubbled up and shimmered like an oilslick at the surface of my unconscious. 

I had done everything she asked, right down to this moment. I had never asked to be the person to fulfill her final wishes, but I was, and I couldn't feel guilty about doing what she had wanted, not really. 

We played the game, keeping the questions light, sticking to things that we know all of us had done so we could get good and drunk, drunk enough maybe to forget why we had started playing in the first place.