Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  “Over there,” Beck said, pointing beyond the dryer to a chrome-legged, Formica-topped table. “Pretty cool, no? It’s vintage diner.”

  “It’s nice,” Audrey said, though it wasn’t, not really. The Formica was scratched, and one leg had been repaired with duct tape. Still, it was a table.

  Beck lit another cigarette and offered one to Wickham, who, to Audrey’s surprise, seemed to consider taking it before shaking his head no.

  “Give me a hand, will ya?” Beck said to Wickham, who seemed reluctant to touch anything down there. As they jockeyed the table out, Beck asked Wickham his name.

  “Wickham.”

  “Anybody call you Wick?”

  “Not really,” he said in a not-quite-frosty tone, the same tone he’d used with Clyde Mumsford the night she’d introduced them at the country club.

  They carried the table up to the elevator and then, on the third floor, maneuvered their way through Audrey’s door. The apartment was blissfully warm, as usual, and Audrey relaxed a little. Wickham and Beck put the table down in a little alcove by the kitchen and Beck, tapping ash into his hand, said he was off to Oswego.

  After Beck left, Wickham looked around and said, “Is it always this hot in here?” He took off his scarf, coat, hat, and sweater. He sat down on a floor cushion by the windows. “I think the janitor has a thing for you,” he said, but without the playfulness he normally used for a remark like this.

  “That seems doubtful.” She went into the kitchen, mixed cocoa with some water in a saucepan, and lit one of the burners. Wickham sat in the front room, glaring out the window.

  “Can you believe that thing with Leacock?” he said finally. “And you know what it comes down to? She thinks I’m too stupid to have written that paper. That’s what she’s thinking.”

  “It’s my fault,” Audrey said, her stomach clenching at the reminder. She wished Wickham would come into the kitchen so they could talk properly.

  “It’s the whole Southern thing. Yankees believe we’re rubes, and then they do whatever they have to do to prove themselves right.”

  “Could you come in here?” Audrey said. “I’m making hot chocolate and I can’t hear you very well.”

  “Hot chocolate,” Wickham said, walking slowly into the kitchen and sitting on the red wooden chair her father had found at St. Vincent de Paul. “What I need is a cold beer. It feels like August in here.”

  Audrey stirred the cocoa with a sense of dread. It boiled, and she added milk.

  “Do you miss South Carolina?” Audrey asked, thinking for the hundredth time of Jade Marie Creamer.

  “Sometimes I do, yeah,” Wickham said sullenly.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, sure. A little.”

  “What do you miss?” She thought of Schrödinger’s Cat again, but she was part of it now, was one of the scientists in lab coats gathered around the steel box.

  “I don’t know,” Wickham said. “The weather, I guess. And some friends.”

  “Like who?” She knew it was a mistake, but she couldn’t stand the uncertainty any longer.

  Wickham paused and gave her a measuring look. “You sound like you’re hunting for something here.”

  Audrey poured hot cocoa into two mugs, but when she handed Wickham his, he set it on the counter untouched.

  Audrey took a sip and burned her tongue. “I want to know what people you miss,” she said, plaintively, and took a deep breath before adding, “and why you don’t have a driver’s license.”

  His eyes registered this. “What makes you think I don’t?”

  Audrey touched the burned surface of her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She couldn’t bring herself to say Jade’s name. “Well, do you?”

  “No.” His voice was low. “What difference does it make?”

  “None,” Audrey said, her anguish growing. The snow was falling outside the kitchen window in thick, heavy flakes. It was like the snowfall at the beginning of things, hushed and pure. “Someone gave me a newspaper story about an accident that happened in Cypress,” she went on. She looked into her cocoa and tightened her grip on the cup. “An accident that killed a girl named Jade Marie Creamer.”

  His expression didn’t change, unless it became more set in its stoniness.

  “I know it wasn’t your fault,” she said earnestly. “I just wanted you to know that the story is out there, and people might get it wrong.”

