Blame

by Jeff Abbott

  Jane stood up and headed back toward the car. Now a patrol car, its lights flashing, pulled up next to the driver, who was waving it down and pointing at the two of them.

  Slowly Perri got to her feet.

  “Ladies,” the police officer who was getting out of the patrol car said, taking in Perri’s perfect suit and Jane’s rumpled clothes, “what’s going on here?” The officer was young, female, hair pulled back in a severe bun.

  “That crazy woman,” the driver said, pointing at Perri, “attacked my fare. She dragged her from my car.”

  “A misunderstanding,” Jane said. “She doesn’t want me visiting her son’s grave. So I won’t. And if you’re not arresting me, then I’m leaving.” Jane got into the car, the driver followed, and the car zoomed off. The officer didn’t stop them.

  Perri watched them go. She shivered. The fury was gone and now there was just the emptiness, a hole in her heart.

  “Ma’am,” the officer said, “are you all right? Do you need me to call someone?”

  Perri straightened her suit, inspected her fingernails, and brushed her hair back into place. “I’m all right,” she lied. She forced a calm expression onto her face. “Thank you for your prompt response.” As if she’d been the one to call the police.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know what the history is between you and that girl, but you cannot be dragging people from cars.”

  “They told me my son lived for another two minutes once they got him out of the car,” she said. “They tried to save him and they couldn’t. I wonder, could they have tried harder? Do you ever think that, officer? That you could try harder?”

  “I try hard every day, ma’am.”

  “I’m sure you think you do,” Perri said. “I mean no disrespect. But if that was your child lying in the wreckage, how hard would you try? Do you ever think that?” Her voice wavered. “I mean, you can try…to make sure your son doesn’t go around with a girl like her, who decides to end her life and instead ends your child’s…” Her voice faded. “I will always blame her. Always.”

  “Ma’am, I am very sorry for your loss.”

  “It’s not like it’s your fault. It’s her fault!” She pointed in the direction of the departed car. “She’s horrible. My son—”

  But there was nothing the officer could say, no way to make it right.

  ALL WILL PAY. If only that were true. If only she could make it true. But she couldn’t.

  Perri turned and walked with dignity back toward her Lexus. She got into her car, her hands shaking. What if Jane told people about Perri attacking her? She had made such a show of not ever saying anything bad about Jane to people. She had felt so superior in her graciousness. People thought Perri was a saint for this kindness. That driver has a video of me dragging her from the car. I hit her. Not that hard. But still.

  It wouldn’t matter. In Lakehaven, Jane Norton was a pariah. A cast-out killer. And Perri was always That Dead Boy’s Mother. That was why Perri hated Jane Norton—she had stolen not just David but her normalcy. Perri had defined herself as a mother from the moment she knew David was growing inside her, and Jane had stolen who she was.

  She had done more than kill David. She had murdered the person Perri used to be.

  4

  Jane’s Book of Memory, written in the

  days and weeks following the crash

  An explanation for whoever reads this: my memory has been returning slowly since the crash, except for the past three years, so I’m a seventeen-year-old who feels like a fourteen-year-old, and Dr K said I should write down what I remember, that this would help me. Because my amnesia, she says, might have two causes: the physical damage and the emotional shock. MIGHT HAVE. We don’t know definitely. If there is emotional shock that is blocking my memory [here several words are scratched out], then writing might help me remember. Work through my issues. Kamala makes an air quote when I say “issues.” So grateful she is standing by me.

  Also sometimes when amnesiacs can’t remember, they make up stories to fill in the blanks, this is called “confabulation” and so I record what I remember to be true so I don’t fill in the blanks wrong. I could lie to myself and never know. Dr K doesn’t want me confabulating.

  So: I remember most of the big details of my life up until I was fourteen. My family, my friends, school. But high school years are a blank; I don’t remember my dad dying when I was a freshman. I don’t remember how I felt after he died. Apparently I had some “issues.” Dr K thinks losing Dad and the crash are sort of bookends of my lost years. Sometimes from that lost period…there will be a fleeting image, a blip of memory, I don’t always know what it means or what I’m remembering.

