by Paul Cleave
“I wanted to help him. I didn’t want him dead. But I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. That was his choice and I had nothing to do with it.”
“You killed him.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You killed him because you’re a killer,” he says. “It’s in your nature. You said last night you were going to find him. You said if I helped you, you’d go easier on him, but I didn’t help you so you went hard. You went as hard on him as you could.”
“He killed himself out of guilt,” I say. “You knew what he was doing.”
“He wasn’t doing anything.”
“How many are out there?” I ask.
He returns to saying what he says best. “You killed him.”
“How many others? Is it just the four?”
“The police are lying to protect you, just like they protected you two years ago, just like the reporter said.”
“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I tell him.
“I saw him this morning. He was laid out on a piece of steel. He was broken. He wasn’t my boy anymore. It wasn’t Bruce. It was some thing with its head all busted up. You jammed that gun into him and pulled the trigger.”
“You know I didn’t do that.”
“Don’t tell me what I know,” he yells. “You don’t have the right to tell me what I know! He was my boy! My boy! And you killed him.”
“He killed himself.”
“I’ve always thought about what you did,” he says, “and I always wished I had the courage to do the same thing.”
“What?”
“When Lucy died. It was the same thing, you know. But I did nothing. I let it eat me up all these years and I did nothing. But not this time.”
I unfold the newspaper clippings. They’re not big articles, because it wasn’t a big enough story to hit the front page. Just like with my family. They’re small stories jammed in the back pages with the opinions and reviews and the who-gives-a-damn sections of the paper. Alderman’s wife, Lucy, was killed by a learner driver who was still mixing up the difference between yielding and not yielding. There’s a quote: “She just came out of nowhere.” It’s similar to my own story, but not that similar. Though maybe enough that there could have been a bond between Alderman and me. His wife went shopping for groceries and lost her life because of an accident. It was a run-of-the-mill routine: you climb into your car and an hour later you’re cut out of it. No malice. No intent. Just bad luck combining for everybody involved. A left turn instead of a right, ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later: any of those, and she’d still be alive. Similar in some ways to my own story. Different in others. My wife and daughter weren’t driving. They were walking. It wasn’t a learner driver who hit them, but an experienced one. He was experienced in a lot of areas. Mostly proficient in drinking more than he was in driving. He had a criminal record a mile long. He was a repeat offender. He would be pulled over and fined. His car and his license would be taken off him and he would get them back. It became a routine. He just kept on going back out on the roads, and the world just kept on letting him. When the fines increased, it didn’t matter. He just kept on paying them, racking up his mortgage account with drunk-driving conviction payouts. There wasn’t anything the criminal system was prepared to do about it except take a collective breath each time to see if this would be the one when he killed somebody. Nobody cared. As long as he paid his fines, he was a source of income. He was revenue. He was good for the country.
The connection between Alderman’s wife and my own is a strong one in some ways, but not in others. We both lost our own lives the day we lost parts of our family. He spiraled into an abyss that he is still in now. I have an abyss of my own. I figure if Alderman had done something all those years ago, maybe he would be a different man. But like he said, he did nothing. I figure if I’d done nothing, I’d be a different man too.
Better men? We could be. Or we could be worse.
“You took the law into your own hands,” he says. “You did it after the accident, and you did it again last night. You killed my son. You killed him for doing nothing. Ten years ago, when Lucy died, I did nothing. Not this time. This time you are going to pay. Your wife is going to pay. And this time your friends in the department can’t do a damn thing to help you.”
The temperature in this impossibly cold house drops even further. It’s like somebody has just strapped a block of ice onto my back. I can feel the weight of it pushing me down. I tighten my grip on the phone. The air is thick and damp and tastes like sour sweat, and all the words in the newspaper article seem to swirl around as if the ink is wet and running.
“You better be kidding right now, you son of a bitch.”
“You think the police are kidding and my son isn’t really dead? What do you think, Tate?”
“My wife has nothing to do with this.”
“How can you be so stupid as to think bad things don’t happen all the time to innocent people? You know that first hand. You experienced it last night when you killed my boy. You experienced it two years ago. And you’re experiencing it right now.”
The phone goes dead. I look at the display. The battery hasn’t gone flat. Alderman has hung up.
I dial him back. He doesn’t answer.
I hit the driveway running. I reach the car and the tires shriek a little and leave some rubber behind. I speed past the cemetery where a patrol car is just entering the gates. The driver looks back over his shoulder, but he doesn’t turn around and try to pull me over. The cemetery and the patrol car quickly get smaller in my mirror. I call the nursing home where my wife lives—if live is an appropriate word. She resides, maybe, not lives. A nurse I’ve spoken to only a few times answers the phone. I ask for Nurse Hamilton. A moment later she comes on the line.
“Theo? What can I help you with?”
“It’s Bridget.”
“What about her?”
“I think she’s in danger,” I say, and I hold the phone between my ear and neck so I can change gear. “I need you to go and check on her.”
