This Is Not Over Part 35

I was parked there, and then Thad came running out of the building. A scarecrow of Thad, but a mother can always recognize her son, no matter how much he's deteriorated.

There he was, running, and my first thought was not, Someone's chasing him, or, Is he okay? No, it's, Oh my G.o.d, he's robbed someone. He's hurt someone. It was a robbery gone wrong. Do I cover for him? Do I turn him in? For years, I've expected it to come to this. I should have had a plan.

Is Dawn dead? It would be so like the universe to solve one of my problems while creating an entirely worse one.

So I decide that I need to follow him. He doesn't even notice the car trailing him, he's in full flight. One block, then two, then he stops. He bends over, out of breath, and when he looks up, I duck down. He wouldn't necessarily recognize my car. Then I realize he's not looking in my direction at all. He's looking back the way he came, and a certain resolve comes over his face, and he's headed back. Back to the scene of the crime, perhaps. This time, he's walking instead of running.

These are residential blocks in midmorning in what looks to be a depressed area. I bet no one goes anywhere in midmorning. This place comes alive at night, with drug deals, probably. This is just the kind of neighborhood Thad should be avoiding. It's a trigger.

But he clearly hasn't been avoiding anything that's bad for him. I know that look. He's emaciated. He's been lying to me about being clean these past months.

He'll never be clean. Never.

I'm filled with a hopelessness and fury that can't even be expressed as I follow him back toward Dawn's apartment. I'm wondering if the meth has done something to his hearing because he never turns toward the car, and while it's a luxury machine, it's not soundless.

We're almost there, and that's when he spins and sees me. I slam my brakes, and he narrows his eyes. He doesn't look entirely surprised, is the strange thing. But he does look hateful.

He hates me. After all he's put me through and everything I've sacrificed-even right now, I'm here for him, to pry him from Dawn's clutches-and still, he hates me.

He steps out in front of my car, and he bangs on the hood. He's yelling that I need to get out of here, that I don't belong, not here, and not in his life. He's cursing prolifically, even though he knows I abhor that. It's because I abhor it. Another slam on the hood.

He'll never be clean. The addiction is a monster that's devoured my Thaddeus, my little boy, the one who had dreams and potential and a heart. This is the monster he will always be.

That's what I'm thinking, but what I'm not thinking is: Reverse. Then put your foot on the gas.

I swear, I never once thought that.

57.

Dawn

I'm chasing after Rob, down the flight of steps, and he stops so suddenly that I nearly run into him. "Oh my G.o.d," he says.

Thad is half-under a large Audi sedan, and he's not moving. Miranda is kneeling on the ground by the front tire, her hands over her face, genuflecting. Sobs escape from between her fingers.

"Did you already call 911?" Rob asks Miranda. She shakes her head, panicked. That's my first clue.

Miranda is not what I expected. She's wearing a long-sleeved T-s.h.i.+rt, jeans, and sneakers. Her hair looks like it hasn't been washed or brushed today or maybe yesterday either, and she's wearing no makeup. I was sure she'd be Botoxed to within an inch of her life, but she's got deep frown lines beside her mouth and pleats in her forehead.

"It's you," she says.

"And you," I say.

Rob ducks under the car and reports, "He's breathing."

"Thank G.o.d," Miranda says. But there's something in her tone . . . that's my second clue.

Having met Thad, I get it. I really do. I feel like I get her. Yes, her grief is real, but there's nothing simple about it, or about her. I've misjudged her all this time, same as Thad has. Miranda has layers. She's more conflicted than I could ever be, until I have kids of my own.

Now that I'm looking at her, I can see so clearly that she's not the one I've been mad at all along.

The one I've been mad at is me. I married Rob to become someone else, and I did the getaways for the same reason, and here I am, still me. All that darkness insisted on coming out anyway. In fact, I don't see how I can be any brighter until I'm on my own. I can't be a good person by osmosis. It'll never work.

Rob is talking to the dispatcher now, describing the situation. "An ambulance is on the way," he mouths to Miranda.

"I don't know if I should touch him," she says to me. "Should I hold his hand? You know him. Would he want me to?"

