The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  Naomi grew up in this shop, doing her homework sitting on the floor in the history section, stocking shelves as a teenager, starting the newsletter and building the website. But she always had other full-time-ish jobs in the film industry, while at the same time constantly trying to raise the money to produce her own highly experimental—and admittedly not widely understood—short films. Perhaps this didn’t look like a satisfying life for a fully grown adult woman. But as she kept telling her parents, it was.

  Then they died; a drunk driver during broad daylight on the Long Island Expressway. Suddenly Naomi was the sole proprietor of the shop. She couldn’t bear to simply shutter the joint, nor to look for buyers. So she took the helm, temporarily, during one of those occasional windows when the finances of the book business appear to be in relatively good shape. People in Greenwich Village bought a lot of books, and didn’t welcome chain stores; Berger’s was doing all right. And Naomi quickly grew fond of the whole thing, the employees and the customers and the authors, the kids and their moms who came to the Saturday-morning readings.

  It took her a few years to admit that her temporary stewardship had turned permanent. Then she hired a guy to build a simple counter in the rear, and bought a handful of beat-up café tables, and an espresso machine, and a few baskets for baked goods. A place to hang out on a rainy day. And for when it wasn’t raining, she reconfigured the backyard, put some secondhand teak furniture out there, plus a few bins of plastic toys, and all-weather outlets for the computer users—the writers and programmers and start-up dreamers—who swarm into every café every midmorning, living their office-less lives in public, absorbing free wi-fi. Not too many of these café people buy books, at least not regularly; but they do pay for coffee and scones. Some days she sells more scones than books.

  But now these backyard tables are occupied by the party’s smokers, dropping their butts into nearly empty plastic glasses, getting jovially drunk on a Tuesday night.

  Her phone rings. She glances at the screen, and sees something odd: it seems to be herself who’s calling. “Hello?”

  “Hi Naomi, it’s Isabel.” Her old friend, calling from the landline in Naomi’s weekend house. Another of her parents’ follies from the seventies—a ramshackle shingled house atop a tall bluff near the end of Long Island. It was the middle of nowhere, back then; bought for a song, and slowly renovated on the cheap. Her parents were pretty astute investors, for a couple of Communists.

  “Are you in my house, Isabel?”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Of course. I have only one best friend who’s also my literary agent.” When Naomi was halfway through writing her memoir, she’d sent it to a very encouraging, extremely astute Isabel, who helped her re-imagine the whole structure, turning it into a much better book than Naomi would’ve—could’ve—written on her own. And then Isabel had represented the project, submitted it to a dozen editors, and within a few weeks had collected a half-dozen offers, reaching all the way up to $110,000. Six figures!

  But of course the agent’s commission was 15 percent off the top. And who knew that the advance was payable in four separate disbursements? And because it wasn’t Naomi’s sole revenue in any of the four years of payouts, she had to lump the money into her overall income, taxed at her general rate for city, state, federal. So in the end that six-figure payday translated into four deposits of roughly $15,000 apiece, spread over four years.

  One of the partygoers is telling a very loud story, and Naomi looks around for an unoccupied spot, a quiet zone. She starts to walk inside. “You know you’re always—always—welcome.”

  “Thanks,” Isabel says. “Sorry I didn’t call to ask, or anything. It’s been … This has been a very strange day.”

  Naomi unlocks the door to the windowless office, dim and quiet and tiny. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh … God, it’s hard to explain. But listen, Naomi, the cameras in the house: they still work, right?”

  For her most recent film project, Naomi had secretly wired the entire ground floor of the country house with small hidden cameras, and microphones. “Yeah.”

  “Good. Would you mind telling me how you turn them on?”

  This was unexpected. “Sure.”

  “Good, thanks. And Naomi?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That gun? Is it still here?”

  The Accident Page 258

  “So we’re in agreement?” Charlie asked.

  Dave nodded.

  “This is exciting,” Charlie said, smiling broadly. “Are you excited?”

  “I am.”

  Everything was going better than expected. So they had started talking about what was next, with that optimistic arrogance particular to young men like them. And next was the American cable news network, whose investors were already lining up. Charlie was going to have his own show, the main draw, weeknights prime-time.

  “We’re going to do great things,” Charlie said, gazing out the window of Wolfe Worldwide Media’s main conference room, perched atop an old building in Silicon Alley, with open views of the Empire State Building, just a half-mile away. “Great things.”

  “We are.”

  “You don’t sound too convinced.”

  Dave tapped his pen on the pad for a few beats. “We still haven’t discussed it, Charlie.”

  Charlie shifted in his seat. He took a sip of coffee, replaced his cup to the table.

  “I’m talking about the other girl. The one in the dance club.”

  “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “She may have seen us. She may be able to identify you, or me for that matter. When you’re on television all the time …” Dave held out his hands, explaining the rest of that unappealing narrative.

  The Accident Page 259

  “Then she might recognize me.” Charlie provided it, confirmation that he understood. “She might come forward, point a finger: That’s him! The last person with my friend before she disappeared! J’accuse!! Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Aren’t you?”

