If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  As Dr. Klein started to speak, Jackie focused on her soothing voice, the soft curls of her blond hair, and her dress, which was really the most comforting color—the same blue as the blanket of a newborn baby boy. “None of this is normal,” Dr. Klein was saying now. “None of this should be happening. That’s the first thing you should know. If you feel that you can’t just go on with life and act like everything is okay, you’re right in feeling that. It’s not.”

  Stacy, who was sitting toward the back of the students’ section, whipped around in her seat and stared daggers at Helen, who gave a long sigh. Jackie tried a smile. “My kid won’t even look at me,” she said. “So you’ve got that.”

  Helen shook her head. “He’s a good person,” she said quietly.

  Jackie looked at her, a little surprised. “Wade?”

  “He’s always been sweet. Special.”

  Jackie felt herself smiling. Helen, always with the right thing to say. “You think so?”

  “He’s an artist. Artists feel things in ways the rest of us don’t understand.”

  Jackie nodded, an image flickering in her mind: the portrait Wade had drawn of Bill’s family . . . She pushed it away.

  Helen’s calm green eyes rested on Wade. She put a cool hand on Jackie’s arm, smiled her wise, dreamy smile. “We kick ourselves, Jackie, but we’re only human,” she said quietly. “And we’re doing the best we can.”

  AT THE END of her speech, Dr. Klein asked the kids to describe how they felt about Liam’s death in one word. Jackie expected silence, but dozens of hands went up.

  “Shaken,” said one kid.

  “Unfair,” said another.

  Dr. Klein called on Stacy. “Ripped in two,” she said.

  “Can you find the one word, sweetheart?”

  “Crushed.”

  “Good.”

  Stacy gave her mother another withering look and then turned back around. It was starting to make Jackie angry, this seeming determination to blame Helen for everything. So she wants you to stay in school for the day. She’s your mother. Get over it. As uncommunicative and distant as her boys could be, Jackie couldn’t recall either one of them looking at her like that.

  “Jackie,” Helen whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you still have your tattoo?”

  It took Jackie a while to realize what she was talking about—the topic hadn’t come up in all the years since she’d moved back here, after all. But then she remembered. Of course she did. Senior year in high school. The Friday before prom. Jackie, Helen, and their friend Rachel had played hooky from school and driven all the way to New York City in Rachel’s car. They’d found a tattoo place on Bleecker Street and they’d all three gotten tramp stamps in honor of the Furies, which they’d been reading about in English class. “No, I got it removed,” whispered Jackie, who until ten years ago had actually liked her tattoo, an ornate M adorned with thorny red roses to honor Megaera. “After your husband leaves you for another woman, a tattoo in honor of ‘the Jealous’ doesn’t feel so great.”

  Helen winced. “Sorry.”

  “I’m over it.”

  “I still have mine,” Helen said. “I miss those days.”

  Jackie nodded. She missed those days too. Who didn’t miss the end of senior year of high school when the future felt like a perfect fresh egg, just about to crack open, and you hadn’t done anything wrong that couldn’t be fixed? Jackie longed for the energy she used to have back then, when no one relied on her for anything, when she had no real fears or worries, when her heart had never been broken, and everyone she ever loved was still alive. “These poor kids,” Jackie said. “They’ll never have days like that. Whenever they think of their senior year, they’ll think of Liam and they’ll feel . . .”

  “Crushed.”

  “Yes,” she said, both of them looking at Stacy, head bowed, two friends’ arms around her narrow shoulders. “Crushed.”

  ONCE THE ASSEMBLY was over, everyone stood up. Jackie noticed several kids making their way to the parents’ section. Nearby, she saw another girl she recognized from Helen’s Facebook feed: tall, with shiny black hair and brown eyes. When she got closer, Jackie saw her embrace Rita, the mother of Connor’s friend Jordan, Rita taking her in her arms and holding her close . . . Must be Jordan’s older sister, Tamara.

  “Poor thing,” Helen said, watching her too. “Stacy told me they were thinking about getting engaged.”

