by Jeff Abbott
It’s small, Lindsay had said, frowning.
Cozy, Brenda answered, thinking, An artist’s garret is going to be even smaller, honey.
She turned her face toward the pillow, did the math in her head; she could just squeeze out the tuition and the mortgage. The car was old but serviceable. She could even watch YouTube videos on how to repair it herself. She turned over. Two a.m. Then she did the math for how much sleep she could get before her next shift as a paramedic. The bed still felt empty without Rick, but she had, finally, gotten used to his absence.
She closed her eyes, the torture of the math done for the night, and fell asleep. She dreamed of walking through a vast glass house. She reached for a sculpture of delicate crystal, glowing with light.
She heard the sound first, the breaking of glass, and thought she was still in her dream. Brenda Hobson sat up; no more sound. A distant shattering, maybe next door. The empty, new, unsold houses. She’d heard people would break into them to steal the copper wiring and resell it. They weren’t her houses, but this was her neighborhood, her new best hope, and the thought of thievery on a house belonging to a future neighbor made her mad. She’d call the police—
The smoke alarms blared.
She opened her bedroom door.
Flames were spreading across the den’s carpet like wind, surging, and the window beyond the fire was shattered. On the other side of the room was the staircase leading up to her children’s bedrooms.
“Hunter, Lindsay!” she screamed. She couldn’t get through the fire to them. She ran back into her bedroom, forced open the window, climbed out into her front yard. A strange calm kicked in; her training, to do her job in the midst of chaos. She picked up a heavy white stone from the edge of her planned flowerbed, and lobbed it at the upstairs bedroom window. Hunter’s. After a moment he came to the window, his face twisted in panic.
“Get your sister and climb out onto the roof,” she screamed. “Now. You can’t get down the stairs.”
He nodded and vanished back into the rising smoke. The smoke. It would all be rushing upward, toward her kids, choking them, suffocating them…
She turned and ran along the length of her house.
She saw a flash of light in the windows of the house next door. Fire. Her mind registered it: the house next door is on fire, too. Nothing to be done for that—Hunter and Lindsay were her only focus.
She ran around to the back, to the garage. She heaved it open and pulled out a ladder. It felt like it weighed nothing in her arms. She ran with it back toward the front of the house.
The house across the street—also empty—was burning as well. Flames burst from its upper windows. Again she registered it but kept her focus. She shoved the ladder against the house, by the window. She ran up its rungs, crawling across the roof. No sign of her kids, smoke pouring from the open window. No, no, she thought. Then she saw Lindsay coming through the window, coughing, gagging, Hunter sliding out behind her. They both rolled onto the roof, racking coughs. She pulled them to her, hearing a loud explosion inside the house.
“Hurry, hurry!” she screamed. Lindsay went down the ladder first, falling the final few feet onto the new grass. Brenda sent Hunter, but he was coughing so hard—he had gone after his sister in the thickening smoke—he fell from the ladder, sprawling on the lawn. Brenda could feel the fire raging, rising, through the roof. Hunter lay curled at Lindsay’s feet in a fit of violent coughing and vomiting. Brenda rushed down the ladder and started protocols on her son.
“Mom!” Lindsay screamed. “All the houses are burning!”
The houses around them—all five of them—were ablaze, flames licking out their empty windows. The For Sale signs in every yard glowed as the flames rose. No neighbors to call 9-1-1. Her phone was inside, and her son was choking to death.
She began to pound on her son’s back, trying to drive the smoke from him and the life back in, willing him to breathe, while everything she’d worked for burned.
11
Jane’s Book of Memory, written in the
days and weeks following the crash
The most ill-advised Faceplace posting in the history of Faceplace postings, courtesy of my mother:
Jane now remembers a deer running out in front of the car.
This was Mom’s big, nasty, Lakehaven-unforgettable lie. She said it, I suppose, to lessen (futilely) the evidence of the suicide note. And I went along with it, because the world seemed to not like me much once the news of the suicide note spread through Lakehaven, except for Mom. (It wasn’t initially in the news reports. The Halls’ investigator found it in the debris field of the crash the next day, gave it to the police, who didn’t release it to the press, ever, it was part of the investigation. Then, in performing some forensic test on it, the note got ruined. Destroyed. But the lawyer’s investigator, a guy named Randy Franklin, or the Halls, leaked the news of the note’s existence to a few people in Lakehaven, and then word of mouth took over, and that was that. I was damned.)
You’d think, given Mom was a widow and the mother of an apparently suicidal amnesiac, that people would be more forgiving. Some were, but many were not. If she had stayed quiet, maybe it would have been better for me and for her—Lakehaven can be a very generous place. But this one, stupid lie seemed to change something between us and the town, forever. What do they say about sports and celebrity scandals? The lie is worse than the cover-up.