  Wickham turned to stare out at the falling snow. He still hadn’t touched his mug of cocoa, and she realized he hadn’t touched her all afternoon. In a sullen voice, without looking at her, he said, “I’ll tell you the story, if that’s what you want. But it won’t make any difference. Those people who want to get it wrong will make sure they get it wrong.”

  “I know,” Audrey said, “but I’m not one of those people.”

  He fixed his eyes on her and gave her a significant look. “And this is what you want?”

  What did Audrey want besides Wickham? She nodded and managed to say, “Yes.” Then she closed her eyes, and the door to the steel chamber swung open.

  Chapter 55

  Wickham’s Version

  It was completely dark outside now, and the snow fell past the window in huge, somnolent flakes. Wickham didn’t immediately speak. He folded his arms, then unfolded them. The radiators ticked and gave off a peculiar smell, like a curling iron wrapped around hair.

  “Okay, then,” Wickham said, staring off as if at some distant place. “Jade was in the front seat, seat belt on. Same with me; same with Boze and Herffman, the two guys in the backseat.” Pause. “It was a sunny day.”

  For a moment he just stared silently.

  “I hadn’t had anything to drink. Nothing. Boze and Herffman had had some beers, but Jade and I hadn’t.”

  Wickham rubbed at a worn spot on his jeans, and Audrey, taking a sip of her cocoa, felt an overwhelming sensation of relief. He hadn’t been drinking, and if he hadn’t been drinking, how could he have been at fault?

  “Jade wasn’t my girlfriend or anything,” he went on. “She was Boze’s cousin, and the other guy, Herffman, had a thing for her, but she wasn’t interested in him, probably because he’s an idiot. But I was talking to her, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, and that got on Herffman’s nerves.”

  Audrey remembered Wickham in the hallway with Sands Mandeville and the way Sands had touched his arm and laughed. She felt a stab of pointless jealousy, and could sympathize with Herffman.

  “Herffman started mouthing off and being a complete ass, and I could tell Jade didn’t like it. I was smoking, and he was saying the smoke was just one of the several pollutive emissions I brought into the car. I looked at him in the rearview and said, ‘You know, maybe we ought to pull over so we could settle this thing,’ but Boze—he was always the peacemaker— Boze calmed us down and I kept driving. But Jade, you know, I think at this point she just wanted to jerk Herffman’s chain, so she undid her seat belt and scooched closer to me, and of course Herffman says something really crude, and that was when I made a terrible mistake.”

  He looked for an instant at Audrey, then beyond her.

  “Two mistakes, actually. I sped up, and then I twisted around to say something to Herffman eye to eye.”

  In the apartment, the relentless ticking of the radiator.

  “The car drifted, and when it caught the soft shoulder it was like the steering wheel was jerked out of my hands, and that was it.” Wickham took a deep breath. “The car flipped. Jade was thrown like fifty feet.” A pause. “They said she died instantly.”

  Audrey waited.

  “I never saw her body.” Wickham stared off. “The family wouldn’t let me come to the funeral, or even the viewing.”

  After a few seconds, Audrey said, “How about the other two boys?”

  Wickham shrugged. “Boze broke some ribs and so did I.” He made an unhappy smile. “Herffman walked away with a few bruises.”

  “So why was there a trial? It was an acci
dent, right?”

  “If someone dies, there’s an investigation, and I was the guy who was driving.”

  The radiator ticked, and Audrey’s heart pounded.

  “Everybody makes mistakes like that all the time,” Wickham said, his voice hardening slightly. “You get mad at someone, you drive too fast, you don’t look where you’re going, and most of the time, it’s a near miss. You could’ve hurt someone but you didn’t, and you’re grateful. Well, this time nobody got off the hook. The mistake was fatal. And I paid.”

  The argument had a strangely organized feel, as if he’d made it before, but it was forceful, and Audrey could feel the truth of it.

  “I paid big-time,” Wickham said again.

  Audrey sat still, trying to picture Wickham with a cigarette. She wondered why he didn’t say it was Jade Marie Creamer who paid. She opened her mouth and closed it again. She had a feeling she shouldn’t say it, but then she did.

  “And Jade,” she said.

