River Road
Page 7
When I’d made comments like that in class the student would usually say, “But that’s how it happened!” I would try to explain, as my teachers had explained to me in my MFA workshops, that reality was not the final arbiter. The story had to work on the page. I was beginning to wonder, though, if my students didn’t have it right. What did story structure have over the truth?
So I read their stories, crying at details I would have once marked as clichéd or overly sentimental. A ghost story about the local campus legend, Charlotte Blackwell, that I’d seen a dozen times before was made oddly poignant when the writer confessed that the ghost reminded her of her baby sister who had died of SIDS. A story about a family dog dying that I began with trepidation reduced me to tears when my student wrote that his dog was the first one he told he was gay. Maybe it was because standing in front of all those people at the vigil had flayed a layer of skin from my bones and I felt raw and exposed. Maybe it was the bourbon—which I had almost finished—or maybe it was that sitting here watching the dark rise from the road below I felt as if all the sadness, in my life and in the lives of my students, was flowing through my house tonight.
The last story I read was Aleesha’s story about her cousin Shawna’s heroin addiction. “ ‘The first time I shot up I felt like I swallowed the sky,’ Shawna told me. But the last time I saw her the bruises on her arms looked like clouds before a storm.” I read the story gripping my own elbows, my fingers digging into the crooks of my arms as if hiding my own track marks.
When I picked up my pen—a black Flair, not the red one—it was to tell them that I admired their bravery and thank them for sharing their stories.
I gave them all As. Why the hell not? I thought. It would be my parting gift to them.
When I got to the end of Aleesha’s story I saw that another paper was stuck to it, the staples of each paper clinging together. I pried the bottom paper off, hoping it was Troy’s (he still hadn’t emailed me his late paper), but it wasn’t. The name handwritten in the top right corner was Leia Dawson.
I felt suddenly cold, as if someone had opened a window and let in the winter wind. I stared at the paper—at Leia’s name—trying to understand how a dead girl’s paper had wound up in my house. She didn’t owe me a late paper. She’d handed all her work in on time and this wasn’t the fantasy story she had written for the class.
Then I remembered. She had come by to see me before the faculty party but I’d been too busy to see her. No, I’d only pretended to be too busy. I hadn’t wanted to listen to her bright, happy chatter. But she hadn’t come for that. She’d come to show me something she’d written.
Prof, she’d written across the top of the paper, I know you’re beyond busy but would you take a quick look at this? It’s something I wrote last year that I have a question about. Could we talk about it before break? Thanks! Leia.
She’d left it in my mailbox—and then Aleesha had left her paper on top of it. A simple explanation for a missive from the dead. Not a mystery like the daffodils, barrette, and bottle left on Leia’s shrine.
I poured myself the last of the bourbon and stared at the paper—ten to fifteen pages of double-spaced typescript stapled together staring back at me reproachfully. Then I picked up Leia’s paper and began reading her story.
It’s quiet in here but not quiet enough to hear a pin drop, which is too bad because if a pin does drop we all have to stay until it is found and accounted for. Such are the perils of running a quilting circle in a prison.
I laughed out loud and reached for my pen, about to scrawl What a great opening line! across the page until I remembered that it was too late to tell Leia what a good opening it was. I read the rest of the story through tear-blurred eyes. It was clearly based on her experiences teaching at the prison, running a writing class and a quilting circle.
I find that the women are more likely to tell their stories during the quilting circle when their hands are busy and their eyes are bent down to the scraps of cloth we are piecing together.
The stories of the women emerged with the patches of cloth—joined together with the sashing as if by a river running through all our lives.
Some of the things they’ve done are bad, but here those bad things are only more torn patches stitched together to make something beautiful. When I look up from my sewing I don’t see a criminal, an addict, a killer—I see myself.
My eyes blurred on this last line. I looked up from the page—into my own reflection in the window. I stared back at a wasted, spectral version of myself, hair tangled and lank, face white, eyes shadowed—a revenant come back from the land of the dead. Then the figure moved. It wasn’t my reflection. It was a person standing outside my house staring at me. A person I recognized from my nightmares. It was Hannah Mulder.
* * *
I’m not sure how long we stayed like that, our eyes locked across the barrier of glass. The first thought I had was that she wasn’t real, that I’d drunk so much that I’d begun to have hallucinations. But then I thought about the things I had found on the wall—the daffodils, the barrette, the bottle—and it suddenly made sense that Hannah was here. She was sending me messages, trying to tell me something—but what? I had to let her know I understood, that I was willing to talk to her, that I wouldn’t chase her away like I had in the past. The only way I could think of doing that was to show her the bottle of Four Roses she had left. It was still in the pocket of the coat I was wearing. I started to reach for it, but the moment unlocked a spring in her. She bolted—faster than I would have thought she could move. I sprung to my feet without thinking and ran to the door, flinging it open and shouting for her to stop.
I could see her lurching through the snow heading toward the road. I followed, a shadow of her, stumbling through the deep snow in my slippers. It wasn’t the first time Hannah had left things for me. When she first got out of prison I’d started finding daffodils on my doorstep, tied together with twine and notes scrawled in a childlike script. “I’m sorry” and “I want to make ammends.”
