by Paul Cleave
The darker it grows outside, the more our reflections start to solidify in the window. If the accident hadn’t taken her away from me, would she still love me? Would the last four weeks of my life have turned her away? Or would she have saved me?
When I get outside I look up to see her sitting by the window, staring out. I give her a wave, and allow a flutter of hope that she might wave back. She doesn’t even move.
I stop at a bottle store on the way back to the cemetery. The pull of both these places is so strong I’m unable to drive anywhere else. The store is small and cold and full of bright colors and shiny bottles that suggest drinking ought to be a lot more fun than it is. The guy behind the counter doesn’t recognize me—I’ve been using different stores over the two months, which I guess means that part of me doesn’t want to be found out as a drunk by strangers. I use the last of my cash, emptying out my wallet and dropping the loose change into my pocket.
I park by the tree line near the caretaker’s grave. I open the fresh bottle of bourbon. I intend to let the remainder of the day slide by without me breaking any laws other than being too close to Father Julian. I wonder too, though without much hope, whether the cold might just come and take me in the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Around midnight I wake up covered in fog. It clings to me with cold, misty fingers. When I stand up I find that the fog is only at ground level, about waist high. I can’t see my legs. Or my drink. I kneel back down and have to use my hands to find the bourbon. The bottle is on its side. I stand back up and check it out. Most of it has gone, seeped into the ground. Maybe the caretaker can enjoy it.
My head starts pounding and I reach into my pocket for painkillers. You learn a few tricks when the drinking turns from a habit into a way of life. I wash them down with more booze and for a moment consider taking all of them, given how long they’ll take to kick in. Then I stagger to my car and scrape my credit card across the windshield to clear the ice—it’s the only thing it’s good for these days. I turn the heater on full and start the car, but keep the lights off and wait for things to warm up before rolling through the fog. I kill the engine at the edge of the parking lot and take another swig from the bottle. Things are obviously turning my way—otherwise all of the bourbon would have poured out while I was asleep.
The church is still dark and the living quarters around the back are out of view. I sit in the car with the heater on, sipping more bourbon to summon up the courage, all too aware there was once a day when I didn’t need bourbon fuel to find my strength.
I need to talk to Father Julian. I can convince him to tell me the truth.
I get out of the car. I close the door quietly and walk slowly toward the church. My upper body looks like it is floating on top of the fog. The quarter moon is forming weak shadows, making pale reflections dance off the stained glass windows, making the images move, making them look like they are watching me. My toes are numb and painful, and my legs are getting wet from the fog. I’m almost around to the side of the church when I trip on what feels like rock. I go down hard, bracing my fall with my hands. There’s a fierce stinging in my palms from the stones that have cut through my skin.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the sky, but all I can see is the fog that has wrapped around my body. It’s like being inside a cloud. I reach up as if to punch a hole to look through, but it makes no impression.
I’m lying there, picking away at the stones in my palms, when the sound of the church door opening and then closing makes me go completely still. I stay flat and roll my head toward the sound, but can’t see anything. I can feel the moisture from the ground cooling the hot blood on my hands. I have to sit up to see through the top layer of the fog.
A figure moves along the wall of the church, keeping in the shadows. I stay calm, knowing there’s no way Father Julian can see me. Suddenly I feel something sparking away inside of me, something that has been numb since I killed Sidney Alderman. It’s a mixture of hope and curiosity. The ground seems to sway as I stand back up and begin to follow Father Julian. He passes my car, keeping a wide berth, finding safety in the darkness of the church, and then moving into the trees that line the path to the road. Had I still been in the car I would never have known he was there. He’s deliberately trying to hide from me.
Julian crosses the road to where his car is parked and starts to work the key into the lock. I turn back and race to my own car, then wait until I hear Julian’s starting before I start mine. Out on the road I see that he is about three blocks ahead of me. The fog that had attached itself to the cemetery and church has just as strong a grip out here, only the streetlights make it look thinner. Julian turns left. I turn my lights on and begin to follow him. I can just make out his taillights through the fog about two blocks away.
The occasional car comes toward us. Julian drives around the cemetery, then turns toward town. He starts to drive faster and I do the same, knowing if he gets too far ahead I’ll lose him as soon as another set of taillights appears. He races through the intersection and I follow suit. I close the distance until there’s only half a block between us. He isn’t making any evasive maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t figured out I’m following him. And it’s quite clear that if he parked out on the road and snuck past my car he didn’t want me to know where he was going. I think about where he might be going that he doesn’t want me to know about. Is he meeting somebody? Is he going to meet the person who killed those girls? To counsel him? To try to make him confess?
The lights ahead turn orange. Julian makes it through. I put my foot down, gaining on him a little more quickly than I would have liked, though I’m pretty sure he’s not going to . . .
Only I don’t make it all the way through the intersection.
