Blood Trance

by R. D. Zimmerman

  Which was why I ignored her message. I'd either slept through the ringing or she called while I was showering, because I didn't notice the small flashing red light on my phone until I went to order room service. But I didn't want to call Maddy, not just yet. If we spoke now I was sure my sister would pick up on my grogginess and then she'd start zapping me with her usual string of penetrating questions, all very cool and X-raylike, until I'd told her each and every teeny detail. And I wasn't ready to do that. I wanted to give her answers; I didn't want to worry her. So I ordered eggs and bacon, toast and coffee instead. It was almost nine-thirty, and I could always tell Maddy that I hadn't received her message before going out.

  I didn't feel half-bad when I left the motel almost two hours later. The pain was subsiding. My head ached, particularly when I touched the tender swell where I'd been whacked, and I could barely bend the middle finger on my left hand. But I was all right, and I felt well enough to be angry. And angry enough to want answers.

  I drove directly to Loretta's. Barely noticing my surroundings, I drove down the broad four-lane road, turned into her subdivision, and pulled directly into the driveway. As I parked in front of the long, low house and shut my door, I looked up. Helen appeared in the large glass living-room window, hovered, and then disappeared. I thought she would go directly to the door, greet me there. She didn't, however, and I hit the button, heard the chimes announce my arrival in some musical dingdong sequence. No one came. I pressed again, and for a moment I wondered if Helen was choosing not to see me. When I pressed the button a third time and no one came, I began to boil. Finally I heard steps. I stared through the small glass panel in the door, hoped it was Loretta, but no such luck.

  Helen's pinkish lipstick was fresh, her cheeks full of color, and her gray hair neatly brushed. So that was where she'd been, I realized, as she opened the door, smiled with formal stiffness. Powdering herself up.

  “Good morning, Alex. How are you?” she asked in a polite and friendly manner that hadn't been evident before.

  “May I come in?”

  “Well, certainly.”

  Helen moved aside, and I stepped through the doorway and onto the slate stones that lined and defined the small entry. And then I halted and stood there by that planter. Beyond the little rim of green house plants spread a sea of white carpet. Yellow and blue couch. Mahogany coffee table with all the objets arranged just so. Nice framed pictures on a perfectly clean wall. My stomach rolled with a sense of doom. This was false perfection, this house, this room. A manufactured, dusted, and vacuumed perfection that would soon be most horribly destroyed along with the lives that inhabited it.

  My head began to throb and I touched the bruise where I'd been walloped. I blinked. Little bloody-red blobs pushed at the edge of my vision. Just hold it back, I told myself. Keep yourself focused on the here and now.

  I asked, “Is Loretta in? I need to talk to her.”

  “Why, no. She's at the library, but she should be back soon.” Helen's false smile fell. “Why? What is it? Is there trouble?”

  I had wanted to keep them separate, Helen and Loretta. There was something wrong between them, something twisted and warped, and I wanted to keep them in opposite corners in an attempt to sort out their muddy relationship. I hadn't wanted to trust Helen, either. That had been my knee-jerk reaction to her; I had quickly and conveniently cast her as the wicked stepmother. But maybe I had been wrong in trusting the simple Loretta. Perhaps I'd been mistaken in the belief that I'd get the straight, unfettered answer from her and not Helen, for Loretta had been obtuse, had sent me with a mysterious question to Carol Marie. And I suddenly wondered why Loretta hadn't just told me about Billy and if Carol Marie had lied to me. Billy's alcoholism might have been the reason he disappeared into the homeless masses, but people drink for a reason. So what was he trying to mask? What could he be escaping from?

  I stood there in the entry of the home, Helen only inches from me, and I asked, “Can you tell me why Billy had to run away?”

  In spite of the mask of blush and fresh lipstick, I could see her whiten. She glanced down, put a hand to her chin.

  “Oh, God,” muttered Helen.

