River Road

by Carol Goodman

  “Professor Ballantine says that he was on his way to see you when he hit Hannah on the road. Were you expecting him?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “But he said he was coming to say he was sorry that he didn’t defend me at the vigil.”

  “I was there and saw what happened. He didn’t look sorry.”

  It was what I had thought but hearing Sergeant McAffrey say it made me realize all over again how strange it all was—Ross coming to see me, just happening to come around the curve when Hannah ran out. But what other explanation could there be?

  “I guess he had a change of heart,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, not sounding convinced. “And you said you last saw Leia in the kitchen at the holiday party talking to Ross Ballantine? Did you hear what they were talking about?”

  “No, I . . .” The sudden change of topic from tonight to the night of the party had taken me by surprise. “I was upset myself.”

  “Was Leia upset?”

  I recalled Leia swiveling around when I came into the kitchen, spilling the wine she’d been pouring, her eyes wide and startled. Like a deer in the headlights. I’d thought she was surprised by my abrupt entrance but now I recalled that her eyes had been red around the rims and her cheeks were splotchy.

  “Yes, I think she was upset about something. Cressida Janowicz said she was upset when she came out of the kitchen. She thought I had told her about the tenure decision.”

  “Did you?”

  “No!” I cried, offended. “That would have been unprofessional.”

  The corner of Sergeant McAffrey’s mouth twitched, amused, I imagined, that I would be offended at the suggestion I’d complained to a student about not getting tenure when I stood accused of killing that same student. “So she must have been upset about something Professor Ballantine said to her. Was that usual? Had you ever seen them arguing before?”

  “Leia could be impassioned about her beliefs,” I began. “Ross was just saying, before the ambulance came for Hannah, that Leia could be impulsive.” I didn’t add that he’d suggested that was why she might have run in front of my car. I was afraid Sergeant McAffrey would guess what Ross had said but he seemed preoccupied. He left the room for another ten minutes and then came to the door and waved for me to follow him out to the parking lot. I was surprised when he opened the passenger door of the police SUV for me.

  “I guess you don’t consider me a dangerous criminal anymore,” I said, climbing into the SUV and looking with interest at the police radio.

  “You can ride in the back if that makes you more comfortable,” he replied coldly.

  I shook my head, cowed by his tone, and remained silent for the rest of the drive. He turned the heater up and it felt good. I closed my eyes and must have drifted off for a few minutes—not surprising after all I’d been through—because when the car jolted me awake we were on an unfamiliar road passing a dilapidated old farmhouse. Was this a shortcut I didn’t know? But then we turned in to a trailer park. I shook my head to clear the fog that seemed to have settled into my brain. Where was he taking me and why? I peered out the window for a clue.

  Happy Acres Park read the sign in the SUV’s headlights, but the park didn’t look like a very happy place. The trailers huddled together like sheep trying to keep warm in the snow, their sidings dingy and dented, windows patched with cardboard and duct tape, screen doors torn and hanging crookedly on their frames. A few of the trailers were neater, their front paths shoveled, Christmas lights outlining their plain rectangular shapes, wreaths hanging on the doors, but some looked as if the residents hadn’t bothered even to shovel out from the snow. The one we pulled up to on the edge of the park sat crookedly on cracked cinder blocks; the snow drifted over the stoop was pocked by uneven footprints that led to a covered carport. McAffrey got out, leaving the engine and the headlights on. I sat for a moment, unsure what to do. I looked out the back window and saw a crooked blind move in the window of a neighboring trailer.

  I looked back at McAffrey. He was standing under the carport awning staring at the car parked there, hands on hips. Light from the trailer’s windows fell on his face, carving shadows under his eyes and in grooves along the sides of his mouth. He looked tired and sad.

  I got out of the SUV and waded across the snow to the carport. McAffrey’s head nearly touched the top of the plastic awning, which was so heavy with snow it looked like it might collapse any minute. I stepped cautiously beside him and looked at the car. It was a compact sedan painted a dark color that was indiscernible in the dark. The front bumper was dented and listed to the right. That was because its flat tires had sunk unevenly into the asphalt. I looked closer and saw that there were deep ruts under the wheels. The chassis of the car was nearly flush with the ground. When I took another step something rustled in the car and a dark shape scurried out of the undercarriage into the dead weeds growing up out of the wheelbases. The car was home to mice and rot. It looked like a skeleton of an animal decomposing into a primordial swamp. I looked back through the driver’s-side window and met the wide staring eyes of something covered with mangy fur.

