- Part 1 -
Arrhythmia
This is over my head, but underneath my feet,
'Cause by tomorrow morning, I'll have this thing beat.
And everything will be back to the way that it was;
I wish that it was just that easy.
-Lifehouse
"You promised, last night, that we would talk about this."
Aubrey considers herself a woman of integrity – at least she used to anyway. She isn't sure the title fits anymore. But when she promises something, she follows through. She slowly pulls her hand away from Chloe's and angles herself to face her, licking her lips as she thinks about what to say. Her mouth and throat feel dry and stuffed with cotton. "Someone started calling me the first night we were here – when we were at dinner, before I left with Luke."
Chloe nods. "I remember. I thought it was work calling you."
"It wasn't work." Aubrey looks down and picks at the skin around her thumbnail, unable to look Chloe in the eye. "It was just music. It was just someone playing Wedding of the Winds, and then they hung up."
"How many times have they called you?" Chloe asks.
Aubrey could easily look at her phone log, but she just shrugs. The answer is just 'too many'. "I assumed it was Beca, because I thought she broke in with the picture." She shakes her head. "But someone was calling her, too, and broke into her room with a copy of the same picture."
"How did you find that out?" Chloe places her hands over Aubrey's before she can make her thumb bleed.
That's where everything goes awry, isn't it? Aubrey tries to place the events of the last few days in chronological order. It feels more like trying to organize a year's worth of events than just three days. Has it already been three days? They got there Sunday, and it's already Wednesday. Her eyes burn with exhaustion and she pulls one hand away to rub them, the motion doing little to ease the discomfort. She wants to tell Chloe she doesn't know, and just move on and go home. But it occurs to her: What if this follows her? Maybe she can convince her to wait until they're in Seattle and they contact the Seattle PD.
Chloe pulls her hand away from her face and squeezes it. "You can tell me." She strokes Aubrey's hand with her thumb. "How did you find out about Beca experiencing the same thing?"
"I was jogging, the day before yesterday." It occurs to her that it isn't her encounter with Beca that she doesn't want to voice out loud – it's everything that happened before and after.
"And you ran into her?" Chloe asks.
Yes. Aubrey wants to jump straight to the cliffs – forget about the Maritime Museum and her first encounter with Sheriff Mills. She tells herself that Chloe doesn't need to know about the most vital parts. "I ran into the sheriff first," she answers, "I was jogging through town and he wanted to talk to someone from the wedding party about a break in."
"Oh." Chloe's hands tighten around Aubrey's. "I don't like him. There's something weird about him."
"Someone broke into the Maritime Museum and stole a head spade." Aubrey realizes Chloe probably doesn't know what that is. "A knife used to decapitate whales," she explains, and regrets it when Chloe's lips curve in disgust. "He asked if I knew anyone in the wedding party who might have stolen it, and then he told me about a jogging path that he had pointed out to Beca."
"Beca was jogging?"
There's a point where Aubrey would have scoffed or come up with a witty rejoinder about how that would be too far-fetched. She focuses on the feeling of Chloe's thumb repetitively stroking the top of her hand, and breathes deeply through her nose, caught in her own head. She can see the deer standing in front of her, clear as day. She once learned in Psychology class that memories change every time a person thinks of them, but she knows that this one will remain unaltered for the rest of her life. She isn't sure how long she sits there picturing the moment before Chloe squeezes her hands again, dragging her back to the present. She shakes her head in response to Chloe's question. She isn't sure what Beca was doing; trying to get away from everyone, it would seem.
"Did you go there looking for her?" Chloe asks.
"I was just jogging. He didn't even say it was Beca that he pointed the path out to." Aubrey tries to pull her hands away, but Chloe keeps her grip on them. "He just said it was someone else from the wedding."
"I wasn't being accusing," Chloe says, using the same tender voice as the night before, "I was just asking. Nothing you say is going to start a fight right now."
Aubrey realizes that her hands are shaking, and she's tempted to get up and sit on the other side of the bed, but she's sure Chloe has already noticed the tremors. "I was running and I saw a deer, and then Beca started blasting music from out on one of the cliffs and scared it off, and I went to go tell her to keep it down." She tries to swallow, but her throat is too dry. A sharp pain accompanies the nausea in her empty stomach. "But then I wanted to know why she was putting pictures in our room, and she said that I broke into her room, but I didn't."
"I know you wouldn't do that. Did you guys get into a fight about it?"