  Charlie blinked his assent. “So are you merely pointing out an obvious problem? Or do you have a solution?”

  “Do you?”

  Charlie picked up his coffee again, but didn’t raise it to his mouth. “We have to determine whether that’s likely to happen, don’t we?”

  “Duh. How?”

  “First we find her. That shouldn’t be so hard. Her name was in the newspapers, we know where she went to college, and when. We should be able–”

  “Yeah,” Dave cut him off, “I got it: we can find her. Then?”

  “We figure out if she recognizes me. Which I’m sure she won’t. So we’ll be in the clear.”

  Dave smiled, condescendingly. “Yes Charlie,” he said, leaning forward, forearms on thighs, hands clasped in front of him, prayer-like, “but what if she does?”

  CHAPTER 35

  Isabel pads across the whitewashed floor in bare feet. The wood is smooth and cool against her soles, and the breeze smells of the sea, and the knee-high waves lap at the rocky beach, a circular rhythm that sounds like radio static, someone playing with the tuning knob, trying to get a better signal. She can imagine the low indistinct murmur of a ballgame from a transistor radio in another room, and birds chirping their endless conversations, a car with an ailing transmission accelerating on the distant road, the twang-and-splash of a cannonball into a swimming pool from a sagging yellowed diving board, and the ringing peal of a child’s laughter.

  She can imagine that it’s three years ago, and she’s still married, and her baby is still alive.

  Her eye is drawn to the built-in bookcases that flank the fireplace, filled with nature books and photography books, with milky white sea-shells and old green soda bottles, the conventional ephemera of a beach house, plus the electronic equipment hidden in the corners, the discreet circular lenses, the reasons she’s here.

  The weight of her situation settles onto her
shoulders, her soul, her entire being. She can’t remember what it was like to feel safe. It seems like weeks since she finished this manuscript, since this whole thing started, but it’s … is it possible? … can it be true that she finished reading the manuscript this morning?

  Isabel puts her hand on the refrigerator’s handle, but she doesn’t pull. Instead she leans against the door. She starts to cry, at first just a few catches of her breath and a couple of tears, but it quickly escalates, and soon her shoulders are heaving, her whole body is convulsing, crumpled there against the cool metallic plane of the refrigerator.

  The crying stops of its own accord, its urgency dissipated. She takes a deep quavering breath, then another more controlled one. She wipes her cheeks with her right forefinger; her left hand is still holding the handle.

  She opens the door to the freezer compartment, and can’t help but glance down to the bin on the bottom shelf, the big Ziploc that she tucked beneath the box of ice pops, just its zip-closed top fold visible. Then she pulls out the ice-cube tray, and dumps all the cubes into a glass pitcher ringed with multicolor stripes. As she fills the pitcher with tap water, she can see her reflection in the window above the sink. She’s a mess. She wipes her eyes again with her knuckles, then uses a dish towel to do a more thorough job.

  Isabel returns to the veranda, where Jeffrey is putting his empty pasta bowl down on the wicker ottoman. He looks over the railing, to where the sun has sunk below the horizon of the water, setting the sky on fire, sending color bolts through the waves.

  “Thank you,” he says, taking the glassware from her. He fills a glass with water, hands it to her. Then he fills another, for himself. “That was delicious.”

  A single-person meal, pasta with vegetables alongside a salad, a few dollars’ worth of fresh ingredients and ten minutes of cooking time. It’s the type of meal she prepares a lot of, these days.

  Isabel sets her empty bowl into Jeffrey’s, but hers is tilted because of his fork; hers is balanced precariously, while his is steady. She stares at this small edifice, the small unstable structure, perhaps analogous to their lives.

  Jeffrey turns back to the sunset, and she follows his gaze. For a moment, the two of them stare silently at the colorful remains of yesterday. Then he turns to her and smiles. She has always felt secure in the warm embrace of his smile.

  “I know this must be hard for you,” he says. “Being here.”

  She feels tears welling up again, and struggles to suppress them, to not fall apart here and now and possibly permanently. She’s been trying to hold it together for a very long time.

  There was nothing worse than Tommy’s memorial service. Nothing more heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, tear-inducing. Unspeakably sad, but people still had to speak. The hall was standing-room-only, at least three hundred people wearing black, holding handkerchiefs, sniffling, leaning against one another, hugging, wiping their noses, rubbing knuckles into their eye sockets, running fingers through their hair, staring up at the ornately gilt ceiling, at ten-thirty on a Monday morning. What a way to start the week.

  Her mother-in-law was the first speaker. The aging hippie had never looked more formal, in her black shift and tights. Grandmothers know better, she said. They know that everything will pass: every tantrum, every toilet-training mishap, every manipulative strategy for avoiding bedtime, every cold and flu, every stomach virus and scraped knee and busted lip, every vicious meltdown with projectile vomit and bitter, stinging accusation. It will pass, grandmothers know, and the memories of the little annoying things will transform into some of the wonderful things, the lovely things, the things we should have appreciated while we could. And so the unfairness of this, it’s unthinkable … Then Karla fell apart.

