I turned to Penelope.
“It’s okay, Penny. It’s okay,” I kept repeating. “Tell us what happened. Just tell us. Who is the woman and what happened? We can’t make sense of it, you have to talk to us. Penny, please, talk to us.”
Penelope stared off into the distance, her face cold and frozen. We tried for hours. In between she rested, closed her eyes and when her breath turned steady, Edward and I stepped outside the room. We stood in front of her door, where I cried, and Edward told me to pull it together. We whispered, hushed words of accidents and cars and police, and then we argued over what to do next and the conversation turned to lawyers.
“What do we do? Oh my God, what do we do now?” I said, words escaping with every breath in huffs of fear and panic.
“It was an accident. I don’t know what happened but it was an accident. We need to find out where it happened, maybe we can do something,” Edward said.
“Do something?”
“Yes, do something.”
“What’s there to be done?” I asked.
“Her phone,” Edward said, and his eyes lit up.
“What?”
“Her phone. Where is it? Did you see it? There might be . . . I don’t know . . . I’ll have to check, did she use, you know, maybe she used her GPS. OnStar, does she use OnStar?” He sounded incoherent, so unlike him, a torrent of thoughts, so unfamiliar in his usually steady voice. The rock had turned into a quivering mess. “I think I can look it up, see where she’s been. We have to find her phone. That’s it. We need her phone.”
We heard Penelope through the door moaning in her sleep.
“You go check. I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “Should I turn on the news?”
“It’s the middle of the night. Nothing will be on the news.”
“What if no one knows?”
We said nothing after that.
* * *
• • •
I had no recollection of falling asleep. I woke on the couch in the living room to a noise. A clatter of a chain, maybe the garage door? I couldn’t be sure. I remembered Edward had given me pills to calm down. He was nowhere to be seen. I rushed to Penelope’s room. She stirred. Helpless, like a child, her face so young and the shirt I put on her had sheep on it. Sheep. As I sat on the bed and swiped her still-wet hair off her forehead, I cried.
“Pea, we need to talk. Can you talk to me?”
The nickname from her childhood was supposed to soothe her. Never before had I attempted to con her into a false sense of safety, but there was a dead woman in my garage. She needed to understand what she had done. I can honestly say that there was no moral judgment, it was merely an assessment. See what you’ve done. Maybe that was what she needed to hear? Maybe she didn’t understand the implications, the consequences of her actions.
“Pea, do you remember what happened? Tell me about the woman, tell me what happened?”
Her eyes were empty.
“That woman, the woman in the car, in the garage. Who is she?”
No reaction.
“Pea, I need you to talk to me. We can’t fix this if we don’t know what happened. I need to know where you were. I’m trying to help you. So is Dad. Dad is here for you, Penny, we are here for you. Please talk to me, please.”
Penelope’s eyes opened. “Hear me out,” she said. She attempted to sit up and I folded a pillow behind her back. There was this moment when she took in a deep breath and then held it as if she refused to take another. She stuttered at first but then she caught her stride, her voice low with a trace of rasp and much more determination than her frail body suggested. “I did a horrible thing,” she said. Her eyes darted as if she saw this room for the first time. How did I end up here, her eyes seemed to say.
“Tell me what you did. Tell me what happened.”
“I want to turn myself in. Take me to the police.”
I knew Penelope. I knew my daughter. There was no convincing her otherwise once she was determined to go through with something.
“Tell me what happened, Pea,” I said.
“I’m not telling anyone but the police.”
“Tell me what happened,” I insisted.
“You’re just going to mess it all up. Call the police.”
“You know what, I think I know what we’re going to do. We’ll get you some paper. You write it down, okay? Write it all down. Remember, the therapist told you, once you write it down, it’ll be okay.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“However it works, Penny,” I said and watched her jerk as my voice went up an octave, “I don’t care. Get it off your chest. If that’s what you need, that’s what we’re going to do.” I rummaged through her desk, ripped open drawers. A notebook, a pen. “Here,” I said and pushed them hard against her chest. “Write it down. I’m begging you.”
Penelope had closed her eyes as if she were resting before the inevitable downfall, preparing for a final blow.
“I’ll get your father,” I said and shut the door behind me.
In the hallway I stood and my heart was about to explode in my chest.
“I want to go to the police,” Penelope screamed from her room.
The faint sound from before, this time I was sure. Chains pulling the garage door. I waited for a final rattle of the door coming to rest on the metal beams but there was none. I looked out the hallway window, down the driveway. Red lights turned into white and the jeep appeared and looped around the driveway, toward Preston Hallow Road.
I thought about opening the window. I wanted to open it, call out to Edward, come back. We can’t fix this but we can do the right thing. In a vanishing second I reached for it, opened, then slammed it shut. We are in too deep, I thought. So deep we’ll never get out of it.
In her room Penelope cried out with such force that I feared for her lucidity, no longer considered her sane, and I thought she won’t come back from this, this is the equivalent of the boy’s crushed skull, a life of existing in some half world of derangement.
I couldn’t move, could only watch Edward drive off in Penelope’s car. And next to him in the seat was the faint outline of a body.
* * *
• • •
I now know where I went wrong. The night I watched Penelope retrieve the key from the soil like a thief in the night. We found out later, she’d met up with friends on a hill a few miles down from our house. It was a cul-de-sac, undeveloped with half-paved roads and crooked streetlamps and large parcels of land with orange flags sticking out of the soil. Penelope and her friends broke into a house that was under construction. All the other teenagers with her were from other schools, we knew none of the parents.