I say, with full compa.s.sion, "Probably not."

"Would he want you to?"

"Maybe. But I can't." I indicate Rob with my eyes. Just because my marriage is ending, that doesn't mean I need to hurt him any more than I already have. I married him under false pretenses, even if I didn't know it at the time. I was digging for gold, of a sort. I wanted the Thiebold golden aura, the one bred of years of care and love. But instead of absorbing those rays, after a time I seemed to refract them. Rob has begun to take on my worst qualities, and while they were the very qualities I'd hoped to eradicate by marrying him, they've actually grown stronger. We've begun to make each other worse instead of better.

"If this is it," Miranda says, her eyes glistening, "if these are his last minutes, he needs to know he's not alone. Doesn't he?"

"He's still breathing. He'll be okay. Thad's the type with nine lives."

Miranda begins to shake. "I don't know what happened. How did all this happen?" I can see she doesn't just mean hitting Thad with her car. That's the culmination. I feel her pain, and her bewilderment. Neither of us meant to get here. We'll be intertwined, forever.

"It was an accident," I say. "I saw the whole thing from my kitchen window. He ran in front of your car. I'll tell the police."

The look on Miranda's face-that's the third clue. She meant to do it, and she didn't. I'm intimately familiar with that. We're more the same than we are different. Otherwise, it would never have come to this. One of us would have turned back long ago, given in, but instead, we kept driving right for each other.

She wants him to wake up and be okay, and she wants this to be the end of the whole ordeal of having been his mother.

"If he wakes up," I say, "I'll tell them to check his blood alcohol level. They should screen for other drugs, too. He's an unreliable witness under the best circ.u.mstances." I catch her eye meaningfully. "Not like you and me."

I'm going to lie for Miranda, because it's the right thing to do. I owe her that much.

Miranda's been set up her whole marriage by her husband, Mr. Hyde. Her relations.h.i.+p with her son was doomed to fail. Perhaps Dr. Jekyll doesn't know about Mr. Hyde, and all the sabotage occurred during blackouts. He might not have any memory, but Thad sure does.

Poor Thad. Poor Miranda.

I know that no matter how I explained it to Rob, he would never understand my decision to lie to the police. He'll never understand me, and if we stay together, I'll keep trying to be someone else for him. We have different moralities, Rob and me, but I do have morality. I do.

58.

Miranda

I'm in the surgical waiting room, all alone. There are a few blue pleather recliners, though I opt to sit in one of the matching straight-backed blue chairs that skirt the perimeter. The TV is tuned to a cartoon network, and there's a beautiful, sparkly princess of indeterminate race having adventures. I can't bring myself to look for the remote control; my legs wouldn't support me if I tried to stand up. Besides, what do you watch while the son you ran over with your car is in surgery? It's too late for Dr. Phil.

Thad has a closed head injury. That means I didn't crack his skull, which is good, but they need to put a bolt inside to monitor pressure in his brain cavity. They'll also drain some of the intracranial bleeding. "We'll do our best," the surgeon a.s.sured me. I can only hope he hasn't been drinking, and the anesthesiologist is well rested.

Thad can't die. He just can't. There's simply no way. I will not even entertain the thought.

But as soon as you try not to think something, you can think nothing else.

"I thought you might need this." I look up to see Dawn proffering my purse. "You left it behind in your car."

I leaped into the ambulance, and since then, I've been so beside myself, I didn't even realize . . .

I left my car in the middle of the street, keys still inside. Purse, too, apparently. Right next to the police, who were at the scene of what was presumed to be an accident.

If the police run any tests on the Audi, they'll see how fast I was moving at the time of the collision. There may be marks on the street to show that I backed up before I went forward, producing additional velocity. There must be forensic evidence, if they look for it.

They've had more than enough time to examine the Audi's exterior closely. Are they legally allowed to look inside? What would happen if they found an ax, stun gun, and pepper spray?

It's all for self-defense. That's what the man said at Walmart. It was in the Personal Safety department, a subsection of Home Improvement. A very small department, but they call it that for a reason. All it suggests is that I feared for my own safety, going into a neighborhood like Dawn's to retrieve my wayward son. That explains everything, except the ax.

