I press my nose against the glass of Marco’s porch door and squint into the living room, but there are no signs of life. I walk around to the front of the house and discover that Nonna’s car — which hasn’t moved from the side of the lawn ever since we got here on Tuesday — is gone. Along with Marco’s truck.
So they definitely went somewhere. But not together.
My hand shakes as I attempt to open the front door and discover it’s also locked. Marco’s house has been wide open all damn week — I barely even noticed he had locks — and now all of a sudden the place is Fort Knox. What the fuck?
Panic engulfs me as I reach into my pocket and remember — for the ten thousandth time today — that I don’t have a phone. Fear rockets into my chest as I realize just how alone I am. I have a sour gut feeling that Mom didn’t leave willingly. She knows we can’t text each other. If she was gonna take off for even a few minutes, she would have found me at Will’s house or down at the dock and given me a heads-up.
I drop down onto the splintery wood of the front porch and bury my face in my hands. I have nothing. All I can do is sit here. Waiting. Dreading. Assuming the worst.
The back of my throat constricts as I try to take a brea — oh. Okay. So now breathing is a whole ordeal. Every time I think I have a good inhale going, my heart skips and my chest tightens. All I can manage are these shallow, unsatisfying half-breaths. My eyes feel like bombs waiting to explode. But they won’t. The muscles around them just keep contracting. It’s like the dry-heaving version of crying.
I try to calm down by dreaming up possible non-nuclear explanations for their disappearance. They just went to run some errands. Separately. He’s buying groceries for dinner tonight and she’s… getting an impromptu pedicure or something.
You know what? I can’t do this anymore.
My ability to appease myself by imagining wildly improbable best-case scenarios is officially on its deathbed. I have to accept that this entire situation is and has always been a brakeless freight train headed directly toward a five-thousand-foot cliff.
It was a stupid idea to come here. People can’t just start brand new lives as if their old ones never existed. It was a stupid idea to hook up with Will. Arrest warrants don’t just go away after you fuck someone new. It was a stupid idea to throw our phones in the lake. It might have bought us a little more time off the grid, but we’re not safe. We never have been.
Every minute on this porch-shaped electric chair feels like an hour. I don’t even know what I’m waiting for. I almost just want the cops to show up — with Mom already in the backseat — and haul us off to jail. At least then I’d know how this is all going to turn out. At least then we’d be together.
An impossible amount of these excruciating minute-hours go by before the silence is finally interrupted by the sound of a car engine in the distance.
Please be Mom.
I pull myself up and look out at the wooded car path.
Please be Mom. Please be Mom. Please be Mom.
It’s Marco.
He pulls his black Chevy pickup into the gravelly driveway as I keep looking out ahead, hoping she’s right behind him. I’m praying for a miracle I don’t deserve.
“I don’t know where she is,” Marco says as he steps out of the truck. There’s a plague of worry all over his face. “I lost her.”
“What happened?”
“She got in the car and sped off. She was driving so erratically. I don’t know. I followed her until I got stuck at a stoplight.” He throws his hands up in resignation. “She snapped.”
“You just let her drive off?” I scream. “You should’ve run the light!”
“I’ve been driving around town looking for her for the past two hours.” He fumbles for his key and walks around me toward the door. “For all I know she jumped on the highway. She could be halfway to Bayonne right now.”
This suggestion knocks the wind out of me. Why does he think she would head home without me?
“She left you a note,” he answers before I even ask.
“She —” is the only syllable I can squeeze out of my rapidly constricting throat before it closes in entirely. I can’t even take any of those crappy shallow breaths anymore. My knees buckle, which soon gives way to full-body paralysis.
“Whoa. Joey.” Marco pushes the door open and slides his arm under mine in an effort to prevent me from collapsing. “Here.”
He helps me wobble inside, sits me down at the kitchen counter, and forces me to drink a glass of water. The feeling of hydration illuminates every organ it touches on its way down to my stomach. It brings me about ten percent back to life — not quite enough to regain feeling in my extremities, but more than I expected from a few ounces of Brita.
“Where’s the note?” I ask.
He grabs a folded piece of paper from the counter and slides it to me.
Joey,
I’m so sorry for not saying good-bye, but I knew you’d try to stop me.
You were right. I should have steered the ship. You deserve so much more than what I’ve given you. If I could go back in time and fix the past, I would. But I can’t. I can only try to give you a better future. So I have to do this. I’ll tell Nonna to come get you as soon as it’s safe.
I love you so much!!!
Mom
What was she even trying to do with that last line? There is nothing “I love you so much!!!” about any of this. I could maybe understand “I love you so much…” or even “I love you so much.” But three exclamation points? The enthusiasm is entirely uncalled for.