“Danger? What kind of danger?”
“Can you just check to make sure she’s okay? Then stay with her until I get there.”
“But . . .”
“Please, I’m on my way. Just go and check on her.”
“Fine, but I can tell you now there aren’t any problems. We provide excellent care, as you know, and—”
“I’ll stay on the line,” I say, hoping it will hurry her up. It does.
I continue to speed. I wish I had my car from two years ago with the siren installed. I wish I could flash and sound it at the surrounding traffic to get them the hell out of the way.
I hit three green lights in a row; I run through two oranges. And I slow down for a red before accelerating between cars to a chorus of blasting horns.
Nurse Hamilton comes back. I hear her pick up the phone, but she doesn’t say anything. It’s as though she’s on the other end of the line composing her thoughts. Trying to figure what she needs to say. Figuring it because there’s a problem.
“Carol?”
“Bridget is in her room,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she says.
“Is somebody with her right now?”
“We have very adequate staff here, Mr. Tate,” she says, speaking formally, as if giving testimony to a jury.
“That’s not why I’m calling. Look, it’s hard to explain, but I’m almost there. Please just do me the favor of staying with her until I arrive.”
“Very well, Theo. We’ll—”
I don’t hear the end because the phone cuts out. I look at the display and watch it going through the motions of powering down. I try to revive it so I can call Landry or Schroder, but the battery is completely drained.
I get to the nursing home ten minutes later. The day has cleared up even more, bits of blue sky threatening to grow as the afternoon moves on. I look around
at the other cars, trying to figure if one of them is out of place, but I don’t even know what Alderman would be driving.
Inside, I rush past the nurses’ station. The woman at the desk recognizes me as the guy who rang not long ago and gives me the sort of look that suggests I’ve ruined her afternoon.
Bridget is sitting in front of the window the same as any other day. Being here in the early afternoon is no different than being here in the early evening. She’s not watching TV. Not getting up and taking a shower or doing a crossword puzzle. Her world is twenty-four seven and there are no breaks. I rush to her and hug her and she doesn’t hug back, but that’s okay.
“This is all very out of the ordinary,” Carol Hamilton says.
I pull back and hold Bridget’s hand. “Has anybody come here to visit her?”
“Nobody who hasn’t visited before.”
“What about somebody else? Anybody unknown show up to visit, anybody at all?”
“What is your point, Theo?”
My point is simple for me, though perhaps not for her. Still, I decide to give it a go.
I explain the conversation I had with Alderman, touching only on a few of the points, and even then only briefly. She takes it all in stride, as I figure only a cop or a nursing-home professional could—both have seen way too much to be surprised anymore. In the end she points out that nothing bad has happened, therefore the man who threatened Bridget must have been lying, must have been making a desperate attempt to upset me because of his son. The care home is a top-rate facility, she reminds me, and they let nothing happen to their charges. She does make a concession about being more vigilant, and tells me to call the police. I tell her that I will.
She leaves me alone with Bridget. I don’t want to leave her here. Not anymore. I want to be able to take her with me, but where to? Back to my house? How would I even begin to look after her? No. She’s safer here.
Carol comes back. “There’s a phone call for you. You can take it in the office.”
I follow her back downstairs.
“Hello?”
“How did it feel, huh?” Alderman asks. “To think she was dead? To think I had done something to her? That’s how I feel, you bastard. You killed my son, so for me the feeling is always there. It’s going to stay the same. I wanted you to know how it was going to feel. I wanted you to imagine the loss. And not the same loss you suffered two years ago. But the kind of loss that’s deliberate, the kind of loss you can only experience when one human being goes out of his way to kill someone you love. Hurts, doesn’t it? But I just did you a big favor and left your wife out of it. It wasn’t her fault. I still want to make you suffer though. I want your pain permanent. And you still have another family member who won’t care what I do to her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You took my son,” he says. “You still owe me.”
He hangs up.
I hand the phone back to the nurse, extending my arm without really seeing her. The desk, the paintings, the window into the office behind her—they all seem to lose detail and disappear.
“Theo?”
I know Carol is speaking to me, but I don’t look at her. The phone has gone from my hand, but I’m still holding out my arm ramrod straight.
“Theo?”
She touches my shoulder and the contact seems to work. I look at her and she starts to say something, but I don’t wait to hear what it is. I cover the foyer with large strides and the heavy door weighs nothing as I pull it open.
I make the drive back to the cemetery in about the same amount of time I made it from the cemetery to the nursing home. People toot at me and give me the finger. I race through intersections and run red lights when there are gaps in traffic. When I reach the cemetery I have this hollow feeling in my stomach, similar to the one that was there the day my daughter died. It’s a feeling that grows worse when I bring the car to a stop. I run toward Emily’s grave, though the pile of dirt next to it already tells me what I’m going to find. All these cops out here and nobody stopped Alderman from desecrating her grave. But why would they? They were never there to protect her from dying. Just as I wasn’t there. And in this case it simply would have looked from a distance as if Alderman was doing his job. Just digging a hole. Just moving on with life after losing his son—if they even saw him at all. And looking toward the lake, I can already tell they couldn’t. There was no way.
