by Jill Malone
“It’s OK.” The same voice. “It’s OK. We’ve got her. We’ve got her too.”
Thirty-nine
A sound woke me
He called her several times before her eyes opened. They closed, and he called her again.
“Mama.”
“I’m awake.”
“Mama.”
“What is it, baby?”
“A sound. I heard a sound.”
He’d heard a shriek like a pterodactyl, and found his mother’s bed empty. Down the long hallway, he thought maybe they’d been eaten. In the living room, his mother slept in a nest of blankets, on television a commercial for pet supplies.
“I want to sleep with you,” he said.
“OK.”
“Mama.”
“I’m coming.”
He came and stood beside her. She followed him down the hallway—leaving the light on, the television—crawled into bed, and tucked him against her. Sleep broke over them.
Five stitches. They had to shave a patch of Liv’s hair to clean and stitch her scalp just to the left of her part. Wrapped her forearm too, the skin sliced and bleeding from the broken windshield. Sophia in emergency surgery, they said. Trauma, they said. Trauma not word enough for that girl’s body.
The police officer found Liv in the waiting room, and led her to a cubby of an office down one of the wings. A huge, scrubbed guy in a button-down shirt and suit jacket, no tie; he had two cups of coffee, and held one out to her.
“How’s your head?”
She shook it. This guy looked like he might cry too. They sat side by side; he’d turned in his chair to observe her. The coffee tasted like silt.
“We found deer tracks,” he said. “Along the roadside where you swerved. You hit one of them with the truck—we found it on the other side of the road—then the truck hit the tree, and then it rolled.”
Her eyes burned, her jaw from clenching it.
“It could have happened without a blizzard,” he said. “We notified her parents—found her cell in her bag, and called them. They’re driving up from Ritzville.” His voice was subdued, as though to lull her to sleep, and she wanted to be lulled to sleep. “You were driving?”
Liv stared at Claire’s boots, the torn knee of her jeans. “Yeah.”
“She was in the passenger’s seat?”
“Yeah.”
“Was she wearing her seatbelt?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Where had you been, before the accident?”
“Sophia’s house. She and her boyfriend just split up.” Liv choked, coughed. “Her housemate is in Napa. I’ve tried to call her, but I just get voicemail.”
A knock at the office door, and the officer stood, stepped outside. She looked at the bandage on her arm, a dark patch at its heart. Her coffee spilled, the liquid expanding across the floor. She tried not to think of blood. He came back into the room, shut the door, knelt beside her.
“She’s fucking dead,” Liv said. “She’s fucking dead, isn’t she?”
The cop said yes. A shudder escaped before she could seal it off. “And the baby? Her little boy?” Liv saw legs in the snow, her body half buried, and blue. Nothing could survive that. Nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Fuck,” she said. “Fuck.” She crushed the Styrofoam cup with Claire’s boot. “I’d gone over there because she was frightened to be alone. I was taking her back to my house, and then—”
She could not swallow the wail; it tore from her. Sophia would never have a little boy named Riley.
Simon played on the floor beside his mother’s bed. He had made breakfast, and drunk milk, and gone back to the kitchen later for raisins, and a banana. Still she slept. And so he’d brought his trains into her room, set up a track along the floor to the chest of drawers.
When he heard the kitchen door open, he ran down the hallway, and launched himself into Bailey’s arms.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she said. “Where’s your mama?”
He climbed her, clutching her neck and shoulders, and buried his face into her throat.
“I’ve got you,” she said, squeezing him. “I’ve got you.”
“Mama’s sick,” he told her.
Bailey jostled him in time with her heartbeat. “It’s OK,” she said. “We’re going to be OK.”
Forty
Those are my boots
Coffee going cold in the mugs they held, Liv’s mother and father sat at the kitchen table at Claire’s house. On her way to class, Drake had dropped off bagels and apples, but no one could eat. Liv stood at the counter, beside Bailey, and tried to remember the police officer’s name. Watts, she thought. Could a cop be named Watts?
