“Don’t take too much,” he said. “My boy here needs to drink as much as he can. If you’re thirsty you can have some of this.” He handed Ollie a can of beer. Ollie knew kids weren’t supposed to drink beer, but because he was so thirsty he took a sip.
They just floated there for a while then, the three of them. Four, actually, if you counted the girl. Ollie didn’t know how long they stayed there, but it was long enough he had to pee so badly he thought he would burst.
“Pee over the side of the boat,” Monkey Man told him.
But there was a girl on the boat.
“She won’t notice,” Monkey Man said.
Once again, Ollie told Monkey Man he wanted to call his mom. Monkey Man said, “Remember what I told you? We don’t get cell phone service on the lake. And anyway, why would you want to call your mom? You aren’t a baby, are you?”
To make the time pass, Ollie pretended he was watching Toy Story 2 inside his head. Starting with the beginning and trying hard not to race ahead to his favorite parts. Only it didn’t work very well. Then he tried to remember Shel Silverstein poems we’d read.
Two boxes met upon the road, he recited. Not out loud, just in his head. He forgot what came next, so he started in on a different one. If you’re a bird, be an early bird.
“My brain was getting jumbled up,” he said. “I couldn’t remember anything.”
Finally, he recited to himself the contents of Goodnight Moon. A baby book, but for some reason he still remembered all the words. In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon . . . It had made him feel better, he said, thinking about sitting on my lap, long ago, reading that book together.
It was getting late. He knew this because the sun was a lot lower in the sky than before—the time of day, he remembered, when I had told him photographers usually took their best pictures. Also, it wasn’t so hot anymore. He had fallen asleep for a while, but then he woke up. Monkey Man and Cooper were still sitting on the back of the boat, talking.
“I think we can call someone now,” Monkey Man said. This was strange, because all day Monkey Man had told him the cell phone wouldn’t work on the lake.
For most of that day—except when Ollie asked him a question—it was almost like Monkey Man forgot all about him, but now he remembered.
“We need to talk about something, buddy,” Monkey Man said to Ollie. “You and me. Man to man.”
There were going to be some men coming over on a boat pretty soon, to help the girl wake up. She probably needed to go see a doctor. They’d have some medicine at the hospital to make her better.
“They might ask you a few questions, after,” Monkey Man had told Ollie. “Like how she hit her head, and how the boat crashed into the Jet Ski.
Monkey Man had it backward. It was the Jet Ski that crashed into the boat. Ollie tried to remind Monkey Man about that.
“Some of the stuff from today . . . it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell,” Monkey Man told him. “The police might get mad at Cooper, if they thought he was driving a little crazy.”
Cooper wasn’t talking in that funny way anymore. He wasn’t even smiling the way he had been before. He actually looked pretty serious, like a person who lost their money or their dog died.
“We aren’t going to talk about Cooper driving funny on the Jet Ski,” Monkey Man said. “The men that come on the boats to help us might not understand that part. Then they might not let Cooper drive the Jet Ski anymore and you wouldn’t get to ride on the back next time.”
Ollie didn’t actually want to ride on the Jet Ski. Now all he wanted was to get back on dry land and never go to Lake Tahoe again.
“Another thing,” Monkey Man told him. “We probably aren’t going to mention about how we took our little rest. We’ll probably just say we were out for a little ride, and we had this accident, and now we need to get our friend here to the hospital.”
Ollie didn’t understand what difference it made, whether they had the rest or not. Maybe his mom would be mad that Monkey Man let him stay out on the boat all this time without his hat on, getting a sunburn.
“Certain things,” Monkey Man told him, “are just for us guys to talk about. Like that beer you drank, for instance. I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble about that. If you had to go to jail, for instance. You wouldn’t get to see your mom.”
Monkey Man took out his cell phone then and made a call, and the surprising thing was, the phone worked fine. A couple of minutes later another boat pulled up. It was some kind of water police. There were two men wearing uniforms, also a woman in a doctor suit.
