Page 97 of Gone Tonight
There’s one final lie between us.
“You don’t have Alzheimer’s disease.”
My mother’s face collapses, then re-forms, this time with the steely expression I know too well.
“I’d do it all over again if I had to. James was getting out of prison, and if you were living alone, near him, and he found out about you—I wouldn’t be able to protect you. I had to keep you with me, and I didn’t know how else to do it.”
I look at my mother for a long, steady moment. She perpetuated a horrific deception to keep me close, but it wasn’t because of her neediness. It was to protect me. Still, that doesn’t erase what she did, or the amount of pain and disruption I endured.
Her hands begin wringing themselves together, and her sleeve slips, revealing the old, slightly bumpy scar on her forearm.
My mother knows the agony of having fire sear her skin, yet she ran through flames tonight to save me.
She also made choices with momentous consequences for us both without ever once letting me know how much control she was exerting in shaping my life. She could have told me the man who impregnated her was dangerous. I deserved at least a small piece of the truth.
“Can you forgive me?” she whispers.
There have been enough lies between us, so I answer honestly. “I don’t know.”
We don’t talk much more after that. We are both wrecked, physically and emotionally. We already changed into fresh clothes in theBonneville because the outfits we were wearing reeked of smoke. All that’s left to do is brush our teeth and climb into bed.
The moment I lie down, though, a forgotten detail slides into my mind. I sit bolt upright.
The Cadillac I took from the Campbells is still in the parking lot of Pizza Piazzo.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURRUTH
I’ve gone over this in my mind a hundred times, and I keep landing on the same conclusion. There is only one safe path forward.
I’m sitting in an upholstered chair that I’ve dragged over to face the door of our hiding place while Catherine sleeps restlessly a few feet away. It’s well past midnight. I should try to doze for a while too, but I can’t bring myself to lie down.
“Mom?”
I whip around at the sound of Catherine’s strained whisper. But she’s only talking in her sleep.
I stand up and walk over and smooth her hair.
“Shhh,” I whisper. Her face relaxes and she drifts into what I hope is a more peaceful dream.
I stare down at her, wishing Catherine had come to me to ask about my connection to the pizza restaurant rather than reach out to the worst person imaginable. But no, that isn’t fair. I’m the one who built the wall of distrust between us. And I can tell by the way she is acting that it may be a permanent structure.
I stand in the darkened room, awash in the cruel self-judgment and what-ifs that accompany hindsight. After a moment, though, I banishthose thoughts. If we are to get through this, I must look ahead, not backward.
There isnothingof her father in Catherine, I promise myself. Yet they found each other, as if by gravitational pull, both reaching out through the gray, misty ether until their fingertips touched.
By now, I am certain James is the man Catherine communicated with in private messages on Facebook. To begin with, he joined Facebook on the same day he was sprung from prison. He also filled his profile with just enough information to allow someone who knew him well to find him but not enough to alert the authorities to his new social media presence.
He listed Pizza Piazzo as his former place of employment. He chose a photo of a black Corvette as his profile picture. He identified himself as David James—his first and middle name reversed. And, in a sick nod to the past, he cited Eric Clapton as his favorite musician.
This information was freely available to me. I only had to log in to the fake Facebook account I’d made years ago to check in on Timmy.
At first, as my eyes skittered across the different clues on James’s page, I felt completely bewildered. No one but me would know the significance of his background photo. It’s the field in the middle of the woods behind my high school where we first had sex and often returned to together. It seemed as if James was leaving private clues on a very public forum for the express purpose of letting me know he was there.
Then it hit me. Maybe he was doing exactly that.
I tensed as a brand-new scenario, one I’d never before considered, exploded in my brain. If James was putting out gentle feelers to find a way to communicate with me, the assumption I’d been operating under for nearly twenty-five years was dead wrong.
I’d always thought James knew I deliberately left him waiting at our meeting place. I’d pictured him passing time in jail fantasizing about revenge.
