I was never arrested or charged with a criminal act, but I was sued by Michael’s parents a few months later, which left plenty of time for made-up stories to spread through town about how I’d passed out during that night’s basketball practice, how I’d behaved after the accident. At the civil trial, other parents lined up to testify that I’d stumbled out of the gym before driving my own daughter home. A couple guys who’d been at the station that night couldn’t remember if they’d smelled anything on my breath or not, but they said they were encouraged not to test me, and didn’t because I outranked them.
By the time the jury found against me I’d already been given the option of resigning from the force-encouraged to resign is probably a better way to put it-and we’d already lost a lot of money to lawyers. The realization that we’d be paying back Michael’s parents for the rest of our lives was a stark one. But there was still the overwhelming feeling that I’d gotten away with something that I shouldn’t have, and I couldn’t help but believe that Tina felt it too: I didn’t spend a second in jail, I was still alive, my daughter was still alive. In some ways, I had gotten away with something. But I still wear that guilt like a heavy winter coat because when something like that happens, when a kid would otherwise be alive if it wasn’t for you, you never really “get away with it” because it never really goes away.
If my work or my sleeplessness or our arguing caused rifts in our marriage, then the night of the accident was like a boulder rolling down a mountain and splashing all the water out of a pond that once upon a time only had little ripples to worry about. But we hung on as long as we could. I probably held on longer than she did, probably longer than was healthy for either of us-probably longer than was healthy for Jessica.
The three of us were never the same. Nothing was.
Easter Quillby
CHAPTER 10
My eyes opened to the sound of the car’s engine turning off. The sun was coming up, and I saw that we’d parked in front of a Waffle House. Wade was sitting up in the front seat, staring at me like he’d been waiting on me to wake up. Ruby still had her eyes closed beside me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re almost there.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“Myrtle Beach,” he said.
I looked over at Ruby to make sure she was still asleep and wasn’t just pretending so that she could listen to what we were saying. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Because neither one of us has ever been to the beach before, and if you’re not telling the truth-”
“I’m telling the truth,” he whispered, “and you need to start believing me.” He nodded toward Ruby. “I ain’t asking you to trust me just for my own sake,” he said. “I’m asking you to do it for your sister. You don’t know how much she looks up to you and how much she wants to be like you.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you because I’m trying to do right, even if I can’t change the past, even if I can’t make up for lost time or undo all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I just want another chance to be y’all’s dad, but if you’ve already made up your mind that you don’t want me to be yours then I understand. But I’m asking you to let Ruby make up her own mind about what she wants.”
“I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” I said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because somebody’s looking for you. He came to school looking for me too. I saw him out in the woods. He asked if you were my dad. I said no, but he didn’t believe me. He knew who I was.”
He took his baseball hat off and ran his fingers through his hair, and then he put it back on. He tried to smile. “What did he look like?”
By the time I’d finished describing the man’s eye, his voice, and how big he’d been, Wade’s face had gone white. “Do you know who he is?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Is he a bad guy?”
“Yes, but he won’t find us.” He looked from me to Ruby, where she was still asleep beside me. “We just have to trust each other and take care of each other,” he said. “Can you trust me?”
I nodded my head yes.
“Thank you,” he said. “We’ll be okay, and we’re going to have a good time. Who knows, you might even change your mind about me.” He smiled, and then he opened his door and climbed out.
“Don’t count on it,” I whispered.
A couple hours later Wade stopped the car and parked it in front of an old garage he’d found after stopping at a pay phone, and then he turned around and looked at me and Ruby. “If y’all could paint a car any color you wanted, what color would you paint it?”
“Pink!” Ruby screamed. After getting to Myrtle Beach, we’d stopped by a store called Wings, and Wade had gone in and bought us some new clothes while we waited in the car. Ruby’d taken off her socks and shoes and was slipping her feet into a pair of pink flip-flops; neither one of us had ever worn a pair before.
“It might look funny for a man to drive a pink car,” Wade said.
“What about red?” I asked.
“Red might be better,” Wade said. He winked at me like we were sharing some kind of secret. “Wait here.”
“Where you going?” Ruby asked.
“I’m going to see about turning this brown car red,” he said. He rolled the windows down a little and climbed out. “Y’all stay in the car.”
“Okay,” we both said at the same time. We watched him walk into what looked like a little office beside the garage. Ruby opened one of the Wings bags Wade had tossed in the backseat, and I opened the other one. We started going through all the clothes he’d just bought for us: a pink bathing suit for Ruby and a red one for me; two matching white T-shirts with Myrtle Beach spray-painted on them, You Can’t Touch This written across the bottom in cursive. There were shorts too: a pink pair for Ruby and blue ones for me.
Wade had said we were going to the beach next, so we went ahead and put on those bathing suits and then slipped the shorts and T-shirts on over them. It was the first time I could remember putting on clothes that nobody had ever owned before me.
Ruby had gotten quiet, and I knew she was thinking about saying something, but she wasn’t sure whether I’d like it or not. “What’s Miss Crawford going to do when she finds out we’re gone?” she finally said.
“She’s already found out, Ruby,” I said. “School started a couple hours ago.”
“Do you think she’s worried?”
“Don’t think about that,” I said. “We don’t live there anymore.”
“Maybe we should call and tell her we’re okay,” she said. Her eyes were looking past me, and I turned and saw that she was staring at a pay phone that sat by the sidewalk in front of the garage.
“No, Ruby, we can’t call anybody,” I said. “We can’t tell anybody where we are.”
“But what if they’re scared?”
“Do you want to move to Alaska?” I asked. “Or do you want us to be split up and sent to different homes? You want Wade to go to jail?” She shook her head. “That’s what’ll happen if we call home.” She sat back and stared at the headrest in front of her. I wondered what was taking Wade so long.
“It’s just-” Ruby started to say.
“Stop it, Ruby,” I said. “Stop it. You’re the one who was so happy to see him last night. Now we’re all here, and there’s no way we’re going back. So put all that feeling bad for people out of your mind.”
A few minutes later, the three of us were sitting on a bench out in front of the garage, waiting for a taxi. Wade had gotten a black gym bag out of the trunk, and me and Ruby had stuffed our nightgowns, underwear, and socks and shoes into the Wings bags. The sun was bright and hot, one of those days where the sky looked white.