The first thing they did when they jumped on the boat was check on the girl, who had been lying on the floor in the exact same position all this time. They put a cuff on her arm and listened to her heart. They pulled up her eyelids and looked at her eyes with a flashlight.
Pretty quick, they said they needed to get the girl to the hospital. They put her on a stretcher first, then moved her onto their boat and drove away.
One of the boat policemen stayed on the Donzi with Monkey Man and Cooper and Ollie. The boat policeman rode back to the dock with them, towing the Jet Ski.
Ollie was hoping that once they finally got back on land, he could have something to eat. He knew he probably wasn’t going to get those flapjacks anymore. But even some chips would have been good, or a peanut butter sandwich. Except the police officer told them they had to go to the hospital, too. They needed to get checked out, plus he wanted to write down the story of what happened.
When the police officer said this, Monkey Man looked at Ollie. He didn’t say anything, but Ollie understood. He wanted to remind Ollie about their secret. The part of the story the police wouldn’t understand.
Ollie nodded. Whatever Monkey Man wanted, he would try hard to do it.
After the doctor checked Ollie out, they told him he could sit on the couch in a waiting room. When he got there, Monkey Man and Cooper were already at the table. This was where I found them when I got to the hospital.
Then Monkey Man didn’t talk to him anymore. Not then, or ever again.
My son and I had been lying next to each other on the bed while he told me his story. When he was done, I could feel something change. His whole body, which had been stiff and tense, suddenly softened, as if someone had just loosened the strings on a guitar. The whole time he’d been telling me the story of what happened, Ollie’s voice had remained steady—quiet, and a little flat, but he had spoken with a surprising clarity and precision. Now he collapsed on my chest, weeping and trembling.
“I wasn’t supposed to tell,” he said. “Monkey Man told me not to.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I told him. “The wrong ones were Monkey Man and Cooper. I should never have let you go with him. I am so sorry.”
“I don’t ever want to go on any more boat rides,” he told me.
I held him tight and sang him a song—“You Are My Sunshine”—that I used to sing to him when he was a baby. After a few minutes his tears stopped and his breath evened out.
“Mom,” he said, just before he drifted off to sleep, “one more thing. I didn’t tell Monkey Man, but I took some pictures.”
71.
After he was asleep, I unzipped his fanny pack and took out the camera.
The first photographs were what you’d expect an eight-year-old would shoot on a long car ride. A picture of Swift, with his hands on the steering wheel and a cigar in his mouth. Pictures of road signs out the window. A McDonald’s. A miniature golf place that Ollie probably hoped they could stop at on the way home, with a giant Tyrannosaurus rex in front and a statue of Paul Bunyan.
There was a picture of Swift’s leg, and a close up of his earlobe, and one of Ollie himself: with only one eyeball and part of his nose visible, and his mouth making a goofy smile.
Then came the Tahoe house, which I recognized from my own trip there only a few weeks earlier. The yellow Viper convertible. The path down to the lake. The
Donzi, next to the dock. Red and chrome and streamlined as a bullet, a boy’s fantasy. Or an adult man’s, evidently.
The next few photographs had clearly been taken while the boat was in motion. They were off-kilter, blurry. Most of what the pictures showed was water, and a little sky, though occasionally part of Swift’s face would appear in a frame, and when it did he always seemed to be laughing. From the angle of the sun in these photographs it was easy to tell that it had still been morning when Ollie shot them.
Then there was a picture of a dot on the horizon, which must have been the Jet Ski.
Around this point, Oliver appeared to have discovered how to switch to video function. A short clip appeared—no longer than seven seconds—of the Jet Ski weaving toward the boat, with Swift’s voice audible in the background, calling out, “Yeehaw!”
Then the video went haywire. Sky, water, the floor of the boat, sky again. A voice yelling “Shit!” Another voice: “Help!”
