Lisa Scottoline - Moment Of Truth

Jack blinked away his own tears. It was his fault. He hadn't been there. Not only tonight, but for all of her childhood. He hadn't known how bad it had been, but

that was no excuse. He should have known; it was his job to know. He had deserted his own daughter and when he had finally realized it, he was too late. Guilt engulfed him, drowning him like a wave.

'I went kind of… crazy. I was yelling and crying… it was like everything came back at me… I mean… I knew I was mad at her… but I guess I just got out of control… and I stabbed her and when I was done, she was… she was' – Paige's expression was a frieze of agony – 'she was lying there… on the floor. I dropped the… knife. It was all… bloody. I didn't mean… I just left her there… and ran out. I just ran… I'm sorry, Dad. I'm so sorry.' Paige's words dissolved into tears, and her shoulders collapsed as easily as a dollhouse.

Jack couldn't help but raise his hands, even handcuffed, to the plastic barrier between them, touching it with his fingertips. It was cold, hard, and lifeless, so unlike the warm, silky hair of his little girl. How often had he touched Paige's head? Not often enough. Now he had to save her. 'Paige,' he said, 'what did you tell the lawyers?'

'I said… I wasn't there.' Paige was sobbing hard. That… I didn't go over.'

'Okay, so you were never there tonight. You never went over. Stick with that story, understand?'

'It's… a lie. God, my head. The… lights.'

'I know it's a lie. I don't care.' Jack lowered his hands and leaned forward urgently. 'Never, Paige. Never breathe a word. If you do, you and your baby are lost.'

'My baby?' Paige looked at him through her tears. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her skin was a mass of hives. 'What about my baby?'

Think about the baby, Paige. We didn't even get to talk about the baby. What are you planning to do?'

'I don't know, for sure.' Paige's weeping stilled. 'Get married. Trevor wants to.'

Jack cringed inwardly. 'What about college? You told me you'd set aside modeling for college.'

'I'll go later, after the baby.'

Jack bit his tongue. 'Okay, let's assume for the moment that's the right decision. If you come forward and tell the police what happened, who will raise the baby? Trevor? Of course not. You have to think of your baby, not me. Please don't interfere with me. If the police question you, say you weren't at the house. Say you were surprised by what I did. Don't go to my arraignment or any other court proceeding. Let me do what I have to do.'

'I can't.'

'Put your hand on your tummy, right now. Do it, Paige.' Jack's tone was so commanding he sounded strange even to himself. Something was happening to him. He felt like he was coming into his own. Maybe even redeeming himself, 'Put your hand on your tummy.'

Paige did as she was told, crying as she rested her slender, pale hand against the slick black leather of her jacket. She was listening to him, Jack could see.

That's your baby, in there. Inside you. That baby is your first obligation now, not me. You're a mother now. You are the mother. Be a mother.'

'Okay, Dad,' Paige said in a whisper, and Jack knew from her eyes that she had yet to think of herself that way. She would do what he said. She owed a responsibility to someone other than herself, as he did. In one horrific, rainy night, she had become a parent.

And so, finally, had Jack.

It was late at night when Mary grabbed the C bus, sitting with her Coach bag and briefcase in the blue plastic seats in the front. The bus was one of the new SEPTA models, white and sharply boxy, with advertisements for TV shows sprayed all over, even the windows. At this hour, the bus was almost completely empty and barreled hollowly down Broad Street. The business day was long over, the in-town shoppers had gone home, and Mary, by any account, should have done the same.

Instead she was going to her parents' house, in South Philly. She told herself it was on the way home, but it really wasn't, and in time she stopped trying to justify her decision. After an evening spent glimpsing the interior of the Newlin family, she yearned to be reminded of what a normal family was like, or at least, her family. Where nobody knifed each other and the only serious fights concerned the Pope. Whoever said you can't go home again didn't grow up near the C.

Mary gazed out the bus window in the dark, watching Broad Street change from the marbled-and-mirrored financial district to the neon funkiness of South Street, surrounded by modern rowhouses filled with lawyers, doctors, and accountants. The gentrified district disappeared in five or six blocks, and businesses began to appear among the less desirable rowhouses; nail and funeral parlors, the omnipresent McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts. She was entering the Italian neighborhood in which she grew up, and though it was only fifteen minutes from the center of Philadelphia, it could have been across the country. Still, the streets of her neighborhood felt more real to her than the law firms downtown.

Mary thought about it as she rode along, and the farther south she went, the better she felt. She remembered that Judy was very attached to her hometown in California, and had told her once about something called land memory. Either you have it or the land does, Mary had never been completely sure, but the bottom line was that you felt best on the land you and your family had grown up on, and in time you made it your own. And no matter what happened to you or to the land, you still felt best there. Standing on it. Being there.

The bus rattled ahead and she watched the land change to dingy rowhouses with city grit blown into each crevice, darkening the mortar. The color of the brick managed to fight its way through, showing the spunk of a weed in a sidewalk crack, and each house had been built with a different color brick; some were the yellow of dark marigolds, some even a pumpkin orange, and the conventional dark red. Each rowhouse had different decorative touches in its facade; in some, the bricks at the top were tilted so the ends stuck out and made a cute line of baby teeth, and in others a layer of narrower brick underlined the flat roofline, an inner-city underscoring. The stoops were the focus of the homes, like the smile of each place; there was marble, concrete, and flagstone, a classy touch.

Mary swayed with the bus, her eyes on the cityscape. The houses were only two stories, so the night sky shimmered above as broad as over any grassy plain, and the luster of the stars wasn't diminished by the telephone wires. She smiled to herself. She was going home. The land didn't have to be the soaring, craggy mountains or cool shady forests that Judy had. described. The land could be concrete, couldn't it? Grimy, gritty, shitty, too-close-together, gum-spattered South Philadelphia. If you had spent your childhood there – playing, laughing, walking to school – even a city block could be your land, and you had as much right to the land memory as anybody else.

The bus approached her street, and Mary grabbed her briefcase and got up to go. She held the stainless steel bar, reading the curved ads running along the top of the bus, the ever-popular yellow PREGNANT? and RESUME SERVICES. The bus lurched to the same sudden stop it had every day since she'd taken it home from high school, guaranteed to hurl Catholic schoolgirls through the windshield.

But Mary wasn't to be outsmarted. She held tight to the pole through the step and then thanked the driver on the way out, which was something else the nuns had taught her. Turn the other cheek, even when people shit on you for no reason. Mary had had to overcome that thinking to be a lawyer; parochial school hadn't prepared her for anything except sainthood.