PART 2 Kenzie started crying before anyone said another word. “I only had three drinks,” she sobbed. “I didn’t see the car. I thought it was empty. I panicked.” My mother tried to pull her back inside.
“Don’t say anything else, Kenzie. Not another word without a lawyer.”
The officer stepped between them.
“Ma’am, you just told me under questioning that your older daughter was driving. You said you saw her leave. Was that true?”
My mother opened her mouth.
Then she closed it.
They arrested Kenzie on the porch. The same porch where I’d been in handcuffs ten minutes earlier.
The airbag DNA matched her. Her phone was found under the driver’s seat. Her fingerprints were on the rearview mirror. She’d adjusted it, because she’s eight inches shorter than me.
The girl in the back seat of the parked car was named Nyla. She was a high school junior. Her mother was a nurse’s aide finishing a double shift at the hospital two blocks away. Nyla had fallen asleep in the car waiting for her.
She had a broken pelvis, a lacerated spleen, and a brain bleed.
She was in a coma for six days.
I went to the hospital every afternoon that week with Arlo in his car seat. I didn’t go in. I just sat in the waiting room, because I didn’t know what else to do.
On the seventh day, Nyla’s mother came out and found me.
“You’re the sister,” she said.
I nodded. I couldn’t speak.
She sat down next to me. She looked at Arlo for a long time.
“The police told me what your mother wanted you to do,” she said. “That you could have just signed and gone home to your baby.”
“I couldn’t,” I said.
She took my hand.
“Nyla woke up this morning,” she said. “She asked for pancakes.”
Kenzie was charged with aggravated DUI causing great bodily harm and leaving the scene of an accident. She pleaded guilty. Four years in prison. Her nursing license application was permanently denied.
My mother was charged with obstruction of justice and filing a false police report. She took a plea. Probation and community service. She lost her job at the school district.
She called me once, from her lawyer’s office.
“You destroyed this family,” she said.
“No, Mom,” I said. “Kenzie hit a seventeen-year-old girl. You tried to put it on me. I just told the truth.”
I haven’t spoken to her since.
My husband came home from his training two days after the crash. He moved Arlo and me back into our own house that night.
Nyla spent four months in rehab. She had to learn to walk again.
Last June, she walked across the stage at her high school graduation without a cane.
I was in the bleachers with Arlo on my lap. Her mother had saved us seats.
When they called Nyla’s name, Arlo clapped his chubby hands together.
He didn’t know why.
But I did.
THE END.
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Family loyalty should never mean taking the blame for someone else’s choices. The truth protects more people than a lie ever will.
What would you have done if your mother asked you to take the blame? Tell us in the replies.
