Since She Went Away(19)

Jenna took another drink of wine. She remembered the night so well. It was warm, Indian summer. And as she’d dressed she felt a flutter of excitement in her belly she hadn’t felt in years. Once she was ready, she told Jared where she was going and that she wouldn’t be gone long. He was reading a novel, something with a creepy clown’s face on the cover, and she made him promise to keep the doors locked and to text her if he needed anything. She expected to get a grunting response, something that indicated an utter lack of interest in his mother’s activities, even if the timing of her departure was a little strange.

But then she saw the bottle on his desk. Jim Beam. She never knew him to take a drink, never knew him to show any interest in the stuff, although she also knew that day would come soon enough. She went into full mom mode, asking a ton of questions about where it came from and who it belonged to.

She decided not to go, to call Celia and cancel the plans.

But Jared told her to go, that they could work it all out. He dumped the booze down the sink right in front of her.

And she didn’t want to cancel. Didn’t want to let her friend down again.

“So I was late,” Jenna said. “I was always late. But that night I never heard from her. She didn’t show up. I texted and texted but didn’t hear back. I figured something came up. Hell, something came up with my son. I figured maybe it was Celia’s daughter, Ursula, or maybe Ian. I called Ian finally, and he reported her missing. He thought she was with me. I thought she was with him. And then later I found out she thought someone might have been following her. She never told me that, so it hit home that we weren’t as close. I could have picked her up. We could have done it all differently.”

“Wow. I’m sorry, honey. But you can’t beat yourself up over that. It’s just . . . a coincidence. A horrible coincidence, but that’s all it is.”

“I try to tell myself that.”

“Are you sure she didn’t run away?” Sally asked. “You know people say things. They speculate. Would she leave her life that way?”

“Leave her child?” Jenna asked. “Like I said, she wasn’t a perfect mom. And Ursula, her daughter . . . she’s shown it a little bit.”

“Wild?”

“Not that so much,” Jenna said. “Just . . . unhappy, I guess. Kind of an angry kid once she hit her teenage years. A couple of weeks after Celia disappeared, she got into a fight with a girl at school. No big deal, really. No one was hurt. They pulled Ursula off the other girl before it got too bad.”

“And if her mother just disappeared, you could understand her anger.”

“Sure. Look, Celia could be impulsive. She could be emotional. Every once in a while, she’d get mad at me and shut me out. She did it about four years ago.”

“Why?”

“We were out with friends, and I mentioned this guy she hooked up with in college. She and Ian were on a break back then, and I thought all our friends knew she had this thing with this guy on the swim team. Apparently not everyone did. She froze me out for two weeks. I didn’t even know what my crime was.”

“So she had some places she wouldn’t let people go.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

But Sally looked as though she had something else on her mind, something else she wanted to say.

“What?” Jenna asked.

“It’s nothing. It’s—I’m sure you’ve thought of it. It’s kind of a morbid thought.”

Jenna didn’t push her, but she knew exactly what Sally was thinking. She knew the same question lurked in the minds of everybody in town. Yes, if Jenna had been on time, Celia might not have been taken.

But what if she’d been on time and suffered the same fate?

That scenario ran through Jenna’s mind at least one hundred times a day. She couldn’t count the number of nights she lay in bed, the room and the house dark, the red glow from the bedside clock in her peripheral vision. She felt the guilt—and she felt a painful, almost sickeningly sweet sense of relief.

What if she’d been there? And what if she’d been the one taken away?

And every time Jenna considered her life—all the things she had and all the things she would have left behind. Like Jared. Her mother.

Everything.

And she always reached the same conclusion: When push comes to shove, she wouldn’t have traded her life for Celia’s. No way. No way.





CHAPTER TWELVE


The rain let up, but Jared didn’t notice. He walked through Caldwell Park, his feet splashing through small puddles, which would soon be turning to ice, the sweat from his exertion drying and cooling against his skin. His heart still thudded but was slowing down, and the frantic energy that had been running through his body since he first approached Tabitha’s house wound down like a clock with a dying battery.

He couldn’t believe he’d thrown a rock through Tabitha’s window.

They couldn’t have seen him, could they? He felt sick to his stomach, like a child in trouble with his parents. Which made him think of home. He pulled out his phone.

His mom would be freaked. He wandered around in the cold and the wet while she sat at home stewing. And they hadn’t even talked about Tabitha, about her being in the house. In his room, on top of him after school.