If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Pearl said. “What gets us in trouble is when we try and pretend we are.”

  Amy glanced around the room and leaned in very close, her voice low and urgent. “I did a lot of horrible things that night.”

  “I don’t judge.”

  “No. You don’t understand.”

  “You want to explain?”

  “Going home with that couple,” she said. “I can’t explain why I did that . . . I love Vic. I’ve never cheated on him before. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was like I turned into a different person.”

  “We’ve all done things we regret.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you something.”

  The look in her eyes, like the truth is in there, trying to burst out.

  Amy took a breath. “After I left that couple’s house, I felt so awful, I needed to numb that feeling. I needed to forget what I’d just done.”

  “You went for a drink,” Pearl said, choosing each word carefully. “You liked the way it made you feel, the alcohol. This whiskey. You liked the way it made you forget. So you wound up drinking too much.”

  “No.” She sighed. “I had a drink or two at their house. Early on. To loosen up. But I didn’t get drunk, if that’s what you’re implying. I’m not really a drinker.” Amy picked at a fingernail. “I was fine to drive.”

  “You can tell me the truth.”

  “I am telling you the truth,” Amy said, her voice rising, getting away from her in a way that felt almost theatrical, that burn in her eyes intensifying. It was powerful, but it was also familiar, and now Pearl realized where she’d seen it before: the “Kill Me with Your Love” video. At the station, waiting for the sergeant and Amy, she’d gone onto YouTube, just as Kendall Wind had suggested.

  “Okay,” Pearl said, her skepticism returning. “So if you didn’t get drunk, how did you numb the feeling?”

  She closed her eyes and breathed in deep through her nose like someone meditating. When she spoke again, her voice was calm and quiet. “I was driving. I was crying so hard I could barely see.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “That boy. The one in the hoodie. He shows up out of nowhere.”

  “At three in the morning? On a residential street?”

  “I didn’t know what street I was on. I didn’t know what time it was. All I know was what he said to me.”

  “Which was what?”

  “He told me he had pills. Oxy. Benzos.”

  “He said that? How did you hear him?”

  “He showed them to me first,” she said. “They were in a big Baggie. All these pills, like he was a pharmacy.”

  Pearl’s eyes widened. She leaned in closer, her mind running. “He showed you pills. So you opened the window.”

  “I already had the window opened a crack. I’m claustrophobic. But I had to open it wider. For the . . . the transaction.” Amy played with a ring on her index finger—a big red stone, cut in the shape of a heart. “I’m not into drugs. I’m sober, actually. But sometimes, if I’m having a really bad day, I’ll take a few of Vic’s pills. Not enough for him to notice. But I wanted something more that night. I wanted . . . I wanted to just go off somewhere and take a whole bunch of them until I blacked out everything I’d done. And I had all this cash. They had paid me in cash.”

  “You opened your purse to pay him.”

  She nodded slowly. “That’s when he grabbed it,” she said. “He just reached through the open window. And then I decided to fight for it . . . for the money I made.”

  “Was it that important?”

  “To me it was.”

  “Why?”

  “Because without that money,” she said, “I wouldn’t even have an excuse for what I did.”

  Pearl handed her a Kleenex. A pointless gesture, considering the box was right between them and Amy could reach it just fine. But the look in Amy’s eyes . . . It made her feel as though she had to do something.

  There had been a break-in at Havenkill’s CVS in early August—the only major crime of the summer. Never found out who did it; no IAFIS match for the fingerprints, so it wasn’t a known criminal. But pills had been stolen. OxyContin. Xanax. Could it be?

  “I tried to get my purse back.” Amy dabbed at an eye. “That’s how he got my car.”

  Pearl could hear footsteps coming up the hall, along with voices—Wind’s voice, then Sergeant Black’s. Amy started to shred the tissue, and Pearl watched her hands—the veined twisting fingers. She wanted to believe Amy. But how could she believe such a habitual liar—an actress, who was now giving Pearl the same anguished look that she’d given her leading man in the “Cut Me So Deep” video? “That’s a pretty ring,” Pearl said.