  So I am supposed to write down important moments in my life that I do remember, and if I have memories that return, write those down as well.

  Dr K told me to write down this journal instead of talking into a digital recorder on my phone since I like to write (although I think Mom probably bragged about being a writer, too, because she always says it’s genetic, that I’m not at all like my dad). So. Here are some things that I remember.

  1. Must always remember the look on my mother’s face when she realized, after I woke up, that I didn’t know who she was. You don’t want to see a look like that again. Regaining all memories of her (up until I was about fourteen) took a few weeks. My first returned memory of her was her reading to me, me sitting on her lap, her mouth close to my cheek as she held me and read. I have some other memories, of her writing her “mommy blog” about what it was like to have me as a kid, but those are mostly of embarrassment. I might write about them later. But I looked at my own mother like she was a stranger. I’m sorry, Mom. No one knows how to act as an amnesiac at first. It’s so awkward. I pretended I remembered her in a few days after I woke from the coma. It was our first little lie of our new lives. No doubt she blogged about it.

  2. Mom says that Mrs. Hall—Perri, I had just gotten old enough where she invited me to call her Perri—came and sat with me while I was in coma, the day after the crash. She said to Mom, “Our babies. Our babies.” And they cried and they held each other. And then the note was found in the crash debris, and they didn’t talk much again. Of course the first time I saw Mrs. Hall, I had no idea at first who she was. You cannot imagine. I can’t even write about it yet.

  3. I learned to ride a bike when I was six. Dad was gone a lot and Mom didn’t like bikes (you can find her articles on her mommy blog complaining about bike safety—until she got a bicycle sponsor), so Mrs. Hall and David taught me. Mrs. Hall gave me lemonade when we were done. It was hot, summertime, and I was afraid the pavement would burn if I fell on it, so I decided I would not fall.

  4. My favorite teacher in middle school was Mrs. Martinez, for English, and she came and visited me in the hospital, during the coma and after. I did not remember her—the world and everyone in it was a stranger—and she tried not to cry but she did. When I remembered her, weeks later, I knew she encouraged me to be a writer. I filled notebooks full of bad stories when I was a kid, but I loved writing them. I’m not sure I could ever be a writer now.

  You have to understand people. A lot of that died in me.

  5. Trevor says he kissed me when we were in first grade and we pretended to get married at recess, but I think he’s just saying that to make me feel better since nearly everyone hates me now. The level of hate is like a fog I walk through every day. He told me this in the cafeteria two weeks after I came back to school. And then he walked away. He is so weird. He’s a football player and I’m just going to assume there have been some concussions. (Like I can talk.)

  6. Kamala was my best friend when we were seven. She and David were dating when he died. She could hate me but she doesn’t. She is sticking with me and helping me at school. I need to write down a bunch of memories with her.

  7. My favorite movie in high school was Casablanca, but I saw it during the time of my life that’s lost in the Black Hole. A poster for it hangs in my room st
ill. I haven’t bothered to watch it again. That other girl I was liked it. What if I don’t? I don’t have anything to put up on the wall in place of that poster if I hate it.

  8. I don’t remember my dad dying. That is still in the Black Hole. So what Mom told me: He killed himself, but it was an accident. With a gun. His business was having problems. He was an accountant and he was starting a new business, setting up offices to do bookkeeping in underserved neighborhoods. (All these words are not mine, this is from a printout of his website that Mom showed me.) He had a gun and he was handling it and it went off and he didn’t realize it was loaded. But he was alone when it happened. So. People said things. That he killed himself. Mom stopped writing the mommy blog for a while and started writing a widow’s blog, but the sponsors weren’t as good and it was just so depressing.

