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“Then why didn’t she call me?”
Instead, Lisa had reached out to Cole, Freemont, Coop, and my mother. Everyone but me. By the time she did reach out, it was too late.
“I don’t know, Quincy,” my mother says. “I guess she didn’t want to bother you. Or maybe—”
Another pause. A lengthy one. So long that I can feel the distance stretching between my mother and me. All those fields and cities and small towns that sit between this Indiana highway and her too-white house in Bucks County.
“Mom?” I say. “Maybe what?”
“I was going to say that maybe Lisa thought you wouldn’t be honest with her.”
“She didn’t actually say that, did she?”
“No,” my mother says. “Nothing like that. But I got a feeling—and I could be wrong—I got the feeling that she knew something. Or suspected something.”
“About?”
My mother goes quiet. “About what happened that night.”
I squirm in the driver’s seat, suddenly unbearably hot. Beads of sweat have popped along my brow line. I wipe them away and click off the heater.
“What gave you this feeling?”
“More than once, she stressed how lucky you were. How you recovered so quickly. How your wounds weren’t that bad. Especially compared with what happened to the others.”
In ten years, this is the most my mother has ever talked about Pine Cottage with me. Four lousy sentences. I’d consider it some sort of warped breakthrough if the situation weren’t so dire.
“Mom,” I say, “did Lisa suggest that I had something to do with what happened at Pine Cottage?”
“She didn’t suggest anything—”
“Then why do you think she suspected something?”
“I don’t know, Quincy.”
But I do. It’s because my mother also suspects something. She doesn’t think I killed the others. But I’m certain that, just like Cole and Freemont, she wonders why I lived when no one else did. Deep down, she thinks there’s something I’m not saying.
I think about the way she had looked at me after I trashed the kitchen all those years ago. The hurt darkening her eyes. The utter fear quivering in her pupils. I wish to God I could forget that look as thoroughly as I’ve forgotten that hour at Pine Cottage. I want it erased from my memory. Painted so black I can never see it again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Itried,” my mother says, going heavy on the faux indignation. “I called you two days in a row. You didn’t call back.”
“You talked to Lisa two weeks ago, Mom,” I say. “You should have called me as soon as it happened.”
“I wanted to protect you. As your mother, that’s my job.”
“Not from something like this.”
“All I want is for you to be happy,” my mother says. “That’s all I ever wanted, Quincy. Happy and content and normal.”
Within that last word lies all my mother’s hopes and all myfailings. It’s as powerful and potent as a grenade dropped into the conversation. Only I’m the one who explodes.
“I’m not normal, Mom!” I scream, my words bouncing off the windshield. “After what happened, there’s no possible way for me to be normal!”
“But you are!” my mother says. “You had a problem, but we took care of it and now everything is fine.”
Tears burn the corners of my eyes. I try to mentally force them not to fall. Yet they leak out anyway, slipping down my cheek as I say, “I’m as far from fine as you can possibly get.”