If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  “ARE YOU OKAY?” Helen said through Jackie’s Bluetooth as she drove away from Mother Goose’s Book Nook. Helen had called about a GoFundMe page one of the moms had made for a football camp scholarship in Liam Miller’s memory. “I thought you might be interested in contributing,” she had said. But Jackie couldn’t get herself to respond. She was still trying to work her mind around what Natalie Reed had said to her: “What are you doing here? Why are you in New York?”

  “Bill’s wife,” Jackie said. “She thought the boys and I had moved back to California.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Bill told her.”

  “He probably was trying to make me feel better.” That’s what Natalie had said. “I was so scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of your son. The older one.”

  Jackie clutched the wheel, heart galloping. A tear trickled down her cheek. “She didn’t even know Wade’s name.” Which was beside the point, she knew. But it’s how the mind works. It grasps onto whatever simple complaint it can and holds on for dear life because that’s so much easier than facing the real problem . . .

  “Why were you scared of him?”

  “Wow. I mean . . . He never told you? You don’t even know?”

  “Jackie.” Helen said her name too slowly, too calmly, as though she were talking someone down from a ledge.

  “What?”

  “Why were you talking to Bill’s wife?”

  Jackie wondered if there had ever been a question she’d wanted to answer less. She pressed the accelerator. The car surged. “Can we talk about this later, Helen?” she said, without waiting for a response. “I really need to get home.”

  OPENING THE FRONT door, Jackie couldn’t get her hands to stop shaking. Her bag hung against her side, phone burning inside it. As she pushed the door open and walked into the foyer, then the kitchen and toward the hallway that ended in Wade’s room, it all played out in her mind for the first time in two years. Her car, missing from its space outside her office. The call to the police. The return call, hours later: “Ma’am. We’ve located your car in Red Hook . . .” And how her heart had dropped at the sound of the town’s name. She hadn’t even been able to focus on anything else the officer had said.

  “Never mind,” Jackie had said when she’d seen Wade standing in front of her in handcuffs. “It was a miscommunication. Of course I won’t press charges. He’s my son. Are you crazy?”

  She’d been slapped with a six-hundred-dollar fine for Wade’s underage driving. And then, one week later, the restraining order. “I only wanted to talk to him, Mom. I swear. You have to believe me.” She’d believed Wade. Of course she had. Bill was a narcissist who saw no harm in abandoning an entire family, while Wade was a boy. A sensitive boy whose mother, who had given him false hope by teaching him how to drive at fifteen, had just told him she couldn’t afford to buy him a car for his sixteenth birthday. A fifteen-and-a-half-year-old boy who was angry and blamed his wealthy father, as any boy would have. Any abandoned boy. It had been a rash act to steal his mother’s car, a mistake to want to see his father, but he hadn’t meant any harm. She’d believed that, all this time . . . She’d believed Wade.

  He only wanted to talk.

  “Hi, Mom.” Connor’s voice followed Jackie, an afterthought as she brushed past him, sitting at the kitchen table, absorbed in his recently returned phone.

  Jackie stopped. Looked at him. You never even knew about the stolen car. You never knew about the restraining order. You were just eleven years old and I saw no reason to tell you.

  “Mom?” Connor said. “Are you okay?”

  The second time today someone had asked Jackie that. No. No, I’m not, she would have said if she wasn’t a person who avoided the truth, hid from it. Turned her sons into liars and worse. “Is Wade in his room?”

  “Yeah. I think so . . .”

  Jackie couldn’t look at Connor anymore. Poor Connor, whom she was bound to ruin too. She turned and left the kitchen, propelling herself down the hall to her son’s room, pounding on the door so hard her knuckle hurt from it.

  “What?” Wade snapped, and it only made her angrier, the tone of his voice.

  She tried the door. It was locked. “Open this door now.”

  Jackie heard movement, footsteps. Then the door opened, her son peering around it, a sheepish look on his face that made her heart drop. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Is . . . uh . . . is something wrong?”

  “I know what you did.”