  I should say a lot more about my dad, but not now. I know when I was little he smiled a lot and didn’t seem sad enough to take his own life. But over the past few weeks I remember him from when I was younger: how excited he was when we moved into the house on Graymalkin Circle, how hard he took it when the company he started with Cal Hall failed. They were business partners first, then neighbors, and Mom and Mrs. Hall were best friends, maybe they were too close. Love and hate, two sides of a coin. The hardest thing is not remembering losing Dad. But Mom said I’ve been through so much, to think of it as a blessing. Mom means well.

  9. I only remember David up to eighth grade. In high school he got tall and he got hurt-my-heart handsome. The braces he got early were gone. Mom had a picture from last year of him and me after the musical, both of us still in costume, in the chorus of concerned parents of River City who knew how to spell “trouble.” I look mad and not really happy to be there and of course I don’t remember why I didn’t like being in The Music Man. He is of course beaming. Mr. Popular. So I’m told. But he was already setting the seeds for that in middle school: football star, class president, academic achiever, soloist in the winter choir concert. I looked in the yearbook for pictures to see if I was ever around him in high school. I found one: I’m behind him while he’s singing in front of the choir and I am watching him. Not looking at the audience. Looking at him. Mortifying. We are together in twelve pictures in our last year in middle school. Inseparable. Then down to one in high school. Try to remember: things change.

  10. I remember summers: school years run together but the summers came back to me. I would walk to the library, often alone. Past the baseball fields; I would see David and Trevor there. Sometimes Kamala walked with me and we talked books we loved. We would (or I would, if I was alone) stay in the cool of the shelves, reading, checking out books. Madeleine L’Engle, I loved A Wrinkle in Time so much Dad bought me a copy so I wouldn’t wear out the library’s (I would just sit and read it if it was still on the shelf, all day, and if it wasn’t, I read the rest of the Time Quintet and the Vicky Austin books); Edward Eager; Lloyd Alexander; Ursula K. LeGuin; then later I binged on British mysteries (I was never into Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys). I was competitive about the summer reading challenges and when I came out of the coma and came home, Mom showed me, tucked under my bed, all these posters, colored and filled in with stickers, of the summer reading programs I had finished. I had done them all. There was a jagged tear in one corner that Mom said Kamala tore in my poster because she was mad I finished and she didn’t and she doesn’t like to lose. Then she said she was so sorry and she had taped it up and then I remembered those summer days in the library, all up until high school, and then I asked Mom if I had still participated, and she said I was too old. Then she cried over the posters. In the corner of one David wrote, Stop being such a bookworm, Jane, come out and play, in his small, cramped handwriting. I knew it was his handwriting, he didn’t sign it. He had come to the library after playing basketball in the heat with his friends. To see me, to find me.

  11. Lakehaven has two middle schools: Hilltop and Ridgeway, and they both feed into Lakehaven High. I went to Ridgeway and so did David, Kamala, and Trevor. Most of my friends are Ridgeway. In high school I made some new friends from Hilltop, in French class (I don’t remember any of my French) and in choir (I don’t remember any songs). But those new friends were gone from my memory. Including the one and only Adam, who had to reintroduce himself to me, and never gave up. Everyone liked David, and after he died I turned radioactive.

  I could have fought or begged to keep a friend. I’m the biggest coward around. I didn’t have the bravery to have a friend, to confide. I didn’t tell Kamala or Adam the truth about my memories, how lost I felt. It felt like part of my brain was gone. My heart, too. Gone. Memories are the engines for our feelings.

  5

  YOU WANT ME to take you back to Saint Mike’s?” the rideshare driver asked Jane. She had pulled over to the side of the road, a half mile away from the cemetery.

  Yes, that would be great, Jane thought. I have a bed I can hide under. But she made her hands stop shaking. You can hide later. See this through. “Do you know where High Oaks Road is?”

  “No, I can find it on the GPS, though…”

  “It’s not far. I can just tell you.”

  “I took a video of her attacking you after I called the police,” the driver said. “Do you want it in case she comes after you again?”

  After a moment, Jane said, “Yes.”

  “Give me your e-mail address and I’ll send it to you.”

  Jane did. “Thank you.”

