Somebody I Used to Know (29 page)

“I’m glad you didn’t rush,” I said.

“I do think all the time that if we’d stayed that day, if I’d gone through with it the way I was supposed to, then everything that came after wouldn’t have happened the way it did. That Meredith, Emily, wouldn’t have ended up dead in that motel room.”

“But she wouldn’t have had any life at all. It was brave of you to give her up.”

But Jade didn’t seem to have heard me. She stared straight ahead as she said, “And that other boy, the one we killed, he would still be alive today.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

J
ade continued to stare straight ahead. I wanted to ask questions, a lot of questions. But some things were coming together in my own mind as I watched her and waited.

She asked me for more water, so I went and filled the glass again. While the water ran out of the tap, I thought about my trip to the storage garage and the abandoned car. And something Laurel mentioned in Hanfort still hovered just below the surface.

I brought the water back and handed it to her. While she took another long gulp, I asked, “This boy you say you killed, was he hurt by a car?”

Her eyes widened as she turned to me. “How did you know?”

“They found Marissa’s car in a pond about a year ago. A work crew pulled it out. Some retired cop heard I was asking questions and showed it to me. The car was never reported stolen by your family, so why else would it be sitting in a pond in the middle of nowhere unless there was a crime involved? And you just answered that question. What exactly happened?”

Jade didn’t answer. She was hiding something.

“What happened, Jade? Just tell me. It’s been years. I’m not here to judge you.”

“I don’t want you to think bad . . . of either one of us.”

“Either one of you?” Then it became clearer to me. “
You
didn’t kill him, did you?”

“I did. It might as well have been me. I wasn’t driving the car, but it was all because of me. We wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it wasn’t for me.”

“Marissa was driving?” I asked.

Jade nodded. “I couldn’t have driven that day. I was too upset. Way too upset. I bawled the whole way as we left the clinic and drove home. Marissa had to take care of me. I was a mess. I was practically hyperventilating. I really did think my life was over, that I had no options or anything that could save me.”

“It’s easy to see the world collapsing on us when we’re young.”

“Sometimes it really is, though,” she said.

I remembered the way I felt after Marissa’s death. The agony. The long hours I spent locked away, crying and mourning. “Sometimes, yes.”

“We didn’t see the stop sign. We didn’t see it because of me. Marissa was trying to hand me a tissue, she was trying to talk to me, and she was trying to drive at the same time. She reached over. She looked at me. We were in a part of town we didn’t know as well. She ran the stop sign, and we heard the thumping sound against the front of the car.” Jade stared off at a distant point in the room. “I can still hear it today. It’s a memory that will never leave me. That awful thump.”

“So she stopped the car and got out, right?”

“She stopped the car.” Jade drank some more water. “We looked back, but I could barely see because my eyes were so puffy and watery. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I remember thinking,
It’s just a dog. Marissa just ran over a dog, that’s all
. But she was looking back. She turned her head all the way around, moving her body in the seat so she could look. She froze that way, Marissa. She raised her hand to her mouth and just froze. I’ve never seen such a look of terror on someone’s face. I knew. I knew she’d hit a person.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

Jade sighed. It seemed to come from deep within her. “We left,” she said. “Marissa drove away.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She panicked. She didn’t know what to do. Someone came out of one of the houses, I remember. An old woman. She lifted her hands to her face like she knew the kid. Marissa saw that. So she just drove off, and I didn’t even tell her to stop. I didn’t say anything. And when I looked back . . .” Her eyes filled with tears again, just as I knew they had on that long ago day that changed their lives. Everyone’s lives. “I saw the boy lying in the street. His arms above his head. His leg bent . . . the wrong way. And that woman, that old woman approaching him, the one who came out of the house. His grandmother, we later found out. I saw them, and she looked up at the car. But we didn’t stop. We just drove home. I’d stopped crying then. It was the quietest, most . . . somber car ride we’d ever taken.”

