Lisa Scottoline - Save Me

“Mom!” a child shouted, and the women looked up, because they all answered to the same name.

“Yes, honey?” Eileen asked. It was Amanda standing there, her face wet from bobbing for apples.

“Can you fix my lightning bolt? It’s coming off, from the water.”

Rose smiled at the sight.

Amanda was dressed as Harry Potter.

Rose parked at the end of the street, twisted off the ignition, and sat in her rental car for a moment. She broke into a light sweat, and her heart pumped a little faster. She checked the dashboard clock-10:49. She was ten minutes early. She inhaled, trying to calm her nerves. She’d felt something come over her the moment she turned onto the street, a shudder that seemed to emanate from her marrow and reverberate out to her skin, like shockwaves from her soul.

She looked around, taking it all in. This end of the street looked different than it had twenty years ago, but she could see the way it had been, the same way she could look into Melly’s face and see the baby she’d been. The past lived in the present, and nobody knew it better than a mother.

Mommy!

The houses were still close together, though the paint colors had changed, and the trees grew in the same places, though they were taller and fuller, their roots breaking up the concrete sidewalk, like so many tiny neighborhood earthquakes. Drying leaves littered the sidewalk, and big brown paper bags of them, stamped with the township’s name, sat at the curb like a row of tombstones, just like then.

Rose closed her eyes, and it all came back to her. Halloween, and she was eighteen years old. She’d just turned onto the street when she saw the white blur and heard the horrible thud. Tears came to her eyes, just as they had then, instantly. That night, her heart knew what had happened before her brain did. It just didn’t know how to tell her. Then she’d heard agonized scream of Thomas’s mother.

Thomas!

Rose found a Kleenex in her purse and wiped her eyes. She eyed the house, which hadn’t changed at all: a three-bedroom colonial, with a front porch, and wooden steps. The Pelals still lived here, and their phone number had been easy to find online. She’d called them yesterday, and they’d recognized her name. She’d asked if she could visit, and they’d suggested the very next day, today, but hadn’t asked any questions.

Rose put the Kleenex away and slid the keys from the ignition. She knew that what happened here had set her in a pattern she hadn’t recognized, and so couldn’t stop. Then, when she was young, she’d been told not to talk to the Pelals, and she didn’t want to, anyway. She could only run and hide. But it wasn’t about law, any longer. It was about right and wrong, and she had become an adult. Jim and Janine Pelal were parents like her, and she had killed their child. She couldn’t let another day pass until she said what needed to be said.

She got out of the car, closed the door, and made her way up the sidewalk to the house. She composed herself, then pressed the doorbell.

“Thanks for seeing me.” Rose sat in a wing chair, the nicest seat in the living room, which had a worn brown sofa and a plain wooden coffee table, covered with a folded newspaper and an ashtray with a pipe and a pile of black ash. The air smelled like burned cherrywood from its smoke.

“Of course.” Jim sat down next to Janine, on the sofa. Both of them had short hair, his gray and hers a dark brown, with steel-rimmed bifocals, plain polo shirts, wide-leg jeans, and newish white sneakers, so they looked paired but not identical, like salt-and-pepper shakers. They had a benevolent way about them, down to their smiles, which were polite, even kind.

“Well,” Rose began, her mouth dry. “It was lucky for me that you still live here. It made you easy to find.”

“Oh, we’d never move.” Jim shook his head, once. “We love it here. It’s our hometown, both of us. We’re semi-retired, but all our friends are here, and our church. Our daughter lives in Seattle. Her husband’s an engineer at Boeing.”

Rose flashed on Thomas’s sister running from the porch, then put it out of her mind.

“We have two grandchildren now, both boys. We love to visit ’em, but we love to come home, too.” Jim chuckled. “I read in the newspaper, online, that you have children.”

“Yes, a boy and a girl.” Rose felt awkward making small talk, especially since Janine was so quiet, her small hands folded in her lap. Her nails were polished, and she wore a fair amount of makeup, with thick eyeliner. “My call must have come as a surprise.”

“We thought we might hear from you someday. You were so young when Thomas died. Just a kid yourself.”

“Not that young. I should have come before.”

“As I say, we’ve been reading about you, but that’s new. We didn’t know where you lived until the fire. Some of our friends up north saw it on TV and called us.”

“I hope that didn’t cause you further… pain.” Rose had to grope for the right word.

“Not at all. A TV reporter called us about it, too. Tanya.” Jim rubbed his forehead. “What’s her name?”

“Robertson?” Rose felt a pang. “She found you?”

“My wife, she didn’t want us to talk to her. Seems like you did a bang-up job up there, in Pennsylvania. That crooked senator going to court, and all.” Jim glanced at Janine, who remained quiet, so Rose got back on track.

“Thanks, but to come to the reason for my visit, I’m grateful that you agreed to see me. I want to apologize to you both, as inadequate as words may be, and to tell you how sorry I am about Thomas.” Her throat caught, but she was determined to keep her emotions in check. “I think of him every day, and I replay that scene. I try to make it end differently. I wish I’d taken another way home, or gone slower, or seen him sooner. I think of how one little thing could have changed everything, and he’d be alive now, with you. I mourn him, but he was your son, and I’m so deeply sorry for what I did that night. Please accept my apology, if you can.”

Jim met her eye, behind his bifocals. Janine lowered her head, a small gesture that broke Rose’s heart.

“Thank you. Thank you for saying that. We do accept, but you don’t have to apologize. We know it wasn’t your fault. We saw what happened. We weren’t that far up the street.”

Rose blinked. She hadn’t known. The lawyers had assumed that the Pelals hadn’t seen it, and even if they had, that they’d sue her anyway.

“Thomas, he ran out in front of the car.” Jim’s lower lip trembled, then he seemed to recover. “It was horrible, seeing how it happened and knowing we couldn’t get there, in time. But Thomas, he liked to run everywhere. He always had ants in his pants. Janine always thought he mighta had, you know, attention deficit. But in those days, well, we didn’t get him to a doctor.” Jim shook his head. “So he ran into the street. We used to tell him, don’t do it, you’ll get hurt. It wasn’t the first time he did it, it was just the first time you were there, and this time, well, the Lord works in mysterious ways, that much is true.”

Rose felt her throat thicken, but didn’t cry. And she didn’t feel better either. “Regardless, I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“We have our faith, and we rely on it, always.” Jim nodded, his skinny shoulders suddenly slanting down. They both looked so sad for a minute, sagging together in the middle of the sagging couch. Janine said nothing, hanging her silvery head, with a whorl of gray at her crown, like a hurricane.

Jim sighed. “I just wish, well, I guess Janine, she wishes she was there. That she was there with him, for him, at the end. That’s what wakes her up at night, almost tortures her, really. Any mother would want that for her child, I suppose.”