  “What?”

  “Tamara and Liam.”

  Tamara. Liam Miller’s girlfriend. She watched Rita. Poor Rita, with her daughter going through a tragedy like that. She felt silly and selfish, obsessing over Wade’s possible secret heartbreak a few days ago when this poor woman had to console a daughter whose first love was now dead.

  Jackie moved away from Helen and into the crowd of students, determined now to find her son, her sensitive artist son, who felt things in ways she’d never understand. That was fine, she knew now. She only wanted to talk to him, to let him know she was here.

  She found the row he’d been sitting in, but he was no longer there. Jackie scanned the group for his dyed black hair, his sad face . . . Finally, she caught sight of him standing near the opened door of the auditorium, the light from outside pouring in around him like foam from a wave. She called out to him, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  Jackie felt a hand on her shoulder just as she noticed the young male police officer talking to Wade, and when she turned around, she saw Mr. Penny, the guidance counselor. “Mrs. Reed?” he said. “You called me over the weekend?”

  Jackie’s eyes were trained on Wade and the policeman. “It’s not important, Mr. Penny,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called.” What was he saying to Wade? Why was Wade backing away?

  “Mrs. Reed,” Penny said, “would you mind coming to my office now?”

  “I told you it isn’t important.” She hadn’t meant to sound so harsh. “I mean,” she said, “it can wait.”

  “No, Mrs. Reed, it can’t,” he said. “It concerns your son.” She stopped and looked into those ice-blue eyes. Her heart dropped. “Follow me please,” he said.

  And so she did. She followed his weaving path through the teary students as Helen called after her. “Jackie? Honey? You want me to wait?”

  She shook her head, following him out of the auditorium and down an echoing hallway, all the way to the end until they reached the office with his name on the door. When Mr. Penny opened the door, she saw the three of them standing in front of the receptionist’s desk: those two officers from the assembly. And then her oldest son slumped between them, his head bowed like a prisoner’s.

  Fifteen

  Wade wouldn’t look at Jackie. She was sitting right next to him in the guidance counselor’s office, with those two cops from assembly and two state police detectives. She kept saying his name and yet he wouldn’t look at her. Wouldn’t speak. “Wade,” she said again. “Please . . .”

  “Wade,” Mr. Penny said. “Are you all right?”

  Jackie wanted to slap Mr. Penny, with that suspicious tone of his, the way he tilted his head to the side the better to examine the state of Wade’s pupils. She half expected him to ask her son how many fingers he was holding up. He’s not on drugs, you judgmental ass. “Of course he’s all right,” Jackie said. “Why wouldn’t he be all right?”

  “Nobody’s in any trouble here, ma’am,” said the male state police detective. So condescending, that “ma’am.” “We’d just like to ask your son a few questions. We can all go by the station, if you feel like you guys might be more comfortable there.”

  Right, because a police station is the most comfortable place there is. It made Jackie think of something her grandmother once told her: “Never believe anything said through a mustache.”

  “Wade has school today.” She threw another pleading look at her silent son, feeling as though she’d stepped into one of those dreams where you can’t move and you can’t speak and nothing goes the way
it’s supposed to go. “He needs to get to class.”

  “It’s perfectly all right for him to miss class,” Mr. Penny said, “considering the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  The female detective was saying Wade’s name now, asking him to please respond, again and again. Jackie leveled her eyes at both the uniformed officers, neither one of them much older than her son—the boy officer in particular, with his acne scars and the way he’d practically cried onstage. A child. “What circumstances?” she asked him directly.

  He turned away. What a strange response.

  “Mrs. Reed,” said the female detective. “A witness claims to have seen your son with the carjacking victim the night Liam Miller was killed.”

  Jackie blinked at her. “What?”

  “That’s a lie,” Wade said, coming to life. He looked at Jackie. “I wasn’t with anybody.”

  “According to the witness,” the detective said, “a young man with your name and fitting your description was at Club Halifax where Aimee En had been performing . . .”

