“Yup,” I say, “this is me,” reaching down inside the trunk for the jumper cables. Nina follows me to the car. I feel her come closer and, when I come up with the jumper cables from the trunk, I notice how she’s staring at my car in a way that makes me suddenly uncomfortable. Nina walks to the passenger’s side, slipping between parked cars, and then she runs her eyes over the outside of my car, before crouching down to look inside. She tents her hands to her eyes to block out the glare, staring into the cabin of the car for a long time. A very long time. Nina takes her time, appraising the dashboard, the leather seats, before moving to look into the back seat.
My mouth goes dry. Because there, on the floor, in the back seat of my car, tucked partway under the passenger’s seat where I didn’t think anyone could see it, is the bag of Lily’s bloody clothes. The bag of Lily’s clothes isn’t obvious—the floor of the car is dark like a cave—and it’s just a bag. It could be groceries, garbage, anything. Literally anything.
But a guilty conscience can take control of a person’s mind and make them think and do irrational things.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Nina was staring directly at the bag, that she could somehow see inside of it, through the opaque plastic.
“What kind of car is this?” she asks. The school backs up to a relatively busy street. Because of it, road noise is loud. Nina and I have to contend with the sound of traffic. We speak over it.
I rub at the back of my neck. “Are you in the market for a new car?” I ask, trying to get her eyes back on me, and also to make light of the situation. I drive a Honda. Nina drives a Tesla. There is no way that, even if she was in the market for a new car, she’d ever consider mine.
She snickers, standing upright, finally tearing her eyes away from the car’s interior. “No,” she says, with a brief headshake, her mood suddenly changed. “No. It’s not that.”
“It’s a good car,” I say, going on. “I’ve had this for six years. It has over a hundred thousand miles on it and drives just as good as the day I got it. It’s never needed any work either, other than your typical maintenance. They say it’s one of the most reliable midsize cars on the market.”
She deadpans, “I’m not looking for a new car, Christian.”
“Right. Of course. Is that your Tesla down there?” I ask, nodding to the Model Y in the distance. She nods. “How do you like it?”
“I like it,” she says. “It gets me where I need to go.”
Nina goes quiet. I slam the trunk closed. I step around to the driver’s side of my car to lean in and release the latch, opening the hood. At the front of my car, I open the hood and hold it open with the prop rod. Nina watches, saying nothing as I connect the jumper cable’s red clips to Lily’s battery and then mine.
What is taking Lily so long?
“The thing is, Christian,” Nina says, and I gaze up at her as she shifts her bag higher on her shoulder, and then pushes the hair out of her eyes, “that Jake didn’t actually come into my house that day Lily and I were at breakfast.”
In that instant, everything changes. My body becomes stiff. I stand straight, throwing a glance back, over my shoulder at the high school but the parking lot behind me is empty and the heavy school doors are still, the world outside getting reflected in the glass so that if Lily was somewhere on the other side of those doors, I wouldn’t know.
“I... I don’t understand,” I say, looking back at Nina, who’s looking again at my car. “What do you mean Jake didn’t come into your house that day? I thought that’s what Lily said.”
“No,” she says. “It wasn’t Jake. It was someone else.”
“What do you meansomeone else?”
“I mean my mother was wrong. Someone broke into my home.”
I clear my throat. “How do you know?” I ask, and she explains that a neighbor had a doorbell camera that captured the break-in.
“This man let himself right in through my garage door,” she says. “He knew the code.”
“Oh my God, Nina. I’m glad you and your mother weren’t hurt.”
I grab the black jumper cable clip and attach it to my battery, burying my head inside the hood of the car to avoid Nina’s eye.
My heart beats so fast it hurts. I’m fucked. Nina knows it was me that broke into her home.
She’s still talking. She says, “The quality of the video wasn’t great, unfortunately. I took the video to the police, but even they weren’t able to get a clear enough picture of this man, this intruder, to identify him,” she says, and it takes a second for her words to sink in, for me to find my voice. If what she’s saying is true, then Nina knows an intruder broke in, but she doesn’t know the intruder was me.
“That’s awful. Did he take anything?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What did the police say?”
“Their tech people are looking at the video to see if they can identify the man, but they said not to get my hopes up. It’s not likely they’ll be able to clean the video up enough to see who the man is. The car in the video, though,” she says, running her fingers over my car, as I turn my back to her to attach the last clip to one of those metal struts holding Lily’s hood open. I eye the school again. Lily still isn’t coming. “It looked like this one. What kind of car did you say it is, Christian?” she asks again, because I never said.
“Honda. Accord. Did you get a look at the license plate?” I ask.