Aubrey expects herself to be irritated with Chloe's constant interrupting, but it gives her a moment to breathe in between thoughts. She shrugs. She and Beca are always in a fight about something. Their little spat on the cliffs doesn't strike her as anything worse than their usual altercations. "I was trying to get away from her, and something happened to the path, and it wasn't there anymore." She waits for Chloe to tell her that paths just don't disappear, but Chloe doesn't say anything. She gets herself off-track for a moment, trying to determine if a person with a leaf blower could have covered the path like that. "They called again, and then they started playing the music in the woods." It sounds ridiculous when she says it out loud – like she's describing some sort of B-list horror movie. She can barely believe herself, let alone expect Chloe to believe her. She yanks her hands back. "Are we done now?"
"No, we're not." Chloe grabs her hands again, not letting her pull them away this time. "I want the whole story. Now, Aubrey." Vexation creeps into her voice. It was only a matter of time. "Right up until whatever happened last night." Her voice softens again. "Right now."
"I tripped." Aubrey tries to find something in the room to stare at – something to put all of her focus on. Just talking about falling hurts. If she had to place every aching part of her body on a list, between tripping in the woods and being knocked over by Bumper, her arm would be at the top of the list. It's not that bad when she isn't thinking about it. But every wrong move or memory that reminds her of falling sends another darting pain shooting from her wrist to her elbow. Even Chloe just holding her hand makes it feel off. "There was a trap in the leaves and it cut off part of a deer and I tripped and fell in the blood." The room is spinning, and she can't focus on anything stationary. It was the same deer. She knows it. It would be so much simpler to catch a deer already missing one leg.
She can't look at Chloe as she speaks – even though Chloe is the only thing not turning in circles. The guilt is too strong. Instead, she looks down at the bed, because she knows Chloe's reaction to anything happening to animals all too well, and somehow this feels like it's her fault. There is a point where she could have said something and stopped all of this from happening but she can't pinpoint exactly where that moment should have been. Everything just started spiraling out of control so fast. And it's not as though every single moment of the past few days has been threatening. Maybe she should have made a bigger deal their first night here, but it was just a stupid picture. Up until now, she would have just been blowing things out of proportion, and according to Beca, she still is. She twists her hand out of Chloe's tight grip and rests it over her eyes, but it does little to stop the spinning. She's beginning to feel motion sick just sitting still.
"It's okay; keep going." Chloe gives her wrist a light squeeze.
Aubrey hisses and tries to pull away, regretting it immediately. She presses her fingers against her eyes, but a few tears still manage to escape out the corners. She can hear Chloe murmur a guilty curse under her breath.
"I think we need to go to the hospital when we get out of here." Chloe shifts one of her hands to under Aubrey's elbow then lightly presses down on different areas of Aubrey's arm, asking her if it hurts every time she puts pressure somewhere new. It's hard to lie when the permanent grimace on her face would give her up, and Aubrey nods each time, silently willing her to stop. "I'll find you some Tylenol when we're done here." Chloe lightly rubs her fingers up and down the length of Aubrey's lower arm. It doesn't really alleviate any of the pain, but it makes it easier to ignore. "Keep going."
Aubrey furiously scrubs the tears from her face with the back of her hand then lowers her hand and rests it on her stomach. "Jesse saw me trip, and he was being a dick about it." It's the only explanation to his reaction that Aubrey up with. "So, I just came back to wash the blood off, but there was blood on the bathroom mirror that, that said…" Her voice trails off and she lifts her hand to her face once again, rubbing her forehead with her thumb and pointer finger.
"…that said what?" Chloe asks, unease creeping into her tone.
Aubrey pulls back from her and scoots across the bed until she's back against the headboard.
"Aubrey…" Chloe's voice switches quickly from uneasy to low, almost like a warning. It reminds her too much of her father's tone.
Aubrey rubs her throat and looks out into the hallway. She tries to imagine who it was that walked down the hallway while she was out and Chloe was asleep in bed, and finger painted with fresh blood on the bathroom mirror of their hotel room. The only person she can imagine painting in blood is Lilly, and, well, even that would be taking her weirdness to an entirely new level. She can't match a face or a name to the person she's trying to picture. She keeps trying to block out the knowledge that she has left Chloe alone multiple times here, and that worse could have happened. Her hand instinctively falls back down to rest on her stomach. It had to have been a stranger, but she can't understand why. Okay, she can understand why people might not like her, but not why it would be enough to do this.
"Aubrey…" Chloe says her name again.
"It said that I was crazy, okay?!" Aubrey snaps. Her throat is still too dry to swallow, and it gets even drier the moment the she starts to feel out of breath. She switches between holding her stomach to rubbing her throat then back to clutching her stomach, finally settling on wringing her hands together in her lap.
