“Do you consent to a breathalyzer?”
Jenna rolls her eyes. “Can we just skip that part?”
“Then you’re looking at an automatic DUI, and with your record that would mean—”
“I know what that would mean.” Jenna’s focused on her fingernails, bites at a strip of loose cuticle.
Callie sighs. Jenna is looking at hefty fines, 180 hours of community service, anywhere from two to ninety days in jail. Even with all of her varied infractions, she’s never done jail time before. “Okay, well then I’m—”
“Yeah. You’re going to have to take me in.” It hits Callie sideways, like an unexpected blast of wind: a sadness so profound it nearly makes her rock on her heels. As an adult, she gave up on hopes that Jenna would stay sober, would rehabilitate herself, would mother her. This sadness is the sadness she used to feel as a girl, before she taught herself to hope for so much less.
“Please step out of the car, Mom. I’m going to cuff you, read you your rights.”
The door creaks open and Jenna stands, stumbles a little until Callie catches her under her arm. Jenna’s feet are bare, her toes pale against the dark road.
“Where are your shoes? In the back?”
“Nope.”
“Where were you going with bare feet?”
“Nowhere. Just one of those nights. The devil’s out tonight, and hell if I was going to sit around and let him catch me. Only thing to do when you feel the devil coming is to run.”
She isn’t going to touch that one. Her whole life Jenna was busy blaming the devil for her afflictions rather than choosing to take accountability for anything she’d done.
Callie flicks her flashlight in the direction of the dents. “What’s the deal here?”
“Hit a deer.”
“How long ago?”
“Few weeks, maybe.”
“You gonna get it fixed?”
“You gonna loan me the money?” Callie snorts. She’s made it a policy not to loan Jenna money ever since she moved out at eighteen. She knows well enough where it all goes.
“You sure it was a deer, and not, say, a person? Someone like you who tends to drive around after a few drinks… It doesn’t seem out of the question, does it?” There’s an edge in Callie’s voice. She tells herself to calm down, to just cuff her, read the rights, and get on with it, the way she would with anyone else, but she can’t help it.
For the first time Jenna seems rattled. “You’re talking about Jane.I had nothing to do with that. My own fucking daughter. Unbelievable. I was sober. Ask anybody. Three months and counting.”
She almost has to give Jenna credit for sticking to her lines.I was sober, I’ll stay sober, I was sober but…
“I’ll tell you what’s unbelievable. It’s that you’re still pulling the same shit you’ve been up to my whole childhood. Like hell you were sober. It’s been twenty-five years since you tried.”
“Oh, you know everything now, don’t you? I could fill a goddamn book with all that you don’t know.”
Callie doesn’t say anything, just rolls her eyes, guides her mother’s hands behind her back, and cuffs her. She thinks for a second about keeping them loose, before clicking them one notch tighter.
In the cruiserCallie radios HQ, lets them know she’s bringing in a DUI.
Jenna sighs from the back seat. “He’s watching us now. I can feel it.”
“Who?” Callie asks, thinks of the string of men Jenna would bring home, guys with names like Butch and Skeeter, who would stay for a few weeks or months thinking it would be nice to have a place to crash rent-free for a stretch, before Jenna finally drove them crazy. Rusty, who inexplicably took their electric skillet and VCR with them when he left.
“The devil. Out there, stalking through the trees in the night, looking for souls to prey on. But even in the day you can feel him. Lurking. That itchy feeling like something bad is about to happen. That’s him.”
“Enough with the superstition, please.” In the Pines you can’t escape the lore of the Jersey Devil. The creature was born in these woods, a mess of a thing: bat’s wings, a goat’s head, forked tail, hooves, and claws. There’s a local brewery that makes a decent IPA with a cartoon of the devil on its label, but for most people, rational people, the devil was more of a mascot than something anyone arranged their lives around, like Jenna did. When Callie was young Jenna liked to tell her stories about a hunting cabin that belonged toher family for generations, where the men in their line used to keep vigil, guns in their laps, should the devil show his face. If the cabin is real—when pressed, Jenna could never tell her where it was—Callie thinks it’s more likely it was a hiding place for the men who didn’t want to go home and face their wives after a bender.