Plus, there was the sense she was protecting her own interests. Her blog, Blossoming Laurel. She’d made a name on the Internet for being a stellar mother and sharing her insights. All the entertaining, oddball moments of my youth—which normally would have been told only to family or close friends over coffee, at reunions, or on holidays—were instead written up in her breathless prose and posted for the world. Every moment when she had faced an “Important Choice” as a parent. And then each thing was commented on. She finally shut them off when they turned cruel or twisted. I had become vaguely aware of her blog as my memories of her surged in like a slow tide. And then I read a few entries the day after I got home from the hospital—at the suggestion of Dr. K, that it might help prompt memories—with a kind of detached numbness, like I was reading about another girl, a stranger. In the blog I was “The Blossom”—never referred to as Jane. That was her idea of protecting me: changing one detail, not using my name. Some entries were funny, others touching—her love was clear. But it was strange to see my life laid out like a novel, available to anyone who wanted to read about it. She had written about my first crush, my first period, my first failing grade. Had she ever asked me if that was cool with me?
Back to the deer, Mom’s last “Important Choice”—a choice to lie.
Deer running out from the oak and cedar into the streets in Lakehaven were a real threat. There were more deer than coyotes, and despite the growth in Lakehaven and beyond as Austin’s population boomed and real estate prices soared, deer bounding across major thoroughfares, especially at night, were a problem. A few DVCs a year resulted, usually not fatal except to the deer. (DVC means “deer-vehicle collision”—I looked it up online—nationwide, on average, a couple of hundred people die in them a year, and they result in a billion dollars’ worth of property damage, which seems awfully high to me.) There had not been a fatal DVC accident in Lakehaven in twenty years.
Until me and David—according to my mother, the storyteller, who could not sell this story to Lakehaven.
“You just tell people it was a deer,” she told me in a strict voice. It was my fourth day back from the hospital. The first three I’d spent alternately resting and walking and picking up things because Dr. K said my memory could be prompted by physical contact with reminders from my life. We had lived in this house since I was really little, so Dr. K was hopeful that I would have a wealth of physical reminders to help my memory. I didn’t see how that was supposed to work if my brain was physically damaged. But then I didn’t question Dr. K—she was a neurologist, and she was right: already I
had started to remember times from my early childhood. They came, at times, like a rush of dreams inside my head. I would have to stop and focus and then the memory, like a scratchy film, would come. Playing flag football with David, a Christmas with Mom and Dad opening presents under the tree, running through the house laughing, singing along with Disney Channel musicals with Kamala. We knew every word, every inflection.
“I don’t remember a deer,” I said. She had made me lunch, a ham sandwich she claimed I liked, but I was not so sure. I was wondering if my taste buds could have been changed by amnesia. “Did I say there was a deer?”
“Yes,” Mom said, voice booming with certainty, rinsing a dish. “While you were in your coma. You opened your eyes and you said, ‘It was a deer running in front of us, Mom,’ and then you closed your eyes again. You woke up the next day.”
“Was a nurse or a doctor there when I said this?”
“No. Just me. Dr. K had just left.” Her gaze held steady into mine. “There must have been a deer and you swerved to avoid it. That’s the logical explanation. Your brain knows it’s true.”
“What difference does a deer make? David is still dead. And that note…”
“You did not. You could not. I see one thing you haven’t forgotten is your argumentative attitude.” But she folded me in a hug when she said it.
“Mom. OK, if you said I said it was a deer, then I believe you.” I said this because I wanted to believe her.
“Yes, and I am going to post it to my Faceplace page. And my blog, which I haven’t written in a few weeks, since you asked me to stop for a while. I am going to tell people at church, and some of the more sympathetic parents, and I’m going to tell the Halls so they will stop this campaign against us.”
“Campaign?” I didn’t like the sound of that word; it seemed so organized.
“Oh, they’re upset. I understand. David was their son. But…obviously, honey, there has been some bad-mouthing of you. Not so much by them. By friends of theirs, but it’s like wildfire, it spreads so fast. Whole group texts going over days and days, forwarding lies and misinformation. I feel the Halls could stand by us and put a stop to it.”
“But I don’t remember anything, and yet I’m going to remember this deer?” I felt a cold panic.
“Of course. It was the last thing you remember. Memory is selective.”
“Mom. I don’t know if people will believe us.”
“But it’s true.” [A note added in blue ink: Reading back on this, I am sure Mom convinced herself that this was true. She believed it, heart and soul, rather than believe I would have killed myself and left her alone, with no family remaining.]
“Is this because of Dad?”
“You’re being silly. Two different accidents.”
“I can’t lie about this, Mom, I can’t.”
“They will crucify you at that school. David was a very popular boy, Jane, and they’ve already buried him, so the grief is turning to anger. Real anger. I saw it when I went to the grocery store. People staring at me. One mother told me it should have been you…well, never mind. I got asked to resign from every volunteer position I’m in. Your circle of friends is close, but, forgive me, honey, it’s small. And David was a big deal. I wasn’t like you in school, I was popular, I would have known how to cope. But people are going to believe the worst of you.”
“Why was I with this superpopular boy if I’m such an outcast, Mom?” This was the first I was hearing of our respective social standings.
“You didn’t run in the same circles anymore. And you withdrew from your friends, a lot, after your dad died. You changed.” She coughed, as if those final two words choked her.
“Changed?”