Do not let Dawn see you panic.

"Thank you," I say, accepting the purse. I don't meet her eyes. I want to riffle through the contents, making sure everything's as it should be-nothing taken, nothing planted. This is, after all, the infamous Dawn Thiebold.

She must realize what I'm thinking. I've always been transparent. "Everything's in there. I'm not the type to take anything, contrary to what you might think." Her tone has no sharp edges. She seems at peace. Maybe she and Thad were doing drugs together.

This is neither here nor there, but Dawn's not as beautiful as I'd made her out to be. She's attractive, yes, but she has a lot of acne, and wears heavy makeup in order to (unsuccessfully) conceal it. She's trashy, in that tank top and skintight jeans. Well-proportioned, but short.

She takes the seat next to me, and I tense up. "I owe you an apology," she says. I keep my eyes on the floor and my shock to myself. "I should never have taken it to that level. I'll delete everything online."

I want to ask why the change of heart, what's in it for her, but I remain silent. It's probably good practice for me.

"You might not believe me, but I'm going to prove it to you. I told the police that I saw the accident. I said that Thad was behaving erratically, that he was drunk and probably high, and he ran out of my apartment when Rob came home." Now I have to glance at her, and what I see is a lot of pimples and an equivalent amount of sincerity. "I said you were here to help him, but he wasn't ready to accept help."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because it's true. Right? You've always meant to help him." Her blue eyes are peculiarly kind. This is not the woman I've come to know. This is not a woman I'm prepared to trust.

She's willing to lie for me, but it can't be out of the goodness of her heart. Not Dawn Thiebold.

There will be strings, probably expensive ones, and now that I've seen her husband's store and her neighborhood, I understand a little better. She didn't have an extra two hundred lying around to replace those sheets. She never had any business renting the Santa Monica house.

If I pay her off, I'm as bad as her, and as bad as Larry. No, I'm nothing like either one of them.

Whatever I've done, it was because I felt too much. I loved too much. That is surely not Dawn's problem, or Larry's.

I'm getting ahead of myself here. There's no reason to believe I'm even a suspect. A doc.u.mented drug addict ran in front of my car while inebriated. It's a much more plausible story than "Pillar of the Community Mows Down Addict Son." The former wouldn't even be a headline, only the latter.

I can hold my own with the police, if it comes to that. I'm a respectable citizen, a concerned mother. I would never try to kill my son. That isn't me. It's someone else. "Temporary insanity" is entirely apt.

This could be it, my fork in the road. Sell the Santa Monica house, start over somewhere new. I'm leaving Larry behind, that feels like a given.

He is still Thad's father, which means I should call and say that Thad's in surgery.

"Where's your husband?" I ask Dawn.

"I don't know. He's pretty upset with me right now."

Well, no wonder. But I'm not about to jab at her, not when she's managed to get the ultimate upper hand.

"There's something you should know," she says. "This wasn't your fault."

"That's what you told the police."

"No, I mean from way back. Thad held you responsible but he was wrong. He was responsible for his own actions, with an a.s.sist from your husband."

"Larry?" I can't even muster surprise, and that seems to surprise her.

"Ever since Thad was a little kid, Larry would go into his room late at night for drunken confessions."

"Which one was drunk?"

"Larry. But his confessions were more like complaints about you. About how you were impossible to please, and the only love you showed was fake, and how"-she lowers her voice-"you wouldn't let him admit that he killed that guy on the operating table. You wouldn't let him own up to it."

"What!" I exclaim.

She nods. "See, I knew that was c.r.a.p. But Thad totally believed it. I guess the conversations went on for years, and Thad came to really trust this dad who came to see him at night."

"But then ignored him pretty much the rest of the time." My head is spinning. I never saw this coming.

"Larry undermined your whole relations.h.i.+p with Thad. Any nice thing you did was chalked up to being fake, and any time you showed something negative, Thad thought that was the real you. You pretty much couldn't win. Mr. Hyde saw to that. You know, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?"

I'm speechless.

"And just so you know, Thad's been squatting in the Santa Monica house. He was behind the stained sheets."