“I’m glad he’s gone,” Isabelle said, but she couldn’t help wondering where he was. “I’ll be here,” he had said, and then he had left her alone in the hospital.
“Oh, isn’t this adorable!” Michelle picked up the stuffed animal.
“Andi can have it.”
“Let’s get you home,” Michelle said, handing the bear to Andi, who gummed its ear.
Isabelle couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital, but as soon as she was in Michelle’s car, panic set in. Her skin felt clammy. She couldn’t catch her breath, and her arms and legs had turned to rubber. A car zipped past them and she flinched. The road seemed crazily curved, and she felt tiny cracks opening up throughout her body. It was all she could do not to jump out of the car and keep running. She’d do anything to feel safe again. She looked around the car. This is how lives are ruined, she thought. This is how people die.
She felt Michelle watching her and dipped her head, biting down on her lip. “It’s okay,” Michelle said. Her friend reached across and took Isabelle’s hand for a moment and squeezed it. “I’ll go really slow,” she said quietly. “We can stop anytime you need.”
Michelle drove as carefully as she could. She stopped every half hour at the rest stops, and as soon as she parked, Isabelle leaped out of the car, panting, rubbing her arms as if to make sure they were still there, intact. “We’re almost there,” Michelle promised. “Just a bit more.”
By the time Michelle pulled up at Isabelle’s, Isabelle could have crouched down and kissed the pavement.
ISABELLE DIDN’T KNOW what she expected, but not that everything would look and feel so different. She thought the house would be as she had left it three days ago. Luke’s casual mess, a dish or two still in the sink, maybe all her things neatly boxed up. She hadn’t thought what it would be like to come back to the house without Luke in it.
The sharp tang of citrus cleaner permeated the air. Luke had cleaned for her. She tried to imagine him paying attention, swiping at grime, and shook her head. Maybe he hired someone. Maybe his girlfriend did it. The floors were gleaming, even the rugs had been vacuumed, and there was a pot of daisies, the flower he had courted her with, on the table. She hobbled into the room. There was a card with a picture of Saturn on it—her favorite planet, the rings lit as if by moonlight. Inside, it read, Call me if you need anything. Love, Luke. She dropped it into the wastebasket.
On the kitchen table were more cards from friends who had heard, from the studio. The answering machine light was glowing. Fifteen calls.
Slumping on the couch, Isabelle looked around her. The first time she had walked into this house with Luke, she had been barely sixteen. Oakrose. Luke loved having a baseball field right in the town and that every summer there were concerts right on the beach. “Look at this great house!” he said, but it was really only a tiny one-bedroom, all the rooms cramped together, the lawn nothing but pine needles. She loved it only because she was there with Luke.
The two of them had walked into this living room holding hands, spiffed up for the realtor. Luke was in a sports jacket and tie and he had slicked his hair back so it looked shorter. She was wearing a long yellow summer dress and had pinned her hair up so that she might look older. She had worn a cheap rhinestone ring they had bought at a Rite-Aid, and though they had both laughed at it, Isabelle had felt different the moment she’d slid the ring on. The house! God, she had thought it was a palace. She’d stood in the center of the empty living room and shut her eyes, dizzy with joy. She could go into any room she wanted and no one could tell her not to! She didn’t have to shut a door and push a heavy dresser up against it to have privacy! Imagine, sixteen years old and getting to live in her own house, all courtesy of Luke’s savings account. “Who are your parents?” a new neighbor asked and Isabelle laughed out loud and showed off her wedding ring, while the neighbor looked at her in surprise. “You look so young,” the neighbor murmured.
“I’m twenty,” Isabelle lied. Neighbors could be won over. Friends could be made. Marriages could happen when both parties were old enough and bigger houses could be bought when enough money was saved. Who are your parents? What kind of a question was that? She should have quipped back, “Well, who are yours?”
“You aren’t going to have any wild parties, are you?” one neighbor asked.