Fuck amends, I’d thought. I’d been about to get a restraining order against her when the daffodils and notes had suddenly stopped. Why had they started up now? Was it because she had something new to make amends for? Had Sue Bennet been right that the police should be looking at her? Had she run over Leia?
You can make amends by clearing my name, I thought, as I got closer to her at the bottom of the hill. She was having trouble getting over the stone wall. She had the distended belly and twiggy legs of a drunk—plus she was probably loaded. How many fifths of Four Roses had she had to drink to steel herself to face me? Certainly more than I’d had tonight. I only hoped she stayed conscious long enough to make a statement to the police when I dragged her sorry ass there.
I caught up with her just as she was clearing the wall. I lunged and grabbed for her, but my hands were clumsy from the cold and I only got a handful of her denim and fake-sheepskin jacket. Her spindly arms slipped free of the sleeves and she toppled backward into the snow on the other side of the wall. I shook the jacket at her.
“Did you think leaving flowers would make up for what you did?”
Her face crumpled as she struggled to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?” I screamed. “Is that why you left this?”
I reached inside my coat pocket and took out the fifth of Four Roses. She threw up her hands to cover her face as if she thought I would throw the bottle at her and stepped backward, shaking her head, her eyes wide and startled in the sudden wash of light as a car came around the corner. I had only time to see her expression turn from confused to terrified before the car, going too fast to stop, hit her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“She was standing in the middle of the road! I didn’t have time to stop!”
I looked up from Hannah’s inert body to the man who had gotten out of the car. Silhouetted against the headlights he loomed like the black cutout shape of a monster, but when he crouched down bes
ide me I recognized him.
“Ross! What are you doing here?”
“I was coming to see you—to tell you I was sorry for what happened at the vigil—and then she ran out in front of me! Is she . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” My hand was on Hannah’s neck. How had it gotten there? I couldn’t remember the seconds between the car hitting her and my crossing the road, just as I never remembered running down the hill to Emmy. I felt a faint tick under my hand—Hannah Mulder’s blood running through her veins.
“She’s alive,” I said, surprised at the sound of relief in my voice. I should be angry. Why should she live when Emmy and Leia hadn’t? “We need to call an ambulance.”
Ross fumbled in his pocket for his phone, cursed, and turned, mumbling that it was in his car. He left me alone, crouching beside Hannah. She was turned away from me, her face covered by loose, stringy hair, her knees drawn up to her chest as if she’d tried to roll into a ball to protect herself from the impact. Or from me, I thought, remembering the way she’d cowered from me. How she’d stared at the bottle in my hand as if I’d meant to throw it at her. Her ankles above her thin canvas sneakers were bare and scabbed, obscene-looking in the yellow glare of Ross’s headlights. The same yellow headlights I’d watched light up those lonely mountain roads with Ross six years ago—he’d been driving the little Peugeot, not the Volvo, which was probably why Hannah was still alive. But what was he doing here? What had he just said? To tell me he was sorry for how he acted at the vigil? He hadn’t looked sorry. There was something strange about his being here—as strange as Hannah’s showing up outside my window—but when I tried to sort it out my mind balked. I brushed back Hannah’s hair from her face and caught the scent of cheap bourbon and menthol cigarettes.
“The ambulance is on the way,” Ross said, crouching down beside me. “Is she still—”
“Yes,” I said, “although I’m not sure why. She must have enough alcohol in her bloodstream to kill a person.”
“Is that why she ran into the road—Jesus! She came out of nowhere!—because she was drunk? But what were you doing with her?”
“I saw her standing outside my house. I called to her and she ran. I followed her—I thought she’d come to tell me that she was the one who hit Leia.”
“But then why would she run?” He shook his head. “Oh, Nan, I can see how it might have happened. That curve—if Leia ran out in front of you . . . that’s something Leia might do. She was impulsive—brilliant, yes, beautiful, talented—but there was something in her that sometimes just had to burst out and she didn’t always care who was in her way or who got hurt. If she ran in front of you like that . . . well, it wouldn’t really be your fault.”
I stared at Ross. In the glare of the headlights his eyes looked like gouges carved into his face. Unreadable. Why was he talking about Leia now? Was he trying to excuse himself for hitting Hannah? Did he think that if I admitted hitting Leia it would somehow excuse him for hitting Hannah? But it wasn’t the same.
“Whoever hit Leia left her for dead in the road,” I said, “and I would never do that.” I tried to hold his gaze but it was like trying to grab hold of something in the dark. His eyes slid away from mine.
“I believe you. That’s what I was coming to tell you—that and something Leia told me that night before you came into the kitchen—”
The wail of sirens drowned out whatever Leia had told Ross in the kitchen. Then we were surrounded by flashing lights, pinned down by them, as if Ross and I were criminals tracked down by the police. The lights blanched his face and I saw it was wet with tears. From hitting Hannah? I wondered. Or from remembering Leia? There wasn’t time to find out. We were separated by the rush of paramedics and then a police officer was asking whose car it was that had hit Hannah. I heard Ross telling him that he’d been driving—no, Ms. Lewis hadn’t been in the car. She’d heard the accident and come down from her house.
