Save Me

Chapter Eighty-eight

Rose parked at the end of the street, twisted off the ignition, and sat in her rental car for a moment. She broke into a light sweat, and her heart pumped a little faster. She checked the dashboard clock-10:49. She was ten minutes early. She inhaled, trying to calm her nerves. She’d felt something come over her the moment she turned onto the street, a shudder that seemed to emanate from her marrow and reverberate out to her skin, like shockwaves from her soul.

She looked around, taking it all in. This end of the street looked different than it had twenty years ago, but she could see the way it had been, the same way she could look into Melly’s face and see the baby she’d been. The past lived in the present, and nobody knew it better than a mother.

Mommy!

The houses were still close together, though the paint colors had changed, and the trees grew in the same places, though they were taller and fuller, their roots breaking up the concrete sidewalk, like so many tiny neighborhood earthquakes. Drying leaves littered the sidewalk, and big brown paper bags of them, stamped with the township’s name, sat at the curb like a row of tombstones, just like then.

Rose closed her eyes, and it all came back to her. Halloween, and she was eighteen years old. She’d just turned onto the street when she saw the white blur and heard the horrible thud. Tears came to her eyes, just as they had then, instantly. That night, her heart knew what had happened before her brain did. It just didn’t know how to tell her. Then she’d heard agonized scream of Thomas’s mother.

Thomas!

Rose found a Kleenex in her purse and wiped her eyes. She eyed the house, which hadn’t changed at all: a three-bedroom colonial, with a front porch, and wooden steps. The Pelals still lived here, and their phone number had been easy to find online. She’d called them yesterday, and they’d recognized her name. She’d asked if she could visit, and they’d suggested the very next day, today, but hadn’t asked any questions.

Rose put the Kleenex away and slid the keys from the ignition. She knew that what happened here had set her in a pattern she hadn’t recognized, and so couldn’t stop. Then, when she was young, she’d been told not to talk to the Pelals, and she didn’t want to, anyway. She could only run and hide. But it wasn’t about law, any longer. It was about right and wrong, and she had become an adult. Jim and Janine Pelal were parents like her, and she had killed their child. She couldn’t let another day pass until she said what needed to be said.

She got out of the car, closed the door, and made her way up the sidewalk to the house. She composed herself, then pressed the doorbell.