by Dan Alatorre
I leaned forward, curious to know more about the man who could have killed my daughter that morning and who seemed to have no regrets about what he’d done to the people he hit with his truck. “What kinds of things would he do?”
“Well . . .” Janice said, catching herself. She lowered her eyes and adjusted her chair. “Mostly just temper tantrums and such.”
I sat back, putting my hands in my pockets. It seemed as though Janice had run her course, so I tried to think of something conciliatory and reassuring to say.
“We all saw the senility coming, getting worse each year. Some suspected Alzheimer’s, and that may have been part of it.” She looked at me squarely. There was a twinge of fear in her eyes. “But the drinking and the pain killers played their role, too.”
I watched but said nothing. My job was to let her talk. She seemed to need to.
She knitted her fingers in her lap, glancing around the empty room. “It’s like the devil came to sit with him one day out in the fields, and never left. Like evil itself just grew and grew in him like a weed, until Mr. Hill—the nice Mr. Hill we all knew—was gone. And this angry old man who hated everyone was left in his place.”
Janice stood up to leave. “He’s running this place into the ground you know. Poor Mrs. Hill is always having to go behind him and clean up his mistakes.”
“Alzheimer’s can be—”
She shook her head, raising a hand to her temple. “This one today was a doozie.”
I went for one last thing. The obvious. “Was he drunk?”
Janice watched me in silence for a long time. She took a step backwards away from the window into the shadows, nodding.
“Wow, that early in the day, huh?”
She nodded again. “Every day. But it’s not just that. He can’t control that truck of his. Not anymore. His hands can’t work the controls very well, and his legs get spasms. He can’t manage them at all some days.”
She looked across to the hall window and the parking lot, retreating further into the coming darkness, her eyes alight with fear. “He sure couldn’t manage it today.”
I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees. “You know, Janice, Mr. Hill said something curious to me. After the wreck, when I came in, I saw him standing in the hall. I didn’t know he was the owner. I thought he was an employee who did deliveries. He was just standing there staring out the window.”
The setting sun cast long shadows over the room. Janice’s eyes were the only part of her visible against the darkening walls.
Taking a deep breath, I went on. “I asked him if he was okay, and that kind of snapped him out of a trance. Then he said the strangest thing.”
Janice gripped one hand with the other, saying nothing.
“He said something like ‘people need to learn to get out of the way.’” I let that sink in. “Saying something like that about people you had almost killed. It seemed very odd. Very . . . inappropriate. Misplaced. You know?”
She lowered her eyes. “I’d say his mind is going, but it isn’t.”
“Do you think there will be a lawsuit?”
Janice stifled a sarcastic laugh. She walked to the door, stopping to look up and down the hallway. “Maybe,” she whispered. “But it’ll never go anywhere. His friends on the police force will see to that. They didn’t take your statement, did they?”
“They’re supposed to. I was waiting—”
“The police have left.”
I bolted upright and peered out the window. The parking lot was empty.
“See?” Janice turned and quietly disappeared down the hall.
Soft noises from upstairs told me Sophie was beginning to stir. “Daddy?”
Climbing the stairs two at a time, I reached my daughter before she could become frightened by waking up in a strange room.
Chapter 9
My wife had never been so happy to be leaving a winery.
Neither had I.
Mallory arrived with the replacement van and had already made arrangements to get us back into the hotel we had checked out of that morning. It was now time to get a bite to eat, and to get some sleep before planning our next move. We were supposed to see more of Virginia wine country—but I wasn’t sure I wanted any more wineries or any more of Virginia.
I also didn’t want to ruin things for Mallory. She sat at the tiny table by the window, sifting through her brochures, but her mind seemed elsewhere.
She knew that if she even mentioned leaving to me, I’d pack up the van and start driving in the middle of the night.
“What a week we are having, huh?” I asked, attempting to lighten the mood. Sophie had drifted off to sleep watching cartoons. The only light in the room was the flicker from the TV. I picked up the remote and switched it to Sports Center. “Hey, how about some wine? I think we’ve earned it.”
“Pfft.” Mallory tossed her brochures into the center of the table and sat back in the chair, folding her arms. “I know we have.”
I could probably guess what was on her mind, but it was better for her to bring it out on her own schedule. She sighed, pushing back from the table and moving to the bed, undressing as she went.
“Okay, madam sommelier. What did we buy that’s any good?”
Mallory commenced to scrolling through her purchases out loud, trying to decide on a proper vintage for an after dinner sleep inducer. I dug around for a clean t-shirt to sleep in.
“Anything but that!” Mallory whispered intensely, seeing the Hillside Winery shirt in my hands.
“Yeah . . .” I laid it aside and sat down next to her on the bed. “I guess I already have enough souvenirs from that place.” She was under the sheets but a glass of wine would still sound good to her. Better than good. Necessary.
I took a deep breath. “Let’s open the champagne.”
“Champagne?” Her eyes widened. “What the hell are we celebrating?”