  Helen closed the door behind me, then silently started across the sea of carpet, around a couple of upholstered chairs that looked as if they'd never been sat in, and into the back of the house. I followed her into the kitchen, and noted that the only things on the perfectly clean counter were a knife holder stocked with three or four knives, a ceramic canister that I knew from my previous visit held coffee, and a coffee maker, its small light glowing. Without a word, Helen ushered me once again to the dinette table that stood by the rear door, and I sat down, then watched as Helen opened one of the wooden cabinets, took out a mug, and poured coffee.

  “Cream?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  She took another mug, poured herself a cup as well, did it all quite slowly as if she were trying to stall while she figured out not just what to say but how much. She put one mug in front of me, returned to the counter, opened a drawer, and took out a package of cigarettes and an ashtray. With a sigh, she sat down, coffee, cigarette, ashtray, and matches laid out before her like poker cards.

  She indeed eyed me like a card shark, asking, “So what did she tell you?”

  “Loretta? Nothing, just that her brother had to leave.”

  Helen scratched a match and brought it hissing and flaming up to the cigarette that was stuck to the pink lipstick rimming her mouth. She took a long, pensive drag, held it, then sent smoke spewing upward like a long, mournful thought.

  “I've tried so hard to make things right, but we've had our share of problems,” she began. “Particularly Billy. That poor child's been plagued all his life.”

  Helen waited, obviously wanting me to divulge what I knew. Or perhaps hoping that I would get the conversation going in a unexpected direction and steer her off course. But I let the huge hole of silence loom right in front of her and she finally walked into it.

  “If only he were more like his twin sister, Carol Marie. She's so responsible. So resourceful. Not Billy, though. He's two hours younger, and oh, what a difference.” She took another drag, stared out the window, then looked back at me and dug into the story. “He doesn't have the troubles that his big sister, Loretta, has. No. Loretta, she's different, what they call special. Truly so. Billy, though, just isn't responsible. He's always had trouble keeping a job. He never did go to college, you know, so he went to work for his father. We all thought that was a good idea, to get him involved in the family business, you see, but in the end I suppose it wasn't. He never became independent. Carol Marie, on the other hand, just went off on her own. She went to college, did beautifully, started a successful store. Maybe Paul, my husband, should have turned the business over to her. If he had, maybe it wouldn't have failed.” She looked down, pitifully shook her head. “Maybe it's because they're not my real children, but I had no idea raising a family would be so hard.”

  Right then I knew what the family business had been, and I asked, “How long ago did the car wash close?”

  “Let me see…”

  Helen showed no surprise that I knew; she must have assumed that Loretta had told me about the building with the huge octopus above it. Instead, however, I'd discovered it furtively, finding the hulk of a once-large business deserted and crumbling, inhabited by rats and a derelict son.

  Helen continued, saying, “Billy took over completely after his father died five years ago. He made a bit of a profit for a year or two, but then business began to go down, and then… then, well, there was the accident and we had no choice but to close it. Which was a shame. Paul had started it back in the fifties, and he practically lived there, building and expanding it. His first wife, Marge, did all the books, ran the cash register, and they even kept little Loretta down there in a crib. She grew up there, really. When she was about ten or so Paul let her go out there and help the guys at the end of the line—you kno
w, dry off the cars. She really liked that, and I guess she was pretty good at it. That was, or course, before, when she still used to go out, when she'd leave the neighborhood. After Paul added some new and elaborate equipment, it was Loretta's idea to change the name and put the octopus on the roof.”

  I steered Helen back to Billy by saying, “This accident—what happened?”

  “Oh, God.” Helen puffed on her cigarette, rubbed the weathered skin of her neck. “Billy's a drinker. Ever since high school. Beer, then vodka. We tried to get him to stop. We watched him and then his father even tried to get him to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. But Billy wouldn't have anything to do with it. That was another reason Paul brought Billy to work for him—he wanted to keep an eye on him. None of it helped, though, and Billy's drinking just got worse and worse. I don't know how he was able to work, to go down to the car wash every day and keep it going. But somehow he did. I suppose he could have kept going, too, if it hadn't been for the driving. He had two accidents.” She took another pensive drag, stared out at the backyard. “He's actually a very nice boy. Gentle, you know? I don't know why he drinks. His first accident was one winter and he just skidded across a road and ended up in a ditch. The second one, though, was in the middle of the day, broad daylight. He drifted out of his lane and smashed into another car. It was horrible. The driver of the other car, some poor old man, was in the hospital for a month. That's when Billy lost his license.”