  Wade let go of the door. He seemed to shrink before her eyes, the slight tinge of color draining out of his face as he backed up, shaking his head. “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me.” As Jackie reached into her purse and felt for her phone, she half expected not to find it there, for the messy floor of Wade’s room to melt away, Wade along with it, Jackie waking up in a drenching sweat, exposing this entire day for the bad dream it was.

  No such luck. Jackie’s phone was solid and real and when she called up her recent photos, it responded the way it was supposed to. She closed the bedroom door behind her, took a few steps closer to her son, and watched his face, an expression she’d never seen before—a dawning fear. Or was it guilt? “I spoke to Natalie today.”

  Wade opened his mouth; then he closed it again. “Wait. Who?”

  “Stop playing games,” Jackie said, not in her own voice but in the clipped tones of her own mother. “I spoke to Natalie. Your father’s wife. She told me what you did.”

  He stared at her without speaking for several seconds, his face relaxing, color returning to his cheeks. “Why were you talking to her?” Same as Helen had said.

  “I asked Natalie why she and Bill had seen fit to hurt you so much.” Jackie said it firmly, but quietly. She didn’t want Connor to overhear. “She took me to her house and she showed me, Wade.”

  “She showed you?”

  “She’s kept it in a locked drawer all this time. Ever since you broke into their house and taped it to their refrigerator.”

  “Oh . . .”

  Jackie turned the phone around, the picture filling her screen so Wade could see it—the drawing that had made her stop breathing when Natalie had shown it to her. “Bill doesn’t know I’ve kept it, but I have,” Natalie had said. “Just in case something happens and I need evidence.”

  That awful, damning word. Evidence. Yet Jackie couldn’t get angry at her. She couldn’t stand up for her son or get indignant for the way this woman viewed him because she knew that, had she been in Natalie’s position, she’d have wanted evidence too.

  The photo was of a carefully drawn rendering of Bill, Natalie, and their three daughters, the youngest just a baby, all of them posed and smiling. All with X’s for eyes.

  “You drew this,” Jackie said.

  “I copied it,” he said. “There was a picture of them in the Red Hook paper. They were at some stupid event.”

  Jackie’s voice started to rise. “I don’t care whether you drew it or copied it or carved it out of marble. Why did you do this?”

  “I was mad.”

  “Why did you lie to me about it?”

  “Probably because I knew you’d be like this,” he said. “Taking his side. Not standing up for me when I had every right to—”

  “Break into your father’s house and threaten his family?”

  “To be angry. I had every right to be angry. Look, you didn’t even know about that drawing. You thought I just wanted to talk to that asshole and you still treated me like I was crazy.”

  “I did not. I took you seriously and—”

  “Oh, come on. What do you call forcing someone to go to an idiot guidance counselor for therapy sessions every day? What do you call listening in on my phone calls and hiding all the freakin’ razors in the house and—”

  “Wade.”

  “It was two years ago and he deserved it. That whole family deserves it.”

  Jackie stared at him, at the gleam in his eyes, ugly and p
roud. She said, “I am ashamed of you.”

  Wade stared at her, the gleam dissolving. His face started to crumple.

  She gripped the phone. Take it back, a voice inside her said. Take it back. Tell him you aren’t ashamed.

  “I . . . I need to take a walk,” Wade said.

  As he moved past her and out the bedroom door, Jackie turned and watched him, the way he shuffled down the hallway, drowning in those baggy black jeans, that black hoodie. Like a child in his father’s clothes, Jackie thought, her heart sinking, breaking. Until she realized that those clothes were the same ones she’d seen in the dryer.

  From the kitchen, Jackie heard Connor asking, “Where are you going?”

  Wade replied, “Back soon.” Which wasn’t an answer at all.

  STANDING ALONE IN Wade’s dark, messy room, Jackie remembered all the promises she’d made while pregnant with him, how she’d vowed not to be the way her own parents had been, dismissive and judgmental and cold. She remembered what Bill had once said when Wade was a baby, still small enough for the bassinet: “At least once a day for the rest of his life, let’s tell him he’s the greatest.”

