If I Die Tonight

by A L Gaylin

  The door opened and Helen came in, trailing fresh perfume. ‘The Courtneys changed their minds about the new property. They want to see the house on Riverview again,’ she said. ‘I think we may be closing in on an offer.’ She applied frosty pink lipstick. Smoothed the arch of her brow.

  Jackie pulled her lipstick out of her purse and dropped the key ring back in. ‘Good luck.’

  Helen’s soft brown eyes sought out Jackie’s in the mirror. ‘Connor is going to be fine,’ she said. ‘He’s a boy. Boys get into fights. It’s the way of the world.’

  But Jackie wasn’t worried about Connor. Connor had never been the problem. ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Does Stacy ever talk about Wade?’

  ‘Wade?’

  ‘Does she ever tell you things about his friends? Or who he’s dating? You know. Gossip?’

  ‘No, honey. Stacy really doesn’t gossip about Wade,’ she said. ‘Different circles and all.’

  ‘Right,’ Jackie said. Though it didn’t used to be that way. Stacy and Wade had been inseparable as children, to the point where she and Helen had once caught them dressed as bride and groom, a lacy pillowcase arranged on Stacy’s head like a veil, her stuffed bunny rabbit apparently performing the ceremony. ‘Remember when they got married?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Stacy and Wade. Remember? They were in love when they were little.’

  Helen removed a piece of folded tissue paper from her purse and gently blotted her lips. ‘As I recall, Stacy treated him more like a pet,’ she said. ‘He let her give him makeovers. I remember trying to get this awful purple eye shadow off of him before you picked him up. He was probably five and it wasn’t even for humans – it was from Stacy’s doll’s make-up kit, full of glitter and epoxy and God knows what else. I was worried he’d have an allergic reaction.’

  ‘Love hurts.’

  Helen grinned. ‘In the wise words of Nazareth. Yes. It does.’ She dropped her lipstick back in her purse, gave her reflection the once-over and fluffed her chestnut hair, diamond earrings sparkling. ‘Remember when we used to be able to get away with no make-up at all?’

  She started to leave, but Jackie put a hand on her arm. ‘Wade got a text.’

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘I don’t normally look at his phone, but it was in the kitchen and I read it and I found it … troubling.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘“Leave me alone.”’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s what the text said.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘It was from someone named “T.” Do you know who that might be? Any girls at the school with T names?’

  ‘Listen,’ Helen said. ‘“Leave me alone” can mean all sorts of things. Most of them a lot less awful than what you’re imagining.’

  ‘How do you know what I’m imagining?’

  ‘You’re a writer, Jackie. You create these elaborate scenarios in your head, these fictions, when it was probably just some buddy of Wade’s telling him to stop being such a wise-ass.’

  Jackie exhaled, her breath shaking. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  She forced a smile. ‘Calling me a writer, for one thing. I haven’t written anything since before the boys were born.’

  ‘Jackie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s not a little boy anymore.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘I know it sounds patronizing, but believe me, I have to remind myself the same thing all the time about Stacy. They’re not going to let us into their lives as much, but that’s normal. Wade’s a complicated young man now.’

  Jackie’s face flushed. ‘Believe me, I know he’s complicated.’

  Helen gave her a probing look. ‘That’s over now,’ she said. Reading her mind. ‘He’s better. Two years is a long time.’

  Jackie gritted her teeth. ‘You know that for a fact, do you? Well, that’s a relief.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  Jackie remembered a day, must have been around six months ago, before Wade had a car of his own. Helen had been at the school anyway for a PTA meeting and so she’d given Wade a ride home. They hadn’t seen Jackie working in the garden, Helen and Wade, yet she’d seen them. Spied on her eldest son and her oldest friend for a full five minutes, their two faces behind the windshield, Wade talking and Helen listening, nodding every so often, her expression so intent and serious, Jackie half expected her to take notes. She hated that feeling of being on the outside looking in, that awful yearning to pound on the glass until it broke so she could hear what her son was saying and know his thoughts. It was the way Jackie almost always felt with Wade, but it had been so much more pronounced in that moment. Jackie’s friend giving her son the advice she couldn’t. Understanding him as she never would. She felt it again now with Helen scratching open that old wound, no matter how kind her intentions had been. Two years is a long time. Is it really, Helen? Go fuck yourself.