  Wickham lifted his chin and gave her a sharp look. “What? You don’t think I know Jade paid? Jade paid huge.” He paused. “But she paid fast. I’ve been paying ever since.” Another pause. “And it looks like I’ll keep paying as long as I live.”

  Audrey couldn’t help herself. She moved toward Wickham, slid onto his lap, and touched his eyelids closed so that she could kiss them. “I know,” she whispered.

  But Wickham just opened his eyes and said, “I’d better go. Talking about this stuff makes me feel funny.”

  This surprised Audrey, and she didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “Want me to drive you?”

  He shook his head no.

  “You want to call a taxi, then?”

  He barely took time to consider this. “I think I’d rather just walk.”

  It was as if he couldn’t stand to be there even long enough to wait for a taxi—that’s what it seemed like to Audrey. “Is anything wrong?” she said.

  Another shake of the head.

  “Will you call me later?”

  “Sure.”

  He shifted so that she would stand up—which she did, though she didn’t want to. She followed him to the door, where, instead of a kiss, he gave her a stiff, perfunctory hug. “Bye,” he said. He barely looked at her.

  “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” she asked as he went down the hall.

  He shook his head without looking back, and Audrey could do nothing but watch him go.

  Chapter 56

  Is That You?

  Wickham Hill shoved open the heavy front door of the Commodore Apartments and tightened his scarf against the snow. He knew that if he looked up, he’d see Audrey staring down from the living room windows—as she’d done sometimes from her bedroom in the old house, giving him one last wave—but he didn’t want to look up.

  Is anything wrong?

  How could she ask that? How could somebody so smart be so stupid?

  Everything was wrong. Audrey’s hot apartment, the forced confession, the way it all sounded, the way it all was. It was like being back in Cypress again, with people looking at him over the produce bins at Piggly Wiggly or the gas pumps at the Shell station. At least once a day, he would run into the mother of a friend from school, a teacher, a neighbor, a nurse from his mother’s shift, his dentist. They all said hello, but they never knew what to say after that. Silence, pity, blame. Never just a normal conversation, never again.

  Wickham shoved his hands into his pockets and walked with his eyes straight ahead. Snowflakes clung to his sleeves, and he could almost feel Audrey’s eyes willing him to look up and reassure her that everything was fine, but he kept walking, and when he turned the corner and knew she couldn’t see him anymore, he felt relief.

  Wickham crossed the street and, leaning into the snow, climbed a steep hill, past three-story wooden houses, faded and chipped, that leaned out over crooked porches. At the top of the hill, sturdier houses decorated with holiday lights ringed the park.

  He walked quickly past the park’s forested shadows, and his leather shoes grew damp from the deepening snow. He was closer to the university neighborhood now. Maple trees lined the street, their roots buckling the sidewalk.

  His feet were wet and cold, and without knowing why, he blamed Audrey for that.

  He should have told her everything. She wanted the truth so badly, he should’ve given her the story about his father, too, and exactly why he wanted to shut Herffman’s mouth. He should have told her about Jade’s brown shoulders and back, her delicate vertebrae arching when he rubbed coconut oil between the string tie of her yellow bikini top and the yellow triangle below; about Herffman drinking beers and crunching the cans one-handed and giving them his endless monologue on the mythological significance of the Star Wars movies that no one was listening to, least of all Jade.

  She was wearing a boys’ dress shirt over her yellow bathing suit—the suit was optic yellow, like tennis balls and some BMWs. He tried to remember what her face looked like, but nothing came to him. Well, that was the family’s fault, wasn’t it, not letting him come to the funeral, which he would have gladly done, even though it would have been hard.

  A car passed by, its tires making a shushing noise.

  Herffman. He was like those guys that poke alligators to make them bite. On the way back from the lake, Herffman had seen an old newspaper on the floor of the car, a Cypress Telegram that had Wickham’s father’s picture on the front page. It was some story about a fund-raising gala, and Wickham had shoved it under the seat to prevent his mother from seeing the picture of Dr. Yates with his arm around his wife. Herffman held up the newspaper and read part of the article aloud: “‘Dr. James E. Yates and his wife, Elaine, donated $500,000 to build a new children’s wing.’ Well, isn’t that nice.”

