Save Me - Lisa Scottoline [82]
“Okay.”
“Later, she came falling down the stairs, drunk, and, randomly, topless.” Rose felt mortified, even at the memory. “She came down the stairs with no bra or anything, only in her panties and high heels, my high heels, oddly, and she hit on one of my guy friends. She actually tried to sit in his lap, with her breasts in his face, and it was, well, you get the idea.” Rose shook it off. It wasn’t anywhere near the worst part of the story. “Anyway, the party broke up, and I ran out crying. I got into the car, and drove to my old high school. I was in her car, I didn’t have a car. I sat in the parking lot, which was empty. I stopped crying, I calmed down, then I left for home. I was upset, but not too upset to drive, and I hadn’t been drinking.”
“I know that. You don’t have to tell me that. You never drink.”
“Right.” Rose never drank, except for the backsliding the other night in the kitchen. She’d spent her college years partying harder than she should have, then stopped after she’d graduated and started working, full-time. She’d wanted to be a mother, and not her mother. Her mother’s drinking had driven her father away, when she was only ten. Rose hardly remembered him, and he never came around again, though he always sent checks, to support them.
“So what happened?”
“I was driving home, and most of the little kids were done trick-or-treating. It was like nine o’clock. Only the older kids were left, the hoboes and the basketball players, too cool to dress up. But still, I was going slow, the roads were slick from the rain.” Rose could see the scene, in front of her. “Wet leaves were everywhere, so I was careful. She would never want anything to happen to her car, not a scratch. I could see everything. I was paying attention. I didn’t even have the radio on. I was driving fine, I was—”
“Okay, you were being careful.”
“Right, I was.” Rose could see it happening all over again, in her mind, and she could tell him the story in real time, like a horrifying play-by-play. “Something flew out in front of me, a white blur. I heard a noise. I stopped right away, but the car skidded on the wet leaves, and I heard a scream. A child, a scream. It was him.” Rose held back tears that came to her eyes. “Thomas Pelal.”
“The little boy.”
“He was six.”
“Where were his parents?”
Rose could hear a change in Leo’s voice, and he sounded almost professional. Already he was thinking like a lawyer, constructing a legal argument for her, finding a way to absolve her of responsibility. It had been his first instinct, even as angry as he was at her, and Rose felt so much love for him at that moment that she couldn’t meet his eye.
“Babe?”
“His parents were up the street, talking to a neighbor. He was with his sister.”
“How old was she?”
“Fourteen. She had gone up on their porch. It happened right in front of their house. He’d dropped a jawbreaker, one of those big ones they used to have.” Rose formed a ball with her fingers, for some reason. Maybe because she’d seen the jawbreaker later, when the ambulance and the police came, with their sirens and lights. The jawbreaker made a yellow dot among the wet leaves, like a discarded sun. “It rolled into the street. He was going after it. I didn’t see it roll, it was too small. He’d gotten it that night, in his Halloween bag.”
“So then what happened?”
“I heard this sound. Thud.” Rose knew she wasn’t telling the story in order, but it didn’t matter. It would end the same way. “And I realized I’d hit a child because he screamed, ‘Mommy!’”
Mommy!
“I jumped out of the car and ran around the front, and he was lying there, crumpled, on his side, turned away. He had on his costume, a white pillowcase with holes cut out for the neck and arms.