“No,” he said miserably. He took her hand, squeezed it. She felt his touch like a shimmer of heat on the road: distant, fleeting.
“She would forgive you, Zach,” Jude said. It was the truth, and all she could think of.
Jude stared dully out the window. I do not forgive you. The last words she’d said to Mia.
“Why didn’t I just tell her I wanted to go to USC?”
Jude thought about telling him about Mia’s last decision to go to SCC with Lexi and Zach, but what was the point? It would only hurt him more to learn how much Mia loved him.
“Mom? Maybe I’ll go anyway. For both of us.”
Jude saw how desperate Zach was for her approval, and it broke her heart. As if a college choice could undo all of this tragedy somehow and return their family to them. It was her fault he felt this way. She’d made college so damned important, and he wanted her love as much as he needed Mia. She knew she should talk to him about this, tell him it was a bad idea; her voice was gone, though. All she could think about was the woman she’d been before. The mother to whom USC had been so important.
I do not forgive you.
She flinched at the memory of those last terrible words. “None of this matters now, Zach. Just sleep.”
She knew she should say something more, help him with his grief, but what good were words to them now? She looked away from her son’s sad, sad eyes and stared out the window at a bright and shiny day.
Fourteen
It felt like they’d been at the hospital for days, but it had been less than thirteen hours. While Jude sat at Zach’s bedside, news of the accident spread through Pine Island. By early evening, the phone calls had begun. Jude answered the first few, eager to have something to do, to think about beside her loss, but within seconds she knew it had been a terrible mistake. Even as she listened to murmurs of support, she heard the relief in other people’s voices, the immense gratitude that it wasn’t their child who had died. She heard I’m so sorry until she despised those words as she had never despised anything in her life, and she discovered an anger in her soul that was new. Toxic.
Finally, she turned off her phone and buried it in her purse and let Miles handle the condolences. She drank so much coffee she felt jittery, a racehorse at the gate with no race to run. A mother of twins who only had one child.
She paced the hallways, walked up and down the bright corridors, seeing nothing. She couldn’t sit by Zach anymore, couldn’t talk to Miles, couldn’t go see Mia. Her existence was defined by that which she couldn’t do or have. So she kept moving, sobbing on and off, clutching wads of Kleenex that turned into soggy gray lumps in her hand.
“Jude?” She heard her name as if from a distance and looked up, disoriented. Where was she?
Molly was in front of her, holding an overnight bag clutched to her stomach. Without makeup on, dressed in pink Juicy sweatpants and a white cardigan, with her white hair a spiky mess, she looked as ruined as Jude felt inside.
Molly moved toward her awkwardly, let the bag thump to the floor between them. She kicked it aside and took Jude in her arms. When Molly began to cry, Jude felt as if she were floating away, disappearing, only her friend’s embrace kept her in this corridor at all.
“I’m so—”
“Don’t say it,” Jude said, easing out of Molly’s arms. “Please.” Her eyes felt painfully dry, sandpapery, and yet her vision was blurred. She saw now where she was—near the entrance to the waiting room.
Molly tried gamely to smile, but it didn’t work. “I brought you some clothes. Toothbrush. Whatever I could think of.”
Jude nodded. The last thing in the world she wanted was to stand here, pretending she wasn’t shattered inside, but she couldn’t make herself move, either.
Just down the hall, in the waiting room, she saw the crowd of women sitting together, watching Jude from a safe distance. They were women she knew from the island, women with whom she’d chaired committees, played tennis, had lunch. Women with whom she’d shared both motherhood and friendship. Neighbors, friends, acquaintances. They’d heard about the accident and come to help in whatever way they could, the modern equivalent of a quilting bee. In hard times, these women came together to help one another. Jude knew all of this because she was one of them. If someone else’s child had been killed, Jude would have put everything else aside and come to offer help.
They needed to support her. Jude could see that, but she couldn’t seem to care about it.
How could she make them understand that the woman they knew was gone? She wasn’t the woman who’d befriended them anymore.