After this, Ollie had taken a couple dozen photographs. Each nearly identical—the work of a boy stuck on a boat for too many hours—hungry, thirsty, tired, scared—with nothing to do but point his camera at every single object within range of the viewfinder: The floor of the boat. The motor. The gas tank. The life jacket Swift had chosen not to put on. Swift himself, bent over the cooler, taking out another bottle of what he had told Ollie was their very limited supply of water.
There was a picture of Cooper, draped loopily on a boat seat, looking as if he had no idea where he was. Behind him—visible, though ignored—lay Estella’s daughter, Carmen. Someone—Swift, probably—had put a life vest under her head and laid Swift’s jacket over her like a blanket, as if she were peacefully napping. But even in my son’s blurry photograph it was clear: Carmen was not simply sleeping. Something was terribly wrong.
There was a button on Ollie’s camera that revealed the time each photograph had been taken. I pushed it and scrolled back through the images.
It had been just after ten o’clock when my son and Swift set out on the Donzi. The time on the photograph showing the approach of the Jet Ski read “10:27 A.M.”
The photograph of Carmen—lying still, though not sleeping, her wet hair suggesting that she had recently been in the water—bore a time of 11:15 A.M.
In all the commotion, I doubt Swift had even noticed that Ollie was taking these photographs. In all those hours, he had barely made note of my son’s presence on the boat.
But I knew who would take an interest. Officer Reynolds.
72.
Cooper was brought in for questioning. My son’s account of his behavior, combined with the clear evidence that Swift and Cooper had delayed calling for help for more than six hours in an apparent effort to bring Cooper’s blood alcohol level down to the legal limit, were sufficient that Cooper was charged with negligent operation of a vehicle (the Jet Ski) and driving while under the influence, along with multiple counts of reckless endangerment and failure to report an accident. The most serious of these, for which Swift was also charged, stemmed from the Havillands’ apparently mutual decision to delay calling for help for an amount of time that might well have contributed to the level of brain injury sustained by Carmen Hernandez.
Swift had top-dollar legal counsel, of course. Not only Marty Matthias, but a whole team. To some cynical types—and perhaps I am slowly becoming one such person—it matters more in the end who a person’s lawyer is and how much money he’s prepared to throw at his defense than whether or not he actually committed the crime for which he stands accused. In the case of Cooper and Swift, at least, neither father nor son was found guilty of any crime besides—in Cooper’s case—one count of reckless endangerment, for which the penalty was the one-year suspension of his boating privileges and the requirement to take a course in defensive driving of a watercraft. Swift was fined for operating an unregistered Jet Ski.
Based on the extent of injury to her daughter, Estella would have had grounds for a civil case, but here, too, nothing came of it. I can only speculate as to the reasons. A number of months after the accident, on a rare visit to the ridiculously expensive market where Ava and Swift got their groceries, I spotted Estella in the parking lot. She was at the wheel of a Mercedes SUV that was clearly hers; the bumper sported a sticker of the Guatemalan flag, and a little statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stood on the dashboard.
In all this time, I had not heard from the Havillands. Naturally, once I decided to challenge Swift’s testimony concerning the events out on the waters of Lake Tahoe that day—backed up with photographic evidence and my son’s eyewitness testimony—I forfeited any possibility that Swift might assist me in mounting a new case for custody of Oliver. But as it turned out, in the midst of so much regret and so many losses, I didn’t need Swift’s expensive attorney after all.
I never had to mention to my ex-husband the information that Marty Matthias had disclosed to me that afternoon at my apartment. Life over in Walnut Creek had evidently gotten so difficult for Dwight and Cheri that Dwight was the one who suggested that maybe Oliver would do better living with me now. “If you’re up for it,” he said.
I was, of course. I still had the photograph in my drawer of that one bad night when I’d fallen off the wagon. I would take nothing for granted, but I wouldn’t let that happen again.
And it hasn’t.