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetie,’ Jackie said finally, a forced lightness in her voice that she hated but couldn’t help. ‘I think I just need more sleep.’

  Jackie had one more hour of floor time left when Helen returned from her showing, a pot of fiery orange mums in her arms. She held it out to her. ‘Happy fall.’

  ‘Oh Helen, they’re beautiful,’ Jackie said. ‘And mums are my favorites.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You didn’t have to –’

  ‘Please,’ Helen said. ‘I saw these on my way back and I couldn’t resist. I got two pots for myself, too.’

  Jackie leaned into the flowers, inhaling their scent, fresh as an apology. She remembered how she’d snapped at Helen in the bathroom and her face flushed from guilt.

  ‘Do you feel any better?’ Helen said.

  She nodded.

  ‘He’s a good soul,’ Helen said very quietly. ‘Both of your sons are.’

  Jackie wasn’t sure she’d ever met anyone as considerate as Helen. ‘So how did the showing go,’ she started, but Helen’s cell phone chimed, interrupting her.

  She glanced at the screen, held up a finger. ‘Stacy.’

  It was a short call, Helen saying, ‘Oh my God,’ and ‘Okay,’ a few times and then hanging up, color drained from her face. ‘I have to take Stacy to the hospital.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘One of Stacy’s very dear friends, Liam Miller … Do you know him?’

  ‘Yes. I know him,’ said Jackie, though she didn’t know Liam Miller so much as remember him – a boy with cornsilk hair and sparkling eyes on Wade’s Little League team. Liam Miller, who had once helped her wash dishes after Wade’s birthday party, when was that? She’d still been married to Bill at the time. Wade’s seventh birthday party. What a sweet little boy … ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He’s been hit by a car. He’s in intensive care.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jackie said, stomach clenching. ‘That’s … awful.’

  ‘Stacy wants to go to the hospital, but I think I should talk to Sheila and Chris first. Do you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His parents. Liam’s parents.’

  Liam Miller. The boy from this morning, the boy the police were talking about. That poor lost boy. It was Liam. Jackie wanted to ask what he’d been doing out on the street so late, the night before SATs. But that would sound like she was blaming his parents. And it could happen to anyone. Any parent. Turn your back for one moment. She thought of Wade standing alone on the front step, cigarette in his hand. Her Wade, awake and outside at that hour, that very late hour … And a feeling swept through her – sadness of course, but something else as well, a type of dread she couldn’t quite identify, as though the floor beneath her had suddenly turned to glass, thin and untrustworthy. Just about to shatter.

  Pearl’s hands were heavy on the wheel as she drove Amy Nathanson home. She hadn’t slept in eighteen hours and she was exhausted, emotionally and phy
sically, Amy Nathanson the reason, Amy Nathanson the last person in the world Pearl wanted in the back of her cruiser. But it couldn’t be avoided. Nathanson’s car was still missing: an emerald-green 1973 Jaguar ‘in perfect condition,’ referred to by Amy as ‘her baby,’ and indeed, she’d described it with all the loving care one would use in describing a missing child. She’d asked to be driven home and the sergeant, star-struck as he seemed to be, had volunteered Pearl, explaining, ‘Amy told me she’d be more comfortable with a woman behind the wheel.’

  Pearl sighed. As the only female police officer on the Havenkill force, she had a locker room big enough for eight people all to herself, complete with a shower of her own. But she also had to drive Amy Nathanson all the way to Woodstock – a forty-five-minute ride with a has-been pop singer from the eighties, who insisted on playing the role of victim as though she were pulling for an Oscar. You win some; you lose some.

  ‘You don’t know,’ Amy was saying now. ‘You just don’t understand what a violation it was.’