He was even bigger here, impossibly large in this kitchen. He kept his voice soft, she noticed, to minimize his size. Today he wore a tie, a blue suit. Officer Watts, she tried it in her mouth.
They’d buried the mother and child three days earlier, another item in the paper. The night of the blizzard, twenty-four people had died in accidents, most of them in the freeway pileup. She got a sentence in the lead article the morning after, the young pregnant woman killed in a collision on Government Way.
The police had taken photographs of the scene, measurements, asked Liv for a voluntary blood sample that night at the hospital to rule out any question of impairment. They had investigated thoroughly because of the death involved in the crash. The death involved in the crash. He had explained all this to her, this detective. Today, in the kitchen, he assured them that the case was closed, the accident officially accidental, and no charges would be pressed.
Claire came into the kitchen, holding Simon’s hand. They sat at the table, and Simon crawled across into Susan’s lap.
Bailey had shaken Claire awake that first morning, told her that something terrible had happened, and that she needed to get up.
Nauseous, aching, Claire had tried to sit. “I feel awful,” she said.
“Simon said you were sick.”
“Where is Simon?” Claire asked.
“He’s here. Claire, you need to get up. Something’s happened.”
“I had a dream,” she said. “I couldn’t find him. He was lost. I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find him.” Simon had been lost in the woods. It was so real. But here he was on the floor playing. “My head. Something’s wrong with my head.”
“Is it the flu?” Bailey asked, glancing at her, as she grabbed jeans and a sweater from the bureau. “Do you want some ibuprofen?”
“You’re in Napa, aren’t you?” Claire said. Why was she wearing Liv’s pajamas?
“We came back early from Napa.” Bailey laid the clothes out on the foot of the bed. “Claire, you have to get dressed. I’m sorry to drag you out of bed when you feel rotten. I don’t know much yet, but Julia—” Her phone rang and she looked at the display. “I have to take this; it’s Julia.” She left the room, with Simon tailing along behind.
Her head ringing, a pain in her belly whenever she breathed, Claire pushed up from the bed. She discovered the bruises when she undressed, examined them in the mirror, pressed her ribs as she breathed in and out. After dressing, she found them in the kitchen, Simon in Bailey’s arms, his head tucked, eyes closed.
“There’s been an accident,” Bailey said.
And then she explained that Liv had hit a deer in the blizzard, and rolled the truck. She said that Sophia had been killed. Claire touched her ear, asked if Liv had been hurt.
The detective stepped toward Liv, and she started. He’d said something, she realized. “I’m sorry, detective. I didn’t catch that.”
“Would you walk me to my car?” he asked.
Liv smiled, the idea of protecting this mammoth man, the first amusing thought she’d had in days. “Sure.”
He held the door for her, and she led down the steps, and along the path through the snow to his unmarked car. Once she reached the car, she turned to face him, waiting.
“It’s good you
r family’s here with you,” he said.
She stared up at him, his earlobes the size of half dollars.
“A time like this.” He shaded his eyes to see her better. “We closed the case, but that doesn’t mean things will resolve for you. I know how hard you worked to help your friend—your tracks were all over the place. I know you worked desperately. I know you did. And to find her, in the woods in the dark after an accident, to try to help her, to call for assistance, Liv, you did everything you could. Remember that.”
“Stop,” she said. His kindness hurt her. “Please.”
And so he stood quietly with her beside the police car, the sun refracting off the snow.
In the kitchen, Bailey brewed tea. A house full of people, and nobody had anything to say. The day after the accident, while they waited for Drake to bring Liv home, Bailey had played trains on the floor with Simon, while Claire sat on the sofa, her head splintered.
Simon woke her, crying Liv’s name. When Claire stepped into the kitchen, she saw Liv on her knees, holding the little boy. Her head shaved just back from the forehead, stitches showing in the patch of scalp. Her eye and cheek were bruised.