  “Vic got it for me,” Amy said. “He gave me two of them, actually—this one’s a garnet. The other was a yellow citrine and it was my favorite, but I lost it that night too.”

  The detectives and sergeant came into the conference room. Pearl stood up and stepped out of the way as Wind and Wacksman took their seats at the table, but Amy’s eyes were still on her. “I lost everything that night,” Amy said—something anyone would believe. And then she turned her attention to the two detectives. She told them everything she’d told Pearl. Word for word, as though she were reading from a script.

  “ARE YOU KIDDING me, Jackie?” said the voice on the other end of her phone. Bill’s voice, she realized, but not right away. She hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband in so long that it took a little while to add things up in her mind. “Are you kidding me? Going to Natalie’s store?”

  Jackie thought of Connor, around the house somewhere, listening. She kept her voice calm. “I had questions for her and she answered them. I don’t know how she portrayed it to you—”

  “She didn’t portray anything. She was shaken up. She brought up two years ago. She asked why I’d never told you the reason for the restraining order. It didn’t take much figuring out on my part.”

  “Oh.”

  “What were you thinking, Jackie?”

  Jackie exhaled. “I don’t know.” She could hear the front door opening behind her. “I just don’t know.”

  Get him off the phone, Jackie thought. Say what he wants to hear and get rid of him. And then Connor came bursting in, throwing open the hall closet door, grabbing his phone off the kitchen table, a whir of energy and determination. She held up a hand but Connor didn’t see her, immersed as he was in his own thoughts.

  Jackie had never realized it before, how protective the self-absorption of children could be. Not the slightest clue that his father is on the other end of this line.

  “I shouldn’t need to tell you,” Bill was saying, “but please don’t do this again.”

  Jackie gritted her teeth. The self-absorption of certain adults, on the other hand, serves no purpose whatsoever. Connor rushed back out the door, muttering something about picking something up, being back soon . . .

  “I don’t know why you would do something so blatantly hostile, Jackie,” Bill said. “To be honest, I’m shocked.”

  She said, “Your son is deeply unhappy.”

  “What?”

  “I know you don’t think of him that way. But that’s what he is. Your son. And he’s grown up knowing that his own father wants nothing to do with him.”

  “Jackie, I don’t need to tell you—”

  “No. You really don’t. You send child support in the amount agreed on. You fulfill your end of the deal. Always have, always will. You don’t have custody of Wade and Connor, and so their upbringing is not your responsibility. That is what you were going to tell me, right?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, then. Point well taken,” she said. “Welcome to the results.”

  “Look,” Bill said, his voice softer now, “I tried to have a relationship with Wade. I bought Yankees tickets and took him there and he didn’t say a word, the entire time. At the end of the day, he said, ‘I hate you.’ He said he never wanted to see me aga
in.”

  Jackie’s jaw tightened. Her cheeks felt hot. “You’re telling me you honored his wishes?”

  “He didn’t want me around.”

  “He was seven years old, Bill,” she said. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I . . . Okay, listen. Do you need more money? I’m fine with that. Just let me know how much.”

  Jackie gripped the phone so hard, the edges dug into her hand. She wanted to throw the phone across the room, to break the glass into a thousand pieces and cut him with it. “Wade is a Mets fan,” she said. “He hates the Yankees. He has always hated the Yankees.”

  She ended the call while Bill was still stammering about money, thinking not of her ex-husband at all but of her older son, of that necklace in Wade’s shirt pocket—a gift given back, “T” doubling down on a text telling him to leave her alone. She thought of Wade’s clothes in the dryer and the dark, secret side of him she’d never known or understood because, even under the best of circumstances, boys don’t show their mothers that side.

  Mothers have to go looking for it.

