Never Have I Ever(24)

I shook my head. I was so overwhelmed by guilt and sorrow I could hardly breathe. Why hadn’t I gone with Tig back to that mattress? In the hope and terror that had gipped me after the kiss, I had insisted we leave. I had put us on the road that led us to poor Mrs. Shipley. Last night I’d cried myself down to a rag over that choice. I would again, many times, but I had tears for Tig, too. I tried to sputter an explanation with my thick tongue, but my mother’s veneer of calm support had cracked.

“Do you realize this is going to change your entire family’s lives? Your father is talking to headhunters. Do you understand? Your brother will spend his senior year at some strange school.” She blew air out her nostrils, lips compressing, and she was close to tears now, too. “We are all making sacrifices here. For you, Amy. We hired Mitch, and his retainer alone is— Yet here you sit, crying over the awful boy who got us into this mess.” Her voice rose. “And you could go to jail!”

“She’s a minor,” the lawyer said, still facing the window, as if making an observation to the clouds outside. “I doubt she’ll be arrested. Even if she is, it will be sealed.”

But that did little to propitiate my mother. She straightened, crossing her arms, nostrils flared.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hitching and snotting as I tried to stop my tears. I had never been the kid she wanted. Maybe, after perfect Connor, who was born sporty and swaggery and smart, she’d thought children were custom orders. Maybe, if I’d been trim and glossy or if I’d been a boy, she would have been the doting mother I saw parenting my brother. But she got an awkward, compulsive overeater who stole cheap wine and snuck out of the house with a boy from the bad side of town. I’d made our shiny, much-admired family the topic of whispers and thinly veiled op-eds about tragedy and underage drinking, and now I was weeping over Tig instead of being grateful and impressed by how much she had shelled out for a lawyer. “I’m not only crying for Tig. I keep thinking about Lolly and Pau—”

“Well, stop that!” she interrupted, and I realized I had somehow made it worse. “You want to drop by and make sure they know you’re sorry? Those kids with no mother, that widowed man, should they pause their grieving to hear your apology? They aren’t sitting around their house wondering, ‘Is Amy sorry?’ We are moving so they do not have to look at us—to give them some peace.”

“But I am sorry,” I promised, weeping so hard that the lawyer could no longer pretend himself out of the room. He turned back and handed me a crisp white handkerchief. My mother stared at me, her face registering such a tumbled mix of emotions that I could not read a single one.

“Just answer Mitch’s questions,” she said at last. I had almost stopped crying when she added, “I only hope they don’t find a way to sue us because you brought that boy the wine.”

By the time the first detective came to take my statement, I was so wrung out that the whole interview rolled over me in a wash of words. I could barely talk around my tongue, but I mostly told the truth, only skipping the kiss, my small, bright secret, now totally eclipsed. What we had done next negated it, ruined it, made it into a mistake, too.

The first detective kept pressing me for details about the accident itself. But after Tig had kissed me, we’d finished off the wine, smoked more, and the night had become a kaleidoscope of tumbling colors and shapes that made no sense now. I told the truth, though the truth was only three words long.

I don’t remember.

I said it over and over, and in my swollen mouth the words came out mostly vowels. I ’onn rem-em-ba. After we left the clearing to get food, my first solid memory was Mrs. Shipley’s face. Lolly’s piping voice. Amy? Paul is cry.

I did not remember. It was true then, hand to God, and it was still true six days later, in the second interview, when the new, dadlike detective shrugged and said, “That was last week.”

My lawyer smiled, revealing his movie-actor teeth, square and pearly white in the wet pink flesh of his mouth. My parents had those exact same teeth, but neither one of them was smiling. I sat, a silent lump, though my tongue no longer hurt. It was miraculously nearly healed, just as the doctor had assured me—something about all the blood vessels making tongues heal abnormally fast. The rest of my body, however, was sore down to the bone. Under my clothes I looked like a ruined peach, bruised yellow and black and deep purple and brown.

My lawyer said, “Nothing has changed since last week.”

“Let’s go through it again,” the detective said. “That could trigger—”

“She’s doing that. With her therapist,” my lawyer interrupted. “Should her therapy bear helpful fruit, rest assured we will contact you.”

“Her testimony could—”

“Yes,” my lawyer cut him off again. “I realize it would be very convenient for you if she did remember. With her testimony you could convict that boy without having to look for any pesky evidence or investigate. But that is not her job. Her job is to get well.”

I stared down at my hands. In one of the occasional chairs, off to the side, some sort of junior lawyer was taking notes and looking stern. There was a junior cop, too, sitting opposite him, with an equal and opposing notebook. They didn’t really matter in this room. The people who mattered were my lawyer and the detective. After that my parents. Dad tall and imposing in a bespoke suit that cost more than this cop made in a month and my mother, sitting slim and straight beside me. I should speak, I thought, but me and the lackeys, we felt so incidental. I had no power in this room.