It Happens All the Time: A Novel

The bullet from Amber’s gun tears through my right shoulder, causing me to cry out and topple onto the dusty floor. The acrid stench of gunpowder fills the air. The pain is unbearable—a searing sensation my mind can barely process. I can’t move.

“Motherfucker,” I say, spitting the word through tight lips. She shot me. My best friend had done the one thing I didn’t believe she would do. I lie on my left side, in agony, but manage to lift my free hand up against my shoulder, knowing I need to apply pressure to the wound.

“Say it,” Amber says, standing above me, still holding the gun. “Admit what you did. Say you’ll go to the police.” She sounds like a maniacal windup doll, a haunting creature created for a horror movie, repeating the same words over and over again.

I squeeze my eyes shut. My deltoid muscle is on fire; I can feel blood oozing down my back, and I hope this means the bullet isn’t lodged somewhere inside my shoulder, wreaking havoc on my joint. I might be okay if it went straight through, though it still could have bounced off the bone on the way out. It’s possible I’ll suffer nerve damage and maybe even lose partial function in my arm.

“Answer me!” Amber shrieks. “Tell me you’ll do what I want and I’ll drive you to a hospital right now!”

“First . . . get the aid kit . . . from my truck,” I say, trying to ignore the seething heat radiating from my shoulder as it travels throughout the rest of my body. The metallic smell of my own blood is sickening; I can taste it in the back of my throat.

“No!”

“Please, Amber!” My words come out in short bursts, as I try to handle the pain by controlling my breath. “At least . . . give me something . . . a towel or a blanket . . . anything to stop . . . the bleeding.”

“Why should I?” she asks. “You might not be able to see my wounds, Tyler, but you tried to kill me first.”

She’s not in her right mind, I think. The Amber I know would never have pulled that trigger. I’d tried to remain calm since we first climbed into my truck at the station. I didn’t want to aggravate the situation by challenging her. I didn’t want my own anxiety to make the situation worse. But when we got inside the cabin, I decided to change tactics. I thought I could intimidate her. I could force her down from the precarious ledge she’d been standing upon—I thought I might be able to convince her to capitulate and let me go.

“I’m sorry,” I say, grinding my teeth. “I never—”

“If you say you never meant to hurt me one more time, Tyler, I swear to god I’ll shoot you in the head.” Her voice is calm again. Too calm, I think. I’ve never seen her act this way. I have no idea what she might do next. I think about my training, how I’d been taught to deal with mentally unstable people in the field. Make them believe they’re winning, my instructors always said. Keep them calm, let them think that you’re on their side.

“Okay,” I say, looking up at her, my left hand still pressing where the bullet entered my shoulder. “I get it. But please . . . something to stop . . . the bleeding.”

“Not until you promise to turn yourself in.”

Had this been her plan, all along? Bring me to a secluded place, and then shoot me to make me confess? “Fine,” I say. I’ll tell her whatever she needs to hear just so we can end this. “I promise.”

“You’ll go to the police with me? You’ll tell them you raped me?”

I nod, biting my bottom lip, willing to concede anything to get her to help me.

She hesitates, and then walks a circle around me, out of my reach, toward the kitchen, where she rummages around in a few of the drawers until she comes up with a sealed plastic box filled with dish towels. She returns to where I am lying with a stack of them, and throws them at me. “You have to do it.” Her voice is dull now. Defeated. “You have to admit what you did.”

I pull back my hand from my shoulder and try to gauge how much blood I’ve lost by looking at it, but there’s no way to be sure. It’s possible the bullet nicked the brachial artery, and if it did, I need to get to an ER sooner rather than later. I take a couple of the towels and press them hard against my shoulder, managing to sit up and lean against the side of the couch.

“I know,” I say. I worry I might pass out from the pain. But there’s no way Amber can carry me to the truck; I need to stay alert long enough for her to get us back on the road. I look at her, and try to keep the rage I feel from showing on my face. “I still need the first aid kit . . . from my truck. There’s a special kind of gauze . . . that will make a gel and . . . seal off the wound. I’ll need your help . . . wrapping it up.”

“I should have aimed for your heart,” she says, but there is no energy behind her words.

“Amber,” I say. My breathing is still erratic. “Please. The kit.”

She bobs her head, and then disappears out the front door, returning a few minutes later with the large red bag from under the driver’s seat. It isn’t your standard, pick-it-up-at-Target kind of kit. I’d packed it myself with the same supplies that Mason and I use on our rig and in the field. She drops it at my feet, and I notice that she’s no longer holding the gun. Should I hit her? I wonder. Should I knock her down and make a run for the truck? Should I just leave her behind?

