Second Chance Friends Read online

  They were upside down. She could feel the seat belt digging into her shoulder, her hair sticking to one side of her face. She felt a tickle on her cheek and hastily swept at it. Her hand came away covered with blood, but she didn’t know where it had come from. There was no pain, only shock and confusion and deep, deep fear.

  “Michael,” she croaked, surprised to hear that her voice worked. She fumbled, trying to orient herself, and reached for him with the hand that still held the positive test stick.

  She knew. Right away, she knew it was bad. Blood, there was so much blood, and his eyes were open, but he wasn’t moving. His mouth worked, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  “Michael!” she croaked again, only louder this time, and she shifted, grasping for the seat-belt buckle, but she couldn’t move. The door had caved toward her and the buckle was wedged into a tiny space that her hand couldn’t make sense of.

  She looked around wildly. A school bus lay on its side about ten feet away, the back windows shattered, its front end rutted into the ground near the windows of a diner. As she watched, three people barreled through the diner door, racing toward the bus.

  “No,” Maddie said, though she knew her voice wasn’t loud enough. “Over here. Help us over here.”

  She watched as one of the people—a tall, slender woman—climbed the bus and stuck her head and arms through a window. A few seconds later, she came out with a child who was crying, holding one arm up against her tiny side, but otherwise unharmed.

  “Come over here,” Maddie said, louder this time. She felt throbbing begin to set in. Her head, her shoulder, one trapped leg. “We need help.”

  The woman passed the child to two other women, who took her and sat her gingerly on the ground. She dipped back into the window and came out with another. That child was fine, too. Blood ran into Maddie’s eyes.

  “Help!” she cried, tears mingling with the blood. She felt panic rise as the woman extracted yet another child through the window, and one of the others managed to pull open the back emergency door to let more children stream out. “Oh, God, oh, God,” she said, breathing heavily. “Help us, please! Michael.” She turned toward him again. Reached for him, but her arm was so tired now, so heavy. “Michael, please talk to me.”

  He continued to stare at her, his face pale as she’d ever seen it. He blinked, but it was lazy and far away, and that was all it took to unleash the panic full force.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help us, please! Over here! Look over here!” She thrashed with every ounce of energy that she had, bumping around in the cramped and crumpled space. “Help us! Help!” And then as quickly as it had come, the energy drained from her and her screams turned to sobs. “Please help,” she said. “He’s dying.”

  She saw the woman who’d opened the bus door turn her head, and then say something to the other two, motioning toward Maddie’s car. The one standing on the overturned bus slid off. Together, they rushed to the car, a younger woman coming to Maddie’s side, and an older woman going to Michael’s.

  “Sir?” she heard the older woman repeating. “Sir? Can you hear me?”

  The younger woman was a flurry of activity, reaching in and trying to get to the seat-belt buckle, asking Maddie questions, saying things to her, but it was as if the world had ended. Maddie could feel herself talking, screaming, crying, but on the inside she was only watching as the older woman held Michael’s head in her hands, catching his blood as he drifted away from them.

  ONE

  Karen gazed through the plate-glass window, her eyes wandering over the divots in the ground where the bus had crashed a month ago. She rubbed the side of her cell phone absently, her fingers bumping over the volume buttons, her fingernail scratching up against the SILENCE switch. Oh, how she’d love to “accidentally” flip that switch. If she never heard the phone ring, she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, right? She wouldn’t have to answer the next time Kendall called. But she knew even if she did silence it, the peace would be short-lived. Kendall would only show up at her house or, worse, at her job, expecting her to pull strings she didn’t have to make things easier for a son whose hide she wasn’t sure she wanted to save anymore.

  The girl had been calling all morning, congested with tears, begging. Blaming. Always blaming. As if Karen didn’t do enough blaming for herself. You’d think, as a mother, Kendall would know that. Yet Karen had awakened to Kendall’s tears and blame at the most ungodly hour, had been ripped out of a dream with it.