“We’re alive.” I found the bottle and started undoing the foil over the cork. “We are alive and healthy and safe. That is worth celebrating.”
“This trip has been a complete disaster.”
I picked up two plastic cups from the sink area and unpeeled them from their cellophane wrappers. They were better than nothing. Placing a hand towel over the champagne bottle, I liberated the cork with a muffled pop. “This trip has been a disaster, and we are alive to complain about it.” I handed her one of the thin, flimsy hotel cups. “That’s worth celebrating.”
We sipped our champagne, considering our different assessments of the situation, then we both spoke at once.
“You go first,” I said.
Mallory’s shoulders slumped and she rested the cup in her lap. “I’m ready to go home. I’ve had enough of this trip and I don’t see the next few days being any different.”
As much as I wanted to agree, I held myself back. “We could do that. We could get up bright and early tomorrow and drive straight through to home. We’d be there by, say, 8 P. M. at the latest.”
I took another sip. Mallory waited for the “or” that she knew was coming, and the alternate plan.
But I had no alternate plan to consider. “Honestly, I’m ready to get the hell out of Virginia.” I chuckled. “Screw this place!”
We laughed together, relieving the tension for a few minutes as we sipped expensive champagne from cheap plastic hotel cups.
“We still have the rest of the week off.” I sat on the back of the chair, being careful not to spill my wine. “We can goof off in the garden, maybe go to Sea World . . .”
“We have our annual passes to Busch Gardens . . .”
“And that would all be fine, you know? Sophie would love it. Heck, I would, too. So if you wanted to, we could go home and do that, but we could also stop and see a few more places—some of the special places you’ve already mapped out—and maybe have the best of both worlds.” I sat down on the bed again. “You know, kind of salvage the trip? Only if you want to. Then head straight home.”
; Mallory sighed again, her eyes alight in the glow of ESPN highlights. It hadn’t been a bad trip the entire time. We’d gotten some rain, and Sophie was sniffling with what might turn into a head cold, but the big downer was the wreck at the winery. Losing the car and how afraid Mallory had been thinking her husband and child had been killed. Living with that very real fear, the heartfelt possibility, even for the few minutes, had changed her attitude for the whole trip.
“Well.” I watched the tiny bubbles lift off from the bottom of my glass and make a wobbly path to the surface where they popped silently. “I think years from now, the car wreck won’t be the part of this trip that we remember. People tend to remember the good things.”
I didn’t really believe that. People seemed more likely to move on from small inconveniences, not a near death experience, but I hoped I was right.
Mallory bit her nails and stared at the TV, crossing and uncrossing her legs under the sheets. Maybe heading straight home was the best thing, the medicine she needed.
“I want to ask you something.” She turned to me. “Do you really believe we were lucky today? Because I don’t see it!”
I rubbed my chin in the near dark, nodding. “I do. What happened today was tragic, it really was. We all got a good scare. But in the end, here we are, unhurt, whole, healthy . . .”
She folded her arms.
“I have to look at what did happen. When things happen around you and not actually to you, you have to believe that you were lucky.” I leaned over to her, putting my face near hers and kissing her softly. “That truck nearly killed four people. I watched it all, like it was happening in slow motion.” I glanced at Sophie to make sure she was asleep. “The young lady should have been killed. She is feeling horrible right now but she is lucky to be alive.”
I drew a deep breath. “Now, I’ve asked myself whether we were lucky or not. Here’s how I know we were.” I set my cup down. “Our daughter is never hungry. Never. It’s all we can do to get her to eat. So it surprised me when she acted up in the winery today at lunch time. Maybe she was hungry, maybe she was bored and wanted attention, I don’t know. But as soon as we started making our way out to the van to have a picnic, she didn’t want to go.”
I leaned into my wife’s line of sight. “I know if we had gone out to the van like we planned, she and I would have been sitting between the two cars having a picnic. That’s what was in my mind, to sit on the cooler between the cars and watch DVDs through the open van door. That’s what I had planned. If we had gone when I wanted to go, that’s where we would have been when that old man got into his truck.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We would have been killed.”
It wasn’t often I would let myself be so dramatic. I let the words hang in the air for a moment, trying to decide how to explain what happened next.
“The reason we didn’t go out right away, the reason we aren’t in a hospital or a morgue right now, is because our sweet little princess over there threw a freaking tantrum. So I stopped to show her some t-shirts and knickknacks, to distract her. It was only for a few minutes, but . . .”
Tears welled up in my wife’s eyes.
I swallowed hard. “Those few extra moments would have been about the amount of time I would have needed to get the cooler out of the car and set up shop. When the truck squealed its wheels, there never would have been enough time to get out of the way. In the hours that passed while we were waiting for you up in that meeting room, I had a chance to play it all back. There was nowhere to go. Think about the lady who was hit—she was facing the pickup truck and saw it coming. She still couldn’t get out of the way. Neither could her boyfriend.”
By now, I was reliving the moment in my mind, the words catching in my throat. “ I might have survived, but she . . .”
