Sweet Water(12)

I peer at the people in the dim room, the ones I’ve called family for two decades. They’re fully composed, basking in the light of the reflective lamps, seemingly unaffected by the events of the evening. Mary Alice’s long face is offset by a turtleneck, a mint color that’s so pale it’s almost white, except for the sleeve dotted with the tiniest speck of red—Finn’s blood.

And then I finally understand how exactly the Ellsworths are going to “figure this out” for us. This party of individuals carefully positioned around the room is meeting to cover up whatever happened in those woods tonight.

We are staging an accident.

That’s what we’re doing here.

There are only five seats in the semicircle, but no one speaks loudly enough for me to hear anything over the clatter in my chest. When we finally make eye contact again, Mary Alice’s flat-faced features are nearly translucent in the lighting, a true fright. When Martin and I were dating, I asked if she ever smiled, and he said not really. If she did, I imagined her skin might crack.

It’s then that I think of Yazmin’s beautiful olive skin, probably beginning to decompose now. A roll of nausea falls over me, sweat dripping down my back in a chilled stream.

This is wrong. We should call the police. We should call Yazmin’s parents.

“How much did he tell you before he went lights out?” Alton points to Finn, asking for his point of view for the first time all night.

“Only that he and his girlfriend had gone for a walk in the woods, smoked pot, and got into a fight. He remembers nothing else,” Martin says. I wince when he says this, remembering the car ride home, how agitated I became when I asked Martin, “What happened? What did he say?”

And Martin simply replied, “He doesn’t remember.”

I’d feel so much better if I knew what the fight was about. This is the first I’ve heard of it, but all I can think about now are the fingernail marks on Finn’s neck.

Alton stands to address the room. “Okay. There’re a few things we’ll need to do, but we have to be careful about what we say from here on out.”

Martin grabs my hand again, and this time I don’t let go. He forces me to look at him. The throbbing blue vein in his forehead has subsided, and his eyes mimic an exasperated sigh, because he knows I’m not on board here, and he desperately wants me to be.

“This is for Finn,” he whispers.

No, it isn’t. This is for them.

I look away and stare at the far corner of the wall, the thick binding of a John Grisham book catching my eye—The Innocent Man. The only fictional work I can find other than the classics is the one in the field in which William works. Ironic that it includes the word innocent in the title. He shouldn’t own a single thing with that word on it, and I’ve known it since the first time I’d sat in that semicircle, shackled to it with what I had brewing in my belly.

Even if they can stage Yazmin’s death to look like an accident, create a scenario to clear Finn, what does that teach our son about accountability? He won’t always have a rock-star team of lawyers and law-enforcement officers at his side. If he hurt the girl, he should be taught to pay for his crime.

Or he might keep on hurting girls. I think back to the nail marks, feeling sick again.

My head jumbles with horrible news headlines, cases of privileged, wealthy boys who were found not guilty after an incident with a less fortunate female victim.

That cannot be my son. That will not be my son. He’s not the boy who would force a girl to do something she didn’t want to. He isn’t the kid who uses drugs and tricks girls to slip away into the woods with him, their only way of escape physical attack.

A cry escapes my lips, and I suck it in, but the tears are already falling, these thoughts of what Finn could’ve done making me crumple.

“I’ll make some tea.” Mary Alice stands from her chair and runs off to the kitchen. I seem to have made her uncomfortable with my weeping.

Martin tries to put his arm around me, but he can’t fully circle my body because of the sheer girth of the bulky chairs. For maybe the first time ever, I shift away from him. I want Finn to own up to his actions, whatever they may be, but I know in my heart of hearts that this wasn’t his doing. Yazmin was his first real girlfriend, and they barely held hands in my presence. Finn is my shy kid, my straight-A, straitlaced, soccer-playing sweetheart. What the hell happened tonight?

Finn never came home from school, but he did text me that he was going for a walk with Yazmin and that they might circle back to our house. I was working late at the shelter, trying to find housing for an unwed mother and her child fleeing an abusive relationship. I was having trouble securing a place but didn’t want to leave until I did. Martin was home; I didn’t need to worry about Finn, but Martin never let me know that Finn hadn’t shown up—until he called me to rush home because something was wrong with him.

Is this my fault? Should I have had him check in at home first before I let him take off with Yazmin Veltri?

The guilt is so widespread. What could I have done differently to prevent this?

Martin doesn’t feel the same way, I can tell. I glance at him and see the determined shimmer in his eye, the same one he had when discussing the difficult zoning issue he’d been having for opening the new location for his business on the riverfront. Martin is concentrating only on how to fix the problem as quickly as possible.