  Jane gave the woman directions to the crash site. She had been here only once before, a few weeks after she came home. She had stared at the evidence of what she’d done: the spray-paint signs on the road, to indicate the direction and estimated velocity of the car; the lack of skid marks; the torn ground along the steep hill; the shattered oak saplings and cedar and ripped grass and the heavy rock where the front of the car had smashed. Just once. The doctors had said perhaps it would help prod her memories—but it had done nothing. Mom had watched her, as though expecting a dramatic returning of memories in a rush. She had stood in the sunlight, waiting for the miracle of memory. But nothing. The sides of the road rose and fell steeply, too steep for easy building of houses. There were only three houses, all palatial, but on the opposite side of the road from the crash site, and among them, only one person had heard the crash, a resident named James Marcolin.

  The road curved and went back down the hill past the Marcolin estate, intersecting again with Old Travis Boulevard, the main thoroughfare for Lakehaven that stretched through the whole town and into Austin, south of Lady Bird Lake. High Oaks had many bends as it wound up the cliffside, and its two endpoints, separated by a mile, both dead-ended into Old Travis. Sometimes, during rush hour, it would be used as a cut-through. Most of the time, the road was lonely and quiet.

  Jane wondered, So why were David and I here, on this empty stretch of road? We knew no one here. Where were we going, hours after school let out, when we should have been home doing assignments or waiting for early college-admissions decisions or looking at our friends’ pictures on social media?

  The rideshare driver dropped her off; Jane gave her an extra-big tip and a five-star rating. The woman said, “You sure you’ll be OK out here?” Jane nodded and she drove away.

  High Oaks Road was narrow, surrounded by oaks and cedars, undeveloped. The road ran west to east. The land north of the road where the three remote houses stood rose in a steep hillside, the south side began a slow then steep descent, tumbled down to boulders and more oaks and cedars and then finally a cliff’s edge. There was still a cleared path where her small SUV, two years ago, had torn through the growth. Here she walked down, through the shade of the trees, the wind gentle against her face.

  No reason for her and David to be here. Unless they’d driven up here to be alone, or if the suicide note was accurate and she’d tried to drive off the cliff. But she hadn’t reached it. Of course maybe David, realizing her intent, grabbed the wheel and they fought for it and the car spun and crashed
into the rocks before it could plummet over the edge.

  She didn’t like to think about that.

  Old bunches of flowers rested against one of the trees, part of a solid grouping of oaks close to where Jane’s SUV had come to rest on its crushed top. A large rock face, rising from the grass, was where the SUV’s front had impacted. If they had slid another twenty feet, they would have gone over the edge into a forty-foot drop into rock and cedars and oaks below. A bunch of deflated silver balloons lay by the flowers, still tethered together with strands of ribbon, the colors faded by the sun. Last year’s remembrances? Or for David’s birthday?

  She sank to her knees.

  Remember, she told herself. Remember. She made her own thought intense, commanding, stern. Willing her brain to give up its secrets.

  She dug her fingers into the dirt. Like she could pull the secrets out of the ground. Or David. David had died here. Memories of three years of her life had died here.

  She rose. She walked to the edge of the cliff. She felt vertigo but she made herself peer down. If she had wanted to end her life and David’s, like the note suggested, then…this would have been a good choice.

  She knelt again and she cried. Silently. Despite the bright light she pulled off the steampunky sunglasses that guarded her eyes from the sun-spiked headaches and she let the tears fall from her face and water the rough stone.

  “Oh, Jane. Are you all right?” a young woman’s voice said behind her.

  Jane jerked, turned, slowly climbed to her feet—realizing how close to the cliff’s edge she was. An attractive young woman stood between her and the road, clutching a bunch of flowers and a football. She had black hair pulled back in a tidy ponytail, high cheekbones, a small, neat bud of a mouth. She wore expensive jeans and a black top, nicely fitted. Kamala Grayson. Her mother had been a beauty queen from India, fourth runner-up in a global pageant twenty-five years ago, and had used her scholarship money to get her medical degree here in Texas. Kamala’s father was from an old Lakehaven family.