  “Aimee En?” Jackie said. “The singer from the 1980s?”

  “. . . between six and eight PM. You want to tell us where you were during those hours if you weren’t at Club Halifax?”

  “He was at his SAT class. It goes on till seven PM,” Jackie said. She looked at Wade, and again he wouldn’t return her gaze. “Weren’t you? Wade?”

  He stared at the desk. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said softly.

  Jackie’s face heated up. She felt dizzy. “Aimee En?” she said again. “Aimee En was the carjacking victim?” As though that were the point of the story—the celebrity tie-in to Liam Miller’s death—and not the fact that her own son had been at a club when he was supposed to have been at his eighth and final SAT class, classes she’d been paying for, which was again beside the point. She stared at Wade, who was looking at her now. She had no idea what was behind those sad eyes, or if he was even sad at all, or whether the sadness was just something she read into them. I don’t know my son.

  “I was there,” he said. “I was at Club Halifax.”

  “All right,” Mustache said. He glanced at his partner and Jackie caught it, the two of them oh-so-cat-that-ate-the-canary. Probably wishing they could high-five. “You want to tell us where you went after?”

  “I went home.”

  “Why were you there?” Jackie said, her voice rising.

  “Ma’am,” Mustache said. “If you don’t mind—”

  “Why were you at a club watching some one-hit wonder from thirty years before your time when you were supposed to be preparing for tests?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Wade,” said the female detective. “Were you still at the club when Aimee En left?”

  “No.”

  Jackie said, “Of course you know why you were there!”

  “Ma’am, please.”

  She continued. She couldn’t help it. “Were you with friends, Wade? Did you meet anybody at this club?” She watched the side of his face, thinking of “T.” “Did you meet a girl there?”

  “No.”

  “Then why on earth were you—”

  “I just wanted to . . . to go somewhere.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to be where no one knows me.” He turned and looked directly at her. “Okay?”

  “Let’s leave that aside for now,” the female detective said. “If you could just look at this, please, Wade. We’d like to know if you can remember posting this comment on Tamara Hayes’s Instagram.”

  Jordan Hayes’s sister, Tamara. That black shiny hair. Those widow’s eyes and dewy lashes, Stacy’s arm around her narrow shoulders in assembly, comforting her. They’d been planning on getting engaged, Liam and Tamara. Beautiful, sad Tamara. Tamara, whose name starts with a T . . .

  The female detective placed a printout in front of Wade: two short Instagram comments, blown up big. “This was at the end of a comment thread, on a post for people who wanted to pay their respects to Liam Miller’s parents. If you could just look at this final comment here, and let us know if you did, in fact, post it.”

  Jackie read over Wade’s shoulder. Her mouth went dry. Wade started to answer and she squeezed his arm. “Don’t answer,” she said.

  Mr. Penny started to say something, but she cut him off. “Is my son under arrest?” She glared at Mustache.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then we’re leaving.” She turned to Penny. “We’re going home.”

  “But—”

  “You said it didn’t matter if he missed school so we’re going home,” she said. Her grip tightened on Wade’s arm, practically lifting him off the chair. On their way out, she turned to the two detectives. “He won’t speak to you again without a lawyer,” she said.

  “MOM,” WADE SAID as Jackie led him down the hallway, past fluorescent-lit classrooms full of students and droning teachers and turning heads. Yes, people were turning to look at them. She could feel it. “Mom. You’re hurting me.”

  She realized now that she was still holding his arm very tightly, as though he might run away if she didn’t. Her grip tightened.

  “Mom.”

  They were in front of the school now, moving around the side to the parking lot. Once they reached it, Jackie stopped. He was a few inches taller than she was, but when she looked into his eyes he seemed to shrink.

  “I need to talk to you, Wade.”

  He said nothing.

  “I am going to ask you some questions, and I need you to tell me the truth, no matter what. If you can’t answer me honestly, then tell me exactly that. Say, ‘Mom, I can’t answer that question,’ and I will accept that. The one thing I can’t take from you now is one more lie.”