  Jackie got up. She headed out of the kitchen and down the hall toward Wade’s room. Once she got there, she picked his phone up off the floor and keyed in his pin, which, as she recalled from when she first gave him the phone, was simply his first name. It still worked, and that gave her a weird sense of relief. He didn’t change it. Jackie went right to the texts.

  There were very few of them, and most were to and from herself. She saw a few more from Connor, unanswered, asking him to pick him up from school. Also, an exchange with Rafe from back in April—a back-and-forth about an English assignment. But nothing else. Nothing from any other friends. Nothing at all from “T.” Leave me alone gone, as though the text had never existed to begin with. Did he delete more texts than that one?

  She went to his photos, holding her breath as she did it. Hating herself. She was that mom now, but she had to be, didn’t she?

  Jackie exhaled. The photos were mostly landscapes: fall foliage on sloping hills and glowing, oversaturated sunsets that showed Wade’s artist’s eye, interspersed with still lifes that were more than a little self-indulgent. The most recent ones had been taken inside his room: a carefully blurred shot of an orange safety cone, the birch tree outside his window, and half of Wade’s face, the mouth downturned, the eye sad and searching. She scrolled down, past older pictures: a close-up of a gum wrapper, a dead bird on a lawn, the hallway outside their bedrooms, a colorful shot of cereal in a bowl, drops of milk glistening on Froot Loops.

  Why do I let them talk me into buying that sugary cereal? It’s so bad for them.

  Jackie felt a vague sense of relief. There was loneliness to these pictures, yes. But it was teenage loneliness, familiar and finite—something Wade could look back on and possibly even mock in a few years, when he’d found his way in life and high school was a part of his past.

  But one picture made her stop. Amid all the landscapes and sweetly pretentious still lifes was a selfie, taken in front of a mirror. In it, Wade was wearing jeans and no shirt. Jackie hadn’t seen him shirtless in years, probably since the last time they went to the public pool, and strangely, he seemed to have shrunk since then. His chest was sunken and pale, his body so thin, he could have been a child.

  That’s what first caught her eye: Wade’s thinness. What surprised her even more, though, was the maturity of the pose. His free hand was hooked into the loop of his jeans—a cheesy stance, tailor-made for Playgirl magazine or maybe a bad Tinder profile pic. And the way he was looking at the camera . . .

  Whom did he take this picture for? Where was it taken?

  It was a room she’d never seen before. Jackie tapped the picture so that it grew bigger, filling the screen, then stretched the image with her fingers so she could pick out details behind him: a pale pink wall, a framed black-and-white photograph of the Eiffel Tower. She brought her fingers together again and stared at her son’s face—that unsettling smile.

  According to the date at the top of the screen, the selfie had been taken at 2:00 PM on Tuesday, May 15. A school day.

  She closed the picture quickly, scrolled up through the other photos, wishing she hadn’t ever touched this phone. No mother should ever see her son looking at a camera like that. What did you expect? He’s a teenage boy. These are his private pictures. Better close them fast before you see something a whole lot worse.

  Her gaze returned to the more recent shots, the leaves and sunsets—a quick, necessary palate cleanser for the mind, though she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Whose bathroom was that? What was he doing there when he was supposed to be at school?

  Another photo interrupted Jackie’s thoughts—a recent one she couldn’t quite make out. It was very dark, speckled with small, glistening shapes. She tapped it, but it made even less sense larger, until she held it out a few inches from her face and tilted her head and the speckles became coherent. Drops of water on glass. The picture had been taken from the inside of a car at night. Jackie was looking at raindrops on the windshield, the dim blur of a streetlight behind them. Heavy rain.

  “Oh . . .”

  Jackie checked the time when the picture was taken and stopped breathing. Her hands began to shake so much that she dropped the phone and had to pick it up quickly, to make sure she hadn’t cracked the glass.

  Heavy rain on a windshield. Light shining through. And the time and date listed up top was this past Saturday, at 3:15 AM—the same time that Liam Miller had been hit.