  “When was that?”

  “Not long after his father's stroke.”

  I was beginning to peel back the layers of unspoken truths, which were as thick as the layers of a huge, fat onion, and beginning to picture where this story could go and probably would.

  “Neither of those is the accident you were referring to, is it?” I asked.

  Helen shook her head. Looked into her lap. She dragged on the cigarette, stared out the window, then exhaled and took a sip of coffee.

  “No,” she said. “After he ran into the old man— Billy just passed out, you see, that's how the police found him—he lost his driver's license. Which was good, of course, but it meant it was very hard for him to get down to the car wash. He was living in an apartment not too far from here, and we worked it out that Carol Marie would drive him to work in the morning before the mall opened, and then I would go back in the evening and pick him up. I suppose he could have taken the bus or the train. That's what we should have insisted on. Maybe he would have learned something if we'd done it like that. But we didn't, and one night I went down there and Billy'd been drinking again. It was almost eight at night, and it was dark and chilly. The middle of October.” Helen sighed, said, “He was drunk and insisted on driving my car. He's never much liked me, you know. He's always resented the fact that his real mother died and that I married his father. And he started yelling at me, told me if I didn't move over and let him drive, he was just going to throw me out. He would have, too. Would have left me down there to walk all by myself. Billy's an angry drunk. He went to grab me by the wrist, so I slid over. If he was going to drive, I thought it would be better, at least, to have me with him. I thought maybe I could… could…”

  As Helen's voice trailed off into a pained memory, a tightening sense of dread began to grip my stomach. I pictured an angry Bill, drunk on beer or perhaps vodka shots, and I pictured his car driving down Fullerton, swerving and probably speeding.

  Helen appeared frozen, and I jarred her by asking, “Did you make it to the freeway?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn't make it home?”

  “No.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Up to Northfield.”

  “Oh.”

  Just as I'd thought. Northfield, the small suburb where I'd recently been. Where I'd just delivered a photo of a dead little girl to a still-distraught father.

  “Billy was driving much too fast,” said Helen, her voice faint. “He was swerving in and around cars. We started arguing, and that's when he missed the turn. We were going up the Kennedy Expressway and he was supposed to go to the left up 90, then to 294, and so forth. But he swerved around a car and then couldn't get back over, so we had to go on Edens. We had a terrible fight. I wanted him to stop and let me drive. I was screaming. He was screaming. He said he was going to drive me all the way up to Milwaukee and dump me there. Dear God, I really thought he would, too. We were going so fast. But then he started laughing and swerved off at Northfield. He was going to cut across there, you see. Back toward where we lived. He was laughing so hard then, telling me how much he hated me, what a fool I was.”

  “And he ran a red light?”

  Elbows on the table, Helen bowed her head into her hands. “Yes, and the other car was just pulling out from a little strip of shops on the left. Oh, that poor little girl. Her parents were divorced, and she had just spent the day visiting her daddy.”

  Helen told me the rest. She told me how Billy had been turned, looking at her, and yelling. Yelling as loudly as he could. And she had been staring at him. But then she looked ahead, down the road, realized that they were about to speed through a red light, and saw the car, that black one. But it was too late. Billy barely had time to hit the brakes, and they rammed it, broadsided it.

  “Sometimes I pray I'll just forget that child's face,” said Helen, choking back a sob. “Right before we hit, she was looking at me with these sweet eyes, sitting in the passenger's seat, wondering what this was all about, not realizing that she was about to be killed.”

