by Will Allison
Also by Will Allison
What You Have Left: A Novel
Free Press
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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New York, NY 10020
SimonandSchuster
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Will Allison
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Free Press hardcover edition May 2011
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Designed by Carla Jayne Jones
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-4165-4303-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-0819-9 (ebook)
For Deborah and Hazel
Contents
Long Drive Home
Acknowledgments
Praise for What You Have Left
About the Author
Dear Sara,
It’s hard for me to imagine the person you’ll be when you read this—probably on your way to college and a life of your own. Sometimes that feels like forever away. But other times—when you get into the car wearing your mom’s perfume, or shush me distractedly as you study the menu at a diner, or manage to throw a baseball that goes exactly where you want it to—I feel time racing by so fast I can hardly breathe. Not knowing where things will stand between us ten years from now or how this letter will change them, I need to make sure you understand, before I go any further, how grateful I am to have you in my life, how lucky I am to be your father, how sorry I am for the way things have turned out between your mom and me since the accident. I know it’s been hard. I know it’s been confusing. My intention here is to be honest with you about all of it, to write down for later all the things I can’t very well tell an eight-year-old now.
You may be wondering why I’m doing this. I won’t pretend I’m not hoping you’ll forgive me, but please don’t think I’m asking for forgiveness, or that I think I deserve it. Detective Rizzo once told me that all confessions boil down to one thing: stress. People confess, he said, to relieve the psychological and physiological effects of guilt, regret, anxiety, shame. To share the burden with someone else. To at least glimpse the possibility of redemption. It’s only human nature.
Remember the time you spilled orange juice on my keyboard and I didn’t know why it wasn’t working and you told me what you’d done, even though you could have gotten away with it? You said you couldn’t stop thinking about it. You said you felt so bad, you had to tell me, even if you got in trouble. That’s where I am. People confess when their need for relief overrides their instinct for self-preservation. I don’t claim to be any different.
Still, I’m not sure I’d be writing this if I didn’t also believe that, on some level, you already know the truth about the accident. You were there, after all. I have to think someday it’s all going to come clear to you, and when it does, you’ll know not only why I did what I did, but also that I wasn’t honest with you about it. You don’t deserve to be lied to. I don’t want that between us, not on top of everything else. I don’t want to make the same mistakes with you that I made with your mom.
_______
Things didn’t have to turn out the way they did. The accident was no more a matter of destiny than anything else you can rightfully call an accident, just mistakes and poor judgment. With a different choice here or there—and I’m talking the small ones you wouldn’t otherwise give a second thought to—I could have gotten us safely home from school like I did every other day. Sara would have done her homework at the kitchen table while I prepped dinner, then we might have gone for a bike ride over to Ivy Hill Park, or played catch in the backyard, or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. She’d have kept me company in the basement while I folded laundry, or read a book on the rug in my office while I returned calls and checked email. At 6:38 sharp, we’d have gotten back into the station wagon to go meet Liz’s train, then the three of us would have sat down to stir fry or spaghetti and meatballs and talked about the positions Liz was trying to fill at the bank, or whose parents we wanted to spend Thanksgiving with. Mostly, though, we’d have talked about Sara—which one of her friends she wanted the next play date with, what she wanted to be for Halloween, whether she was going to keep growing her hair or get it chopped off. Putting her to bed, Liz and I might even have paused to remark on how lucky we were, as we were inclined to do, but at no point would we have considered the possibility that we’d dodged a bullet that day, that we’d come this close to our lives veering permanently off course. That’s the kind of thing you see only in hindsight.
This was late October, just over two years ago, when Sara was in first grade. I had a small accounting business I ran out of the house—tax work, mostly—and I’d knocked off early to be the parent helper in Sara’s classroom. Up until the drive home from Montclair, it was a good afternoon. The kids were writing their own historically accurate Thanksgiving play, with deer meat instead of turkey and no black clothes or funny buckles. I got to help with the script (“Do not be confused, sir, we are Pilgrims, not Puritans!”) and painting the backdrop. At the end of the day, there was a birthday party outside. The weather was warm for fall—kids shedding hoodies, kicking up leaves, the sun almost white against a deep blue sky—and though it was Thursday, I remember it feeling like Friday. The birthday girl had brought a box of chocolate cupcakes the size of softballs. Sara offered me a bite of hers, very polite in front of her teacher, and looked relieved when I said no thanks.
I was teasing her about that on the drive home, asking if she’d saved me any, when I had to stop short for a light on Thomas Boulevard. I didn’t know there was a police car behind us until it almost rear-ended us. In the mirror, I could see the officer back there cursing me. I shook my head. What are you going to do, I thought, write me a ticket for not running the light?
