I need help.
From her place on the driveway, she eyed the workbench in the back of the garage. She needed to pull herself together. Her thoughts came at her in pieces, a smashed dinner plate in the driveway of a yard sale. Pieces everywhere. They could be scooped up, reassembled, but never, ever, would any of it be the same. She had done the unthinkable. That was true. But it was an accident. She didn’t see Charlie. Not even a glimmer of the boy had caught her eye. Liz thought back to the night before and the pills she’d taken to prepare for the test. She knew that whatever was coursing through her bloodstream just then was partly to blame for what had happened. Saying so would only invite questions from the police. She’d tell them over and over that it was an accident. She was in a hurry. They’d pounce on every detail, shredding her explanation into a million tiny pieces. Each piece, when assembled, would make her out to be either careless or drugged out.
Liz saw no way out of it. She hoisted herself up and stood there, her head bowed over the boy. Blood oozed from the back of his head.
The RAV4 had hit him hard.
She looked over at the workbench once more.
She glanced down at Charlie.
The spinning had stopped. Liz gripped her phone. She could call for help, or she could put Charlie in the car to get him to St. Charles Medical Center. Driving him would be faster. It would get him to where he’d receive the medical attention that he needed.
If something could be done.
But even as she stood there deciding what to do, Liz Jarrett thought about herself. Later she would wonder what had moved her toward being that person. A person who would go into a self-preservation mode that was really a collision course to personal annihilation. A person who put ambition over responsibility, kindness. Decency. It was in that moment that Liz considered what was at stake in a hotel conference room near Portland. She thought about the test she had yet to take. She thought about Owen telling her that she was a screwup and that she’d really messed up this time. That she was never going to be anything. She was going to be known forever as the woman who killed a close friend’s son.
Tiny pieces of gravel were stuck to her palms from crawling on the driveway. She brushed them off, then noticed tiny blood droplets on her jeans. Charlie’s? Hers? She sucked in some air. She opened the front passenger-side car door and moved the seat up, then opened the back door.
She hooked her arms under Charlie’s tiny body and lifted.
You are so stupid, Liz.
You are going down.
The police lab will find Adderall in your bloodstream.
You will fail the test.
You will be a pariah in your own neighborhood.
You will go to prison.
It happened so fast. Faster than a blink. It was nearly a magnetic force that drew her to the workbench instead of the backseat of the RAV4. She set the body down, gently, on the workbench. Sweetly, even. Even though nothing but darkness was passing through her mind, Liz leaned over and kissed the child’s forehead. A tear splashed on the boy’s blond head.
What have I done? Fuck me! Kill me!
A blue tarp her father had used when he painted the house and stained the front porch caught her attention. She unfurled the stiff, paint-splotched fabric and placed it over Charlie.
She’d killed him. She hadn’t meant to. It had been a terrible accident. It really had.
She knew what she was doing would only buy her time.
Got to take the test. Got to figure this out. Got to. Got to. Got to.
As she approached her car, Liz could hear Carole’s voice calling out for her son down by the river.
God, no.
It was an ice pick in her chest.
“Charlie!” Carole called out.
Liz slid behind the wheel and started backing out.
Carole’s voice was louder, more forceful. Closer.
Liz pushed the button on the garage-door opener, and the door rolled downward. She caught a glimpse of a woman’s face in the rearview mirror. Her own reflection seemed foreign to her. A stranger’s face.
Again Carole calling out for her son.
“Charlie!”
Liz pressed her foot on the gas slowly and continued backing out. As she cleared the space in front of the garage, she saw the bucket of cones that Charlie must have been carrying when she struck him. She also saw a small pool of blood on the gravel driveway. She could feel the pills and coffee make a play for her esophagus, but she managed to suppress the urge to vomit. She’d lost control of everything else.
She’d lost everything.
“Charlie!”
She got out of the car, picked up the bucket, and kicked a couple of the errant cones into the flower bed that flanked the driveway. She put the ball of her foot on the blood and spun around on it, grinding it into oblivion. The spot left behind was no longer red but a damp, dark stain. Liz hoped it would blend into the driveway. She put Charlie’s bucket in the car. She needed air. She could barely breathe. She returned to the car and got inside. She rolled down the window and put her foot on the gas.
And she was gone.
Liz pulled over on a quiet side street just before the highway that slices through Bend and rolled up the opened window. All she could see in her mind’s eye were images of Charlie. Playing in the yard. Following after his mother when Carole came for a visit next door.
He had been an angelic child.
Now he was an angel.
As the car idled, Liz screamed as loud as she could. Tears rained from her eyes. She had no idea why she’d panicked. It was an accident, a terrible one. One that she’d made a million times worse by her actions after the car hit Charlie.
She dialed her husband one more time. This time when she got voice mail she didn’t leave a message. She didn’t know what the message should be. She knew that the right thing to do was to return home, call the police, and face Carole and David. Tell them how sorry she was. Tell them that she loved Charlie too. Beg them all for forgiveness. Plead for mercy.
For she’d done something she could never explain to anyone. She’d put Charlie under a damn tarp in the garage and drove on to Beaverton and the bar exam.
CHAPTER FOUR
MISSING: TWENTY MINUTES
If only.
There is a moment when the parents of many, if not most, missing children recognize an irrevocable mistake they made. They can pinpoint the split second when something they did changed everything in their world. Mistakes are dominoes, falling on one another in a mechanical, unstoppable progression. Those moments never leave them. The echo is a ticking clock at the end of a long wooden hallway. Pounding. Reverberating. Mocking. Reminding those parents that terrible accidents or dark incidents caused by others truly rest only on their shoulders.