  Jade gave Herffman a bored look, then undid her seat belt and scooched close to Wickham. That was something he could remember perfectly—the liquid green trees sliding by against a pink twilight and Jade’s long brown bare legs inches from the gearshift and his hand.

  Then Herffman said, “Does anyone here know Dr. Yates? He seems like such a generous man.”

  Wickham said nothing, but he speeded up a little. In downshifting at the next curve, he let the back of his hand graze Jade’s bare leg, and a moment later, as he accelerated past the speed limit, she took his hand and laid it there. Looking at Herffman in the rearview, he’d said mockingly, “What are you trying to prove, Herffman? That you can read the newspaper?” Not a great line, he knew, but he was concentrating on the creamy softness of Jade’s thigh as a few more hundred feet of forest and pink twilight shot by. Then red ash fell from his cigarette, and when he felt it burning through his cutoffs and into his leg he began madly brushing it off, which is what made Herffman say, “You spanking the monkey up there, Mr. Wickham?”—and that made Boze laugh, and even Jade, so Wickham had to laugh along with them until things quieted down and he could say, “That’s a science you excel in, Hefferman, not me.” And that was when Herffman, asshole Herffman, said what he said: “That makes me and your mom, then. She wasn’t wasting any opportunities. She seemed to know whose monkey to spank.”

  Just thinking of it now made him clench up a little, as he had then just before he asked Herffman exactly what he was trying to say.

  “Trying to say?” Herffman had said. “Hell, I’m saying it. Question: Who did Wicky’s mother screw to get him into Leighton Hall? Answer: A doctor with his name first among the ‘Y’s on the Wall of Patrons.”

  Who wouldn’t have flipped his cigarette out the window and turned back and reached for the guy who’d said that? Who wouldn’t have done exactly what he did?

  Wickham found himself walking now in a small business district where the windows of shops were painted with big holly leaves and red-capped elves. He was standing on the corner, shivering in his wet socks and cold shoes and wishing he’d called a taxi from Audrey’s or at least that he had enough money to buy a pizza, when a voice, a girl’s voice, said, “Wic
kham?”

  He turned woodenly, afraid it was Audrey, but it wasn’t.

  It was a girl in an Audi A6. She’d rolled the window down, but her face was hard to see because she was on the other side of the street. “Wickham?” she said. “Is that you?”

  Whoever she was, she seemed pretty and she drove an A6, and so Wickham Hill, who the moment before had been feeling peevish about his wet feet and unfair fate, now fixed his dark eyes on the pretty girl in the A6 and slid into an easy drawl. “That would depend on who’s doing the asking”—here his lazy smile widened slightly—“and why.”

  “It’s me,” the girl said. “Lea. Lea Woolcott. Audrey’s friend.” Now she was smiling, too. “You need a ride?”

  As Wickham circled the back of the car, he reached into his pocket for his peppermint lip balm and smoothed some across his lips.

  Chapter 57

  Dark and Stormy

  As Wickham opened the car door, Lea was tugging her skirt toward her kneesocks, but not before the overhead light had shone fleetingly on an inch or two of her pale thigh. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks pink, either from the car’s warmth or from excitement. She looked out the door and said nervously, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

  Wickham laughed and climbed in, grateful to close the door against the snow and cold. “You know, that was an actual first line from an actual book.”

  Lea smiled brightly. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Wickham said, rubbing his hands together in front of the nearest heater vent. “Nobody reads the rest of it, though.”

  Lea looked at the dashboard and clenched the steering wheel a little tighter. She hadn’t yet pulled the car from the curb, and seemed uncertain what to do next. She nodded toward his feet. “You want to take off your shoes and socks? You can put them over the heater vent.”

  Wickham said they’d have to drive around a long time to get them dry.

  When Lea glanced at him, he was freshly startled by the paleness of her blue eyes. Her hair looked very soft, and it fell in a kind of white corona over her dark scarf. “Yeah,” she said, pulling slowly away from the curb and shops. “So?”