“You think he ran our plates?” Mom asks.
We’re still pulled over with our hazards on. Stalling under a dim streetlight. Catching our breath and counting our blessings. For now.
“I’m sure we’d be in the backseat of that cop car right now if he did,” I answer. “He must have been trying to get us out of the way so he could speed off to some other crime scene.”
“Jesus.” Mom digs her nails into the front of her scalp and blinks really hard. “That was so close.”
We remain still in the aftershock for a few more moments.
“But you know?” she continues. “As scary as it was, a small part of me felt…”
“Relieved in a fucked-up kind of way?” I finish for her. “Me, too.”
“Something like that.”
“We need to turn ourselves in,” I say. “The next time a cop chases us, it probably won’t be a false alarm.”
“You’re right.” She turns her hazards off and pulls back onto the road. “This was a gift. We can still do it on our terms.”
“Maybe they’ll go easier on us because we’re going voluntarily,” I add. “Getting caught in a high-speed car chase would have definitely made things worse.”
“Listen to me,” Mom says. “I don’t care if it was your GPS text that got us caught or whatever.” Her voice is a straight line of determination. “When we tell the story, I’m taking full responsibility. Okay? You were there, but I lit the match. We’ll tell them you wanted to go straight to the cops, but I talked you out of it.”
I consider objecting, since the exact opposite is true. But there’s no use. In a few hours we’ll be talking to police, and she’ll tell the story this way whether I cooperate or not.
“Fine,” I say. “But you have to be extremely clear that it was an accident. We only wanted to —”
“I only wanted,” Mom interjects.
“You only wanted to burn some clothes in the tub. You’ve done it before with no issues, but didn’t realize it was a standalone tub without a shower.”
“I must have taken a million showers in that bathroom,” she laments. “And I didn’t put two and two together.”
“It was an emotional night.” I look down and spot Marco’s phone on the floor. I must have dropped it amid all the hoopla. “Want something else for us to freak out about? Marco’s phone is almost dead.”
Mom sighs. “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”
You might think this would cause us to spiral into yet another panic, but we just laugh instead. Our constant misfortune has finally become amusing.
“We have to call Nonna before it dies,” I say. “She’s probably such a mess.”
Mom recites her number from heart as I punch it in. I put the phone on speaker and hold it out in the space between us. Nonna picks up on the first ring.
“It’s me,” I say.
“And me,” Mom adds.
“Cristo Santo!” Nonna sounds like she’s actively being electrocuted. “Where are you? You know the police are looking for you? All day I’ve been worried sick, crying, thinking —”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “We couldn’t tell you where we were because we didn’t want you to get in trouble.”
“I knew this would happen,” Nonna shrieks. “I knew it. Ever since you called me the other night, I just knew.”
“Ma, stop freaking out.” Mom sounds more composed than she has in days. “We’re going to the police station and we’re gonna tell them the truth — it was an accident. My accident. Joey didn’t do anything.”
“Madon’ — Gianna Maria — do you have any idea how —”
“Nonna,” I interject. “We’re fine. We’ve been at Marco’s. He says we’ll probably just have to spend the night at the station and we’ll be home tomorrow.” The phone screen dims slightly. “Listen, Nonna. This phone is dying —”
“Don’t go to the police.” Her tone shifts from admonishment to desperation. “Come here first and we can figure out what to do. They arrested that medigan Richard.”
Nonna’s bombshell sucks all the air from the car.
“What?” Mom and I wheeze in unison.
My mind goes wild running through possible scenarios that might have led the fire to be pinned on Richard somehow. Maybe we expertly staged it to look like insurance fraud without even realizing it. Maybe he turned himself in because he was guilty of some other crime and didn’t want the arson investigation to blow it open. Maybe we’ve been touched by an angel.
“Money laundering.” Nonna sounds like she’s reading from a piece of paper. “It came out in the investigation, cops say.”
There goes my touched-by-an-angel theory. I guess I knew it was far-fetched. Clearly there are others in the world (cancer patients, etc.) far more deserving of divine intervention than a couple of arsonists from New Jersey.
“Oh, my God.” Mom hits the steering wheel. “Oh, my God! I knew his businesses were all sketchy.”
“You think this will help our case?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “I hope his ass rots in prison either way.”
“Wait,” I say. “What if Richard and I end up at the same jail?” I imagine myself having to shower in a big open locker room with a naked, angry Richard scrubbing his balls two drains away from me. The thought gives me a full-body shiver. “Together?”
Mom gasps. “Don’t put that thought out there —”
“Basta!” Nonna interrupts. I almost forgot she was still on speaker. “Don’t go to the police.” Her voice is laced with equal parts hope and despair. It’s clear she hasn’t gotten to the stage of acceptance that Mom and I are at yet. She’s probably still somewhere between denial and bargaining. “Come here first. We’ll think of something.”
“We’ve already thought of everything,” I tell her, recalling the conversation Mom and I just had about Monica. We can’t keep running from our mistakes. We need to face them, own them, and move on. “Trust me. We have to just confess —”
“Joey, stop it!” The frustration level in her voice ramps up to a hundred. “Just come —”
The phone goes black and turns off before she can finish her sentence. Everything remains in this state of unfinished quiet until we finally approach the on-ramp to I-87.
“So we’re really doing this,” Mom whispers. Mostly to herself, I think. “I’m nervous.”
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I offer. “Marco said it’s like —”
“Marco said?”
“Yeah.” I sit up. “He told me all about the time he got arrested.”
She takes her eyes off the dark stretch of highway for a second to shoot me an apologetic look. We’re the only car on the road for miles.
“I know you’re not going to believe this,” she says. “But I really haven’t kept that many secrets from you over the years. Honestly. It’s just all this history with Marco. It’s… I don’t know. I think I wanted to shield you from it?”
“You don’t have to explain, Mom. It’s cool.”
She keeps explaining anyway. “I never wanted you thinking you were the product of some kind of tragic situation — after everything I had been through that year, you know? The parking lot fight was just another disaster to add to the list. But you — you were the opposite of a disaster. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. If I could go back in time to my junior year of high school, I wouldn’t change a single thing. All the bullshit — everything.” She chokes up. “I’d keep that list of disasters just the way it was. Because it led to a fuckin’ miracle.”
“Thanks.” My mind flashes back to what she said during our fight on the hill earlier. Hurt people hurt people. Maybe it is a cliché. But it’s a true one. “I’m sorry I blew up at you earlier. You didn’t deserve that.”
“I love you.” She rubs the back of my neck with her free hand. “We’re gonna be fine.”
Despite all the reasons not to, I believe her. “I love you, too.”
We ride along in silence until we catch up to a car that’s going about forty miles per hour — on an empty highway in the middle of the night.
“This bitch,” Mom scoffs as she passes it on the right. Her shift in tone makes me laugh through the tears I didn’t realize I’d been crying. “Get the fuck out of the left lane!”