complaints to the homeowners association, as did other residents, to no avail. My headlights barely made a dent in the dense blackness of the moonless night. However, it was late, and there wasn’t another set of headlights anywhere around, so I turned left. We’d be at Bunny’s in less than a minute.
I couldn’t get Bunny’s odd behavior out of my mind and was about to ask Roz what she thought, when she shouted. “Barb, watch out!”
I hit the brakes, but not before I heard the thump.
My neck ached from stopping so fast. “What happened?”
“You hit something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s too dark. I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A deer maybe?”
“I never saw a deer.”
“Well you hit something!”
“Okay, okay. Calm down. I’ll get out and check.” Shifting back to park and leaving the engine idling, I opened my door. My feet landed on the street rather than a dead animal, so things were looking up. I ran my fingers along the front side of my van—no dents. Another good sign. No front bumper damage either as far as I could tell and nothing on the ground in front. Maybe Roz was wrong. Maybe I hadn’t hit anything. I continued along the front bumper when it became very obvious that Roz was right. Well, she was sort of right. I hadn’t hit something.
I had hit someone.
Michelle Alexander.
Chapter Six
ROZ OPENED THE DOOR WHEN I started shrieking.
“No!” I yelled. “You’ll step on her! Crawl through the driver’s side.”
She scrambled across while I knelt by Michelle’s body. The beams from my headlights didn’t offer a ton of visibility since she was sprawled on the ground beside my van rather than in front of it, but there was enough light to see the face of my victim. My mind swirled at the possibility that I had just killed someone. Barbara Marr: Mother Killer. My unflattering mug shot would be plastered across every newscast and newspaper in the DC Metro area. People would point at the picture and ask, “Is that Charles Manson?” “No,” others would respond. “That’s The Mother Killer—Barbara Marr. Hope she fries.” My daughters would have to hang their heads in shame in school while I sat in a cold jail cell and learned to play the harmonica.
Of course, I would only be a murderer if she was actually dead. Jumping to conclusions of her demise wasn’t fair to anyone. Taking precious seconds to calm my erratic respiration and faster-than-the speed-of-light pulse, I crawled closer to her face. I recalled a CPR course I had taken with my mother a few years earlier. Check for breathing. There was something about checking for breathing. How hard could that be?
I put my face even with her chest and tried to see if it rose and fell, but my eyeballs were actually pulsing, if that’s possible, so everything seemed to be moving. Probably some horrible curse of accidental mother murderers. Homicidal Eyeball Pulsing Syndrome. I would have to ask my optometrist about that.
“Who is it?” Roz asked. She was behind me now.
“Michelle Alexander. I think she’s dead! Do you have your cell phone?”
“I forgot it!”
I reached in my jacket pocket for my own, but pulled out Bethany’s Game Boy instead. I felt in my other pocket. No cell phone. Damn! “Run back to the house and call 911!”
Roz was gone in a flash.
Since the look-see test wasn’t working, I decided I should feel near her nose for any sign of breathing. Only, I was breathing heavier than a hormone-heavy teenage boy at a cheerleader convention. I couldn’t tell if the breath was hers or mine.
Then she moaned and coughed a bit.
I probably broke all sorts of rules about moving accident victims, yada, yada, yada, but I wasn’t thinking clearly and I was just so thankful that she was alive that I lifted her head off the ground.
“Michelle?”
No response except a small rattle in her breathing. When I put my hand on her chest, it felt wet and warm. I assumed that was blood, but it was just too hard to tell. The moment called for a flashlight. Remembering that I had one in my van, I started to put her head back down so I could retrieve it. She moaned again.
“Michelle?”
I thought she was trying to talk, but it was hard to tell.
“Michelle? Do you want to say something?”
She moved her head in what might have been interpreted as a nod.
“Michelle. I’m so sorry—I didn’t see you—”
She gurgled and spat up some blood.
“Hang