“My husband manages a restaurant,” she said, though the truth was Luke had just got a job at a local pub, “and I’m a photographer,” as if that explained everything.
She would walk into the small room in the back and picture a baby crawling on the floor toward her. In the kitchen, she imagined the clink of forks at a dinner party. And one day they’d build her a darkroom. Her own darkroom! She’d get her GED and take some courses, or maybe she’d just start working. What did it matter? All of life was spread out in front of her like a picnic blanket and all she had to do now was pick out the refreshments.
Luke retiled the crumbling bathroom and kitchen in a bright ocean blue. He patched the drywall and repaired the hole in the stairway. Before he did, she had slipped in a brown paper packet of photos of the two of them, a time capsule someone might find years later. Imagine, they might think, such a nice young couple and so in love! Look at them holding hands! Look at the way he looks at her.
They lived in the house for two years and when she was finally eighteen, old enough to get married for real, she put her rhinestone ring in a drawer and exchanged it for a thin gold band they bought at a jeweler. She had called her mother, telling her they’d gone to a justice of the peace. “Married,” Nora finally said. “God help us all,” and then she had hung up. The only thing Isabelle kept from her past was her last name.
She and Luke had come back here to the house, the two of them as dressed up as they could afford, and he had lifted her up and carried her across the threshold and everything had felt new for a very long time. Every time she walked through the front door, she smiled.
Now, though, the house felt broken. Her sorrow must have gotten into the floorboards, because now they creaked when she walked on them. Her disappointment made the cupboards sag. The neighbors had changed so many times she no longer knew some of them, and no one would consider them a young couple anymore, nice or otherwise. Luke was just a guy who had worked his way up in a local pub until he owned it. He spiffed it up and got a decent menu of food, a chef who could whip up four different kinds of pastas, some soups and sandwiches, but no matter how fancy the tablecloths, how pretty the menu, everyone in the area knew it was still really a bar, a place with dark lighting where you could sit for hours and not get kicked out, or kiss a complete stranger, and that’s what they came for.
Well, she should have known better. She should have seen what was coming. Isabelle got herself a bottled water from the refrigerator and sat in the kitchen, sipping, trying to think what to do next, when the doorbell rang.
A MAN IN A DARK SUIT was at the door, and for a moment, Isabelle thought he had the wrong address, until he flashed a badge, a glint of silver in the chilly air. Her mouth went dry and she couldn’t speak. She had felt better since she was home, but now her leg began to throb. “Detective Harry Burns. I’d like to talk to you about the accident, if I may,” he said. He glanced at her. “Is this a good time, ma’am? You feel up to it? I tried to talk with you in the hospital but the nurses were pretty persuasive that I wait.”
Isabelle eagerly led him into the living room, nearly toppling, and he quickly offered a hand to steady her, holding her tightly. He helped her to sit and then pulled up the black leather chair of Luke’s for himself. “What happened to the other people?” Isabelle blurted. “Please, you have to tell me.”
He looked at her mildly. “Let me get some information down, first,” he said. Her stomach twisted. He pulled out a dime-store notebook and a black pen that had chew marks on the tip, and Isabelle was suddenly conscious of her matted hair, and she wrapped it into a clumsy knot. “Your husband gave us your insurance information,” he said. “S
o we don’t need to go there.” He nodded at her, expectant. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
She looked at her hands, which were still jeweled with bruises. There was a thin white band of flesh where her wedding ring had been. She wanted to get it over with, so she started to talk. Every once in a while he asked her a question, but she kept noticing how bored he looked, and more than a few times he glanced at his watch. “What was your speed?” he asked. “What was the visibility?”
“There was so much fog,” she said. She swallowed. “I was only going about thirty.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What happened to the woman and the boy?” Isabelle said.
He looked up at her and for the first time she noticed that his eyes were a soft, mild blue, like cat’s eyes. “I thought you would know. The woman died instantly,” he said.
