there it was again. that feeling : gut ache. heaving chest. pins and needles. tv static. tunnel vision. would it ever go away ?? or maybe he'd spent too long kissing corpses ; now everything he loved would become one. ( shut the fuck up. you don't know that- she could be fine. everything could be fine. this isn't like that ..... but , god , there was yellow fucking tape. ) swallow the bile. keep moving. through thickets and brambles , past police tape , toward the scene of the crime .... all he needed to do was put one foot in front of the other. a twig snapped under his foot. " liz ?? " his hands ran through his hair ; he hadn't realized they were shaking. " did you see- " a breath. " is vicki ..... " god forgive him , that was all he needed to know. he'd take every single one of those poor motherfuckers lying dead in a pool of their own vomit before that. he swallowed. " fuck , liz. i did what everyone's been telling me to do for once and i walked away. i walked away and- " hysteria was creeping into his voice , he could hear it on himself. liz was going to call jenna and jenna was going to call the therapist and- he smacked the back of his head into the tree ---- hard. enough that he could feel the pain in his jaw , vibrating in his teeth , echoing in his skull .... " i thought i was doing the right thing. " and that was the worst part of it , wasn't it ?? " are they ..... is she ?? "
The sound of her name snapped her attention. What the hell? Of all the people. Don't get her wrong, she loved the kid, but Jeremy had a horrible bad luck streak as of late. It seemed like every time she turned around he knew the body they were zipping up. It took her an extra second, but she connected the dots--they'd found Vicki's ID lying around and Liz thought she might have seen them cozied up at the grill a time or two.
Liz took a deep breath and squinted through the late morning sun to remind herself it wasn't midnight, she wasn't putting her friends in body bags, and she wasn't about to tell Jeremy his parents were dead. Just his girlfriend, she thought bitterly. Except they didn't actually know if she was dead because the coroner still had to examine and pull dental records. Liz didn't want to lie to him, but she also didn't have much truth for him right now, either.
"Hey--hey, slow down, Jeremy." Liz tried to grab his shoulders and urge him to sit down, only to suddenly wonder when he got so tall? When he seemed to only get more upset and hit his head, she put her hand out between him and the tree. "Sweetheart, I need you to breathe." Liz spoke softly, but not too soft.
It was a delicate balance, one she had to master over years of raising her own daughter. When Caroline was little, Liz only when she fell or hurt herself. Liz had to be careful not to sound too worried or Caroline would panic and cry even more, but she didn't want to sound like she didn't care, either. As she got older, it became the tone she used when they argued. She couldn't sound too soft or it just made Caroline even more angry, but if she was too firm, then Liz was being a bitch. It was a little like talking someone off a ledge. Which, conveniently, she also had experience in. Who would have thought that would prepare a girl for motherhood? "Listen to me. We don't know who those bodies belong to, okay? It might not be her. We found six wallets, there's only five bodies. You do the math. She could have left after you did. What happened before you left, did you two get into a fight?"
