Part Eleven
"Maybe I should just go home," Bradley mused. Caleb wasn't even awake yet; she had found herself talking to the reflection in the mirror with a long sigh. "What do I think I'm doing here anyway?" But she remembered what it had been like when she had tried to go home; she had been replaced. Her room was a fucking exercise room, for God's sake.
What was she supposed to do, walk in there and forgive her mother for writing her off, for forgetting about her? For only bothering to put up a single photo which she had told her that she hated (hadn't she? It felt so long ago, now, as if she had only had the conversation with herself). She didn't want to remember Bradley at all, not really, but maybe she thought that if she didn't put up a photo it would look weird.
And if she walked back into their lives now, she knew what they would say – sorry, but there's no room. Maybe if she faded into the landscape like an exercise machine did, sat in the corner like a dumbbell. She hadn't been what her mother had wanted, someone to rely upon, to fetch her drinks and to tend to her every need.
She needed a man for that, a man who looked and played the part. She couldn't be bogged down by memories of the previous man – or did she mean servant? – bursting into flames. But Bradley couldn't forget, and she hadn't been able to forgive, either. She hadn't been able to forgive and she had murdered Gil Turner like it was nothing.
Maybe she could have stayed there, waited it out with her mother and tried to be supportive as she tranquilized herself into a stupor every night.
Maybe she should have just tried harder. Maybe that had been her fault all along.
"I could go home again. I could go Bradley Martin again," she said to the mirror. "Bradley Martin. My name is Bradley Martin."
She swallowed. She'd been Winnie. Mary. Lila. Diamond. Honey. A hundred other names that she'd come up with off the top of her head because her name hadn't mattered where she had been. It just mattered that she had been able to play the role.
She remembered reading an article that there had been sex trafficking in White Pine Bay, that they had discovered that there were sex slaves being sold out of the Seafarer Motel. It should have surprised her – or maybe it shouldn't. She wondered how much Norman knew about that – maybe he'd been a part of it and that's why he had turned so weird.
Maybe Caleb knew a lot about it, too. There were a lot of things that Caleb seemed to know; but he didn't want to know the right things about her, the things that usually worked with men.
There was a knock on the door.
"Bradley!"
She would have to tell him to stop calling her that, even in private. It was the kind of name people might notice.
That was why her mother had given her the name, no doubt. One of those trendy names that would stand out, one of those names where she could go "look at me" even if she weren't in the room.
Especially if she wasn't in the room. It had backfired on everyone, of course. Now there had been pictures up of her, big glossy pictures, and people had been out looking for her. They hadn't looked that hard, though – being a glamorous missing woman only worked if you had a spotless reputation, if you were a good picture to put up on the evening news. No one was all that much interested in tracking down the daughter of a career criminal who had tried to off herself once before.
Maybe that was why she could come back if she wanted…
Maybe that meant she could pick up where she left off and no one would say anything at all.
"Bradley!"
She sighed, wishing that he would stop calling her. If he just left and abandoned her, then maybe she would be forced to finally figure out what she was meant to be doing with it all. With her new hair and the new face she was trying to put on, the way she wanted to disappear.
She opened the door.
"What do you want, Caleb?" She put her hands on her hips. Maybe the answer was just to drive him away, to show him that he was just another plaything.
The way she had driven away Norman. She could still feel the way he had shook when she'd wrapped her arms around him, as if he'd been about to do something but had stopped just in time.
About to do something very, very bad.
Bradley couldn't put her finger on what now, though, despite the fact that this last year had been filled with men doing very bad things.
"Whatever we're doing here, we should wrap it up and get going before the end of the week. I don't like the look of those guys we keep running into at the bar. All we need is to get caught up in something."
Maybe, Bradley thought, that they did need to get caught up in something. Something that would take the whole place crashing down and shatter her new identity for good. Maybe she needed to be found as Winnie to be reborn as Bradley Martin again, alive and rescued from… from…
She couldn't set Caleb up to look like a kidnapper, not after all of this. She didn't even know what she would want to pretend to have been rescued from. Maybe she could just lay down at the side of the lake and wait for some melancholy power-walker to find her and ask who she was.
Then she could sprout up like a phoenix, even though she didn't feel like one.
Instead she said, "We'll leave tomorrow then."