  Pearl kept a box of Kleenex in the front seat, which she’d given to Amy at the beginning of the ride. Amy yanked what had to be one of the last few tissues out of the box and blew her nose with it. She’d been crying solidly for the past twelve hours and she had said the word ‘violation’ so often it could have spawned a drinking game. ‘I understand, ma’am,’ Pearl said.

  ‘I tried to talk to him. The other boy. The one who tried to get my baby back. I checked his pulse and he was alive, but he wouldn’t speak to me. Wouldn’t open his eyes. His back might be broken.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘I didn’t have my phone. It was in the Jaguar. I shouted and screamed but no one came so I had to walk. I had to leave him. He’ll be okay, won’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That … that monster drove off with my baby. He was all in black. Black hoodie. Black pants. He was so big and threw me to the ground. He took my purse. My phone. He got in my car. My beautiful leather seats. I had to walk. In the pouring rain. All the way to the station.’

  ‘You said that, ma’am. You said all of that, in your report. I took it all down, remember?’

  ‘I remember. I’m just telling you it was –’

  ‘A violation.’

  ‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘So do you think you’ll be able to find her?’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Baby.’

  ‘We’ve put out an APB on the car, but stolen cars can be hard to track down, especially if the plates have been changed.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We hope for the best,’ Pearl said pointedly. ‘Just like we’re hoping for the best for Liam Miller’s recovery.’

  Pearl waited for Amy to say more, but she didn’t. Pearl took a long, deep breath, relieved at the silence in the car. She was over the bridge now, just about twenty minutes from Woodstock. The sky was cloudless – that crisp, true blue that you only see in the fall after a big rain. There was something hopeful in that type of sky. Washed clean, if only for a few hours.

  She kept an eye on Amy Nathanson: the vintage raincoat of shiny red vinyl, the rainbow-striped hair. The mascara, like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands, still staining her face, no matter how much she’d tried to scrub it off in the station bathroom. Some things, Pearl supposed, washed clean easier than others.

  Amy wore bright red lipstick, which Pearl assumed was a thirty-year-old trademark. She’d applied and reapplied it so many times since she’d fallen into the station, over so many questions from the sergeant and phone calls to the state police, over a seemingly endless stream of reports to fill out and hospital updates to receive, over so much sobbing and shivering and so many cups of hot coffee, Pearl fetching towels from the locker room so that Amy could dry her drenched hair, clothes, face.

  Hours and hours of tears and worry and still Amy Nathanson’s lipstick had stayed perfect. ‘Aimee En,’ Sergeant Black had sighed at one point, calling her by her stage name. ‘I saw you at the Palladium, must’ve been 1988 …’ Sergeant Black, who had actually asked for her autograph. What a dumb hick move that had been. So embarrassing.

  To Pearl’s eye, Aimee En was a drama queen, treating the world like a stage, expecting all the misplaced respect that came with celebrity. And yeah, up here in the boondocks, thirty-year-old celebrity still counted. Pearl couldn’t help but wonder what Sergeant Black would have said to a woman he’d never seen before, at the Palladium or otherwise, had she shown up at the station at three in the morning with whiskey on her breath, clearly more concerned about a missing car than about the unconscious boy she’d left in the middle of the road.

  ‘Officer Maze.’ Amy was watching her from behind the glass that separated the back seat from the front, making eye contact in the rearview mirror. Pearl wasn’t sure for how long, and for a few moments of sleep-deprived panic, she wondered if Amy had been able to read her mind.

  ‘You can call me Pearl, ma’am,’ she said.

  ‘Pearl. Lovely name.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So, Pearl, have you ever killed anyone?’

  Pearl turned her gaze to the road. Wow. ‘Small talk, huh?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Amy said. ‘I just … You probably think I’m being overdramatic about the car.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘It’s not the Jaguar.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘Well, not really. It’s just that some things are easier to worry about than others.’

  Several car lengths ahead of them, a red pick-up truck was going close to seventy-five in a 55-mph zone, though Pearl was neither in the mood nor in the position to give out a ticket. She pressed down on the accelerator anyway, weaving and screeching around other cars until she was right behind the truck, tailing it so closely she was practically in the cargo bed.

