Good as Dead(56)

“Where is he now?” Evan asked, and I shook my head.

“I don’t know. He’s an adult—” I started, by way of excuse, but he cut me off.

“You need to find him,” my lawyer said. “We need to talk to him about what the hell he thinks he’s doing.”

Evan had never raised his voice at me before. But I let it go. Because in this fraught moment, I knew I was going to need him now more than ever.





SAVANNAH


Three months ago

There was a knock on our door at eight a.m.

We knew the police were going to want to talk to us, we just thought they would come at a decent hour.

I showed Officer Kellogg and his plainclothes sidekick into our living room, then went to the bedroom to wake up my mom.

“Mom,” I said as I touched her arm. “They’re here.”

She blinked herself awake. She looked disoriented. But that was not uncommon these days.

“I’ll make you some coffee,” I told her as I handed her a bra and a pair of sweats that would fit over her brace. There was no point in asking them to come back later. The sooner we got this over with, the better.

“You can sit down if you want,” I told the policemen as I returned to the living room after putting the coffee on. Kellogg looked a little winded from those three flights of stairs, but Plainclothes dismissed my offer with a stoic smile, so they both just remained standing.

It took a couple of minutes and the aroma of fresh brew to get my mom out of bed. She was bleary-eyed but not ungracious to our unexpected company as she joined us in the living room.

“Good morning, Officers,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind if I sit?”

“Of course,” they both said in unison. In the kitchen the coffeepot sputtered, and I used it as an excuse to slink out of the room. I had to get out of there. I felt like I was suffocating. Mom was about to put the final nail in our Pandora’s box of secrets. After she lied to the police about what we did, there would be no going back. I reminded myself that our hand had been forced, and that I didn’t want her to tell, nothing good would come of it.

“Any details you can remember . . .” I heard one of them say as I opened the cupboard to forage for cups.

I suddenly realized I had no idea what she would say. We hadn’t talked about how to handle questions from the police, or any of it, really—how else we could have survived without Dad, what we would do if we got caught. I never asked her if she wanted to go through with it, because what if she didn’t? Would I try to change her mind? I didn’t want to be broke. I didn’t want to be pitied. And more than anything, I didn’t want to go back to my old school. The thought of facing all those tears and hugs and Oh my God, I am sooooo sorrys was enough to make me want to hurl.

My teachers had already told me I could take my tenth grade finals at home, and excused me from all remaining assignments. So once my mom moved back home, I cleaned out my locker and said goodbye to my friends. I didn’t know I’d never see them again, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have cared. I hated that place. I wanted to be at a school where you didn’t have to keep your head down when you walked through the halls. I wanted to go somewhere with a real track-and-field program, one that had locker rooms with working showers. I wanted to be with people who wanted something more out of school than to just get through. I wanted friends who didn’t have to work every weekend and could hang out. And I wanted a boyfriend. A guy from a good family, who could afford to take me out and had a car to drive me home.

But more than all those things I wanted, there was one thing I didn’t want—to be the girl whose dad died.

I didn’t want people to look at me with that “poor you!” half smile. I didn’t want to spend the next two years ducking Principal Price, who I’d cried all over and would never be able to look in the face again. I didn’t want anyone to start a GoFundMe page or bring us hand-me-downs or a lasagna. I didn’t want to be talked about, pitied, stared at, coddled, or avoided. I didn’t want to have to assure people I was going to be OK, because some days I might not be. I didn’t want to have to start every conversation with someone saying sorry about your dad, or hate them for not saying it. People would say they didn’t bring it up because they didn’t want to “remind” me—as if I wasn’t going to be thinking about him every damn minute of every damn day for the rest of my life.

I wanted to move forward. But more than that, I didn’t want to go back.

I fished the milk out of the fridge, then smelled it to make sure it hadn’t turned. With just two of us in the apartment, perishables sat a lot longer now. I had already thrown out a pound of deli meat, a half dozen tomatoes, two avocados, and a hunk of moldy cheese.

“I’m sorry, but it’s all just a blank,” I heard Mom say as I opened the cutlery drawer. I was just about to fish for a spoon when the detective asked a question that stopped me cold.

“Do you know what this cord was for?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Plainclothes pinching a power cord between his finger and thumb. The one for the dashcam. My hand hovered above the teaspoons as I waited for Mom to answer.

“Is it for a cell phone?” Mom asked.

“No, not for a cell phone,” Kellogg said. “It’s a barrel connector, phones use USB.” Plainclothes stepped forward to show it to her. She looked at it and shrugged.