  She was followed by a family friend. Then Isabel’s parents. The final speaker was Isabel’s husband, who spoke for barely a minute, with Isabel slumped against him. But it was too much, not just for him and Isabel but for everyone in the voluminous room, for all the people crushed by the loss of a boy who was about to start his second year of preschool, who had a best friend named Danny and a favorite teddy named Baba-Beebee and a favorite color orange and a second favorite color green and a favorite television show and movie and song, who had just that Tuesday morning had a tantrum at the toilet—“Pee-pee, come back! Please come back, pee-pee!”—because Isabel had mistakenly flushed the toilet before letting Tommy do it himself.

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  Then three hundred black-clad mourners streamed out of the building onto the gray, wet street, dabbing their eyes and holding hands. Some lit cigarettes, and others flung their arms in the air to hail taxis, and dozens or scores or hundreds reached into their pockets and handbags and opened cell phones, and switched off silent modes, and examined screens and pressed devices against ears, staring off into the low dark sky, heads hanging at angles, listening to messages, concentrating on the details of their lives from which they’d been absent for seventy-five minutes, to the rescheduled appointments and updates and questions, and their eyes were still inflamed when they eased back into their normal lives, untragic lives from which their perfect little child had not been taken, unshattered lives, lives that still made sense, lives with reasons to move forward, to go to work and then to go home, to wake up the next day and do it again.

  But not Isabel. Everyone could see that her life no longer made sense. All those new friends she’d made in the playground and the preschool, all those women who spent their lives managing the trappings of their wealth, tending to their co-op lofts in Tribeca and their beach houses in Water Mill and their slope-side condos in Vail, scheduling their nannies and babysitters and tutors and piano instructors and French teachers, their tailors and cleaners and manicurists and colorists and stylists, their personal trainers and Pilates sessions and yoga classes, their doormen and garage attendants, their summer and Christmas vacations, their midwinter breaks and spring breaks, their cars and boats, their silk upholstery and granite countertops and reclaimed wood floors, their this and their that, but for Isabel it just didn’t fucking matter what Farrow & Ball shade of blue anyone was painting any goddamned foyer.

  Suddenly there was no reason to go to work, or to go home, or to wake up tomorrow.

  Because she couldn’t stop thinking this: we don’t lose our babies. That’s not part of the deal of life. That’s not fair.

  And while she retreated into her grief, her husband veered further toward his nihilist tendencies, the amorality that had always been lurking beneath his surface. He was angrier at the world than ever, and he was taking revenge by not caring about it.

  Isabel couldn’t help but think that he was angry at her. That he blamed her. Because she certainly did.

  They had never been one of those hand-holding couples, never called each other Babe, never were the ones running out onto the dance floor. But neither had done anything egregious, neither had said anything horrible. It was just that their marriage, which to begin with hadn’t been constructed on the soundest foundation, couldn’t support the weight of their tragedy, their grief. And Isabel’s guilt.

  So the divorce wasn’t acrimonious. They split their assets right down the middle, without debate. He bought her out of her share of the downtown loft, and she used that money to buy the uptown apartment, to fill it with soft comfortable furniture in soothing shades of neutrals, with top-end appliances and nickel-plated fixtures. He visited the new place once, for a glass of wine on the terrace, soon after she moved in. He brought a housewarming present, a small lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, about whom Isabel had written a term paper, two decades earlier.

  They still spoke, every few months. Or maybe it had become a couple times per year. There were things Isabel still loved about him, various reminders that could be elicited by that ten-thousand-dollar piece of paper hanging on her living room wall, which is probably why he went out of his way to buy the thing in the first place, a thoughtful present for an ex-wife.

  S
he stands at Naomi’s kitchen counter, leafing through pages, rushed. She doesn’t want Jeffrey to discover her in here, doing this.

  Isabel knows it’s in the scene about the car accident, so it takes her only a few seconds to find, at the bottom of page 136, the sentence that changed everything:

  “Charlie, come on,” I said, “stop the car.”

  She can’t believe how naive she was, how trusting. She’d always thought of herself as savvy, wary; a native New Yorker’s self-assurance in her immunity to swindles of every sort. But here it was, black-and-white evidence that she’d been deceived on the deepest levels, for an unforgivably long time.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Hello, Hayden,” Charlie Wolfe said. The two men shook hands as if they were old friends, free hands on shoulders, wide smiles. But friends are not what they’d ever been. “Nice to see you again.”

  For a few years in the 1980s, back when Charlie was still in high school, his father Preston Wolfe had been deputy director of Central Intelligence. The Cold War was in its last throes, and Europe was still a crucial theater for American intelligence. Hayden was becoming an important man there, in an important part of the world, so he and Wolfe père had gotten to know each other. They’d maintained a relationship at a low simmer for the next couple of decades, over which Hayden caught the occasional glimpse of young Charlie: a cocky high-school kid at an elitist New York private school, then an irresponsible frat boy, then a striking transformation into a studious law-school student, and finally an ambitious and hardworking and sober young adult, immensely ambitious.