  I gasped and covered my mouth, unable to look away, my horror undiminished when I realized it was only a stuffed animal suction-cupped to the window.

  She thought she hit a cat, the caption had read above a photo of the surprised face and the splayed limbs of a stuffed animal suction-cupped to the window of the car that had killed my daughter.

  “This is Hannah Mulder’s car,” I said, then turned to look at the trailer. Through the lit, uncurtained window I saw a cluttered room filled with tables piled high with newspapers and empty beer cans, a sagging couch bearing the impress of its owner, and a lump of mangy fur that might have been the litter mate of the stuffed animal in the car. “I see,” I said. “This is to show me that Hannah Mulder didn’t have a car to hit Leia with. But what does that prove? She could have bought another car or borrowed one from a friend.”

  He smiled at me but it was a sad smile. “Look around you. Does it look like Hannah Mulder can afford to buy another car? Does it look like she has any friends to borrow one from?”

  I looked back through the window for anything to prove him wrong—pictures on the refrigerator, Christmas cards on the ledge above the television set—any sign that anyone else but Hannah had been inside her house but her since she’d gotten back from prison.

  “Okay,” I said, “I get your point.”

  “Do you?” He took a step closer to me and I backed up. Had he brought me here to threaten me? I wondered wildly. Would any of the residents of Happy Acres Park come to my rescue if I screamed? I had a feeling that no one here wanted trouble from the police.

  But all he did was sniff. “You smell like bourbon,” he said. “You smell just exactly like Hannah Mulder did when I pulled her in after she ran down your daughter.”

  I flinched. It would have been better if he had hit me. “I’m not Hannah Mulder,” I cried, my voice sounding weak and pathetic in my own ears. “I’m not a drunk.”

  “Maybe not yet,” he said, looking at me steadily, “but keep going the way you’re going and”—he jerked his chin toward the sad tableau of Hannah’s living room—“this is what your life is going to look like in a few years.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  We didn’t talk on the rest of the drive back to my house. I was too furious to trust myself to speak. How dare he? I fumed to myself. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know anything about me.

  I expected McAffrey to leave me at the foot of my still unplowed driveway but he drove easily over the rutted tracks Anat had left. It was on the tip of my tongue to say my next car should be an SUV when I remembered that I might not have a car again. Instead, when he pulled up to my door, I turned to him and said, “I understand why you don’t believe Hannah hit Leia, but why then do you think she was lurking outside my house—or do you think I was so drunk I made up that part too?”

  “I don’t think you made up that part,�
�� he said, staring straight ahead, his emphasis making it clear he thought I’d made up other parts. “I’ve followed Hannah half a dozen times from the Swan to your home. I know she’s been hanging around here since she got out of prison.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure if I found it reassuring or creepy that McAffrey had been watching my house. Maybe he did know more about my life than I thought. Had he watched me buying bourbon at the local liquor store? Did he monitor my recycling for empty bottles? But instead of asking if he’d been watching me I asked, “Why were you watching her?”

  “I wanted to make sure she wasn’t bothering you. I had a word with her . . . I thought she’d stopped.”

  “She had . . . until yesterday. Did she say why she was doing it?”

  “She didn’t have to,” he said, turning to me at last, his eyes full of sympathy but whether for Hannah or me I didn’t know. “She was obviously looking for forgiveness. A person takes a child’s life, they’ve destroyed their own life. They’ll never be free of that.”

  * * *

  Joe McAffrey’s words rang in my head as I entered the house and the image of Hannah’s desolate living room rose before my eyes. My halfhearted efforts to clean up last night hadn’t made a dent in the mess that was my life. The clutter might have been made up of books and teacups instead of tabloid newspapers and beer cans, but at least half those teacups had held bourbon and in the gray light of dawn it was clear that the inhabitant of this mess was as broken as Hannah Mulder. The idea that I’d hoped to get out of my own mess by blaming Leia’s death on Hannah seemed now as pathetic a delusion as Hannah’s quest to gain my forgiveness.