I stood up and took a walk around the living room, Riley and Jade tracking me with their eyes. The accident itself was one thing, and it explained a great deal. But Marissa’s behavior . . . that was the part I couldn’t reconcile. The Marissa I knew—
thought I knew
—was honest to a fault. I had to accept her infidelity as well as her complicity in an accident she left the scene of, an accident that killed a child.

“What happened when you made it home?” I asked, still standing. My legs felt weak, the floor beneath me uncertain.

“We pulled into the garage. We weren’t supposed to park our cars in there, but we did that day. Marissa looked over at me and she said, ‘I’m going to tell Dad. And then we can tell the police.’ She was crying. She leaned her head down against the steering wheel and sobbed. She kept saying over and over, ‘I killed that boy. I killed him.’ I tried to comfort her. It was total role reversal. I told her that it was an accident, that she hit the boy because she was tending to me. I also told her the boy might be okay. We knew a kid in grade school who got hit by a car. The car went right over him, knocked him out. He just had a concussion and a bunch of scrapes.”

“But not this time,” I said.

“Do you know how sometimes you can just feel something, especially things that have to do with death? I just felt it when we drove away from that boy. He was dead. I knew it. I felt it. Marissa must have felt it too.”

“She clearly didn’t tell anyone, right? She didn’t go to the police or we’d all have known about it.”

Jade held up a finger as though asking me to be patient. “Marissa did decide to tell. We waited for Mom and Dad to come home. When they did, the four of us sat down in the living room, and we told them everything. I remember Dad came in pissed because we’d parked in the garage. That quickly became the least of his worries.”

“You told them about the pregnancy too?”

“All of it. I look back on that conversation and think that must have been one of the single worst moments in the history of parenting. Finding out in one fell swoop that your oldest daughter ran over a kid with her car because your other daughter got knocked up.” She laughed a little, a low, faint sound. “I watched my father while we told him. I think he aged ten years during the conversation. You remember him. He could be such a . . .”

“Hard-ass?”

“A prick. A real prick. Mom once said, ‘You know your father. He can be as understanding as Hitler.’ Nice, right? But I sure felt sorry for the old man during that conversation. Mom held up well. She hugged me. She hugged Marissa. She told us she loved us. She told us we’d get through it no matter what. It’s blurry, the whole thing, but I remember those moments with Mom.”

“Didn’t your parents
make
her tell?” I asked. “Didn’t they say they were going to call the police? It
was
an accident. Marissa wanted to tell. Did they make her go?”

Jade leaned forward, staring at the floor. I waited. And waited.

She started shaking her head.

“Dad stood up. He said, ‘I’ve made a decision. We’re going to take care of this, and we’re going to take care of this the right way.’ I thought he meant he was going to call the cops and march Marissa down there to face the music. Instead, he asked if anyone had seen us hit the boy. And then he said he wanted to look at the car.”

“What was he doing?” I asked.

“I knew immediately what he was up to. I’d seen him get that way before. He was working up some kind of a plan.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

“D
ad went out and looked at the car. Marissa couldn’t look at it, she couldn’t bear to, but I went with him. I saw the blood and a little bit of hair on the bumper and the headlight. I actually puked when I saw it. I went outside the garage and puked. Mom was inside with Marissa, and Dad came out where I was puking and took me by the arm. He said, ‘Jade, what are the odds that old woman got the license number?’ I said she didn’t seem to be looking at us. She was looking at the kid. And he asked me how old the woman was. I said, ‘She looked pretty old. Maybe eighty.’ Back then, of course, everybody looked old to me. I was a teenager. The wheels were turning in his head. He asked me if anybody knew about the baby, and I said no.” Jade shook her head. “You know what’s funny? In the middle of all that, neither one of them asked who the father was.”

I went out to the kitchen. I kept a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet, something I only took out on rare occasions: after a long day at work or on the off chance I received a raise or a promotion. It seemed like a good time for it, although not a celebration. I grabbed the bottle and two glasses and brought them to the living room. I poured each of us a shot. Jade threw hers back without hesitation, and I followed suit. I poured another, and we both did the same thing.