“Was that right?” someone asked me.
Dimly I realized that Ross was giving me the chance to recast the events of the night. I didn’t have to be the crazy lady who chased Hannah Mulder onto the road straight into the path of an oncoming car. I felt a pang of gratitude toward him, but I couldn’t let him take the blame for hitting Hannah by himself.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I saw Hannah outside my house and I followed her down to the road.” Chased her would have been more accurate. “She was standing in the road when the car came around the curve. . . .” Backing away from me because she thought I was going to throw a bottle at her. I wasn’t being all that honest after all. “Ross couldn’t have seen her.”
“So you witnessed the incident. You’ll have to come down to the station to make a statement.”
“Of course,” I said, trying hard not to show how much I dreaded going back to the police station. Would they give me a Breathalyzer test? But no—I hadn’t been driving. Still, what would McAffrey think if he smelled bourbon on my breath? Always take the offensive, Anat would tell me. “Is Sergeant McAffrey on duty? I have some information to give him about Leia Dawson’s death. I think Hannah Mulder might have been involved.”
* * *
After Hannah was loaded into the ambulance the young police officer drove me to the police station. We left Ross talking to a state trooper, describing how the accident happened. I wondered if we weren’t being separated deliberately so that we couldn’t coordinate our stories. But that didn’t matter. As long as we both told the truth our stories would be the same. They’d realize Ross wasn’t responsible for hitting Hannah and I would explain to Sergeant McAffrey my theory about why Hannah had been lurking outside my house. When she woke up in the hospital he could question her and she’d admit to running over Leia and then everyone would know it wasn’t me. It didn’t matter if my breath smelled like bourbon. I’d been drinking in the privacy of my own home. I hadn’t been driving. Besides, I hadn’t had that much . . . had I?
I was taken to the same dreary yellow interview room as before—did the Acheron police station even have more than one?—and left on my own to wait for Sergeant McAffrey. Because he’s busy, I told myself, not because he wants to make you more nervous than you already are.
“Back so soon?” Sergeant McAffrey said by way of greeting. He was carrying two Styrofoam cups of coffee. “You must’ve missed us.”
He handed me one of the cups. The coffee smelled burnt but the warm cup felt good. I wrapped my hands around it, thinking it was a good sign that he’d brought me a cup of coffee.
“I’m sorry Hannah got hurt, but yes, I did want to talk to you. Is she going to be all right?” I asked.
“Too soon to say,” he replied, taking a sip of his coffee and wincing at the taste. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
I often told my students that starting in medias res gave the writer the advantage of choosing the most interesting bit to begin with. So although I wanted to tell Sergeant McAffrey about the things Hannah had left on the shrine, I began instead with that moment I looked up from my desk and saw her standing on my front lawn. Like a ghost, I wanted to say, like Cathy’s ghost appearing to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, but I didn’t. Literary allusions were not going to help my case. “As soon as I moved she bolted and so I ran after her.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“I knew she had something to say to me and that she might not say it in front of the police. I only wanted to talk to her but she panicked. I smelled liquor on her breath when I caught up to her at the wall. She was drunk. She stumbled over the wall and then she said she was sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I think for running over Leia. She left this at Leia’s shrine.”
I pulled the pink barrette out of my pocket and laid it on the table between us. Sergeant McAffrey’s face turned pale.
“You recognize it, don’t you? You’re the one who found it wedged into Hannah’s radiator grille after she hit Emmy.”
“Because she left this too.” I took the bottle of Four Roses out of my pocket and saw his eyes widen. Too late I realized what it looked like: a drunk carrying around booze in her coat.
“I found this on the shrine tonight. It’s Hannah’s brand. There were daffodils too, like the ones Hannah’s been leaving for me since she got out of prison. She’s been hanging around my house, leaving me notes, saying she wants to make amends. Don’t you see? She must have been driving to my house the night Leia died—drunk as usual. She’s the one who hit Leia.”
I finished in a rush, gulping for air. Sergeant McAffrey was staring at me, not with the flash of epiphany I’d hoped for but not with disbelief either. Instead he looked sad, as if I’d let him down. But all he said was “Interview concluded” and the time and flicked off the tape recorder. I’d forgotten I was being recorded. Then he spoke into an intercom.
“Louisa, would you please have Ms. Lewis’s statement typed up for her to sign. I’ll drive her home when she’s done.”
He left without looking at me. Half an hour later a woman in a red and green Christmas sweater, Santa earrings, and glasses dangling from a chain around her neck came in with my statement. She told me to read it carefully and sign if it was all correct. I reread the story I’d just told McAffrey and saw how outlandish it sounded. But that’s what really happened, I wanted to say, just as my students did when I critiqued their writing.
A minute after I signed it Sergeant McAffrey came in, as if he’d been watching me. He looked preoccupied. When I handed him the statement he looked up from the page to my face, his eyes narrowed.