I stand at the edge of the grave. I know now there were two reasons Alderman threatened my wife. The first was to scare me. The second was to send me away from the cemetery. That means he was watching me all along. He was waiting.
My little girl’s coffin is down there. The lid is open and Emily is gone.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
All the oxygen is sucked out of me. I stare down at the coffin with the silk linings and soft pillow, and the world outside of the grave fades away and goes black. There are crumbs of dirt where my daughter should have been. The brass handles have pitted, the glossy sheen of the wood long since gone. There are cracks and dents in the wood. My first reaction is to climb down and make sure with my hands as well as my eyes that Emily isn’t in there. My second reaction is to scream. Instead I fall back to the third reaction, the one I had two years ago when I got the call about the accident. I drop to my knees and start to weep and try to convince myself this isn’t really happening.
It should be simple to know which is worse—my wife missing or my daughter—but suddenly I don’t know. Suddenly they both seem as bad as each other. I guess the worse of the two is the one that is happening. I’ve dealt with a lot over the years, but never somebody’s dead child being stolen from a graveyard. Kidnapped. I don’t even know if that’s the term for it.
I have no real idea what to do. No real direction to take. A dead child is every parent’s worst nightmare. What is it when all the nightmares come true?
I have lost Emily. Again.
Two years ago it had been on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a nothing day. People don’t make great plans for a Tuesday. They don’t get married. Don’t leave for holiday. They don’t organize housewarmings. But the fact is one in seven people dies on a Tuesday. One in seven is born. What better day to lose your family? Is there a worse day? That Tuesday should have been like the others. I kissed my daughter and my wife on the way out the door, and the next time I saw them Emily was lying on a metal slab with a sheet tucked up to her neck so I could see her face. Bridget was in a world between life and death, hooked up to machinery and surrounded by doctors.
Hours earlier they had gone out to see a movie. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Disney was entertaining my seven-year-old daughter on the big screen with animals that could talk and evade capture and do taxes and everything else clever animals can do. It was school vacation. My wife was a teacher, so it was vacation for her too. At quarter to four the movie ended and my wife walked my daughter outside along with dozens of other parents and children. They walked around the shopping complex sidewalk toward her car. It was ten to four, and already Quentin James was drunk. It was ten to four in the middle of the afternoon, and Quentin James was behind the wheel of his dark blue SUV, which he had paid a four-hundred-dollar fine to get back that morning. He had no driver’s license, but that didn’t stop him from paying the fine; it didn’t stop the courts from handing over the keys. I can only imagine how it happened—bits of imagery I added together with details from eyewitnesses. The SUV swerving through the parking lot. The SUV jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. My wife and daughter hearing it, both of them turning toward the sound. Emily’s tiny hand tight inside my wife’s grip. The look on Bridget’s face as she realized there was nothing they could do, that the SUV was going to knock them around like rag dolls.
She pushed Emily out of the way. That’s what they tell me. She did what any mother would do and tried to save her daughter. Only it wasn’t enough. The four-wheel drive slammed into them both; it knocked my wife onto the hood, it rolled my daug
hter beneath the wheels, and it broke them. It broke my little girl up inside beyond repair. It did the same to my wife. It did the same to me. And to my parents.
And still Quentin kept driving. He would tell me two weeks later, when I took him away to a small corner of the world, that he couldn’t even remember running into them. He told me that it wasn’t him, not really, but the man he became when the booze took over. Therefore I had the wrong man. He was sick, he said, and it was the sick Quentin who ran over and killed my daughter. The Quentin pleading for his life in front of me wasn’t the man who had killed my girl, at least according to the sober Quentin, but that didn’t matter to me. It was the bullshit plea of a weak and cowardly drunk during one of his few sober moments. He said he couldn’t remember running them over, but that didn’t matter either. I could. And so could witnesses. They told me the impact sounded dull, like heavy suitcases being dropped on the pavement from a second-story window. They told me my wife rolled across the hood of the SUV and was thrown hard onto the concrete. They told me my little girl tumbled and bounced beneath the chassis until she was spat out the end, ejected from between the wheels all twisted and bloody. They tell me my wife and daughter ended up in the same place, side by side on the street. Quentin kept on driving.
Quentin James was caught within an hour. His four-wheel drive with the grille on the front that was never once used off road in the four years he owned it was impounded. It was kept as evidence. He was charged with manslaughter and reckless driving, but he should have been charged with murder. I never figured that one out. The guy chose to drive drunk. He chose to do it every single damn day of his adult life. That means it didn’t come down to fate or bad luck, but down to a conscious choice. That and statistics. It came down to mathematics. It means it had to happen. Put a drunk guy out on the roads every day and he’s bound to kill somebody. Has to happen, the same way if you keep flipping a coin it has to come up tails at some point.
