Chapter 43
Chapter
Forty-Three
The front door slams as I enter my parents’ house.
“Jillian,” my mom calls from the kitchen, “dinner is almost ready.” She comes around the corner. “Your shoes...” Her expression falls. “What’s the matter?” she asks as she reaches out to me.
My shoes are plastered in dust and dirt from the easement. My eyes are moist and my cheeks covered in tears, yet I can’t pinpoint the emotions surging through me.
I lift the orange glass.
“What is that?” Mom asks.
“I believe that it’s part of a turn signal.”
“Well,” she says, leading me to the kitchen and opening the trash bin, “throw that away.”
“I need to know...”
“Jillian Thorne, that is enough. Throw that piece of trash away.”
My hands begin to quake. “Mom, did you hit a deer with Dad’s truck?”
She reaches for the orange casing, and instead of the trash, she tosses it in the sink. Before I can stop her, she turns on the water and hits the switch for the garbage disposal. The grinding glass screams as it dies its final death.
“Mom?”
When she turns my way, tears are falling from her blue eyes.
Yet I know her emotion isn’t sadness. It’s pent-up frustration finally being released.
“I told you to stop.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I told you not to dig. I begged you. And look what happened? Look what happened to Julie and you...to Marty.”
I can’t stop asking questions.
This is why I came back.
To learn secrets, even those I don’t want to know.
“Mom, what happened with Dad’s truck?” I ask.
She turns her face from side to side. “No one else is home,” she says, “and we’ll never discuss this again.”
“Mom, did you hit a deer?”
“No.” She straightens her neck. “And you wouldn’t be asking if you believed I did.”
I lean forward as if her response is a punch in my gut, and my air is gone. Breathlessly, I whisper. “You...hit Craig.”
It isn’t a question, yet I wait for her answer.
“I didn’t set out to do it, Jillian. I didn’t.” She begins to pace the kitchen floor. “I was driving, and I’d just found out that he and Julie had been together.” She tightens her jaw. “After you...I swore...never again. And he...they...”
“Mom” —I reach for her shoulders— “what happened?”
“He was exercising—running. It was early. I took something to Ollie’s and dropped it off in Lawton before work.
I was coming back to Blue Gil on County Road 62.
The sun hadn’t risen, and the rain was falling.
..there was fog. You know how the windshield wipers are on that old truck.
..” She is rambling. “...he was there, running along the side of the road. I thought about you, how your whole life changed. The baby.” Her shoulders sag.
“My grandchild—a boy I’ll never be able to hold.
” She takes another breath. “I thought about Julie, and the revelation that he—that man—was the reason she and Austin broke up, that he was the reason she didn’t want to go away to college. ..Another life changed because of him.”
Mom takes a step away as anguish fills her blue eyes. “It’s my fault. All of it is my fault.”
“If it was an accident, you could tell Sheriff Manes.”
“I did. After I...after Craig fell...I stopped. He was lying there, and the rain was coming harder. I wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead.
I pushed on him, and he rolled into the swale.
” She’s pacing back and forth. “I panicked. I couldn’t pick him up.
So, I left. As I started driving away...
there was so much guilt. All of it. About him, about you and Julie with him.
I decided that I couldn’t live with what I did, with any of it—I deserved to pay.
When I got near the administration building, Joseph was at the high school directing traffic.
I went to him. The rain was falling harder.
In the middle of the street, I told him what happened. ”
“What did he say?”
“He told me to calm down, to act normal. He said he’d go see if Craig was seriously hurt.”
“But he didn’t.”
“He did—I think.” She takes another deep breath. “Joe came to me and said Craig wasn’t where I indicated.”
“Wait, Ollie said something about looking for the deer.”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t completely honest. I didn’t want them to find Craig.”
“But he was found.”
“He was, about a half mile downhill. The swales fill fast. It seems that from where I left him, he washed downstream.” She wrings her hands. “Joe knew—he knows. Everything.”
“About how Craig died?”
“About everything.” She exaggerates the word.
“Joe was on the search-and-screen committee with me and others. He knew that we shouldn’t have hired Craig.
Joe knew we made a mistake. He knew about Theodore’s daughter, about you, and why both of you left town.
He probably knew about others—at least rumors. ”
Theodore’s daughter?
Sydney?
“You weren’t the first.” My sister was referring to Sydney Morton.
“You’re special.” Keith said I was the only one to have a child.
“Mom, did Sydney Morton...? Was she pregnant?”
“No, at least not that I know of.”
Sighing, I lean against the kitchen counter as my mind tries to make sense of this revelation, how Craig died and verification of what Keith said. “So, the committee was informed about Craig’s past transgressions before he was hired?”
“Yes.”
“Keith knew. He’s the one who sent you the police report.”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. You hired him anyway. And it shows that Keith—”
“That he what?” she interrupted. “That he had a vendetta against his brother. Do you think that will help his case?”
My stomach twists as bile threatens to move upward.
Mom steps backward and crumples, falling to her knees.
“I’m so sorry, Jillian. I’ve lived with the regret of bringing him to Blue Gil since he arrived, since you left and were forced to make terribly difficult decisions.
..” She looks up at me. “Don’t you see? The opportunity to right a horrible wrong presented itself, and I took it.
It was a split-second decision that created more death and destruction.
I thought, in that millisecond, that if he were gone.
..” She’s weeping as she speaks, her words punctuated by gasps for air.
“I’m sorry. Craig’s death… brought Keith to Blue Gil.
Everything… everything is my fault. I wanted.
.. to stop his hire. I didn’t. How many others would suffer? ”
“Sheriff Manes?”
Her words are barely audible. “He was the one who talked me into agreeing to the hire. When Craig informed us that he was marrying Serena, Joe thought Craig changed his ways and would be good for Blue Gil. Joe wasn’t the only one.
They thought he was our best prospect—a Big Ten football star willing to coach at our little school.
” She gasps for breath. “Joe was the one who came to me, persuaded me.”
I consider telling her what I learned, that Craig didn’t die from his injuries but from drowning in the ditch, but as I stare at my mother, I can’t. I’m not sure if the information will help or hurt her. She—like so many of us—has suffered enough.
I reach for my mom’s hand and help her stand. For a moment, we embrace.
It’s as I pull back that I say, “I’m going to the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek Airport today and finding an earlier flight. Echo wants me back.”
The tears have subsided, yet my mother’s breathing is erratic. She reaches for a paper towel and wipes her eyes and nose. “You’re not going to tell anyone?”
I shake my head. “Someone once told me that sometimes the answers are right in front of us, but we don’t want to see them.”
Mom reaches out and pulls me into another hug. “I’m so sorry, for everything.” Her words hit the sensitive skin of my neck in warm puffs.
As I wrap my arms around her and say, “Me too, Mom,” the metaphoric pieces of the puzzle come into view, like pieces in Tetris, falling and fitting. “Mom?”
She looks at me with glassy eyes.
“Did Craig and Serena ever travel to Marquette?”
“I don’t know. I think sometimes for the holidays.”
The end of November is Thanksgiving.
“Thank you, Jillian, for not saying anything. Blue Gil has moved on. It’s time we do too.”