Drake said she’d brought some groceries, some things to make sandwiches, in case anyone was hungry, and asked if Bailey and Simon would help her bring the bags in. They put the child in his snowsuit, and headed outdoors.
“Those are my boots,” Claire said.
Liv sat down at the table, rested her head in her hands.
“Liv, what happened last night?”
“Sophia died.”
“Bailey told me you were driving.”
Liv went to the sink, poured a glass of water. Outside, Simon hit one of the women with a snowball. They heard his ecstatic, Gotcha!
“You were driving?” Claire asked. Just standing in the doorway hurt. And breathing.
“What do you remember?” Liv asked, her back to the room, to Claire.
Claire could see the deer in the road. They hadn’t had time to scream. She’d woken in Liv’s pajamas with black, livid bruises. “What happened to your head?”
“I hit it on the truck.”
“You weren’t in the truck,” Claire said. She’d cut her palms crawling through the windshield. She stared at her hands. “Liv?” Sophia bent forward trying to kiss her belly. “Liv,” she said again. The baby hated hiccups. “Look at me.”
A snowball splattered against the window above the sink. Liv stared at it. “The truck pinned her,” she said. “Threw her and pinned her.” Liv drank the water, poured another glass.
“You weren’t driving,” Claire said. She knew this. “I was driving. A deer ran into the road, and we hit it.” Two deer in the snow, and they’d hit one.
“She’s dead,” Liv said. “They’re dead.”
“I don’t understand you.” Claire crossed to the sink, leaned against the counter because it hurt less than being upright. “Why have you done this? It was an accident. I hit a deer.”
“And left an injured pregnant woman in the snow.” At last, Liv turned to face her. The white of her eye was bruised too. “And you never said a thing. Not a fucking word about Sophia. I found her. Buried in the snow where you’d left her.”
Claire stepped back. “Things were—” she looked around the kitchen, “confusing.”
“Oh, confusing,” Liv sneered. “Well, that explains everything.”
In the dark, Claire had stumbled in the woods, had tripped and crawled and dragged herself up. She’d been looking for Simon. No, not Simon, Sophia. She’d been looking for Sophia. The snow—drifts of it, and the blizzard—and she hadn’t seen anyone. She didn’t know how long it had taken her to find the road, or how long she’d been in the truck before she’d kicked her way out. She’d only known that she had to get home. That if she got home, she’d be safe. She looked at Liv’s stitches. “Why didn’t you take me to the hospital?”
“Is that what I should have done?” Liv asked. “Tell me what I should have done.”
“I don’t—”
They heard Simon, on the stairs, his shrill voice asking for hot chocolate. Then they were all in the kitchen: Bailey and Drake hauling groceries, Simon flushed from cold and pleasure, holding out a bag of animal crackers. “Look Mommy, we got these cookies. They’re my favorite.”
Bailey brought her tea to the kitchen table. “I’m going to work tomorrow.”
“That’s a good idea,” Dennis said.
Susan brushed her fingers through Simon’s hair, watched the kitchen door. They didn’t know what to do with Liv and the cop outside. What couldn’t he say to her in front of them? Hadn’t she been through enough?
Without designating anyone in particular, Claire said, “If you need me, I’ll be in the office.”
A field guide to skeptics and martyrs: no one suffers like you do. Claire’s bruises hidden by her clothes, her cuts by her hair, she’d smuggled herself past them, and they’d never suspected. They’d never noticed. No one stopped her when she left the kitchen.
Forty-one
Suspended like this
That inexhaustible winter, Spokane had snow in May, unusual, even in the Pacific Northwest. Spring flowers would bud and die in a single afternoon, undone by the wet chill; Claire thought Government Way might be laced with snow until mid-summer.
