“Just pray, I guess,” Carole said. “The police are all over this. They’ll find him. Everything will be all right.”
“Right,” Liz said, the word coming out like a cough.
“I saw the Amber Alert,” Owen said. “Gave our street. I knew it had to be Charlie.”
Carole pulled back from Liz. “Honey, I thought you’d still be in Beaverton.”
“I needed to be here,” she said.
Carole hugged Liz again. “But your exam . . . you’ve been working so hard.”
“There will be other times for a test,” Liz said. “Tests aren’t important. You, David, and Charlie are. I can’t believe any of this is really happening.”
Carole went into mom mode just then. She told David to get Liz a glass of wine and led her to the sofa. “We’ll find him. They’ll find him.”
“What can we do to help?” Owen asked David.
“Just be who you are,” he said. “Carole is falling apart. I’m not doing that great, either.”
For the next hour the two couples sat, mostly in silence. Carole pulled an afghan from the sofa and wrapped it around Liz.
David and Owen went into the kitchen.
“This isn’t really happening, David. Is it?”
David understood the question. It wasn’t about what had transpired that morning; it was about the worst possible outcome. An outcome neither could say out loud. At least, not directly.
“They searched Mirror Pond,” David said. “There’s hope that he didn’t fall into the river.”
“Yeah, that’s good.”
In the other room, the two women stayed entwined on the sofa. Liz couldn’t stop crying. David and Owen could hear her soft cries in the kitchen.
“Maybe I should take Liz home,” Owen said.
David didn’t think so. “I think it’s good that she’s here. It’s distracting Carole, and I think that’s welcome right now.”
“If you’re sure,” he said. “Is the rest of the family on the way?”
David shook his head. “Carole doesn’t want anyone alarmed.”
“It’s on the news now.”
“I know,” David said. “But it probably hasn’t made it to Spain. That’s where Carole’s parents are, on a trip with friends. My folks are dead. I’ll call my sister.”
David offered Owen a beer and took an O’Doul’s for himself. They stood at the kitchen window overlooking the river.
“Sometimes I just hate it here,” David said.
Owen watched the last group of tubers spin lazily in the river, bouncing off each other like balls in a drunken bumper pool game. They kicked and splashed, lying on their backs like overturned sea turtles. “Yeah. I know what you mean. It’s like having Middle America in your face all day long. Not cool.”
Carole continued to console Liz on the sofa, first with words promising everything would be all right, even suggesting that all of this was only a very bad dream. The simple gesture of holding hands under the afghan provided a little solace in the darkest moment of Carole’s life. Liz’s too. What happened to Charlie—whatever it was—had brought a deep, throbbing pain in the hearts of both women.
They had been close before tonight, but not in the beginning.
Before the teardown of the old house and the construction of the new place, Liz had been a little standoffish, only friendly enough so as not to be rude. She told the newcomers that the house they planned to raze had been part of her childhood. Her grandparents were close friends of the O’Donnells, the owners of the property before it was sold to the Franklins. Liz’s childhood visits to Bend included fly-fishing with the O’Donnells’ son Trevor and making s’mores with her family in the river-rock fire pit that Mr. O’Donnell had built, stone by stone. There was never anything but a crush between Liz and Trevor. He was three years older. At fourteen, seventeen seemed old to her.
When the old house came down, Carole purposely left the fire pit right where it was. David wanted it gone, but his wife thought better of it.
“Liz has real memories here,” she said when she and David met with the landscape designer and reviewed the plans for the landscaping.
“Who cares what she thinks? She’s still a kid. She can make new ones.”
Carole pushed back. “Old memories matter, David.”
He frowned. “It doesn’t go with the architecture. It just doesn’t.”
“We’re neighbors now,” she said, looking at her husband. “I want us to be friends.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MISSING: THIRTEEN HOURS
The Jarretts walked up the incline past the old detached garage and toward their door. A lid of thunderclouds had darkened the sky, and the temperature had dropped some. The eerie call from a loon came from the river. The couple didn’t speak. They only nodded in the direction of the patrol officer who had been stationed on the street. With Carole, Liz had found a new and larger hatred for herself. One that she could never have imagined in a lifetime of disappointments. Owen put his arm around her, but Liz was sure that it wasn’t to comfort her, rather to move her quickly past the police and into the house.
She was a leaf—no, a piece of trash—that he was scooting out of view.
With each step, Liz thought of Carole. Her actions had turned her closest friend into a sodden ball of misery. Carole was about to slide into a very dark place. She would have to go into the bedroom where her son had slept and face the emptiness. She’d pass by the cement pad of the new patio with his tiny handprints embedded forever and know they’d never grow larger. That the family Christmas card with the three of them that Carole had sent last year had been a one-off, not the first of a series. Liz had brought all of that on. The thought ricocheted through her mind that maybe none of this had really happened.
That it was a bad dream.
That she was an actor in a play.
That she’d wake up.
That the curtain would rise.
That Charlie wasn’t dead on her father’s workbench in the garage.
Liz faced her husband. Her brown eyes were on the verge of letting tears fall. She started to shake.
“I have something to tell you,” she finally said.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Owen said. His eyes penetrated her. “You didn’t do that, Liz. You couldn’t have.”
Liz didn’t say anything. When she told him what she’d done, each word had stuck in her throat like a dull steak knife. Saying it a second time would surely make her cough up blood.
Charlie’s blood.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said, her eyes finally flooding. “I panicked.”
Owen started pacing. He slammed his fist onto the top of the morris chair that faced out at the river. He couldn’t look at her just then.
“You don’t run over a kid and then not call an ambulance,” he said.
Liz went to him. She didn’t touch him. She just stood there. “I didn’t run over him. I didn’t. I—I bumped him. It was an accident.”
Owen spun around. “This is more than just an accident, Liz. Get a dose of reality. You messed up in the biggest way anyone ever could. You made bad into worse. There isn’t a word for this disaster.”
Liz reached for him, but he pushed her away. “I’ll fix this,” she said.