Under Her Care(22)

“One of the girls, Tessa, I think? She said you didn’t want to wait for the police or the paramedics to get there. You just wanted to leave as fast as you could after they called 911. In fact, she says you kept trying to pull Mason away from Annabelle and get him to run with you, but he wouldn’t let you anywhere near him.” His eyes grip mine. “Why were you trying to run?”

Why was I trying to run? Is he serious? That Monster was in those woods. We couldn’t just stand there and let him catch us. Do what he’d done to her. I try to hide my frustration and annoyance, but I’ve never been good at masking my feelings. “I didn’t know if we were safe or not. Y’all get to look at things objectively after the fact, so of course it’s easy for you to stand back in judgment and see all these things I should’ve done or what didn’t make sense at the time.” I shift my gaze between the two of them, since Ms. Walker’s questioning everything, too, or she wouldn’t be here, even though she pretends like she’s my friend. “But I had no idea what was going on. None. Nobody did, and I was terrified. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Maybe you think straight in those situations, but guess what? I don’t.” My eyes narrow to slits. “So I panicked, and I stayed panicked. There was a crazy man out there. He’s still out there. Or have you forgotten that?”

I’m tired of this. Sick of them wasting their time on Mason.

Detective Layne cringes and pulls himself up straighter in the chair. I’m not just some dumb lady he can boss around and manipulate. He underestimates me.

“There are other parts of your story that don’t make sense either.” He ignores my question. He stands and walks over to the fireplace. “Like how you told me you were holding Mason and doing your best to comfort him until the police arrived? Because here’s the thing”—he leans against the wooden mantel—“you didn’t have a drop of blood on any part of you. How do you hug your bloodied son and not get any on you?”

“Very easily when you’re pulling on him from behind.”

“But you told the police that you were holding him. That you ‘squeezed him against you,’ according to the police report.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea I needed to be so careful with my words. I didn’t know everything I said would be taken literally and examined bit by bit.” He tilts his head to the side like he’s considering what I’ve said but doesn’t believe me. “Maybe you can explain yourself perfectly when you’re terrified, but I can’t. Trust me, if my son ever stumbles on a dead body again, I’ll be extra careful to make sure I record every single minute detail so I can answer your questions correctly afterward.” I stand too. This is my living room. My house. “Are we done here?”





THEN



There I am on a bed. Wheels on a bed. Round and round like the bus used to go.

Silly boy. This is an ambulance.

There I am in those lights. Mama holds my hand. Shh, child, shh, you’re going to be all right.

All. Right.

There we go. Fast. My throat hurts. On fire.

Say you didn’t mean to.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. But not fast enough.

Too slow.

There we go in the hospital. Hate these lights. So bright. Tell them that you’re sick.

She says.

I’m sick.

Too fast.

The world spins when she moves like that.

There I am in the bed. Ugly. White. Itchy. Scratch-my-skin-until-it-bleeds bed. Stick out your hand.

No.

She wants to hold it. But everything hurts.

Not. Now.

How much longer?

You said I only had to play for a little bit.





TEN


CASEY WALKER



“What did you think?” Detective Layne’s voice booms from my car’s speakers, and I turn him down. We didn’t get a chance to talk privately after our meeting with Genevieve, since we both rushed out in a hurry to get other places. Dad has book club tonight, and I promised him I’d be there by six thirty, so I can’t be late. He’s had Harper so much this week. I don’t know what I’d do without him. Gratitude for his presence in my life washes over me for the thousandth time.

I don’t know what to think about what just happened, and I have nothing to compare it to. I barely said anything while we were at Genevieve’s. All I kept telling her was that I was sorry she was going through this and that I understood how hard things must be for her. We didn’t even get to the most important part because she cut the interview short after Detective Layne made her so frustrated with his questions about the inconsistencies in her story that day. He kept harping on that instead of asking her about Mason’s psychiatric history and all the other strange information in the reports. She got so angry with how he came at her that she was done, and nothing he said convinced her otherwise, especially after Mason woke up from his nap. She snapped into mom mode, immediately ushering us out of the house with promises to be in touch.

“I think there’s a pretty good chance that her reasons for not being completely truthful about what happened might have more to do with how she looks as a mom than how it looks in the investigation or Mason’s guilt versus his innocence.”