  “I haven’t lied to you.”

  “Wade.”

  “Okay,” he said softly. “I promise. No more lies.”

  Jackie kept her eyes on him. She was aware of a few groups of parents, moving through the parking lot, getting into cars, their heads bowed. She heard doors slamming, engines sparking to life. She noticed kids too, loitering at the edges of the lot, someone sneaking a smoke, others talking to one another in voices so thin and distant, they almost sounded like birdcalls. She felt watched, even though they probably weren’t paying any attention to her. She wished she could be alone with her son, but she couldn’t wait for that. She needed answers, now. “Did you steal Aimee En’s car?”

  “No.”

  “Did you run over Liam Miller?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Were you home when it happened?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you?”

  Wade took a long shaky breath. His eyes darted around the parking lot. “My car,” he said.

  Her heart sunk. Raindrops on the windshield. Three AM. “You were in your car?”

  “No, Mom. My car. Look at my car.”

  He started to move, but she kept hold of his arm. “Where were you that night?”

  Wade yanked away from her and started to run across the lot with Jackie following. “Answer me, Wade.”

  “I can’t answer that question,” he said. “I can’t answer any more questions. I shouldn’t have to. You shouldn’t be asking.” He kept running, then came to a halt, Jackie standing next to him, next to the car she’d given him three months ago, her old car she’d presented to her son four months after his seventeenth birthday, topped with a red, oversize ribbon she’d actually found online. “You are the best, Mom,” he had said, and it had made her so happy. I raised him right, she’d thought. He isn’t spoiled. He loves this car as much as I do.

  All four tires had been slashed. On the windshield, in red lipstick letters, someone had scrawled the name LIAM.

  “Oh Wade,” she said, wrapping her arm around his shoulder.

  “Don’t,” he said, his back stiffening, pulling away like a stranger. “Don’t.”

  Sixteen

  Your nose isn’t broken,” C
onnor said to Noah when he came running up to him before first period, same way he’d always done before this weekend, as though nothing had happened. And if you didn’t know better—if you just looked at Noah’s goofy smile and ignored the bruise on his cheek, the shadow of dried blood on his lip, and the Band-Aid stretched over the bridge of his nose, which was still swollen a little—you’d think nothing really had happened, that the whole fight had just been a bad dream Connor was waking up from.

  “Yeah,” Noah said. “My mom totally overreacted.”

  He said it without a hint of sarcasm, which made Connor feel bad—not just for beating him up, but for every mean thought he’d ever had about Noah over the past several months, for all the pulling away he’d been doing, as though Noah’s good-heartedness was something to pull away from.

  “So you want to work on our science project during lunch?” Noah said. “I talked to Mrs. Briggs and she said she’d let us use the lab.”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s wrong?” Noah peered at Connor’s face, as though it had all his thoughts printed on it in letters too small for him to read. “Mrs. Briggs says it’s okay that we broke the beaker, if that’s what you’re worried about . . .”

  “Hey, Noah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know how you said those things about my brother?”

  He cringed. “I’m sorry, dude. Mason Marx is an idiot. I don’t know why I—”

  “No,” Connor said. “No. Listen . . . I got upset because I was scared, deep down. Like . . . maybe I don’t know him as well as I think.”

  Noah stared at him. The bell rang announcing the start of class, but both of them just stood in the hallway, frozen, with the other kids flooding past them, Carly Daniels from their homeroom telling them they’d better hurry up, class was about to start.

  Finally, Noah spoke. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Connor pulled him aside, out of the foot traffic, a feeling like a wave pressing up against his throat, his skin, the backs of his eyeballs, the need to let something out—either tears or the truth; probably both. He heard himself talking to Noah in hushed tones that weren’t his own, words he never thought he’d say. And it was like jumping off a high diving board for the first time, that strange exhilaration of wanting to turn back, but knowing you can’t: “If Wade killed Liam and I knew about it, would you still be my friend?”