  The other car had been crushed on the passenger side, continued Helen, killing the girl instantly, while the force of the impact had sent the driver, whom I knew to be Ray Preston, into a coma from which he hadn't emerged for three weeks. By that time, the mother had already seen to the child's burial.

  “We were fine, Billy and I,” mumbled Helen.”I guess somehow I'd at least gotten Billy to put on his shoulder harness. I don't remember. I had mine on, of course. There was that huge crash, metal screeching, glass flying. Then silence. Total silence. It seemed like ten or fifteen minutes later but it was probably only ten or fifteen seconds. Whatever. I got out, walked around the back of our car, went around and peered in. When I saw all the blood, the way that small girl was crushed by the door, I nearly collapsed on the hood of their car. We were right by the fire department, and I think the police were there in less than a minute. And by the time they arrived, Billy was revving the engine, trying to back up. He was crying, sobbing. I think he thought if he backed up, the door would pop out and that little girl would pop back to life.”

  But of course none of that occurred. In fact, from the intensity of the impact, I doubted that Billy would even have been able to untangle his car from theirs. It was clear, too, that the police recognized almost instantly that Billy was drunk. Nearly as quickly, they also discovered that he'd lost his license for driving under the influence. Which was why they arrested him and locked him up.

  “What did they charge him with, manslaughter?”

  She nodded, but Helen was never quite clear exactly what charges had been pressed. I was completely aware, however, how severely the courts were now coming down on drunk driving. And rightly so, particularly on repeat offenders. There was no way Billy should have been out on the road, just as there was no way the bus driver who hit Maddy should have been behind the wheel. Two horrible and separate incidents with equally horrendous outcomes. At one time I'd loved wine, enjoyed a good gin and tonic, even a martini every now and then, but after my sister had been paralyzed, the pleasure of it all had been poisoned. I'd never been able to take a drink without imagining Maddy lying helpless on the sidewalk, and now I'd never be able to take a drink without picturing the body of a crushed little girl.

  “I've blamed myself ever since,” said Helen, turning to me, looking right into my eyes for the first time. “I should never have let Billy drive. I should have thrown the keys away, done something, anything. And I don't know why I did it, really, but I should never
have posted his bail.”

  It all clicked. Like dominoes, the story was falling into line.

  I asked, “It never came to trial, did it?”

  “No.”

  “He jumped bail?”

  “Yes.” Helen turned away, shook her head. “Loretta keeps saying that he's homeless. That's what she tells everyone. That's what she wants to believe. But that's not exactly right. Billy's homeless not because he doesn't have a place to live but… but because he's a fugitive from the law.”

  Chapter 18

  I drifted out of that time, that story. I let go of the cup of coffee I had been clutching as I listened to Helen, and floated away like a balloon that had been released to the heavens. Escaped. It was sad, that story. Sure, even tragic. And it was all the more disturbing to me because, as they say, it hit so close to home. I understood Ray Preston's pain because my family had been wrapped in a similar nightmare. I wished every drunk driver would be chopped and mutilated and sent to hell.

  I left Helen, not sure where I should go, what I should do next. I left her sitting at the dinette table. I wanted someone to give me some directions, some input, because right then and there I didn't want to go on. I wanted to go home, and that's what I did. When I no longer sensed my mesmerizing angel directing me on, when I could no longer even beckon her, I was sucked into the heavens, where I flew on, retreating to the present. Soon I realized I was no longer whooshing through the air, but was in fact lying down. Brushing away the trance like a heavy sleep, I rubbed my eyes, twisted and stretched, and then stared out the French doors straight in front of me. Maddy's island. Lake Michigan. Late afternoon. Like the lost Dorothy seeking Kansas, home was remarkably close, just the other side of the imagination.

  I rolled my head to the left, saw my sister lying there motionless on the neighboring recliner. Had she employed the typical hypnotherapist trick, had she followed me into trance, been right there with me? Could she still be under or, I thought, tripping on the anxiety that used to beset me when I saw a therapist, had I totally bored Maddy?