My voice grew thin, trailing off, thinking the unthinkable. I swallowed again and refocused, blinking tears out of my eyes. “And why weren’t we killed? Because our kid had to look at stupid t-shirts.” I wiped my nose. “The funny ones. She asked me what they said, so I read them to her. That was the difference between having our daughter alive right now and . . . not.”
Tears fell from my eyes as I strained to keep my voice even. “So, yeah, I believe we were pretty damned lucky today.”
Mallory closed her eyes and leaned her head back, shining streaks flowing down her cheeks. I didn’t usually feel as deeply about things as she did, but this was different. We sat for a moment, in the quiet hotel room, with only the flickering light of the TV to read each other’s faces.
“I wish I could see it that way.” Mallory sniffled. “But this isn’t the first time things like this have happened.”
“Don’t connect things that aren’t connected,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
“Things like this keep happening! What if they are connected?”
I stood up and walked toward the door. I felt a sudden urge to vent some restless energy.
Mallory aimed her words to my back. “There was the car fire last year where you guys were almost killed, and there was the whole NICU thing the year before. Now this, a maniac who almost kills you both in a parking lot. Doug, there’s something wrong about all of this!”
I opened my mouth to speak but had no words. My heart thumped in my chest. “Don’t—”
Mallory pounded the mattress, sobbing. “Am I supposed to sit here and believe that every year, some horrible thing happens almost kills our daughter—but not worry about it? At the same time of year? Every year?” She flung her empty cup across the room. “Stop pretending this is all just a bunch of damned coincidences!”
Chapter 10
A good cry had accomplished what the champagne could not. As frustrating as the conversation had been, releasing the pent-up emotions exhausted Mallory to the point where she could no longer fight off sleep. Now, with the bottle empty and the hotel TV switched off, I sat in the darkness considering what my wife had said.
Each year, around the same time of year, a life-threatening situation happened to our daughter.
When Sophie was born, the examining doctor had inadvertently “heard” something in the stethoscope while he checked her heart. It turned out to be a rare heart condition, one that could take her life without warning. With proper medications, people with the condition could lead a long happy life, but without getting diagnosed, the first symptom was usually sudden death.
If we had taken her home, she could have died. We never would have known why.
The next year, the “incident” was even worse.
At the time, we had two sport utility vehicles, an old Lincoln Navigator and a little Ford Escape. Since they were paid off, the plan was to drive them until they dropped. With the money we weren’t spending on car payments going into Sophie’s college fund, it felt noble, not cheap.
Our little Ford was a fine and roadworthy vehicle, but it was getting up there in miles. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when it started acting up one day.
Sophie and I planned a trip over to her cousin’s house in St. Petersburg, about an hour’s drive. Sophie wanted to go swimming in her cousin’s pool, so I arranged for a hamburger cookout. My brother and I could catch up and see about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ prospects for the remaining football season.
I packed the little Escape: beach towels, swimsuit, pool toy . . . stroller. Always in the back of the car just in case, Sophie’s stroller served as a reminder she was big enough that she didn’t need it all the time, but when she did need it, we wanted to have it with us. She only weighed about twenty-eight pounds, but she gets awfully heavy lugging her around a grocery store or a mall. After one particularly long trek to the parking lot after Sophie conked out midday at Busch Gardens, I decided to keep the stroller handy until she started in high school.
I didn’t pack any food or drinks for the drive to St. Pete because we were going to my brother’s house for lunch. A quick trip across the bridge, a bite to eat, a little swimming, and then back home. Should be a ni
ce day.
I clipped my daughter into her car seat.
“I can’t wait to see cousin Vanessa!” Sophie had been asking me all morning when we were going to leave. Now it was finally time.
A few minutes later, we were on our way. At the last stoplight before the highway, I texted my brother to give him our estimated arrival time, and we pulled onto Interstate 275.
Immediately, I knew something was wrong. The car seemed sluggish. I pressed the pedal to give it some gas and get us up to highway speed, but it didn’t want to do it. That had never happened before.
The on ramp is only a few hundred feet long. I needed to be up to fifty-five miles per hour when it ended, or we’d get hit from behind by another driver. I gripped the wheel and stomped the gas. The Ford was too sluggish. We weren’t going to make it. I glanced around as I flicked on the emergency flashers and pulled into the emergency lane. Cars roared by on my left side. I mashed the gas pedal again to clear whatever was blocking the fuel line or clogging the engine.
The little Ford made a loud hissing sound, but without the white cloud of steam that usually accompanied a blown engine hose. The car still refused to accelerate as traffic whizzed by. The next exit was coming up quickly. I pulled off.
As I decelerated coming down the off ramp, the noise lessened. When I came to a stop at the next traffic light, the noise stopped.
I considered my options.
It was a hot, sunny Florida day, and the swimming would be good at my brother’s house. The kids wanted to see each other. Whatever the noise was, it had stopped. Maybe a piece of a tree limb had gotten stuck under the car and had finally come free when we turned off the highway. It had happened before, and the rubbing against the wheel had made a similar noise. In any case, it was gone now.