I think these things, but I know I can’t do them, not in my current state. I’d bleed out before I got over the hill and back on the highway. “I can’t do it . . . on my own,” I tell her. “Can you find the hemostatic gauze? I need you . . . to wrap the shit . . . out of my shoulder.”

She nods her head again, picks up the kit, carrying it with her to come kneel next to me. We don’t speak, though I can’t help crying out a few times as she tears my shirtsleeve away and shifts me around in order to tend to the wound. When she’s finished, she leans back to sit on her heels, puts her face in her hands, and begins to cry.

“Why did you do it, Tyler?” she asks, and there is so much raw, naked sorrow in her voice, it reaches inside me and claws at my heart. She drops her hands and stares at me. “You were my best friend. You’re the one person I always thought I could count on, someone who would always believe in me, no matter what. And you just tore me up. I didn’t know what to do. What to say. I needed my best friend and I couldn’t talk to him because he was the one who hurt me.” She pauses to wipe her eyes with a stray corner of gauze. “You destroyed me, Tyler. Everything I believed about myself, about my life, disappeared that night. I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know who I am without you there to help me figure it out.”

I open my mouth, about to speak, but she shakes her head. “No, don’t,” she says. “There’s nothing you can say. Nothing to fix us. But you can admit what you did. You can never do this to anyone else again. Please, Tyler. Tell the truth.”

I stare at her, pressing my lips together as she says the same words Mason had said to me just a couple of months before. And I can’t help but think that if Amber had been pushed this far—desperate enough to shoot me—what I did to her in that bed was worse. I know all too well that it’s the wounds no one can see that cause the bloodiest, messiest pain—secret injuries that, no matter the years that pass, never quite heal. I think about the pills I’d taken to try to help manage my guilt, and then, the way I allowed myself to be comforted by the same logic I’d watched my father use to justify his poor treatment of women over the years—the treatment I’d always abhorred. I suddenly feel sick, not just because I’ve been shot, but because I realize that I’d let his criticism of me the afternoon of the party drive my behavior that night. I’d behaved like him long before that even, if I am really being honest with myself. I used Whitney for sex for months, maybe even coerced her that first time on my couch, not giving a second thought to her youth or vulnerability. I’d wanted Amber so much that I didn’t listen when she told me to stop. All I heard in that moment was my father’s voice in my head, telling me a girl like her would never want someone like me, and wanting to prove him wrong. I could rationalize it however I wanted, but if, in fact, Mason was right and the definition of rape is performing a sexual act without the other person’s consent, then I was a rapist. Amber had given consent for everything up until that moment when I lay on top of her on the bed; she’d even instigated it. But she’d also told me to wait . . . to stop. I held her down and had sex with her anyway. And all I’d done since then was try to escape my guilt. All I’d wanted was to blame her so I didn’t have to take it upon myself.

So instead of speaking, I simply close my eyes and shake my head, and begin to cry, too. I cry in a way I haven’t for years. I cry because I know I am guilty, and the only thing I can do to right this wrong is turn myself in. I cry because I know that, even if I do this, I’ve still lost Amber forever. I’ll lose my job, too. I might even go to jail. I’ll be branded a rapist for the rest of my life, and though I still might not be able to reconcile that word with the man I thought I was, as Mason said to me the morning after he drove Amber home, we’d seen it on the job a hundred times—normal, everyday people are capable of doing horrendous things. Drunk drivers who kill another person are still murderers, even if that hadn’t been their intent when they got behind the wheel. In that case, and now, in mine, intent doesn’t matter. What matters is the result.

“I’m sorry,” I say, my entire body shaking from my tears and the pain that throbs in my shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry. I’ll tell the truth, I promise. I’ll tell them what I did. I wish I could take it back. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy and I fucked it all up.”

“Yeah,” she says, darkly. “You did.” She wipes her eyes as she stands up, and then helps me do the same. She looks up at me with confusion and hurt and fear littered across her face. “Say it to me now,” she says, and I know exactly what she means. She wants me to prove to her that I’ll follow through on my promise, that I’ll actually go to the authorities and admit what I did.

And even though every cell in my brain is screaming at me to clamp my mouth shut, even though I still long to hide behind all my manufactured justifications—I can’t live another minute carrying this soul-choking suffering around. The pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the one in my heart as I look at Amber and finally speak the truth.

“I raped you,” I whisper, feeling my insides begin to crumble, and I know that everything in my life is about to collapse, that the world I’ve known is as good as gone.