“I keep thinking about all the horrible things I said to her last night,” Marco says. “I didn’t mean any of it. Obviously she’s been a great mother to you. One of a kind.” He pauses. “You don’t think she’s gonna hurt herself, do you?”
“She would never,” I say with certainty.
I can see how Marco could interpret the note that way. I mean, who writes notes in the first place? But this is very clearly an I’m-going-to-jail-for-both-of-us-and-I-can’t-text-you-so-here’s-a-note note. She’s been wanting to take the fall for this from the beginning. She thinks she’s doing the right thing. She thinks she’s saving me.
I just don’t understand how she deluded herself into believing her confession will somehow undo all the evidence that points to my guilt. There are warrants out for both of us. It was my phone that sent the GPS signal to Luke. The cops aren’t just going to shrug it off. Well, his mom says it was all her, so… case closed!
I wish I could scream some sense into her.
But it’s too late.
“Something’s been off with her,” Marco stammers. “I was in my office working all day, and every time I came out here she was just quiet and dead-eyed on the couch. Wouldn’t even talk to me.”
It’s clear she hasn’t told Marco anything about why we came here, and now that I think about it — now that she’s not here — I wish she did. I wish we did. I wish we told him everything the second we pulled into his gravelly driveway. How did we expect him to be able to help us if we weren’t even going to tell him the truth about why we were barging back into his life?
“She didn’t say where she was going?” I ask.
“No,” he responds. “I don’t know what the hell is going on. I saw you two fighting down on the hill earlier.”
Of all the mistakes I’ve made this week, that fight might’ve been the worst. If I had just stayed with her instead of running off with Will, I could have talked her out of this. Or at least gone with her. We could have decided on a path together.
“I’m not stupid,” Marco says. “I’ve known something was up this whole time. You two just show up out of nowhere on Tuesday. You’ve been acting —”
“We burned a house down,” I blurt. It feels like I’ve just ripped off a full-body Band-Aid. My skin can finally breathe again. “Monday night. It was an accident.”
Marco’s eyes widen with shock. This clearly wasn’t the “something” he thought he knew was “up.”
“Are you serious?” he asks. “What house?”
“Richard’s. Her ex. Did she tell you about him?” I don’t even give him time to answer. “There are warrants out for both of us in Jersey.” Everything in me shudders. This is the first time I’ve acknowledged the truth to anyone other than Mom. It suddenly feels realer than it has all week. Even realer than when I saw our picture on the news this morning. “That’s what this note is about. She’s going to turn herself in.” I slide it back toward him and break open all over his wooden butcher block countertop. “I’m so scared. I don’t know how we let it get this far.”
Marco looks at me like I just told him… well, the truth.
“Jesus Christ, Joey. So that’s why you came here. To go on the lam.” His face is clouded with the smog of a million sad revelations. “I’m so stupid. She never wanted to be here. She needed a place to hide. If you didn’t burn” — his voice slides down into a manic drawl — “a house down… this week would have never even happened.”
“That’s not true.” I honestly believe that Mom loves Marco. She just doesn’t think she deserves him. But either way — that was so not the point of me making this confession. I did it so that he could help me figure out what to do next. “What am I gonna do?” I ask. “I have to just go home and turn myself in. Don’t I?”
“You can’t keep hiding from a warrant. That will only make it worse.” He rubs his eyes and blinks really hard until his system stabilizes. “How bad was the damage? How did they find out it was you?”
My chest thumps as I fill him in on each tiny detail that carried us from “drunk on the couch crying over our cheating boyfriends” to “rain-drenched on the dock launching our phones into a thirty-mile-long lake.” He absorbs them like a horrified therapist.
“So what do you think?” I ask. “Am I gonna be thrown in jail for the rest of my life?”
“No.” Marco doesn’t quite smile, but his tone is light enough that I’m vaguely comforted. He pulls his phone out. “You haven’t Googled it yet?”
“I’ve been too afraid,” I say. Like a total dumbass. “In case our search histories were pulled or something.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that at this point.” He taps into his phone for answers. “It looks like you could get off with anything from a few years’ probation… up to… twenty-five years in prison.”
“So twenty-five years in prison.” I will plan only for worst-case scenarios from here on out. “I’ll be forty-three when I get out.”
“You didn’t hurt anybody in your fire, right?”
I nod.
“So it’s just property,” he says. “That’s probably a good thing. I’m sure it will all depend on this Richard guy. And on the judge. It will probably take weeks — or months — before you even know exactly what your sentence is gonna be.”
“What happens while I wait?” I ask. Even though I’m afraid I might not want to know. “Do I have to wait in jail?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I didn’t have to when I —”
“What?” I almost choke on the water I just attempted to take a sip of. “You were arrested? When? For what? How?”
“Your mother never told you?”
“No!”
He hesitates for a moment as if he’s considering not telling me.
“I got into a fight,” he finally says. “I beat the crap out of your father.”