The car emerges out of the fog like a train. I turn my head toward it, toward the twin headlights barreling down on me. I lift my hands up to cover my face as the car slams into me, the shrieking sound of metal loud enough to make my ears bleed.
For a few moments there is nothing but madness as I scramble to gain control of the car, but it’s impossible. There is another explosion of sound as I come to a stop. The world slowly darkens around me. It darkens, it disappears, and then there is nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Alcohol and burning metal. That’s all I can smell. The windshield has shattered into thousands of tiny diamonds. The engine has stalled, the front of the car has folded around the lamppost. The hood has twisted and bent up into a V, and from beneath it plumes of steam are rising and mixing into the fog. More steam is coming through the air vents into the car. The stereo is going. The heater is going. There is a high-pitched ringing in my ears. The lamppost is on an angle. Its fluorescent light has busted and sparks are slowly raining down on the car. I can taste blood and bourbon. There is a pain in my leg. My chest. There is pain everywhere. I tilt my head back and there is pain there too. I close my eyes and wait for it all to disappear. It doesn’t.
My neck hurts when I move, but I manage to unclip my seat belt. The door is buckled and there is safety glass all over my lap. There are chips of paint on my hands, cracks in the dashboard, and sharp pieces of plastic sticking up. One of my fingernails has lifted up and bent all the way back, a few threads of skin the only things stopping it from touching my knuckle. Before thinking too much about it, I wipe it backward across my leg so that the strands of skin stretch and break and the nail sticks to my pants and stays there. The door won’t budge, so I try to climb over the passenger seat. It is then that the floodgates open and pain wracks my body, one knee jamming into the hand brake, the other into the mostly empty bottle of bourbon that has somehow jumped from the car floor and onto the seat in the crash. It is all I can do not to cry out as I push open the door and stumble out to the road. My feet skid on stones and glass and I fall onto my knees.
The world is caught in the grips of an earthquake, but I’m the only one feeling it. I get up and balance myself by holding
on to the side of the car. There is a shooting pain rolling up and down my leg. The glow from the traffic lights changes color as one set goes red and the other green. Glass grates beneath my feet as I move, pieces of it cutting into the soles of my shoes. There is blood on my shirt and pants and more of it flowing down the side of my face. I reach up and pull away fingers covered in blood. Only one of my eyes is focusing.
I look back into the car at the empty bottle of bourbon, and I understand instantly that its contents have brought me to this. I lean in and grab it. I adjust it in my grip, wrapping my fingers tight around the neck, and then I pitch it into the distance. It disappears into the night.
I look up at Jesus who is looking down at me from above the hovering fog. His eyes are open and his mouth is in a tight smile. He is looking into me, but he is not admonishing me. He is too busy. His hands are wrapped around a bottle of McClintoch spring water. The bourbon bottle crashes and the sound brings the world into focus. It tones down the ringing in my ears and allows a flood of other sounds to pour in. I look away from the billboard and wipe smoke and blood from my eyes and I move away from my car to draw in clean air.
The abyss gets deeper.
The path Father Julian told me I’m heading down takes an even worse turn.
A woman is screaming. It’s a high-pitched note that threatens to break the windshields of other cars pulling over. Ahead of me a four-door sedan has spun around in the intersection. The front of it is completely caved in. Clouds of steam surround it so I can’t tell if anybody is inside. The screaming is coming from a woman who has pulled over and has probably thought her entire life that she would take action in a moment like this and is quickly finding she can’t. She has opened her car door, stood up, but hasn’t gone any further. Another car is starting to pull over.
I reach the wreck first. I push my arms into the steam and touch metal, pushing myself close enough to see inside. There’s a woman in there, slumped over the wheel. She looks young. Like me, she had no air bag. I try opening the driver’s door, but it’s jammed. The woman’s eyes are open; they are rolled into the back of her head and her jaw is pushed forward, either broken or locked, and there is a steady stream of blood coming from the left side of her mouth. I pat down my pockets and find my cell phone, but can only stare at it in my hand.
“Out of the way, buddy,” a man says, reaching past me. He tries the driver’s door too, then moves around to the passenger side. He opens it. It screeches loudly. He looks over at me. “You gonna use that thing?”
I look down at my cell phone. It has survived the crash, but still I can only stare at it.
I have just become the very thing I hate the most. I have become Quentin James: full-time drunk and part-time killer.
CHAPTER THIRTY
They want to take me to the police station, but my injuries require otherwise. I sit in the back of an ambulance and nobody talks to me. A paramedic tends to my wounds, but he doesn’t really seem to be putting any energy into it. Like everybody else he’ll be wishing I was the one who was dead.
