Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

“Hey, Sissy,” Tom said.

Teagan’s head drooped in a curve, as if on a swivel, but then lifted back up temporarily. It repeated its track. She grinned on its upswing and red liquid dripped down her chin. Across the side of her head was a gash that had been clamped shut with sutures. He could see the chewed condition of her hands, her fingertips busted along the nail beds.

“You silly goose,” his mother said and wiped his sister’s mouth.

“What’s wrong with her?” Tom said.

He didn’t care that Teagan had to hear him ask it.

His father looked right at him and then pointed him out into the hallway. The place they had rushed to reach, Tom was now being told to leave.

The door closed heavily behind him.

Tom stood next to a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall.

Someone had decorated his sister’s door with a laminated drawing of a giant seahorse. He had not noticed it on his way in. Purple and pink, it had huge, cartoonish eyes. The length of the seahorse’s body curled like a question mark. It was something Teagan would have loved to have drawn herself, he thought. If she still could do such things.

For those first weeks, Mario would not ride his bike anywhere near Tom’s house. He didn’t want to make eye contact with Tom, for fear of what he might say should he glimpse his friend’s grief. He didn’t want to see Teagan again, not that he would anytime soon. She was still recovering in the hospital; but just the thought of her remembering him in that moment made him sick. He prayed she would forget.

Each day he pictured looking into her eyes and seeing some smaller version of himself looking back, staring down as he had from the top of the pit. Stories on the investigation had taken over the local paper, and there was coverage on all of the news channels. The exact details on the progress of the investigation were being withheld by the authorities. All that was revealed was that someone had come forward and mentioned having seen a man that morning in the general vicinity. For a time, children weren’t allowed to go outside at all. Parents were fearful this person might be out to harm other children. A neighborhood task force had been assembled. Even Mario’s father had joined.

At first the person everyone was looking for was a black man in his early to late thirties, medium build, with a Yankees ball cap. While that was the description being broadcast, Mario felt he could breathe easier. Sometimes he wished he had gone to Tom and told him everything. It was not too late.

He thought, at the very least, he could come forward and say he had seen someone else, but then he knew questions would follow, and they would ask him to describe this person, and he imagined himself sitting in front of a police officer and having to conjure a face that did not exist. That would have been worse, to have sent them on a wild goose chase. He decided he was doing the right thing by saying nothing.

But then another person came forward.

A woman, before beginning her breakfast shift, had dropped off her infant daughter at daycare. The daycare center was at an intersection near the service road entrance to the Pinewood Meadows site. When she was leaving there, the woman had seen a man coming down the road.

He was carrying a shovel, which didn’t strike her as odd, but it was the way he carried himself. He was dragging his foot behind him. Lurching. She thought he might be having a heart attack. He was tugging at his shirt, then bending over, trying to steady himself with the shovel. She did not drive off just then. Instead, the woman kept watching him, to see if he was all right. If she explained it correctly, her boss would understand.

She turned her car and drove toward the man. He stumbled in the direction of a newly constructed drainage ditch. Before he vanished into its surrounding brush, she saw his face clearly. The look was of one about to slip entirely underwater, but willingly so. There was no hint of panic in his eyes. His movements were almost graceful.

She didn’t dare stop the car. As she continued on, she felt foolish for having thought she could have been of any help. She could hear her ex-boyfriend, as if he were sitting beside her in the passenger seat, his painfully pointy cowboy boots on the dashboard.

“What the fuck kind of thing is that to do?” he would have said.

She could see him sneering at her intent. Laughing even, remarking the guy was just looking for a place to piss in peace.

The very next day, after she had seen the man disappear, she took her daughter on a road trip to her sister’s, a few hours south in Raleigh. Not that her ex was still calling the house, but she needed time away. She had saved up money. It would allow her a nearly two-week break from having to come home each evening smelling of sausage and coffee.

And rarely had there been time to spend with her daughter outside of the usual schedule; by the time the two made it home, it was dinner for the daughter, then a bath, and then maybe a small block of quiet when they both would lie on the bed and the little girl would grab at the footies of her pajamas and rock back and forth and blow wet raspberries in the shared air between them.

The time with her sister had been welcome. The woman managed to catch up on sleep, which she hadn’t realized she needed until she got large doses of it, her sister waking to tend to the daughter, and the woman breathing a sigh of relief into the pillow.

When she finally came back into town, the woman