  “Mom?” the voice on the other end had said.

  Karen’s heart had sunk. For one, she wasn’t Kendall’s mom. She was Travis’s mom, and Kendall just happened to be the girl he was living with at the moment. Just as with Jessilyn and Margarite and that trashy girl whom Karen only ever knew as “Tag,” Kendall’s calling Karen “Mom” wasn’t going to make her any more permanent in his life. Travis wasn’t the permanent-girl type of guy, as much as Karen wished he would be. For another, anytime Kendall was calling her “Mom” on the phone at—she had leaned over and checked—4:42 in the morning, it was not going to be good news.

  “What’s going on?” Karen had asked, wiping her eyes with her free hand, then slipping on her glasses. The world had sprung into focus and, just like that, her day had started.

  And now, an hour and a half later, she sat at the Tea Rose avoiding her not-daughter’s phone calls, because she knew what the calls were about. Travis was in jail. Again. Drunk and fighting. Again.

  Only this time he did a real job on the guy. This time the guy might not pull through.

  Dear God, would that make her son a murderer? Was that how it worked? Someone went from hothead to killer in the flip of a switch?

  You’d think she would know. She’d worked at Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith for twenty years. Surely they’d defended drunk guys who had accidentally beat other guys to death in that amount of time. Kendall clearly thought Karen should know what to do. You’ve got to help him. You’ve got to get him out of jail. There’s the baby to think of, you know.

  Oh, yes, that much Karen knew. Her one grandchild. Her grandson, to be exact. Sweet little Marcus, born approximately eight minutes after Travis dumped Tag, seemed to be one of the few good things to come from her son in years. But that also made Kendall more permanent than the others, a fact that Karen wasn’t ready to live with just yet. Kendall certainly wasn’t any worse than those girls, but she wasn’t any better than them, either. She hadn’t shown it full-on just yet, but Karen suspected the girl had a shifty side to her. And a vengeful one.

  Yes, they had the baby to think of, and Karen had her own baby to think of. It didn’t matter if your child was two or twenty-two, she decided—you still hated to see him suffer, even if he brought it on himself. And if this man that Travis had beaten up was to die, Travis would be suffering for many years, she feared. She didn’t even want to think of what that road would look like for her. A son in prison for life? How would she ever admit that to anyone?

  On cue, her phone rang, and even though she’d been expecting it, she still jumped when it vibrated in her palm, causing her to slosh a dime-sized dollop of coffee onto the table. Predictably, Kendall’s name flashed across the screen. For a moment, Karen considered upending the phone into her mug, letting French vanilla crème drown out Kendall.

  But in the end, she couldn’t do it. Abandoning Kendall would mean abandoning her son. What kind of mother could do that? The kind whose son is in jail every other weekend could do that, her mind nagged her. The kind who should have toughened up on him long, long ago.

  She held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Mom? It’s me.” Karen could hear the baby crying in the background. She focused on it. Tried to conjure the scent of the top of Marcus’s head, the clench of his fist around her forefinger. Concentrating on Marcus helped calm her, helped remind her why she hadn’t already washed her hands of the whole Kendall
situation. “You find out anything?”

  “I haven’t even gone in yet.”

  “But it’s a special circumstance.”

  I wish, Karen almost said. I wish this was something that rarely happened. “Nobody will be there at this hour,” she said instead. Though that was a lie. As far as she could tell, Mr. Sidwell practically lived there. She’d found him sleeping on his office couch more than once.

  “Well, will you call me after you’ve talked to them? Be sure to tell them Travis was in fear for his life. And he’s got witnesses, too. I can bring the witnesses right to you. Be sure to tell them that.”

  Karen pushed her finger into the drop of coffee, let it sit there for a moment, and then swiped the stain away, wiping her thumb dry on her sensible—translation: law-firm stodgy—brown skirt. “Honey, I’ve told you. I’m a recruiter. Human resources. I don’t really work with the attorneys. I rarely talk to them. I don’t feel right asking for favors.”

