“The girl you were watching.”
He might as well have punched me in the side. My chest caves in a little, thinking of Juliet. “No one. I know her from school.”
“She used to come all the time. Now I don’t see her much.”
Juliet. Oh, Juliet.
I can see her first letter in my head, the words so full of pain that they inspired me to write back.
You can see it on her face. Her reality is being ripped away, and she knows it.
Her mother is gone, and she knows it.
There is agony in that picture.
Every time I look at it, I think, “I know exactly how she feels.”
Did I cause that?
“Her mother died.” My throat is closing up, and my words sound thick.
“Ah. So sad.”
My vision blurs and fogs, just a little, just enough. I’m glad I’m not on the highway. “She died in a hit-and-run crash. The same night I got drunk and crashed my father’s truck.”
His voice is quiet, and I see him making the same connections we all did this afternoon. “Were you involved?”
My chest is so tight that I can’t speak. I hit the turn signal hard, and we pull into a parking lot in front of a strip mall. Once I pull the parking brake, I can’t look at him.
I fold my arms tight against my stomach, as if I can somehow ease this pain. “I don’t know.”
“And you’re worried you were?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. I can’t figure anything out.”
He’s quiet for a little while, and I listen to my breathing, trying to keep it steady.
When he speaks, his voice is low. “You don’t have to figure it out on your own, you know.”
“There’s too much. It’s too complicated now.”
“My wife might be the doctor, but I’m not stupid, Murph. Give it a shot.”
I inhale to tell him off—but instead, I tell him everything.
I start at the beginning, with the letters against the gravestone, how we started writing back and forth to each other. I tell him everything I told Juliet and everything I haven’t told her, and describe how difficult it’s grown to maintain separate storylines of my own life. I tell him about the night I found her on the side of the road, and how she seemed so convinced that I wasn’t there to help her—and my willingness to let her keep on believing that.
I tell him everything about my father, and the auto shop, and secretly driving him around. I tell him about Kerry and how she died.
I tell him about my mother and Alan, and how I’ve turned into an outsider in my own home. I tell him about the pregnancy they’ve hidden from me, how every action they take ties her closer to someone else who will let her down.
I tell him about their wedding day. About the bottle of whiskey. About the crash and the jail cell and Alan’s muttered comments about how I’m turning into my father. I tell him how badly I wanted to end it all, right there.
Frank is a good listener. He doesn’t interrupt, and he doesn’t say anything except for the occasional question to clarify a point.
Finally, I tell him about sitting around the lunch table, about how Rev told me off, and how Juliet needed to be taken to the nurse’s office after learning the date I wrecked the truck.
When I’m done, darkness has begun its crawl among the buildings along Route 50. I feel wrung out and exhausted.
“That’s a lot,” he says when I fall silent.
I nod. “I knew the date,” I say, finding it easier to speak now that I’m speaking to the darkness. “It was the first thing I noticed about her gravestone. But . . . I didn’t know how she died. That came later. A lot later. And I didn’t put those together until today.”
“But you don’t remember striking another vehicle?”
“I barely remember getting in the car.”
His shadowed expression is thoughtful. “Do you know where her mother died? Or when?”
“No.” I hesitate. “I know she was on her way home from the airport. In the evening.”
“Where did you wreck? Would you have crossed paths?”
“I wrecked on Ritchie Highway. I have no idea.”
“But it all happened in the same county?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
He rubs at his jaw. “Well, the police aren’t incompetent, Murph. If you wrecked in the same county, anywhere near the same time, I’m sure they would have investigated you playing a role in a hit-and-run. Especially if a woman died.”
“The truck was destroyed. They had to cut me out of it. Mom said the only thing that saved my life was the seat belt because of the way the brick pillar collapsed onto the air bag. Maybe they couldn’t tell if I’d hit someone else.”
“There are still ways to tell. Paint marks, things like that. Don’t you ever watch crime shows?”
For the first time all evening, some of the weight on my chest eases. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” He pauses. “You could probably look up the mother. A fatal hit-and-run would have been in the news. They might have said what kind of car caused the crash, or at least what color.”
His explanation is so reasonable, so matter of fact, that I want to sob all over the steering wheel and then do cartwheels across the parking lot.
But I don’t.
There’s still the rest of it.
“Do you mind if I give you a few thoughts about everything else?” says Frank.
I shake my head.
“Start heading back,” Frank says. “I’ll talk.”
I shift into gear.
He doesn’t make me wait. “I think your mother and her husband were wrong to keep a pregnancy from you this long, if they were doing it intentionally. But from what you tell me about the adults in your life, I’m not too surprised.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean your parents let you down when you were young, and they seem to keep doing it.”