“I don’t know, Quincy,” my mother says. “I guess she didn’t want to bother you. Or maybe—”
Another pause. A lengthy one. So long that I can feel the distance stretching between my mother and I. All those fields and cities and small towns that sit between this Indiana highway and that too-white house in Bucks County.
“Mom?” I say. “Maybe what?”
“I was going to say that maybe Lisa thought you wouldn’t be honest with her.”
“She didn’t say that, did she?”
“No,” my mother says. “Nothing like that. But I got a feeling—and I could be wrong—I got the feeling that she knew something. Or suspected something.”
“About?”
My mother goes quiet. “About what happened that night.”
I squirm in the driver seat, suddenly unbearably hot. Beads of sweat have popped along my brow line. I wipe them away and click off the heater.
“What gave you this feeling?”
“More than once, she stressed how lucky you were. How you recovered so quickly. How your wounds weren’t that bad. Especially compared with what happened to the others.”
In ten years, this is the most my mother has ever talked about Pine Cottage with me. Four lousy sentences. I’d consider it some sort of warped breakthrough if the situation wasn’t so dire.
“Mom,” I say, “did Lisa suggest that I had something to do with what happened at Pine Cottage?”
“She didn’t suggest anything—”
“Then why do you think she suspected something?”
“I don’t know, Quincy.”
But I do. It’s because my mother also suspects something. She doesn’t think I killed the others. But I’m certain that, just like Cole and Freemont, she wonders why I lived when no one else did. Deep down, she thinks there’s something I’m not saying.
I think about the way she had looked at me after I trashed the kitchen all those years ago. The hurt darkening her eyes. The utter fear quivering in her pupils. I wish to God I could forget that look as thoroughly as I’ve forgotten that hour at Pine Cottage. I want it erased from my memory. Painted so black I can never see it again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“I tried,” my mother says, going heavy on the faux indignation. “I called you two days in a row. You didn’t call back.”
“You talked to Lisa two weeks ago, Mom,” I say. “You should have called me as soon as it happened.”
“I wanted to protect you. As your mother, that’s my job.”
“Not from something like this.”
“All I want is for you to be happy,” my mother says. “That’s all I ever wanted, Quincy. Happy and content and normal.”
Within that last word lies all of my mother’s hopes and all of my failings. It’s as powerful and potent as a grenade dropped into the conversation. Only I’m the one who explodes.
“I’m not normal, Mom!” I scream, my words bouncing off the windshield. “After what happened, there’s no possible way for me to be normal!”
“But you are!” my mother says. “You had a problem, but we took care of it and now everything is fine.”
Tears burn the corners of both eyes. I try to mentally force them not to fall. Yet they leak out anyway, slipping down my cheek as I say, “I’m as far from fine as you can possibly get.”
My mother’s tone softens. In her voice is something I haven’t heard in years—concern.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this, Quincy?”
“I shouldn’t have had to,” I say. “You should have seen that something was wrong.”
“But you looked fine.”
“Because you forced it on me, Mom. The pills and the refusing to talk about it. That was all because of you. Now, I’m—”
I don’t know what I am.
Screwed up, obviously.
So screwed up that I could tally for my mother the many ways in which I’ve failed as a human being. I’m likely in trouble with the police. I’m possibly harboring Lisa’s murderer in an apartment I could only afford because my friends were butchered. I’m addicted to Xanax. And wine. And I’m sad. Not to mention angry. Also alone. Even when I’m with Jeff, I sometimes feel so unbearably alone.
What’s worse is that I never would have realized this without Sam crashing into my life. It took some prodding on her part, of course. All those tests and dares and nudges to reveal something about myself, to remember tiny details of something I’m all too happy to have forgotten.
Then it hits me. Hard. I’m like a nail just struck by a hammer—brittle, quivering, sinking deeper into something from which there is no escape.
“Mom, what did Lisa sound like on the phone?”
“What do you mean? She sounded like I’d imagine her to sound.”
“I need specifics,” I say. “How did her voice sound? Hoarse? Raspy?”
“I really didn’t notice.” My mother’s confusion is evident. I picture her staring at the phone, befuddled. “You’re the one who talked to Lisa all those years ago. I don’t know what she’s supposed to sound like.”
“Please, Mom. If you can think of anything.”
For the last time, my mother lapses into a deep silence. I clutch the steering wheel, hoping she’ll come up with something. And while she’s failed me many, many times in the past, in this instance, Sheila Carpenter comes through.
“There were a lot of pauses,” she says, ignoring the irony coiled in that statement. “Lisa would talk, then pause. And with each pause, I heard a little exhale.”
“Like a sigh?”
“Quieter than that.”
It’s all I need to know. In fact, it tells me everything.
“Mom, I need to go.”
“Will you be alright?” my mother asks. “Tell me that you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I will. I promise.”
“And I hope that whatever’s going on, I was able to help.”
“Yes, Mom,” I say. “Thank you. You helped more than you’ll ever realize.”
Because now I know that those pauses my mother had heard definitely wasn’t sighing. It was someone smoking.
Which means she hadn’t spoken to Lisa.
My mother had talked to Sam.
Curious, inquisitive Sam. She knows more than she let on. She’s known it all along. That’s why she showed up out of the blue. It wasn’t to connect with me. It wasn’t for money.
She’s trying to find out everything she can about Pine Cottage.
About what I did there.
I end the call and roll down the window, letting myself be hit with bursts of crisp, Midwestern air. My grip tightens around the steering wheel as my foot presses on the accelerator. I watch the speedometer creep higher, passing seventy, seventy-five, flirting with eighty.
It doesn’t help, no matter how fast I drive. I still feel like a fly, wriggling in a web of Sam’s making. I realize there are only two ways to get free—fight or flight.
I know which one it needs to be.
Back at the hotel, I change my airline reservation. There’s an eight p.m. flight from Chicago to New York. I’m going to be on it.
Jeff, of course, doesn’t understand why I need to fly back to New York so suddenly. He peppers me with questions as I stuff clothes into my suitcase. I answer each one twice—the lie out loud, the truth in my head.
“Does this have something to do with Sam?”
“No.”
Of course it does.
“Quincy, did she do something wrong?”
“Not yet.”
Yes, she’s done something terrible. We both have.
“I just don’t understand why you need to leave this second. Why now?”
“Because I need to get back as soon as possible.”
Because Sam knows things about me. Horrible things. Just as I know horrible things about her. Now I need to get her out of my life for good.
“Would it help if I went with you?”
“That’s sweet, but no. You still have work to take care of.”
You can’t go with me, Jeff. I’ve been lying to you. About many things. And if you find them out, you won’t want to be anywhere near me.
Once I’m packed and heading for the door, Jeff grabs me and pulls me tight against him. I long to remain in that exact spot, held in place, comforted. But that’s not possible. Not with Sam still in my life.
“Will you be okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” I tell him.