  “You work in the same office with them every day,” Kendall said.

  “But it’s not like we’re on a first-name basis or anything. I don’t even work in the same hallway with the others.”

  “Just ask,” Kendall said with finality. Karen heard the baby’s cry get closer to the phone, as if Kendall was picking him up, and then settle into sniffles and grow silent. “If Travis goes to prison, Marcus and I won’t be able to afford to live here. We’ll have to move, and who knows where we’ll end up?” Ah, there it was. The shifty, vengeful thing she’d suspected was lurking underneath.

  Karen closed her eyes and pressed her thumb against one, and then the other, not even caring if she was smudging her eye shadow. She was already getting a headache and could feel the backs of her knees begin to sweat inside her panty hose. It was going to be a very long day. A long, stressful one at that. She let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware of holding. She understood the threat clearly. Pull some strings at work to get Travis off the hook, or never see sweet Marcus again. “I’ll ask,” she said.

  But when she hung up, she wondered whom. Whom at Sidwell Cain would she feel comfortable asking for help in getting her son off on a potential manslaughter case? God, the humiliation. She could just throttle Travis for putting her in this position.

  “Please don’t die, whoever you are,” she said, her eyes turning toward the window again. She could see a shadowy reflection of herself, the outline of her hair. She spent way too much time curling it every morning, but it was short and unremarkably grayish brown, and hairstyle was the only style she really had going on anymore. Even though she was trim, middle age was starting to take its wrinkly, saggy toll, and the dress code at Sidwell Cain could be described as “litigation drab.” She felt like she needed to make a daily effort of some sort, and if that effort was a curling iron and half a can of hair spray, so be it. Absently, she fluffed at a flat spot of her hair, her gaze shifting to the lawn on the other side of the window instead.

  “Still doing okay over here? You haven’t even touched your coffee. I was going to top it off.” Sheila, the Tea Rose’s only waitress worth her salt, leaned a hip against the booth. She rested the coffee carafe on the table and followed Karen’s gaze out the front window.

  “Hard to believe it was a month ago already,” Sheila said. “The grass is even starting to grow back.”

  Karen nodded. This was where she’d been sitting when the crash had happened. She’d seen the whole thing as it unfolded one month ago—the bus screaming toward the intersection. She’d known it was going too fast. She could tell, even from her table, that it wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. She’d watched as it wobbled and jerked on its shocks. She’d watched as it hit the other car. She’d watched as both skidded into the grass, spraying chunks of sod onto the window right next to her. She’d watched without flinching. She’d been too rooted by horror to flinch. But she’d been flinching every day since.

  “He died right there,” she whispered, and though she was sure Sheila had heard her, she wasn’t saying it for Sheila. She said it to herself every day as she revisited her booth, unable to scrub away the memory of what had happened. Unable to forget Michael and Maddie Routh, the sweet couple in the red car, on their way to an early-morning doctor appointment. Unable to forget holding Michael’s head in her palms as he died, catching his blood, catching his life.

  “It seems so surreal,” Sheila said. But Sheila hadn’t been there that day. She’d been on vacation. The other waitress—what was her name? Indie? Andie? Karen couldn’t recall—had been there. She’d been out back smoking a cigarette, but had run inside upon hearing the noise and called 911 while Karen and the other two customers had rushed outside to help.

  “Yeah,” Karen said. “‘Surreal’ is a good word for it.” She gathered her purse and pulled out a few dollars. “I should get to work. Can’t lollygag around all day.”

  “A day off would be nice, though,” Sheila said.

  “What are you talking about? You just got back from vacation,” Karen teased. “Some of us never went.”

  In fact, Karen could barely even remember what a vacation felt like, it had been so long since she’d taken one. Raising Travis by herself, she had no extra money for travel. And then by the time he was raised and out of the house, she’d been too lonely to take one. The idea of sightseeing without someone to point out the landmarks to seemed so terribly sad.