Liv and Kyle had incorporated: Building Blocks, Inc. They ran their business out of the first floor of Kyle’s apartment complex on Post Street—contracted a green-building project in Peaceful Valley, a windmill farm on the Palouse, and had half-a-dozen renovations on the bluff lined up for the summer. Liv slept more and more frequently at the office, said the commute to Claire’s for four hours of sleep didn’t calculate.
At the café, Bailey hired a baker from Seattle, and they finally extended the hours, opened seven days a week from 6 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. Claire worked on the books part-time at the café. Each month, their profits increased.
The last Tuesday in May, Claire wandered outdoors on the property with Simon, down to the river, pacing like one of those zoo animals that cannot pretend the confinement away any longer. Simon paced beside her, stepping from rock to rock, ambling as though his energy would never flag, four now, and protective of his mother.
They walked past the spot where Liv had stored her trailer, strangely deserted now; in March, they had hauled the trailer to the Palouse farm for the builder to use there. Dismantled, item by item, the life they had shared. Claire’s closet, the shelves in the bathroom, all the cupboards had seemed bereft, so much less.
And then Claire had had a letter, forwarded by her publisher, from a professor at Cornell. A man known to her from conferences she’d attended with her aunt. He taught at the Department of Plant Pathology, and wanted her to contact him as soon as possible regarding a research project proposal that he had. For a week, she’d kept the letter in the pocket of her coat, reread it until she could see the words as a pathway, and then called Patrick.
“Sure,” he said, “I know a phenomenal agent. I’ve used her a couple of times now. Why are you asking?”
She told him. Patrick kept quiet for a substantial time, so long that she thought perhaps her cell had gone dead.
“You still there?” she asked.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Certain?”
“Yes.” Though she wasn’t. Not of anything. And afterward, when Bailey asked this same question, while Claire packed Simon’s toys in the office at the café, Claire could only shake her head.
“What will you do?” Patrick asked.
“I’ve been offered a research fellowship in New York.”
“Researching?”
“Fungi.”
“Oh,” he said. And then, “You don’t just want to rent the place?”
“No.”
The agent had called Claire later the same afternoon, and the house had sold the first day it listed. For an amount that Claire considered absurd—she’d agreed to the list price as a final stall—to a retired
couple from San Diego.
They would close in another week, and the movers arrived in the morning. Claire had explained all this to Simon. He’d listened without response, not even a flicker in his eyes.
Along the gravel drive, just before Claire and Simon reached the fence line, Liv’s new rust-colored Toyota truck appeared.
“Liv,” Simon hollered, running forward.
She parked, climbed from the cab, caught the boy. Thinner, and taller, he stretched nearly three-quarters of her length now. Liv had come for the last of her things.
Claire waved, but did not step toward her. They had never had another conversation about the accident after the angry abridgment in Drake’s kitchen. Weeks would pass before Claire understood. She could never atone. Not for an accident she supposedly had no part of, a tangential death. Liv had re-written the story, and in Liv’s version, Claire had no injuries, no guilt, and therefore, no suffering. Claire hadn’t been in an accident. Hadn’t woken sideways in the cab, disoriented, shaking, thinking, By the bridge. By the bridge. And then fought her way out of the truck, crawling and bleeding, through the dark, the forest litter and trees, the slick of snow, her breathing like an ice pick jabbed into her lungs as she searched.
Liv had meddled with the accident, and created a crime, hadn’t she? Staged a murder to look like the accident that it always was. And now, they were beyond prosecution for recklessness or negligence. If the police were told, they’d suspect a conspiracy, a cover-up, one lover protecting another. A suspicious death. This silence, this unvoiced, unacknowledged guilt, even the grief, were nothing to Claire, nothing compared to Liv’s punishment: Liv’s slow, inevitable vanishing.
“Liv,” Simon asked, “want to play trains with me?”
“I have to take some boxes to the truck,” she said. “Do you want to help me?”
“OK.”
Claire kept her eyes on the tree line. At dusk the last several nights, she’d seen a bull moose. He’d walked to the river, then returned to stand at the edge of the meadow, as though he were waiting.