The air around Isabelle turned to ice. Her skin prickled. The detective was still talking, his words swimming toward her. “The boy’s okay,” he said. “Scratched up, but he’ll live.” He tapped his pen against the pad. “From all we could gather so far, looks like you’re in the clear. Appears that you did nothing wrong and the other woman was negligent.” He told her they checked the skid marks and saw that Isabelle wasn’t speeding. They’d seen how heavy and dense the fog was firsthand, and it was clear that no driver could see through the soup of it. “You did everything right, to my mind. You weren’t talking on your cell phone, being distracted?”
“There was a hornet in the car,” Isabelle whispered.
“A hornet?” He looked at her, but he didn’t write anything down.
“It wouldn’t leave.”
He glanced down at his notes. “The coroner’s report isn’t in yet,” he said. “If she was dead already before the accident, or on drugs, that would rule out homicide charges.”
“Homicide!” Isabelle cried. “She was alive! I saw her standing in the middle of the road!” She wept into her hands and he shut the notebook. She grabbed for a tissue on the table, blowing her nose.
“You weren’t speeding,” he said. “You didn’t flee the scene and you weren’t drunk or on drugs. I’m filing the case as a formality, and I’ll tell you what. I know what’s going to happen before I even do it. The DA’s going to reject it. The woman’s car was pointing the wrong way and the lights were off. She was in the middle of the road. She was negligent. There’d have been no way you’d have been able to see the car in all that fog, no way you could have stopped. We didn’t even see the smoke from the cars at first because of all the fog. Worst that’ll happen is your insurance rates’ll jack up.”
Isabelle tried to keep track of everything he was saying, but his words seemed to be slurring.
“Forget wrongful death,” he said. “There’s not enough evidence for even a civil suit. And for a criminal case, we’d have to have witnesses.” The detective stood up.
“The little boy—”
“He doesn’t count as a witness. He was deep in the woods when we found him. Sick with asthma. Highly unlikely he saw anything.” He stood up. “We’ll be in touch,” he said. “Don’t get up. I’ll let myself out.”
Isabelle felt frozen to the chair. Wrongful death. She heard the door open and then close.
The woman died. She covered her face with her hands. She wouldn’t kill flies. When Luke had found a mouse in the kitchen, she wouldn’t let him call an exterminator and insisted on getting one of those humane traps and freeing the mouse outside after they had caught it.
She had killed a woman.
She cried harder, great tearing sobs that made her feel as if someone had punched a hole in her heart. They had all known. Luke. Her friends. She’d call them and they’d deny it, or they’d tell her they were just protecting her.
She managed to stand up, though her legs had turned to water. She should have known, too. She went into the kitchen, where her laptop rested on the table. She turned the computer on, found the local paper, and went back three days, to Friday, when the accident had happened. Nothing. It had probably happened too late to make the evening edition. She swallowed and hit the link for Saturday’s paper and there it was, spilled across the front page.
Was Mysterious Murderous Crash
a Snap Judgment of Local Photographer?
Isabelle stood up and then sat down again.
A terrible fog may have led to a mysterious two-car accident Friday that killed a local woman, say the sheriff’s investigators. The woman, April Nash, 35, of 134 Mayfield Street, a waitress at the Blue Cupcake, was apparently driving the wrong way on a one-way road. Her Mercury sedan was parked in the center of the road when it was slammed into by a Honda driven by local child photographer Isabelle Stein. Ms. Nash was instantly killed, and her son and Ms. Stein were both taken by ambulance to Hartford Hospital and later released in good condition. Friends say Ms. Stein was traveling to New York City, but what Ms. Nash and her son were doing on the road was unclear.
County Sheriff Lt. Bob Saldo said an investigation was pending. “We don’t have witnesses, but clearly something was out of the ordinary here and we intend to get to the bottom of it.” Saldo encouraged anyone with information regarding the crash to call 555-987-5940. An investigation is pending.