"Aubrey, why didn't you tell anybody?" Chloe comes off as accusing, even if she doesn't mean to. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Aubrey turns her head and just looks at her.
"Nobody thinks that you're crazy, Aubrey," Chloe says.
"That person clearly does," Aubrey retorts. "So does everybody else at this stupid party. Why would I tell anybody that when they would just make jokes and agree?" She shakes her head and looks down at her hand, pressing her thumb into her palm. "I didn't want you to know either." Her face feels hot even though the return of her is still freezing. "I felt embarrassed, alright?" She sniffles and quickly wipes another tear off her face.
"Nobody here thinks that about you…" Chloe tells her.
Aubrey laughs in disbelief. "Do you think that I'm deaf, Chloe?" she asks. "I'm not stupid. I know that they don't like me. I can hear what they say about me."
"It doesn't even matter that they say." Chloe turns and moves to kneels down in front of her. "You still could have told me all of this was happening. Aubrey, you might have a harder time with certain things, but I know you're not crazy. Everyone has trouble with their baggage; they just don't understand yours, because theirs was on a different flight. You can't tell me that you don't think they are crazy. You don't think I think they are fucking crazy? If anything, they make us look normal." She gives Aubrey a soft, encouraging smile. "I mean, come on. Fat Amy spends all of her free time cosplaying Amy Winehouse, and her name isn't even Amy. Cynthia-Rose once borrowed rent money from me, because she spent $800 sending glitter bombs to Denise as a practical joke. Jessica and Ashley are both dating guys, and yet 'secretly' sleeping together. Lilly is, well…Lilly. Stacie -"
Aubrey blinks. "Um…go back to that part about Jessica and Ashley."
"It's fine; I mean, everybody knows. Even their boyfriends know at this point."
Aubrey definitely did not know this.
"Aubrey, the point is, you just need to take what they say with a grain of salt, and stop acting like they're not a little different themselves." Chloe's smile fades and she takes on a more somber tone. "I know you have a hard time connecting with people. You don't think I do, too?"
"No, Chloe, I don't." Aubrey frowns. It's not that she has a hard time connecting with everyone. Just these particular people. And most of everyone else. "You had to buy a new phone, because your old one didn't have enough room for all of your contacts," she reminds her.
"That doesn't mean any of those people mean anything." Chloe drops her hands down hard on her lap. "That doesn't mean I feel anything. That doesn't mean I don't sit in my bed every night, just like I know you do, feeling isolated from everyone around me. You're not the only one who feels different and alone. The things we went through…" She points back and forth between. "They were hard. They were bound to leave visible marks. Do you think I am crazy?"
Aubrey draws in a deep breath and rubs her face. "I never went through anything." Her father might have been a little stern, but stern isn't always a bad thing. She had a roof over her head. Clothes on her back. Food on the table.
"I'm not stupid either, Aubrey. I've met both of your parents. You can go ahead and tell me all you want that your dad didn't knock you around, but I know you're lying to me. I know."
Aubrey shakes her head, because Chloe doesn't know anything. One time meeting Aubrey's parents during a surprise visit to make sure she was taking college seriously couldn't possibly tell Chloe anything. "Everybody's parents spank them when they're frustrated," she says. Okay, maybe not everybody's, especially this day and age where it's so controversial, but still. "Your parents still hit you."
"Yeah, when I'm not listening to them. And it doesn't hurt; it's just annoying." Chloe reaches forward and squeezes Aubrey's knee. "They don't hit me when they're just frustrated with me. Or when they're frustrated with each other. Or when they're frustrated with work… And they definitely don't hit me with anything other than their hands. At least these ones don't."
Aubrey looks up too quickly. She isn't sure if it's because Chloe knows about her father's penchant for hitting with objects, or because Chloe never talks about her biological parents. Ever. Honestly, she would have never guessed Chloe was adopted if it wasn't for her mother having blonde hair and her father having dark skin. Meeting them with no prior warning had been a little…shocking. Her heart drops down into her stomach. She has spent a lot of years hoping that Chloe's biological parents had simply abandoned her, or, as terrible as it sounds, died. She wants them dead now. She opens her mouth to speak, but Chloe immediately cuts her off – and Aubrey doesn't press the topic, because she hates when Chloe presses it with her.
"Look, everyone is bored here, and they just want something to talk about. They have nothing better to do than be gossipmongers. If they knew what was happening, they would stop." Chloe leans forward and presses their foreheads together. "I don't think that you're crazy, Bree. You have shit parents and OCD, but you're not crazy, okay? And, despite those things, you're perfect and I love you. I have your back here." She sits back. "Keep going."