  I walked over to the desk below the window and looked down at the paper I’d been reading—Leia’s paper—and read where I’d left off.

  When I look up from my sewing I don’t see a criminal, an addict, a killer—I see myself.

  I turned the page and saw there was one more line to the story—

  And I know that by forgiving them I have forgiven myself.

  * * *

  I took a shower and changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt. When I lay down in my bed, though, I kept thinking about Leia’s paper. What had she done that needed forgiving? Unable to sleep I got up and went back to cleaning the house, working until the sun came up, trying to solve the puzzle of what Leia had to forgive herself for. What could Leia Dawson—honors student, vegetarian, prison volunteer—have done that made her compare herself to the inmates of the Fishkill Correctional Facility? Handed in a library book late? Cheated on a test? Eaten factory-farmed chicken? But then I remembered what Ross had said about Leia—that she was volatile, liable to outbursts, that she didn’t care who got in her way—

  Then I thought about Ross and wondered how he was doing. He must feel terrible about Hannah—

  Hannah. With a guilty start I realized I hadn’t given a thought to her condition. Could I call the hospital and find out? But they were unlikely to tell me anything over the phone. Dottie knew all the nurses there, though, one was even a cousin. She’d be able to find out. I could call her—

  But then I remembered how Dottie had looked at me yesterday and I knew I couldn’t face her. I sat down on the couch, feeling like I’d just spun around in a circle. Whatever path my thoughts took I ended up someplace bad. Even sitting here on the couch next to Oolong reminded me of the cat lying on Hannah’s couch. Was there anyone to feed it?

  If I sat here on the couch doing nothing I would think about McAffrey’s prophecy that I was turning into Hannah Mulder. He was wrong, of course. I was an English professor who had a few drinks in the evening while grading papers. That didn’t make me the town drunk. Only, as I sat there I remembered the bottle of Four Roses in my coat pocket. I didn’t think about drinking it. That would be pathetic. But I thought about it. And that was enough to get me off the couch and moving. I’d go to the hospital and check on Hannah, then I’d go to Ross’s to let him know how she was. I got up, fed Oolong, and took the bottle of Four Roses out of my pocket. I poured its contents down the drain and put two cans of Fancy Feast in my pocket instead. The next time I saw McAffrey I could tell him I’d graduated from drunk to crazy cat lady.

  * * *

  I was outside before I remembered I didn’t have a car. But I could hear the squealing brakes of the Loop bus coming from River Road. I ran down the hill, following the sunken footsteps from last night’s pursuit, noticing that my own footprints were as wild and erratic as Hannah’s, and reached the road just as the bus lumbered around the curve.

  The Loop bus was free for SUNY Acheron students and faculty but local residents rode it too. This early, with classes over, most of the passengers looked like townspeople who worked at the college—I recognized Nilda, who cleaned the classrooms in the Humanities building, and a security guard—and some locals. One young man in a leather jacket, scruffy goatee, Ray-Bans, and porkpie hat looked like he’d partied at the college last night and was only now heading back home. He appeared to be college age, only when he took off his glasses to clean them I saw that his eyes were surrounded by a net of fine lines and when the morning sun hit his hair it lit up flecks of gray. An older student, maybe, or an aging hipster who preyed on college girls. I glared at him but he only smirked back and I realized that in my jeans and down coat I probably looked less like a college professor than one of the custodial workers—who, I remembered, had a better right to be protective of the college. At least they still had futures there.

  I got off in town, stepping ankle deep into a puddle of icy slush. The temperature had risen above freezing and the sun was out. The owner of the village diner was pushing slush from the sidewalk with a broom. The local Boy Scout troop was selling wreaths in the town square. I was startled to realize that Christmas was only two days away. I had planned to go down to my mother’s house in Tarrytown but the thought of spending the holiday with her husband—and his grown children and their children—was unimaginable. I’d call my mother later and tell her about Leia’s death and explain that I had to stay at the college over the holiday. I didn’t have to tell her that the police thought I was the one who hit Leia or that I hadn’t gotten tenure. Why ruin her holiday? She would act annoyed but I knew she would be secretly relieved. My stepsisters were uncomfortable around me. Without me there they would be free to bemoan my inability to move on—I could have married and had more children, I’d heard my stepsister Amy saying at Thanksgiving—and revel in the soccer trophies and good grades of their own children.