After a while a policeman takes a statement from me. He doesn’t know who I am. Doesn’t know my history. I tell him what happened. He tells me that witness reports indicate that I ran a red light. That it had been red for at least two seconds before I hit the intersection. He asks if I’ve been drinking. I tell him I have because he’s going to test me anyway. He pulls out a Breathalyzer and makes me say my name into it, as though he’s giving me an interview and the Breathalyzer is a microphone. He looks at the numbers then writes them down. I know what they’re telling him. I’m way over the limit even though I feel sober. Killing a woman will do that to you.
At the hospital I’m put up in an emergency ward with dozens of other people. My bed has a curtain drawn around it. The cut in my leg is stitched up and bandaged and I’m told it will leave a scar. There are other cuts over my body too, other scars. The finger with the missing fingernail is cleaned, wrapped in gauze, and bandaged. There is a cut at the top of my forehead, which gets stitched. Blood is cleaned off my face. Safety glass is plucked out of my knees. My scraped-up palms with tiny pieces of shingle in them are cleaned.
When the nurse is all done fixing me up she pushes past the curtain and Landry pushes his way in. He is expressionless, as if he can’t be bothered being angry with me anymore. It’s worse.
“Of all the people to be drunk and driving,” he says.
“I don’t need the lecture.”
“What were you thinking, Tate?”
I shake my head. Who the hell knows? “I don’t know.”
“I tried to warn you.”
“I know.”
“Don’t you have anything else you can say?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I wish I did.” I feel so numb. So numb.
“The girl’s in a coma,” he says. “It’s serious. Four broken ribs, a punctured lung, and her jaw was dislocated. You’re lucky she’s not dead.”
I’m lucky.
My heart starts to flutter. “I . . . I thought she was dead.”
She’s lucky.
Luck.
“I know,” he says. “Only nobody felt like telling you.”
I’m too angry at myself to direct any of it toward him. “She’s going to be okay?”
“You better pray, Tate. You better pray.”
Nobody comes to see how I’m doing over the next hour, and nobody has made the effort to feed me any painkillers, though the throbbing in my head and from all the wounds is becoming unbearable. Nobody cares about that. They all care about the woman I hurt, and so they should. I want to go and see her. I want to speak to her family and tell them how sorry I am. I can’t, of course. I’d simply be making myself the punching bag for their anger.
Eventually two officers come to get me. They don’t cuff me. With a bare minimum of words and gestures they escort me out to a police car. I sit in the back for the short drive to the station. They don’t put me in an interrogation room. Instead they escort me to the drunk tank full of other people who’ve made similar fuckups tonight.
I find a small piece of real estate I can call my own, a piece of bench between one guy already passed out and another guy on his way to passing out. I take my jacket off and ball it up so I can lie down and rest it behind my head. I’ve never been in jail before—not one I couldn’t freely leave at any time—and even this is only a waiting room for the real thing. The smell is overpowering and the moans coming from the other drunks irritating. The floor is covered in piss and the toilet looks about as bad as toilets can possibly get. The cream cinder-block walls spread a chill into the room.
I stay awake all night. Occasionally our numbers go up, and in the end we all make it through to the morning. As they lead me from the cell I think about Bridget and Emily and what they would think of me now. I remember having the same thought yesterday.
I’m led through to the same interrogation room I sat in yesterday. Everybody looks at me on the way. Yesterday it was with pity. Today it’s contempt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Driving under the influence. Reckless driving. You’re in some real trouble,” Landry says. He’s wearing the same clothes as last night. They’re all wrinkled up, which means he probably slept in them. He looks even more tired than the last time I saw him.
“How’s the girl?”
“Stable.”
Stable. Better than I ever thought she’d be. But nowhere near what I want her to be. “Is she going to make it?”
“Maybe you should have been concerned with other people’s safety before getting behind the wheel drunk.”
“Is she going to make it?” I ask again.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Probably? Don’t you care?”
“I care, you son of a bitch.” Landry bangs his fist down on the table. “I’m the only one in this room who does, and what you did last night proves that.”
I look away. I have no answer to that.
&nbs
p; “What in the hell were you doing?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing nothing at that time in the morning? Come on, Tate. You were at the church again.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“In fact you were. I saw you there. Lots of people did. See, it was on TV. That reporter of yours showed it. She did a great job of it, showing you right outside the church breaking your restraining order.”
“I was getting my car.”
“You were breaking the law.”
“Come on, Landry, you could probably see me climbing into the damn thing. And I left straightaway.”
“Then what? You go back a few hours later and decide to watch Father Julian? What’s the big plan here, Tate? Are you that desperate to kill yourself?”
I wonder if Father Julian heard the crash. I wonder if he looked in his rearview mirror and decided he had more important things to take care of. “What’s going to happen now?”
“Two things. We’re going to talk to Father Julian. We’re going to ask him if you were there last night, and if he says you were, you know what happens: we’re going to take his word for it. We’re going to ask him once and let him think about it, and if he says yes we’re not even going to ask him if he’s sure about it. You get my point?”
“I get it.”