“And what?” my mom said, shaking me, still listening fixedly. Our trio was immediately left to silence, the officer’s face saying she already thought me to be a lying delinquent, while my mother’s intense stare told me the opposite. She believed me, or at least she wanted to.
“He was there,” I said, forging on. “Over the edge. He got stuck under my car.”
I waved to it. The officer shook her head.
“Look,” she said. She pointed her flashlight over. I wasn’t going to oblige her mockery.
“Go on,” she told me. “Go, look again. There’s nobody—”
“Shut up!” my mom burst, so harshly that the officer gave a small jump. My mom let go of me and snatched the flashlight from the officer, glaring up at her as she did. She was a kitten compared to the buffalo of Officer Delaney, but I saw the officer shrink back an inch.
“I don’t pay taxes for you to badger my son,” my mom hissed.
She went to the cliff’s end, swinging the light in front of her. The officer and I stared after her, neither of us able to say or do anything as we watched the light go side to side, my mom’s head looking down at the tire tracks then over the edge.
She studied the rocks below for far longer than anyone could have been compelled, even someone who truly wanted to believe me. Though I hoped that she would spot even a hint that a dead man had been there, in the end her eyes just continued searching. My shoulders fell when I saw her blink and a dejected expression overtake her face.
She turned to us, appearing exhausted.
The flashlight was handed back to the officer without another word. In the silence I heard volumes of defeat. My throat went dry, and I didn’t even feel the pain in my arm anymore.
“He…was…” I said. My mom didn’t reply, only starting back through the woods toward the road. The officer, smirking slightly at us, nodded for me to go ahead.
I followed my mom, buried in devastation. The beam of the flashlight lit the way from the officer behind me, who was likely taking up the rear in case I decided to run again. When we reached the road, the paramedic greeted me with crossed arms. Everyone had his or her arms crossed at me now: Michael Asher, the boy who’d made up the story of nearly being killed to cover for wrecking his car. That was the type of thing a normal person would do—the same type of normal idiot I’d always tried to never be.
My mom stopped near her minivan, running her fingers through her hair.
“Do I need to fill out anything?” she asked, now timid, now set back into her place—the lion caged again because I had led her to a dead end. There was nothing left for us to do. The paramedics deemed me well enough to skip a hospital visit, probably because they were tired of dealing with me. The police told us that my car would be collected and scrapped. I winced, because as inappropriate a time to think of it was, I remembered my $2,500 camera was still somewhere in the car, soon to be smashed and shredded and melted.
My mom and I got into the minivan, but she didn’t start to drive. She stared straight ahead at the scene before us as the officers began packing up. The road, tired now of all the action, had fallen asleep again, and even across the street barely showed any more disruption.
“Really, Michael,” she said.
I didn’t reply.
“Really?” she pressed.
“I know what happened,” I insisted.
“Shut up about the man!” she exploded at me. There it was. I was finally going to hear it now.
“Seriously!” she said. “You could have sneaked out without getting caught. I’ve been awake the past three hours waiting to hear you get home, and instead I get a call from the police!”
I blinked. That was not at all what I’d been expecting to hear. She’d been awake all this time? Then she knew I’d been going out… she knew?
I opened my mouth to splutter a protest but she held up her hand.
“No, I’ve had enough,” she told me. “You’ve made this impossible on me. Last week, I completely ignored you sneaking out at two in the morning, pretty much making an earthquake of noise on the stairs. Not to mention the night before that, when your keys were louder than my alarm clock.”
I’d made noise with my keys? All of this was jaw-dropping news to me. How in the world was I such a miserable failure at sneaking out? And she’d known all this time!
“You go out the door at midnight and forget to lock it,” she went on. “And I can’t just leave it that way—not in Arleta—so I have to lock it behind you, and stay awake watching out the window for you to come back so I can unlock it again before you notice. And all this time, I’m like—Cheryl, don’t say a word. Don’t get on to him. He’s spreading his wings like teenagers do. Except my teenager meets adults in the middle of the night and brings home money for it.”
Crime after crime was being piled onto me at once. All this time that I’d thought I’d been cleverly getting out under her nose, she’d been two steps ahead of me. She’d practically been covering up my tracks for me.
She sighed. “I’ve done so well at this for years now. But the car…I just can’t ignore the car. You crashed a car. You ran a car over the edge of a cliff, and now it’s just impossible for me to act like that didn’t happen. Why, Michael? Why would you do that?”
She lifted her shoulders in exasperation, and any words I might have prepared in my defense raced out of my open mouth like butterflies. One of the officers glanced toward the minivan, but seeing the pantomime of what appeared to be my mother’s fiery wrath, he grinned and continued his work.
“I… I don’t know,” I stammered.
“You don’t know?” she said. She laughed, like my reply was absurd.
“You’re a genius, and you don’t know why you crashed your car,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you didn’t know something before.”
“I know it happened,” I said, trying to pick up the pieces of my story that her revelation had shattered to bits. She rubbed her temples, trying to squeeze the tension out.
“I know the man tried to kill me,” I continued. “I know exactly what I saw. I didn’t make that up. And that’s how the car crashed.”
She sighed, releasing her fury and confusion. At least she’d gotten all of her yelling out. Even though she couldn’t read eyes like I could, she had a way of telling things from my face. I wished I could have just told her what she wanted to hear, and she knew that, which was why I saw her expression soften.
“Come on,” she said. “I want to believe you. So you better not be lying to me.”
She studied my face for a few seconds. Her lips twisted up.
“Maybe,” she said, “you just think it happened. Maybe you hit your head and now you’ve imagined all that stuff when really, it’s all from delirium.”
A weak response, especially from her—mental alarms shouted at me to protest. I knew that if I did she would believe me, and might even jump right out of the van that very minute and go with me to look for clues the police had missed. That was the way my mom was. She’d figure it out based on my word, and ask for evidence later.
But the last officer had just started her car and was driving off, and my mom and I were the only ones left. It was late. So I chose to lie.