Aubrey continues rubbing her palm with her thumb, but she feels significantly calmer now. "I was trying to wash the blood off the mirror, and then you came in." They both know how that went down.
"I wish you had told me all of this." Chloe makes eye contact with her. "Things make a lot more sense now."
"Beca said she wanted to talk to me, so I met her at the beach before the bonfire." Aubrey stops rubbing her palm and blanches at the thought of Beca's ring still in the pocket of her dirty clothes. There is no way Chloe could have found it. She's too calm right now for that. She looks at a spot on the wall behind Chloe's head, refusing to let her eyes wander toward their things. "I knew she wouldn't take things this far, and she didn't think it was me anymore, so we agreed to just be on the same page about things and went back to the bonfire."
Chloe nods slowly, and Aubrey can see her piecing it all together in her head.
"And then the sheriff came, and our stuff was at the beach, and you were drunk, and I didn't know what to do, so I called Beca from Nikki's bathroom and she met me at the room with our stuff after we got back." Aubrey has to slow herself down before she starts talking too fast to breathe. "And someone called me again, and threatened Beca, and everything was just happening all at once, and so we called Fat Amy to stay with you, and went to the clinic to see if Tyler killed himself or if someone else killed him." So much for slowing down. "But it was too soon to tell, so the doctor told us to come back, and that's where we were last night."
"Whatever happened last night, it's okay." Chloe rubs her hands up and down Aubrey's upper arms, and Aubrey realizes how much she's shivering again.
"Someone strangled him and injected his eyes with ink, and then strung him up." Aubrey can't find a lighter way to put it. The only thing she can do is not mention that what Chloe heard from the ice cream shop was probably a muffled scream while he was dying, but she knows by the way Chloe's entire body tenses and how she suddenly looks sick to her stomach that Chloe has already figured that much out. "But Beca doesn't think it's related to anything else that happened." She's shivering out of control and her teeth start to chatter. "We got into a fight about it on the way back, because she said I was blowing things out of proportion."
"I really don't think that that's blowing things out of proportion." Chloe shakes her head and licks her lips. "Aubrey, this is terrifying."
It gets worse. Eventually, Chloe is going to find out that she pushed Beca. Aubrey knows that she is. And she decides that she would rather Chloe find out from her than from Beca. She leaves out Beca's secret, the part where she regrets leaving Chloe. She tells herself that it's because she doesn't want it to be something that brings Beca into their lives, and, while that much is true, she knows it's also because, for some reason, she wants to maintain some of Beca's trust. "I pushed her. I told her she didn't care about us, and I pushed her. So, she hit me, and -"
"She hit you?" Chloe interrupts.
Aubrey pinches the bridge of her nose. "I'm not lying, Chloe." She should have known that this is where it would also go downhill.
"I didn't say you were lying." There is a sudden edge to Chloe's voice, and she pulls Aubrey's hand away from her face. "I'm confirming that you're saying Beca physically hurt you."
Aubrey clenches her teeth. She wonders if Chloe heard the whole part about Aubrey pushing her, but restating it would sound like she's defending Beca – even if maybe she did deserve to be hit. Letting Chloe pursue the topic might also imply that Beca had hurt her. Beca did hurt her. In more ways than one. But it isn't something she needs to admit and say out loud.
"Where did she hit you?" Chloe asks.
Aubrey shrugs.
Chloe takes a few deeps breaths. "We're coming back to this," she warns her. "Keep going."
Aubrey pushes the fight with Beca from her mind as best and as quickly as she can. She regrets it when she realizes what she's about to say is worse. Suddenly, she could spend hours talking about Beca slapping her across the face and her feelings regarding it. She bends her knees and pulls her legs up closer to her chest, then realizes how pathetic that must look and lowers them back down. "We were trying to come back, and I found the music box that was in the lobby on the road." She twists her hand away from Chloe's once more and resumes pressing her thumb into her palm. "Someone put 'You're Next' on the bottom of it. And then Beca found the deer." There is a sharp pang in her stomach, and she grimaces.
"The deer you saw when you were jogging?" Chloe asks, sounding only slightly dubious.
Aubrey nods and closes her eyes, hot tears welling up behind her eyelids. She sniffles and opens her eyes again, tears clinging to her eyelashes. "It didn't have any legs." She knows she would be throwing up again if she wasn't so dehydrated. It's a mystery to her how she can even form tears, at this point. "Someone cut them off."
"So, someone killed it. It was dead…" Chloe says slowly. Hesitantly.
Aubrey shakes her head. "No," she mouths, unable to add sound to the word.