There was a black-and-white photo, as shocking as a slap, of two crumpled cars on a lonely road. There was her car, her little Honda, smashed like a metal toy. Pointed toward it was the other car, ruined beyond recognition. For a second, Isabelle covered her eyes. She forced herself to look again, and there was an inset of a beautiful woman laughing, her light hair artlessly cropped, her eyes big as dinner plates. Isabelle began to shake.
April Nash. Her name was April Nash and she was lovely and a mother and a wife and she was only thirty-five years old. Younger than Isabelle. She worked at the Blue Cupcake, where Isabelle sometimes went to get coffee. She had probably seen her lifting trays and chatting with customers. They could have passed each other on the street all the time. They could have been friends.
Isabelle touched the screen with her fingertips and started crying again.
When the phone rang, she almost didn’t answer it. She had fallen asleep on the kitchen table, her face pressed against the wood. The wall phone was so close, it seemed to be ringing in her ears. She sat up, reaching for the receiver, desperate for the sound to stop. “Hello?” she rasped.
“You’re all right?” The voice was sharp. It had been years and years of calls unreturned, letters come back in the mail. But she knew who it was and she gripped the phone. “Mom. It’s so great to hear your voice. You can’t imagine—”
“Your accident is in the Boston papers. Everyone is talking about it. I nearly died when I saw your photo. I called the hospital and they told me you were all right, so I didn’t have to come down there.”
“I’m all right,” Isabelle said. She felt a sudden tug. She felt ten years old, wanting her mother there to smooth her hair back and tell her that she was Nora’s baby girl. Her mother snorted. “Well, I shouldn’t wonder about this mess. That’s you all over, barreling ahead, getting into trouble, never thinking about the consequences. I tried to stop you when you got involved with Luke, but you wouldn’t listen. And now what? You’ve killed a woman and ruined your life.”
The floor was moving under Isabelle’s feet. Her tongue felt as if it were weighted with stones. “Mom,” she whispered. “Don’t do this.”
“Do what? You never understood anything that I was trying to do for you,” Nora said. “I’m glad you’re all right, but that doesn’t mean I approve of your life,” and she hung up the phone. Isabelle held the receiver against her forehead and shut her eyes.
FIVE
THREE DAYS AFTER April died, Charlie woke up on the floor of Sam’s room, a toy airplane cutting into his shoulder. He was drenched in sweat, still in the same clothes he had worn to the hospital. He hadn’t intended to sleep here, but last night Sam had shouted in his sleep and Charlie had raced in, switching on the light. “Mommy!
” Sam had cried, and he looked so small and fragile that Charlie had held him until Sam fell back asleep. Charlie couldn’t bear to leave him. And more than that, Charlie couldn’t stand to be in his own bed alone.
For the past two days, the two of them had done nothing but sleep. He had left Sam only once, calling a sitter so he could go and take care of the paperwork for the funeral home to have April cremated. When they asked what he wanted to do with the ashes, he went blank. “Let us know,” the funeral director said.
Today, though, he had to get them back in a routine. He had to call people. And he had to tell Sam that April was dead.
He was about to stand when he caught a whiff of beach salt. His head reeled. The room smelled like April. For one crazy moment, he imagined her coming into the room. He heard footsteps and he glanced up, sickeningly expectant. “You big silly. It was a mistake,” she would say.
“April?” he said. Every detail of that morning rushed back to him. The smell of the coffee. The way April kept winding around him. They had argued and he’d been in a bad mood, but was that enough for her to snatch up their son and leave?
Sam coughed. The April smell vanished and Charlie looked at his son. Right now, he felt as if Sam were the only thing anchoring him to the earth, that without him, he might dissolve into a thousand pieces. You breathe, I breathe, he thought.
Charlie tucked Sam in and walked out of his room. He’d tell Sam after breakfast. He went to the kitchen and stood there for a moment. He drummed his fingers on the counter, and then he jerked open the kitchen cabinet to get plates for breakfast. When they fell out of his hands, smashing on the floor, he began to cry. April. Oh Jesus, April. His wife was dead and he didn’t know why.
“Daddy.”
Pictures of You Page 6