  I stopped in the hospital gift shop to buy flowers—a plastic sheaf of red carnations and holiday ivy that looked too festive for Hannah. Remembering her bleak trailer I was betting she didn’t celebrate the holidays much either. It didn’t matter, though, because the volunteer at the front desk told me that Hannah Mulder wasn’t available for visitors. I walked back to the gift shop, only a few steps away, to buy a card so I could leave the flowers. As she was ringing me up the gift shop clerk said, “I couldn’t help overhearing that you were here to see Hannah Mulder. Are you a relative? I didn’t think Hannah Mulder had any relations.”

  “No,” I admitted, although it felt like a lie. We were related, by Emmy’s blood and now Leia’s. “I saw the accident and I just wanted to know how she was doing.”

  The salesclerk looked around to make sure no one else was in the store and leaned over the counter to whisper. “I heard the nurses talking . . . they say it doesn’t look like she’ll recover. But between you and me don’t you think it would be a blessing if she didn’t? You know what she did, right? Killed a little girl while driving drunk. How does anybody live with that?”

  I shook my head, speechless. I’d often thought the same thing and even wondered why Hannah didn’t kill herself, but to hear it put so nakedly made me go cold all over, as if I’d stepped back into that puddle of ice water.

  “I suppose I should hold my tongue,” the salesclerk said, seeing the shock on my face. “But this girl getting killed over by the college has
brought it all up again.” She held up a computer tablet and I recognized a Facebook page called “Overheard at Acheron,” which I’d seen my students reading. “Even if they catch who did it they’ll only put them away for a couple of years. I think there should be the death penalty for taking a child’s life and I’m not ashamed to say it!” She thumped the tablet down against the counter and I recognized Hannah’s face alongside another photo. I stared at it, the blood rushing to my face. When I looked up I saw that the salesclerk was staring at me.

  “Why, she looks just like—”

  I turned away before she could finish and blundered through the revolving door, which spit me out onto the sidewalk where I stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight. The photograph next to Hannah’s was of me. It’s because Hannah ran over Emmy, I told myself. It can’t be because of Leia. I hadn’t been arrested—

  But then I remembered Kelsey Manning whispering to Sue Bennet at the vigil last night. Had Kelsey posted a story about me on the college site? I pulled out my phone, tucking the flowers I’d forgotten to leave for Hannah under my arm, and keyed Overheard at Acheron into the search engine. A spoked wheel revolved lazily on my phone’s screen. My server got lousy service in the village. I had to get home to check my computer. I walked back to the bus stop and sat down on a bench next to a girl who was wearing earbuds and looking at her phone—as most of my students spent their lives doing, I reminded myself. It didn’t mean she was reading about me. I glanced at her screen and saw orange and blue text bubbles. She moved an inch away from me. Great, I’d become a creepy stalker, no better than the aging hipster in Ray-Bans partying with college girls.

  I looked at my phone. The page had loaded but I had to join a group to read it. I hesitated a moment, wondering what the page’s administrator would make of my request, but then decided I had to chance it. I keyed in my request and looked nervously around while I waited for a response. A group of students came out of the diner clutching paper coffee cups and shuffled to the bus stop in a zombie-like trance. Why hadn’t they gone home already? I wanted to demand, but I recognized one of the girls, Young Kim, from Intro Lit, an exchange student from Korea, who had written a smart, sensitive paper on James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues.” “I understand the narrator’s frustration with his brother because my family sacrificed so I could come to America to study and I feel I must live up to their expectations,” she had written. She probably couldn’t afford to fly home for the holidays. I thought of her and the other exchange students staying in the dorms over the holiday, heating up ramen noodles and ordering in pizza, and thought of asking Dottie if some of the professors couldn’t get together and have them over—