The color is slowly draining from Chloe's face, and Aubrey realizes that she's remaining calm strictly for Aubrey's sake. She wishes she could tell her this is where the story ends. That they left and came back to the inn. But, she's not sure that letting Chloe think there's a dying deer out there somewhere that needs help would make this any better – it would probably just make everything worse. "We were outside The Cannery, and Nikki had a gun inside…"
"Aubrey…" Chloe stares at her like she's bracing herself for the impact of Aubrey's words.
"I didn't know what else to do," Aubrey admits – tries to defend herself. "So, I shot it." She can still hear the gunshot echo in her ears. See its blood splatter then start leaking across the rocks. "In the head." Her chest heaves with each breath, and she keeps going, in need of some kind of reaction that isn't just Chloe staring at her. "Blew its brains out." Chloe remains silent, and Aubrey's features slowly start to crumble on their own accord. She lifts her hand to cover her face, so Chloe can't watch her go to pieces.
"I don't…" Chloe pauses. "I don't know what to say."
"This wasn't supposed to happen," Aubrey mumbles into her hand, talking mostly to herself.
"What?" Chloe asks.
Aubrey's expectations sound ridiculous when she reviews them in her head. They're supposed to go home and be happy. Go on real dates. Tell Chloe's parents they're together again. It's all supposed to be just so normal. It's not supposed to be them leaving here like this – overwhelmed, exhausted, going to the police. It's not supposed to be Chloe knowing she shot something on purpose, killed it on purpose. It's not supposed to be Chloe watching her snap under the weight of fear and sheer exhaustion. "I don't want to break up again!" There. She says it. She realizes that with everything else going on, her main concern shouldn't be Chloe walking out the door on her, but somehow it is.
"I'm not breaking up with you. Oh my god. Okay. Hey." Chloe squeezes her shoulders, and Aubrey realizes her hands have started shaking. "Hey. We're fine. Me and you? We're okay, okay?"
Aubrey isn't sure she believes her, but she nods.
"Here's what's going to happen," Chloe says. "It's still early, so I'm going to get you some Tylenol, and you're going to go back to sleep while I finish packing." She pauses. "Correctly," she adds. "And, then, we're going to get some breakfast. And, after that, we're going to hop on the ferry, go to the hospital for your arm, contact the police, then get a hotel until we can switch our flight back home. And then everything is just going to go back to normal, but better, because we are okay."
Aubrey builds their itinerary in her head.
"Let me get you some water." Chloe gives her shoulders another squeeze then climbs off the bed. She gathers the empty glasses off the nightstand, nearly dropping them, then takes them with her to the kitchen.
Aubrey sniffles and looks up once she's gone. She slowly inches toward the edge of the bed then lowers herself onto the floor and begins going through their things until she finds Beca's ring in the pocket of her pants. She's going to throw it in the bay where it belongs. She stuffs it into the pocket of the pants she's currently wearing, then uses the nightstand to pull herself to her feet. A wave of dizziness nearly sends her back to the ground, but she manages to get her bearings and sit back down on the edge of the bed. She can't remember a time in her life where she has ever been this tired – not even after her father cut her out of the family.
Chloe walks back in with a glass of water and places it in the nightstand, then kneels down beside their luggage. Everything is disorganized, but it only takes her a moment to locate Aubrey's first aide kit. She pulls out the Tylenol bottle as well as the Emetrol bottle, and empties the correct dosage of each into her hand before standing back up. "Here." She sits down next to Aubrey and offers her the pills, then rests her hand on Aubrey's lower back once she takes them and grabs the glass of water.
Aubrey can't swallow the pills fast enough. She vows never to drink again, because being hungover just makes everything so much worse. The water does little to decrease the dryness in her mouth, but she drinks it all in small sips anyway, so there will be something in her stomach if she throws up again. She checks taking Tylenol off her mental itinerary. Next on the list is more sleep.
Chloe takes the empty glass from her and places it back on the nightstand, then helps her lie down and cover up with the blankets.
"How early is it?" Aubrey asks, unsure of how much time she has to convince herself to fall asleep. She rolls onto her stomach and buries her face against her arm to block out the light.
"It's early, Bree," Chloe answers simply. She gets up from the bed, and Aubrey can hear her going through their things. "We have plenty of time, unfortunately." She stands up again, then sits back down next to Aubrey. "Just close your eyes." She gathers Aubrey's hair then gently begins running her brush through it. "I think what you did was really brave, Aubrey," she says after a few moments, "I don't think I ever could have done that. I don't know what I would have done if I was in your shoes last night. I think I would have been too terrified to do anything." She continues brushing Aubrey's hair, even after she's worked out all the tangles. "You made the choice you had to make. I'm proud of you."