I take no joy in the fact that the winter after Ollie moved back in with me, Dwight and Cheri lost their home to foreclosure. They moved in with Dwight’s parents in Sacramento, where Ollie has continued to make regular visits—eventually driving up there on his own when he turned sixteen and, with his earnings from many summers of yard work and dog walking, bought himself an old Toyota.
He would probably make more frequent visits to Sacramento if it weren’t for his swimming schedule. Between practice and meets, his weekends are generally full. He holds his swim team’s number one spot in the five-hundred-meter freestyle. This, at least, we owe to Swift Havilland.
And other good things have happened. Ollie came to love being a big brother to Jared. Strangely enough—or maybe it’s not so strange—Dwight’s hard times served to make him a kinder and less judgmental person. He and Oliver seem to be forging a better relationship. Maybe one day they’ll even be friends.
Friends. There’s a loaded word for you. I know some people, when speaking of a particular relationship, may say “we’re just friends,” as if this were some lesser form of connection to that of lovers or so-called soul mates. But to me, there may be no bond that matters more, in the end, than friendship. True and enduring friendship.
Alice was a friend like that. “Loyal as a dog,” she used to say. I wish I could say the same of myself.
I called her up one time. It was the summer after the accident, and there was a new Coen brothers movie out. I actually had to look up her number, it had been that long since I’d dialed it.
“I was an idiot,” I told her. “Worse than that. I was a bad friend.”
Silence on the other end of the line. How could anyone argue that point?
“I was thinking maybe we could get together and catch up,” I said. “Becca must be graduated now. You wouldn’t believe how tall Ollie’s gotten.”
More silence from the other end. Uncharacteristic for Alice, who always had something to say.
Finally, she spoke. “I wish I could say things could be just the same as they used to be, Helen,” she said.
She had plans that night, she told me. That night, and every other one.
73.
Other than that one brief sighting in the parking lot at Bianchini’s Market, I’d had no contact with Estella, and I had no idea how Carmen was doing. I didn’t have a phone number, and of course the only people I knew who could tell me how things were going with Estella and her daughter were the people who no longer acknowledged my existence.
So one day, more than a year after the accident, I parked my car a couple of blocks down the road from Swift and Ava’s ho
use, remembering that this was the time of day Estella usually walked the dogs. Sure enough, there she was.
I jumped out of the car and ran to her. With the exception of the one time she spoke to me about Carmen’s studies and her dreams of medical school, and the day she walked in on me when I had tried on Ava’s clothes, Estella and I had barely communicated during all the time I’d spent at Folger Lane. Still, I had always felt a warmth and goodness coming from her. She had comforted me that day I feared for Ollie’s life, had told me she would pray for my son. So I put my arms around her. All I had to do was say her daughter’s name.
She shook her head. A person didn’t have to speak Spanish to understand the universal language of grief.
In halting English, Estella gave me the news, such as there was. Carmen had been transferred to a nursing home, she said. A beautiful place. (I could guess who was paying.) She was receiving physical therapy, but so far, she did not seem to recognize anyone.
“I go every day to feed her,” Estella said. “She don’t eat much. Food for babies. She watch TV. Music videos. She’s some salsa dancer, mija. She was.”
I stood there on the sidewalk. Sometimes there is nothing to be said. All a person can do is listen.
“I sit by her bed,” Estella said. “I sing to her. I pray. It’s like she’s an angel. One time she opens her eyes. Gracias a dios, she looks at me. But she’s not like before, those bright eyes. The doctors can’t make it better. Only God, one day.”
I asked about Swift and Ava. They were helping her, right?
Estella nodded. “I got a cousin in Oakland. Right after the accident, she say I can get a lawyer. Make them pay big money.” She shook her head again. “I tell my cousin no,” she said. “Judge gonna listen to me? Judge see me, he send me back to Guatemala City. Where is my daughter then? Mr. Havilland takes care of us. He says we don’t got to worry. They make sure Carmen’s good.”
Under the Influence Page 27
