Long Drive Home

by Will Allison

  The workers had finished with the lawn and were now replacing damaged shrubs along Clarice’s driveway. They greeted us mostly in Spanish but made clear that it was okay to walk on the sod. Sara circled the tree. She looked at the photos. She picked up the teddy bear and hugged it.

  Then she got down on her knees, put her hands together, and began to pray.

  I was dumbstruck. I’d never seen her pray before. We didn’t go to church; we didn’t even say grace. The families of the kids in her class, the ones who were religious at all, were so low-key about it that you could hardly tell the Christians from the Jews from the Muslims.

  “Are you praying for the tree, or the boy?”

  She was moving her lips, but no sound was coming out. The workers were watching us. With nothing else to occupy myself, I glanced at the photos. That’s where I first learned Juwan’s name and saw what he really looked like. A happy kid. A goofy kid. Most of the shots were candids, he and his friends with skateboards, mugging for the camera. There was also a yearbook picture, a prom photo, a portrait of him in a band uniform holding a trumpet.

  I wondered if his parents had been there yet. That morning, as I was driving Sara to school, they’d probably been on their way to the morgue. I imagined a cold hallway, a smell like a high school biology lab, a Polaroid that looked just like their son but also nothing like him at all.

  “Dad?” Sara said. “Don’t you want to pray too?”

  A crowd was gathering in Clarice’s yard when we got home from the train station that night. Cars were parked up and down the block.

  “Must be some kind of vigil,” I said.

  Sara asked what a vigil was, and Liz said it’s when people stay up at night to remember someone.

  I suggested we go out for dinner again, to avoid the scene. “Maybe this’ll be over by the time we get back.”

  “No! I want to see,” Sara said.

  “I think that would be okay,” Liz said.

  I looked at her—Really?—and she looked right back— Yes, really. Since when do we hide things from her?

  Inside, the three of us stood at the window. I felt like a vulture, but also as though I couldn’t resist. There must have been fifty people out there, teenagers mostly. They were hugging each other, laying flowers at the tree, writing messages on the skateboards. Now and then you could hear the sounds of one of them crying.

  Off to the side, a few adults were gathered around a woman in a black dress dabbing her eyes. You couldn’t miss her, even at dusk—she was tall, with a full, reddish Afro. I guessed it was Juwan’s mom, and the sight of her made his death more real to me than having actually seen the accident. I remember thinking that if I were her, I’d want to kill myself. I couldn’t imagine waking up in the morning knowing Sara was dead and feeling like there was a single worthwhile thing left to do in the world. I went into the kitchen and stood at the fridge, pressing my forehead against the smooth, humming metal, trying to block it all out.

  “Can we go over?” Sara called after me.

  I was relieved to hear Liz telling her no, it was for people who knew him.

  “But Clarice is there.”

  “It’s Clarice’s yard,” Liz said.

  “Can’t we at least open the window?”

  I threw together some bean and cheese burritos, and we ate at the kitchen table, listening in strained silence to what was going on across the street. First they prayed, then they sang. Sara ate half her burrito and asked to be excused so she could go back to the window. She was still there when I finished eating. The crowd had gotten bigger. They were holding candles and singing “Amazing Grace.”

  “Let’s get you ready for bed,” Liz said.

  Sara sighed. “How am I supposed to sleep with all that singing?”

  I scooped her up and started toward the stairs. “It has to end sometime.”

  That night around two o’clock, long after the vigil, Juwan’s mom came back. I was on my way downstairs to the sofa, not wanting to keep Liz up with my tossing and turning, when I happened to look out front. There’s no overnight parking allowed on our street, so it was unusual to see a car at that hour. I figured one of the kids had been too torn up to drive home and had gotten a ride with somebody else. Then I realized there was someone in the car, so I thought maybe one of them had gone out after the vigil and gotten drunk and ended up back here again. Maybe Juwan’s girlfriend. Maybe they’d had a fight—the reason he’d been driving so fast?—and now she was out there wishing she could take back whatever it was she’d said.

  But it was the woman from the vigil who got out of the car. I recognized her silhouette in the gaslight’s glow. It had gotten cold, but she didn’t have a coat, and at first she just stood on the sidewalk, hugging herself. After a while she went over and put one hand on the tree, then the other. She was standing on the flowers but didn’t seem to notice. She looked like she was trying to push the tree over. At some point she began to cry. Her head fell, her shoulders shook, her hands balled into fists against the bark. She was sobbing so hard that I could hear her through the window, gasping and wailing as if she were being mauled, having her heart torn out. Watching her was like standing at the edge of a pit I couldn’t see the bottom of.