What he ended up doing was backing up and going around us, as if the law didn’t apply to him—no flashing lights, no siren, no nothing. He ran the light because he could, because who was going to stop him? As he passed us, he shot me a look. The look was what did it. Imagine my finger tapping the first in a line of dominos. I opened the window, stuck out my arm, and flipped him off.
* * *
I admit, I’m not the most laid-back driver, especially with Sara in the backseat. Even now, I still think about a close call we had in Cleveland not long before she was born. I’d just passed my CPA exam, and Liz had taken me out to celebrate. On the way home after dinner, a few blocks from our apartment, the light turned green and she started into the intersection. Next thing I knew, the trees and cars and buildings were going sideways. A delivery truck had run the light and spun us into a pole. It felt like we’d been hit by a tornado. The front end of the car was practically gone. A few more feet into the intersection, and it would have been the driver’s-side door. Liz was hysterical—“Oh my God! Oh my God!”—hyperventilating and holding her stomach, saying she should have seen the guy coming. She was seven months pregnant.
At the risk of offering too tidy an explanation, it
was the kind of thing that makes you appreciate waking up every morning, but also the kind of thing that can make you edgy just driving to the store for a gallon of milk, or watching a lead-foot cop run a light.
Three years later, after we’d paid twice as much for a house in South Orange that was half as big as the one we’d left in Cleveland, the driver of the moving truck, taking a smoke break behind the semi trailer, warned me about Jersey drivers. The lowest of the low, he called them. He was from the city, he said, and therefore in a position to know.
I remember thinking, oh please. I’d heard the jokes about New Jersey and frankly didn’t believe motorists in one place were any worse than in another. The next few weeks changed my mind, though. I’d never seen so much hostile, reckless, flat-out incompetent driving. Running the gauntlet to and from Sara’s school—twenty-five minutes each way, twice a day, part of the price we paid to send her to a crunchy private school—I’d pass the time tallying infractions and coming up with theories to explain it all. Maybe New Jersey, with its sky-high taxes and neglected roads, simply had more pissed-off drivers than other states. Or maybe New Jerseyans, with their second-highest-percapita income, felt traffic rules were beneath them. Maybe, living in the shadow of New York City, they suffered a collective inferiority complex that found its outlet on the road. Maybe the police were to blame, for letting them get away with anything they pleased. Or maybe it was our politicians, for being so corrupt that nobody respected the law anymore.
Obviously, I got carried away. Maybe even a little obsessed. Too much time in the car can do that.
The officer didn’t notice me flipping him off, or if he did, he didn’t care.
“What are you doing?” Sara said.
“Nothing,” I told her. “Waving to the policeman.”
The patrol car was already a block away.
“The light’s green,” she said.
A black Suburban in the oncoming lane was turning left in front of us, a tricked-out model with four wheels in back instead of two. Halfway through its turn it stopped, blocking our path. I thought the driver must be lost, or having second thoughts about turning, or car trouble. I couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows. It wasn’t until he came around the tailgate with his middle finger up, glaring out from under a Yankees cap, that everything clicked into place.
“Yo,” he said. “You giving me the finger?”
He was a big guy, maybe thirty, with a green Puma track suit and bloodshot eyes. Stoned, probably. He also happened to be black, which wouldn’t matter except that Juwan was too, and I’ve always wondered, as much as it shames me, if that was a factor in what happened later.
I held up my palms to show him I’d meant no harm. “The cop,” I said, “not you.”
He glanced over his shoulder, unimpressed; the cruiser was long gone.
Common sense kicked in. I locked the doors. But before I could get the window up, he was sticking his finger in my face.
“Apologize, bitch.”
I stared straight ahead and took a deep breath, arms spring-loaded, ready to put the car in reverse. My teeth were clenched so hard they hurt.
“Dad?” Sara said.
“It’s okay, honey. Just a misunderstanding.”
The guy lowered his finger—yes, I thought, thank you, there’s a child in the car—but then he unzipped his jacket. I didn’t have to turn to see the pistol in his waistband. The dark grip stood out against the white of his T-shirt. The gun rose and fell with his breathing. By now traffic was weaving around us. Someone started honking.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” he said.
I told him I was sorry.
“Can’t hear you.”
“I’m sorry.”
He laughed. “You got that right.”
As I watched him drive off, my legs were shaking so much I could barely keep my foot on the brake. What kind of psychopath flashes a gun with a kid around? I wished I’d closed the window on his arm and dragged him, pushed him into traffic with my door, grabbed for the gun and fired it down his pants. Instead, I’d sat there apologizing.
I turned down the side street and went after him, fumbling for my phone. I had an idea that I’d follow him until the police caught up. If he saw us before then and stopped, I’d run him down. I’d tell the police it was self-defense.
“Dad,” Sara said. “What’s happening? Where are we going?”