  Was she wrong to be disappointed in her child, when she and Bill had let him down so much themselves? That was the Merrick/Reed style of parenting, she supposed. Make a series of promises and then successively break every one of them until your kid has no choice but to rely on himself.

  Jackie sighed. The room was such a disaster. Dirty clothes everywhere, empty potato chip bags, discarded drawings and things like safety cones and street signs that had no business indoors. Six months ago, Jackie had stopped taking care of the boys’ rooms beyond giving them clean sheets, clothes, and linens. And in Wade’s case, it showed.

  Jackie plucked a shirt off the floor—a yellow dress shirt she didn’t remember buying him and couldn’t imagine him wearing. Carefully, she buttoned and folded the shirt. Placing it on his unmade bed, she smoothed the front. She felt something in the pocket—a small box—and slipped it out. It was from Kay Jewelers in the Hudson Valley Mall.

  She struggled with whether or not to open the box, but only briefly. Ask Wade a question, he lies. Confront him with the truth, he runs out of the house. Could have just been an excuse, but that didn’t matter. She lifted the lid.

  Inside the box was a necklace. It looked expensive. This explains the Summer of Odd Jobs. Jackie held it up to the light—a silver chain, a pendant dotted with tiny diamonds, in the shape of the letter T.

  “Oh . . .” Jackie replaced the necklace very carefully and slipped the box back into the shirt pocket, hating herself for looking, for learning something she couldn’t ask about at all.

  She left the room quickly. On her way out, she almost stepped on Wade’s phone, which lay on the floor plugged into its charger, left behind by its brokenhearted owner in his haste.

  AMY SAT IN the back of the cruiser with Officer Maze driving again—curly-haired Officer Maze with the dove-gray eyes, the long eyelashes, and the sharp, no-nonsense jawline. Tough number, Amy had thought when she’d first seen Officer Maze at the station, the type who made up for a slight build and a sweet face by carrying herself like someone not to be messed with. Someone a lot like Amy herself used to be when she was young and on her own in Hollywood and wore brass knuckles as an accessory, vials of fake blood dangling from her ears.

  “You all right?” said Officer Maze, whose first name, Amy recalled now, was surprisingly delicate and old-fashioned. Pearl.

  “I’m as all right as I can be.” Amy said it to the gray eyes in the rearview, which were looking at her strangely . . . Or was she being paranoid? “Why do you ask?”

  Pearl tilted the mirror briefly, so Amy could catch a glimpse of her own puffy, swollen eyes. Yes, she’d cried at the sight of Baby, but she thought she’d wiped away the evidence.

  “It’s just been a traumatic day.” Amy wished she hadn’t seen her face, so tired and crepey in the afternoon light. Old. She needed lipstick, but she hadn’t even thought to bring her makeup bag, distracted as she’d been, as she still was, over Vic. Jacinta had assured her she was on her way, but still Amy hated leaving him alone . . . “A traumatic couple of days.”

  “You know,” Pearl said, “if there’s anything you want to amend on the police report, you can do that with the state detectives.”

  Amy stared into the mirror. “Why would I want to amend anything?”

  “You may have been too tired,” she said, “or too traumatized to tell the complete truth.”

  Amy opened her mouth. Closed it again, her stomach starting to turn.

  “I’m just saying that this happens with a lot of victims of violent crime. The first time they talk about it, they don’t always get the specifics right.”

  Amy’s shoulders relaxed. It’s just a spiel. Same spiel she gives all witnesses probably. It’s not directed at you. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take that under consideration.”

  They drove in silence away from Baby’s resting place—that dank, sulfurous swamp the sergeant had called the Kill. She stared out the window, longing for her phone, her car, the antique compact she kept in her purse, everything she’d taken for granted but never would again. A clean conscience. How she wished she could climb into bed with Vic, pop a few of his pills, and watch old music videos and forget what year it was.

  The streets here in Havenkill had been made festive for the season, with jack-o’-lanterns and paper skeletons arranged on charming front porches, pots of orange and yellow mums in window boxes, everything well kept and freshly painted and full of cheesy, pumpkin-spice charm.

