“I did it. I killed him.” He turns toward me so abruptly it scares me. And then I remember: It’s him. It’s still him, right? “I had to, Bridge. He was gonna kill me.” The word kill is pinched.
“You killed him,” I echo. I look up and see everything in the bleeding sky: the color of Mom’s cheeks when she’s been laughing too hard. Micah’s hair, unruly fire. But mostly I see Wil and me as cloudkids, racing out past the breakers, arcing back to catch a wave to shore. I see Wilson in the surf, holding me, holding me, holding me until just the right time. Rocketing me into the crest of the wave, whooping and clapping as I ride until the sand scrapes my belly. I see the three of us on the hot sand, water-beaded and spent. Wilson covering us up with beach towels like blankets, and saying, G’night, kids, until one of us cracked up and blew the whole game.
I propel myself back, away from Wil, pressing myself against the driver’s side door. I don’t mean to. It just happens.
“And then what?” I moan. “Why didn’t you call the cops, Wil? Why didn’t you—”
“Fuck! I wanted to!” he sobs. “But my mom—my mom said—” He’s crying too hard to speak, and almost all of me wants to hold him. And I’m watching his fists clench tighter and tighter and I think about it. I think about the fact that those hands have ended a life.
“Okay. Okay,” I say, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, exactly. I can feel it worming its way up from my gut: a deep, low moan that turns into a sob. Into a scream.
“I wish you didn’t know!” Wils shouts at the windshield. “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell you any of it!”
“Okay.” I wipe my face, making space for more tears. “It’s not too late. You can go to the cops, still. Turn yourself in. Explain what happened! It wasn’t your fault!”
“I can’t. If it had just happened—but we’ve done too many things to make it go away.” He curls into a ball, his voice muffled. “We wiped my prints from the golf club. We put the club in Dad’s hands. We broke the glass door from the outside to make it look like a break-in. We lied to the cops!”
“So tell them now!”
“Tell them what?” he wails. “Tell them that I let my mother convince me to lie to save my own ass? Tell them that the story about my dad coming home from the bar to find an intruder is total bullshit? Thank them for all the news stories about the break-ins?”
“I don’t know!” I scream. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to tell them!” I don’t know how to fix this for them, for us. I hate Henney for convincing her son to lie. I hate Wilson for what he did to his family. The only person I can’t bring myself to hate is Wil.
“She said our lives would be over.” He closes his eyes, and his voice gets soft. “She said with my dad gone, we could start over and have the lives we were supposed to have. And I’m sorry, but I wanted to give her that. After all the bullshit he put her through—” Fresh tears slide down his cheeks. “She deserved that.”
I reach for his hand and I take it. He lets me.
“I believe,” I say fiercely, “that you did what you had to do to save your life. And your mom’s life. And I know that anyone else, anyone who knows you, would see it the same way.”
He shakes his head. “It’s too late.”
“Timothy Pelle,” I say. I squeeze his hand.
“He killed that other lady. He broke into those houses, right?” Wil’s eyes are big and wild. He is grasping for something to make this okay. There is nothing there but dead air.
“But he didn’t kill your dad.”
“He should be off the street,” Wil argues. “He’s a murderer.”
“He didn’t murder your dad.”
“No,” he says finally. His body crumples in the seat. “He didn’t murder my dad.”
I am suddenly and completely empty. I want to curl up in his lap and sleep for years. I sink back against the window. The warm glass tugs at my skin.
“What about Porter and Yancey? They have no idea?”
He covers his face with his hands. “That guy’s been on the news for a long time now. I remembered some of the details. I told Porter and Yancey that my dad saved my mom’s life.”
“And they just . . .”
He nods. “They believed us,” he murmurs into his palms. “We said Dad had been out drinking at Big Mike’s, and hadn’t been home too long when a guy broke the front door. We said Mom had surprised him, and when he’d attacked her, my dad had tried to hit the guy with a golf club. We said the guy was wearing gloves, and after he attacked my dad, he just . . . He ran.”
This is too much. I can’t hold this. I thought I could. I pull my knees into my chest and squeeze until I can’t feel my arms anymore.
“Anyway, next couple of days when the cops were asking us to go over the details, we’d seen the sketch of the guy they were looking for. So we knew what to say.” Finally, Wil lifts his head for a fraction of a second before his chin drops to his chest again. “We’re such fucking liars.”
“Don’t say that. Did they check with the bar?”
Wil nods. “Yup. He was there that night, just like Mom thought.” His mouth withers. “He’d been hanging out there a lot lately. Drunk piece of shit.”
When I blink I see Wilson, leaning outside the bar as I’m on my way into Nina’s. Fuck. Maybe if I’d said something. Maybe.
On Atlantic, a siren screams past. An electric charge runs through me, and Wil stiffens, too.
“They’ll figure it out,” I tell Wil gently. “When they don’t find the guy’s DNA, when you slip up and say something different—they’ll figure it out. You should have—”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you sit there and judge me.” There is venom in his voice. “I had to. For her.”
A new wave rises in me. I let the tears leak. I’m too tired to cry.
“I didn’t—” He looks out the window. “You can’t tell the cops. It’ll end me, Bridge. You can’t. I love you. You can’t.”
“I have to go home.” My head is throbbing. I’ll go home and I’ll sleep, and when I wake up, this won’t be true. Wil Hines will be Wil Hines again. Our biggest worry will be a long-distance relationship. I’ll bitch about an eight A.M. class, and he’ll tell me about this customer he had who was kind of a jerk. But we won’t talk about this. Nothing like this.
“I have to graduate. For my mom. I don’t care what happens to me after that, but I have to graduate this weekend.”
“I know, Wil. I just—I need to think.” I pull out of the lot. He rolls down his window silently. The breeze can’t cool my fevered skin.
“You have to tell the cops,” I say.
He doesn’t respond. I close my eyes and let the neon lights bleed over me.
“I love you,” I say.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year