And just like that, I snapped out of it. I pulled over as the Suburban rounded a corner up ahead and told Sara not to worry, everything was fine. I couldn’t stand seeing her afraid.
“Can we go home now?”
“Soon, honey. I just have to make a call.”
It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk dialing 911 that it hit me: I hadn’t gotten the license plate. By then I had no hope of catching up with him. I could have filed a report anyway, but I knew no cop was going to drive around looking for a random black Suburban. And what if they sent the officer I’d just seen?
So that’s the frame of mind I was in the first time Juwan Richards almost killed us. Sara must have known I was upset, because she didn’t say a word until we were almost home. She was eating grapes left over from lunch. I could feel her watching me.
“Still awake back there?” I said, cheerfully as I could.
“Dad? Why’d that man show you his finger?”
I told her it was just a way of telling somebody you’re angry.
“But why was he so angry?”
“He was angry at me,” I said, “because he thought I was angry at him. Isn’t that strange?”
“He went like this!” she said, raising her finger and screwing up her face.
At least Liz wasn’t there. Telling her what happened was going to be bad enough. She’d want the guy locked up, immediately, and if it took the whole sheriff’s department to bring him in, so be it.
I was putting my window down for some fresh air, thinking maybe I wouldn’t mention the gun, when I noticed the convertible in the opposite lane, a Jaguar with its top down. It was accelerating so fast I could hear it coming. Behind the convertible was a police safety checkpoint. Officers were standing in the middle of South Orange Avenue, directing some cars into a lane marked off by neon cones, letting others pass. A couple of cones had been knocked over, and it occurred to me that the convertible might be trying to dodge the police. I started to make the turn into our neighborhood, half looking for signs of a chase, when the convertible turned onto Kingsley too, veering across three lanes of traffic and cutting us off. There was nowhere for me to go. I stood on the brake so hard I came up out of my seat. My sunglasses hit the windshield. Sara cried out as her seat belt locked across her chest. The kid driving the Jaguar—that was my first glimpse of Juwan—didn’t so much as turn his head. He was steering with one hand and holding his phone walkie-talkie style with the other. I don’t think he ever saw us.
Even as I watched the convertible make another quick turn at the end of the block, I couldn’t believe we’d missed each other. It was that close. My heartbeat was pounding in my ears. The stop had thrown me back against the seat, but I still felt like I was pitching forward. I managed to turn around and ask Sara if she was all right. She nodded through a curtain of wavy blond hair, but she was crying and rubbing her shoulder.
“My grapes,” she said.
They were all over her lap, the floor, even the dash.
The second time Juwan almost killed us came less than a minute later. At that point, I was feeling like I’d been shot out of a cannon and wasn’t coming down anytime soon. “Is this the craziest drive ever, or what?” I was saying, trying to downplay it for Sara, take her mind off her shoulder. I wanted to get us home. In the time it took to reach our street, though, Juwan had made a loop through the neighborhood, and suddenly there he was again, headed toward us. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone driving so fast on our street. We lived in a sleepy little enclave of shady lanes and tidy 1920s-era homes, a neighborhood so quie
t that the local driving schools routinely used it for lessons, the kind of place where you felt okay letting your first-grader ride her bike around the block alone. And here was this joker, practically flying. You son of a bitch, I thought. And then, instead of laying on the horn or just letting him pass, I lashed out. It was instinct, more a reaction than a decision. I cut the wheel to the left—as if I were going to turn in front of him into our driveway—then back to the right, to get out of the way.
I was trying to give him a scare, slow him down, teach him a lesson. I figured at worst he’d slam on the brakes. Instead, he swerved into our lane, like he meant to squeeze past us on the other side. But since we were still there, not actually turning, he kept swerving—until his front tire caught the curb. The rest happened in a blink. His back end came around, the car went up on two wheels, and just like that it was rolling side over side, coming right at us.
_______
Later, you told me it happened too fast for you to be scared. I had enough time to be scared but not enough to appreciate what a mistake I’d made. That didn’t sink in until afterwards. Even now, more than two years later, I can hardly admit it to myself, the danger I put you in. Sometimes I look at you and it comes back to me like a sharp blow to the chest.
_______
I was twisted around in my seat. Sara was looking at me and saying something, but the sound of the car hitting the tree was still in my ears. Turns out that’s what had saved us, one of the big sycamores along the curb. Sara had to say it again: “Dad, you’re squeezing me.” I was squeezing her. I had her by the wrist. When it had seemed the car would end up on top of us, I’d reached for her in the backseat, as if there were a thing in the world I could have done.
Now I let go, thinking thank God but also oh my God. Sara wiped her eyes and looked at the convertible lying upside down in our neighbor Clarice’s yard. The soft top had come loose, its fabric and metal frame sticking out from under the car like a broken wing. There were silvery hollows where the headlights had been.