“You stayed away from people. You dropped out of extracurriculars. You didn’t hang out so much with your friends.” She gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “I’m going to go post this about the deer on Faceplace. I’m going to make some calls.”
“Mom, I won’t be able to keep the story straight.”
“Of course not, you have brain damage,” Mom said, as if it were an advantage.
I wanted to cry, and really, I was so sick of crying. I was cried out. I just felt dazed and frightened and tired, all the time, and it was starting to scare the hell out of me. I couldn’t sleep. The whole world seemed alien to me. I felt I didn’t know the rules. When you are sick, aren’t people supposed to be kind to you, support you? I was sick and Mom said people hated me. A fear from deep down inside me, curled along my spine, a realization of how much my life had changed. “No, Mom.”
Mom leaned down close to me. “You remember that flash at the moment of the accident. The deer, running out in front of you and you trying to avoid it. Repeat it after me.”
I said it. “There was a deer. It ran in front of us. I don’t remember anything else.” The whole time I felt like a noose was slipping around my neck.
“Yes. You tell that to Kamala. She’ll tell the kids who matter.”
“Mom…”
She sat down at her computer and brought up Faceplace and wrote this short status about the fragment of deer-filled memory that magically absolved me from suicide. She tagged me so it would appear on my Faceplace page.
I should have written an apology to the Halls for the accident. But I didn’t. So the first public statement I gave the world was an excuse, a cheap lie told by my mother.
Of course Mom didn’t consider that the investigator working for the Halls’ lawyers, Mr. Franklin, and the sheriff’s accident investigation team would look at the damp earth around the crash site and not see a single trace of deer prints. She didn’t realize it was standard operating procedure, for a one-car accident in the hills, to look for signs it was a DVC. There was no sign any deer had been through there that day on either side of the road. Not to mention that their consulting neurologist discounted my magically intact single memory.
But then, once the investigator’s report disallowing the presence of deer got to the Halls, I wasn’t just a loser who had wrecked her car and killed David Hall, I was a liar. Nail me up.
They told everyone that we had lied.
12
PERRI HAD PUT “Office Mom” on her business cards because she didn’t care about titles, and there was a certain pervasive wry humor at Hylist Software. And she was still a mom, in her heart, in her mind—that was an unchanged image. Hylist was a start-up company, ten months old, thirty employees strong, in an office overlooking a bend of Lake Austin. From her boss’s office Perri could see the soaring arch of the Pennybacker Bridge spanning Lake Austin along Loop 360. But the new HR chief, a prim-mouthed woman named Deborah, who seemed to lack any sense of fun, had told Perri that it was unprofessional and to replace her cards and use the title “Executive Assistant to the CEO.” Perri had smiled tightly and said, “All right.” She knew she could go to her boss and keep the original card, but that wasn’t how she wanted to start with Deborah. Here she would pick her battles.
She worked, officially, for the CEO, an old high school friend named Mike Alderson she’d grown up with in Lakehaven. She and Mike had been the less fortunate kids at what was often seen as a rich-kid school: he lived with his grandparents in an old house, one of the first built in Lakehaven, back when it was country and not suburban; she and her mother had lived in one of the few apartments in Lakehaven’s school district. Her mother cleaned houses and eventually started a housecleaning service that had a dozen workers. Mike had gone on to Rice, at full scholarship, for an undergraduate computer-science degree and then an MBA, while Perri, also on scholarship, stayed close to home at Texas State and got an English degree. She started teaching middle school, but then met Cal, who was a friend of Mike’s, and married him six months later. They moved to San Francisco for his first start-up company, and after a few more years she decided to stay home when she got pregnant with David and they moved back to Austin. So this had been her first out-of-the-home job in many years, and she loved it. Basically, she took ca
re of the office. There were four execs—Mike, the marketing/sales, engineering, and HR vice presidents—but most of the employees were software designers, grinding out code to finish their first product release. They were building a product to simplify the integration of company-issued cell phones with computer networks, to make them easier to manage and to share information securely. Many of the developers were young, and they worked long hours. Perri often felt tender toward them. Aside from managing Mike’s schedule, she stocked the refrigerator, had dinner brought in when lots of the “kids”—she knew she shouldn’t think of them this way, but she did, some of them were barely older than what David would be now—were working late, and coordinated the Friday-afternoon beer break that was one of the rewards of working for a driven yet more casual company. She had taken two of the developers who were in sore need of fashion advice shopping for clothes suitable for high-level meetings with customers. She’d helped two engineers who’d moved here from San Francisco find places to live and a preschool for another family. She kept things running smoothly, while Mike and his execs wooed potential customers and the programmers coded and drew incomprehensible diagrams on whiteboards and lived off the pizza she ordered.
Perri had needed this, after David died. Activity and chatter to fill the empty hours. She liked the people, and she knew they liked her. She was valued.
She had gone in extra early the morning after the awkward dinner with Cal, ignoring the wine headache gently throbbing in her head. So she was productive about what needed to be done: she brewed two pots of coffee (the developers usually did this themselves because they drank it so fast), stocked the fridge with new cans of soda, cleared the conference rooms, reordered supplies.