“So your dad wanted to cover the whole thing up?” I asked, the liquor burning on its way through my system.

“He
did
cover the whole thing up. He said we both had bright futures, and it was his job as a father to do anything in his power to see we lived them to the fullest. He said he’d put his money, his job, his reputation on the line to protect us.” Jade poured herself another shot but only sipped it. “It’s funny.” She grimaced a little from the liquor. “I know it was his way of saying he loved us. He saw himself that way. The protector. The big man. That’s who he was.”

“And you all just went along with it?” I asked.

“Hell, no. Mom pitched a fit. She said there was no way we were just going to make it go away. She said they’d raised us to accept responsibility for our actions, no matter what they were, and we both had to face the music. She’d love us and support us always, but we had to be responsible.” Jade swirled the glass of bourbon in her hand. The amber liquid caught the light from the lamp and glowed through her fingers. “Mom always gave in to Dad, but that night she showed a lot of steel. She bowed her back and stood up to him. And they reached a compromise. They said we’d all wait until the next day to see the news. If the boy lived, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for Marissa. If he died . . . well, nobody really admitted that as a possibility. Even though Marissa and I both suspected the truth.”

“I bet that made for a long night,” I said.

“I’d forgotten all about me and my problems. I didn’t think of the baby. I listened to Marissa cry all night. I even went into her room and lay with her, holding her close to me. I half expected she’d leave during the night.”

“You mean run down to the police by herself?”

Jade nodded. “But she didn’t. She was scared because Dad filled her head with so much noise. She thought she might go to jail. And Dad said over and over again that just having an arrest like that on your record could ruin you. No job. No credit. Her education would be set back. Maybe she’d never finish college. You know how concerned with appearances they were.”

“Why didn’t she call me?” I asked.

I tried to remember how I’d passed the time that weekend when Marissa was at home. I remembered going to a party off campus and working up a good buzz, and then stumbling home with my friends, trying to distract myself until she came back.

“I told her to. Dad said not to tell anybody what was going on, but I told her to call you or another friend. Anyone. Just to say hi. But Marissa wouldn’t listen. She said the same thing over and over.”

“Did she say she wasn’t worthy?” I asked.

Jade pointed at me. “How did you know?”

“I heard a variation of that right after she came back to Eastland. After your dad clearly won the argument. Right?”

Jade stared into her glass. “When the paper came out the next day, it said the boy had died.” She lifted her hand to her chest. “Samuel Maberry. He was nine. Just a little boy.”

“So your dad wouldn’t let Marissa go confess?”

“The paper had a report from the only witness, Samuel’s grandmother, the woman we saw in the street. She got the color of the car wrong. And the make. She said it was a blue van and not a black SUV. And she said it looked like a dark-haired man was driving the car. She didn’t get any of the license number. Apparently, she really was too old to see that well, and I remember Dad staring at the paper and saying, ‘That’s about as good as the news could get.’”

“That’s harsh. What about the dead boy?”

“He didn’t mean about him, I’m sure.”

“Are you?” I asked.

“This is my father, Nick. I loved him. He did act out of love, even if it’s hard to see.”

“So what did he do next?” I asked. “What was the loving plan he came up with?”

Jade finished her drink. “He started pulling strings. He wanted to get rid of the car. He wanted to move. He wanted us to go somewhere no one could ever find us. He wanted to go away so we could still have our lives, Marissa and I. Mom and Dad didn’t have a lot of close friends. They knew a lot of people, but they weren’t tied to things. We had some cousins back east, but that’s about it. He wanted to pull up stakes and run, but he couldn’t put it all together right away. He had to look into some things and make some calls. So he sat Marissa and me down and told us that, for the time being, maybe for the next week or so, we had to act like everything was perfectly normal. That meant I had to go back to my senior year of high school and hang out with my friends and do all the things I would normally do.”

“And Marissa had to come back to Eastland,” I said.