  Twelve

  The bartender at Club Halifax was wearing flannel Snoopy pajama pants and a skintight tank top with a cannabis-leaf pattern. Yet still she was overdressed for this dismal place, which smelled of mold and decades-old cigarette smoke—an asthma attack waiting to happen. Pearl had driven here right after her shift ended and Amy had called a cab to take her back to Woodstock, walked in, and ordered a Johnnie Walker on the rocks without even thinking first, as though compelled by some unseen force. She told herself it was the need to retrace Amy’s steps, to figure out what she was lying about and what she wasn’t. Bolstered by the detectives’ reaction to her pill story, Amy had provided a much more detailed description of her alleged assailant—a teenage boy with a “loping walk,” whatever that was supposed to mean. A boy who, Amy now theorized, could have been stalking her and her car for hours. (“He seemed to know me,” she had said, that tragic music-video look in her eyes. “He seemed to know who I was.”)

  But above that, it was the need to escape. Truth told, Pearl wasn’t ready to go back to her lonely apartment with nothing but beer and stale bread in the fridge, the hookup app beckoning and her father’s call still waiting on her voice mail, like some burning thing left unattended.

  Pearl took a long pull of her drink, the warmth radiating up into her cheeks and bringing an extra feeling of comfort to her off-duty clothes: the soft ripped jeans, the thick socks she wore under her boots, the fisherman’s knit sweater that still smelled faintly of Paul’s Axe spray. She’d order another after she was done with this one, just enough to get her a little slurry, take the knots out of her neck. Then she’d brave the quiet of the road. She could easily drive home after two Johnnies. Pearl was well aware of her limits.

  “You’ve been working here long?” Pearl asked the bartender, whose name, Joy, didn’t fit her facial expression.

  “About a year,” Joy said.

  “You like it?”

  She shrugged, which actually seemed like the only polite response to a question like that. Club Halifax was a true pit, made all the more obvious with so few people in here and the lights on too bright—the chipped paint on the walls, the yellowed vinyl floors, riddled with sticky beer stains no one had ever bothered cleaning up. (Man. Pearl hoped it was beer.)

  The stage was at the far end of the room and it was tiny. Pearl pictured Amy up there, belting one of her old hits into a cheap, fuzzy mic, feedback all around her. A few tables had been set up in the space bet
ween the bar and the stage, and Pearl found herself wondering which one they’d sat at, the couple. If there had really been a couple . . .

  Pearl cleared her throat. “Hey, by any chance, were you working the night of the Aimee En show?”

  “The who?”

  “Aimee En. She has rainbow hair?”

  “Oh right. She opened for Ghost In You. Sings like she’s got the hiccups.”

  Pearl took another swallow of whiskey. “That’s the one.”

  “I was working that night,” she said. “Why?”

  Pearl finished the rest of the glass. “Did she have a big crowd?”

  Joy shrugged again and glanced meaningfully at the only other customers—two guys in matching green and blue sweatshirts at the other end of the bar, drinking beers in complete silence. “Bigger than this one.”

  “Did you see her talking to anybody? After her show?”

  “Yeah. There was a couple who got here early. They said they were fans of hers. I remember the dude because he was a really good tipper.”

  “A couple.” Point goes to Amy.

  “The dude bought her a few drinks. They all left at the same time.”

  “A few, huh?”

  Joy shrugged. “I wasn’t counting.”

  Pearl pushed her glass forward. Without another word, Joy refilled it—a good heavy pour. She took a swallow that was big enough to burn. “Did you happen to notice any teenage boys at the Aimee En show?”

  “Teenage boys?” Joy put a hand on her hip, gave Pearl a look like an eye roll waiting to happen. “That’s an interesting question, especially considering we don’t serve anyone under twenty-one.”

  “I’m looking for one boy in particular.” Pearl took another swallow and then recited Amy’s description word for word. “Dark hair that hangs in his face. Pale skin and kind of a wide mouth. He’s about six feet tall. Loping walk. And that night, he would have been wearing a black hoodie.”