  ‘Whoa,’ Amy said.

  ‘Just teaching a lesson,’ Pearl said, and within moments, the pick-up truck pulled into the right lane, reducing its speed to a crawl. ‘See?’ She let herself smile over that one moment of power. Pearl took satisfaction wherever she could find it.

  Amy said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do if that boy dies.’

  Pearl’s smile dissolved.

  ‘I don’t think I can cope with the guilt.’

  Pearl reached a stoplight, the word tugging at her. Guilt. She turned around, looked directly at Amy through the glass divider. ‘Why would you feel guilty?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t you that ran Liam Miller down.’

  ‘No, no. That’s true.’

  ‘Well then –’

  ‘But my car did. Baby did. I let that piece of shit take Baby away from me. I screamed for help and that other boy … Liam … he came running. If I hadn’t screamed, he wouldn’t have come. Baby wouldn’t have run him down.’

  Pearl nodded slowly, Amy’s story playing out in her head, all the flaws in it. You were stopped at the stop sign on Orchard and Flower. A teenaged white boy in a hoodie, a tall, strong boy ‘hopped up on drugs,’ and ‘laughing,’ reached through your open driver’s side window and grabbed your purse off your lap. You leaped out and fought with him, allowing him to push you to the ground, jump into your unlocked Jaguar and steal it. But it was freezing cold last night, even before it started raining. What was your driver’s side window doing open? Were you talking to the hopped-up boy? Did you know him? Was there even a boy at all?

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Pearl said.

  ‘If I’d had a gun. If I’d just had a gun I swear to God I’d have –’

  ‘Left it in the car, probably. Along with your phone.’

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just want to know if I’ll ever be able to close my eyes again without seeing the whole thing happening, over and over.’

  Pearl pulled onto Route 28 and drove, reading billboards as she passed. Pest control, car insurance, a Halloween haunted house …

  Amy said, ‘Please tell me. Have you ever killed anyone?’

  Pearl had been
asked this question before, more often than not on dates. It came with the job, and she usually said no. But something about the desperation in Amy’s voice, or the clarity of the sky, or perhaps simply her own overwhelming exhaustion, made Pearl more truthful than she usually was. ‘Not that I remember,’ she said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Pearl looked once again at Amy, the black mascara stains on her gaunt, sad face, the rainbow bangs limp against her forehead. She looks doomed, Pearl thought. Though maybe she was just projecting. ‘It means that when I close my eyes,’ she said, ‘I see nothing.’

  Havenkill Hospital brought back memories for Jackie, good ones. She’d given birth to both her boys here. But she felt guilty for indulging in those memories now. After all, Liam Miller had probably been born here too and his life was in the balance. He was the one who needed her thoughts.

  The visitors’ lot was a long way from the building, and she tried to keep her mind off the past as she walked, her wool coat heavy on her shoulders, the air colder now than it had been earlier, thin and hard to breathe. She found a smoky scent in it – a woodstove burning somewhere, which felt to Jackie like fall and home and warmth. But also like something else. Something sad.

  The maternity wing was on the opposite side of the hospital. Liam was in intensive care, which was in the main building. Jackie knew that from calling the hospital after she’d done her last hour of floor time, talking with two sets of leaf peepers and showing one of her listings to a ridiculously pretty male model who’d come here from Belgium and was, as he’d put it in his continental accent, ‘through with that snakepit called Manhattan.’ Real potential, Jackie would have normally thought. Rich and ready. But showing him the house had felt like stalling, the whole afternoon a long-drawn-out preamble to calling the hospital.

  ‘What is the condition of the boy?’ Jackie had asked as soon as she’d dropped the model off at his parked rental car and driven off alone. And while the nurse had told her she could only provide that information over the phone for family, she had offered that Liam Miller had many friends ‘camped out in the ER waiting room,’ and she was welcome to do the same. After Jackie had hung up and was on her way to the hospital, it had dawned on her that she’d never given the nurse Liam’s name, referring to him only as ‘the boy.’ That was how small and safe Havenkill was, how rare it was here for a boy to be in intensive care.