  How she hated this side of the river. If I hadn’t played that gig, she thought. If I had just stayed home . . . “Can you tell me what’s going on with the investigation?” she asked. “Have they gotten any leads on the carjacker?”

  “I’m not sure,” Pearl said. “The detectives would know better.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Ma’am, all I can suggest is that you tell the complete truth.”

  Again? “Of course I’ll tell the truth.”

  “That’s the best advice I can give you,” she said. “Don’t embellish. Tell the detectives what you remember.”

  “I wasn’t planning on embellishing. Why would you think I—”

  “Good. Then everything should be fine, ma’am.”

  “Should be?”

  The car slowed, even though there was no traffic light and they weren’t even close to the station. Through her window, Amy saw a police car parked along a side street, yellow crime-scene tape remnants dripping from two trees like tears. That’s where it happened. The name of the street was Shale. Amy had learned that later, at the police station. But just after Baby had run over that poor boy, she’d seen that street sign in the flash of headlights and misread it as Shame. Shame Street, she had thought. Street of Shame. And then it had started raining.

  Amy watched the group of lookie-loos milling about the crime scene, a few of them using their phones to take pictures, and thought back to the scene at the Kill—all those police officers, probably press too. She’d heard cameras . . . God, why had she cried? Crying over a car. What must that have looked like?

  At the base of one of the trees was a patch of brightness. Amy looked closer and saw that it was bouquets of flowers, probably a dozen of them, piled on top of each other. This is where it happened. This will always be where it happened.

  For a second, Amy thought she saw blood on the macadam and her eyes snapped shut, though she knew rationally it had only been a shadow. Street of Shame. “Can you drive faster, please?”

  The car sped up slightly. When she opened her eyes, Amy saw Pearl watching her through the rearview, peering at her, as though to gauge her response.

  “I didn’t embellish,” Amy said quietly. “I didn’t lie.”

  Nine

  Killer car, read the caption on the picture Jordan Snapchatted to Connor. But it was the picture itself Connor couldn’t stop starin
g at—the car that had killed Liam Miller, yanked out of the Kill by its banged-up rear frame, trailing dead cattails with cops clustered around it, taking pictures and collecting samples from this crazy vintage Jaguar as though it were a dead body.

  Or a murderer. Which, in a way, it was.

  Jordan and this new kid Chris Stapleton from Connor’s math class both claimed that some rich old lady from Woodstock had gotten carjacked by a gang member from Poughkeepsie and, when Liam had tried to save her car, the gang member had run him over without even slowing down.

  Connor took a picture of himself looking shocked. Captioned it, Holy shit! Any gang stuff on the car? Snapchatted it to Jordan, who was there, “at the scene of the crime,” as he’d called the Kill, looking for “evidence.” Jordan had said he knew “for a fact” that the killer was a drug kingpin from the Crips. But then Connor’s friend Malcolm from Little League—whom he’d been texting with at the same time—said that Jordan was full of bull. Malcolm’s mom had told him there were no Crips anymore, that the Crips were from the 1990s, and even back then the Crips were from L.A., not Poughkeepsie.

  But what did Malcolm and his mom know? They weren’t with the police.

  Another snap came in from Jordan: a woman in a heavy overcoat standing next to a female cop, their backs to the lens. Jordan had taken it from a weird angle too, off to the side, partly behind a tree . . . The car wasn’t in the frame. Connor looked at the photo for a while, trying to figure out what it meant. He cringed. The cop was the same one he’d seen on his way to Lukoil. The one Noah had acted like a dick in front of at assembly. Had to be. He recognized her hair, which was long and curly and pulled back in a ponytail.

  He took a snap of himself frowning, then typed in: Why did you send me that pic? He sent it and waited.

  Connor heard the front door opening, his mom’s light footsteps. But he was too absorbed in his phone to turn around. He needed a response from Jordan—something he’d missed in the cop picture, a piece of evidence, something gang-related.