  Sheila rooted through her apron pockets until she found Karen’s check. “It’s a double-edged sword, though, you know? You get away, and by the end of your trip you start thinking about how good it’ll feel to get home again. And then you get home and all you can think about is how amazing it was while you were away. This diner seems extra dingy ever since I got back. I want to smell sunscreen again.”

  “I’ll be sure to wear some next time I come in,” Karen said. She scooted out of the booth, then paused to offer Sheila a smile and a quick pat on the arm. “See you tomorrow. Try not to skip off to any tropical paradises while I’m gone.”

  “You didn’t even touch your coffee today,” Sheila said. “You sure everything’s okay?”

  Karen thought about Travis, tried to picture him in jail, his shaved, tattooed head gleaming under fluorescent jail lights. Miserable, in danger, but alive, breathing. She thought about the man whom Travis had beaten, hooked to tubes in a hospital bed. His family already grieving their loss.

  No, things were not okay.

  Her eyes roamed to the divots in the grass again. Things were not okay, but she wasn’t Maddie Routh, now, was she? And she wasn’t that poor bus driver, God rest her soul.

  “Guess I was just in it for the company today,” Karen said. She waved and headed to her car.

  TWO

  Recently, Melinda had been particularly struck by how truly easy it was to live a lie. How frighteningly simple it was to love someone, be totally and undeniably committed to him, build a life with him, and still be hiding a major life fact. Hard emotionally, perhaps. But in execution, a breeze.

  She thought about this every morning at this time, studying herself in the scuffed bathroom mirror, washing her face, tying her hair into a limp ponytail (the only trick her hair seemed to know how to do), brushing her teeth, and unceremoniously popping that tiny white pill into her mouth.

  Chewable. They made them chewable now. Which meant she had to think about it every day, not just wash it down along with her feelings of guilt. Tiny white pill; tiny white lie.

  Baby, baby, baby, her jaw muscles seemed to creak at her while she chewed. Or more like, Nobaby, nobaby, nobaby. Door locked, pill packet crammed back into the bottom of the tampon box, where Paul would never look. Easy and done. She licked her teeth clean and gave one last study of herself in the mirror, faking a smile. She didn’t look like a liar. She could forget the deceit had ever happened. Until tomorrow, when she had to do it again.

  Paul was still sleeping. Curl
ed around his pillow like a child, with his bare back, soft and warm as a biscuit, poking out from the top of the sheets. His cowlick knocked free by sleep once again. Melinda studied him while she wrestled earrings into her earlobes. He was perfect, really. The most perfect man. She was so incredibly lucky to have him, and she knew it. Most of the time, she waited breathlessly for him to figure it out and leave her. If he ever did, it would destroy her, yet she would somehow still understand.

  He’d been her first. God, how embarrassing it was. Almost as bad as admitting it to the guys at work. A twenty-four-year-old virgin, they’d crowed. If you need any volunteers, they’d offered. If you want some pointers. Ha! Get it? Pointer? I’ll happily volunteer my pointer! The comments were humiliating, but she didn’t take them personally. It was part of working with mostly men. They meant it no more seriously than when they razzed one another. In a way, it was an honor that they treated her like one of them.

  She’d saved herself for Paul. She hadn’t known that was for whom she’d been saving herself until after they’d done it. And then she’d realized that, yes, this was the one. This was the man who was meant to take her virginity. This was the man who wouldn’t abuse it, even if things didn’t ultimately work out between them.

  When Paul had lowered himself over her that first time, she’d lain there like a corpse, afraid to so much as touch his cheek. She’d cried, too, not because it hurt, but because it had finally happened and her chest felt so full of feeling for him she couldn’t contain it. But of course he’d been afraid he’d hurt her. He’d pulled her into him and petted her hair, his bare feet finding hers.

  “I’m so sorry,” he’d murmured over and over again. “I never want to hurt you.”