  This will sound awful, but I considered calling the police. For her own good, I told myself—she should have been at home with her family. Even if Juwan’s dad wasn’t in the picture, surely she had siblings, parents, someone to look after her. I was about to turn on a light, thinking she might get self-conscious about waking the neighborhood and leave, when she stopped crying and looked across the street, toward our house. I thought she’d seen me. I stepped behind the curtain, but then I realized she was watching a raccoon make its way along the curb. The sight of it must have spooked her, because when it disappeared down a sewer grate, she got into her car and drove off.

  I lay down on the sofa, my heart hammering. I remember feeling like it would serve me right if something terrible happened to my family too. To get what I’d given. That’s what I would have wanted, I think, if I had been in her shoes. Chairman Meow settled onto my chest, and I concentrated on his purring, the ticking of the mantel clock, the hiss of the radiator—anything to get the sound of her crying out of my head.

  I must have finally drifted off, because the next thing I knew, I was standing in Sara’s doorway. It was still nighttime. Liz was there, shaking me.

  “Wake up, honey,” she said. “Glen. Wake up. You’re sleepwalking.”

  She’d heard me coming up the stairs, heavy footfalls that didn’t sound right. Like Frankenstein, she said later.

  “I am awake,” I said.

  “What is it?” Sara asked.

  “Just checking on you,” I said.

  The strange thing is, once I came around, I remembered it all—walking up the stairs, opening the door, seeing her curled under the comforter. But I’d done those things without so much as a thought in my head.

  “Are you really awake?” Liz said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She was looking at me like she couldn’t trust a word I said.

  “Then go back to bed,” she said, already closing the door. “I’m staying with Sara.”

  If there had been a lock, I’m sure she would have used it.

  I woke groggy and confused, staring out at a gray morning. I’d never sleepwalked before, and it unnerved me. If I could ramble around the house unconscious, what was to stop me from, say, picking up the phone in my sleep and confessing to Rizzo? A light rain began to fall as I drove to the bakery for Liz’s favorite cinnamon buns. Except for a handful of weekend commuters heading to the train station, downtown was mostly deserted at that hour on a Saturday. Back at the house, I brought in the paper and was just starting to check the obituaries when Liz came tiptoeing downstairs. I set the paper aside and walked toward her with my arms out, like a zombie.

  “Stop it,” she said, swatting my arms and tryi
ng not to laugh. “You gave me the creeps. It’s like your body was there but you weren’t.”

  I told her about Juwan’s mom showing up and said maybe that had something to do with my sleepwalking.

  “You should see a doctor,” she said. “Seriously. What if you’d scared Sara? Or accidentally hurt her?”

  “How could I hurt her?”

  “People do all kinds of things when they’re sleepwalking.”

  I didn’t want to argue. I suggested we spend the rest of the weekend in Philadelphia at her mom’s, give things across the street a chance to die down. She reminded me we had plans; we were supposed to go out to dinner with Sara’s friend Lacy and her parents.

  “Lacy wants to see the tree,” Sara said, coming into the kitchen in her nightshirt. “Everybody in my class does.”

  Liz reached for the obituaries. “Here it is.” She looked at me to make sure it was okay and began to read aloud. Juwan Richards had been born and raised in South Orange, she said. He was a senior at the high school, an honor student who hoped for a career in medicine. He worked summers as a lifeguard at the village pool. His hobbies included music and skateboarding.

  “And drinking and driving,” I said.

  Sara’s eyes widened in surprise, but I was so intent on trying not to feel anything for Juwan that I didn’t care. Ignoring me, Liz continued. Juwan was survived by his mother, Tawana; his father, who lived in Maryland; and an older sister in California. A graveside service was being held the following afternoon, at Rosedale Cemetery.

  Sara put down her cinnamon bun. “Can we go?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But I want to see him again. I want to say good-bye.”

  “Sweetie, he’s dead.”

  “That’s why I want to.”

  “You didn’t even know him.”

  “But Dad—”

  A clap of thunder rattled the window. The rain was suddenly a downpour. Sara got up from the table and went into the dining room.

  “The teddy bear! The pictures! Everything’s getting soaked.”

  I joined her at the window. The wreath had already blown over, and flowers lay scattered among big brown sycamore leaves on the freshly laid sod.

  “Do something!”

  “Let’s give it a minute,” I said, “see if it lets up.”

  It didn’t, though, and soon I was coming back from the basement with a tarp. Sara stood at the door while I jogged across the street, propped up the wreath, and covered as much of the memorial as I could. When the wind blew the tarp off, I came back for rocks from our flowerbed and used them to weigh down the corners. Liz and Sara were waiting at the door with a towel when I was done. Sara hugged me before I even had a chance to dry off, then Liz sent her back to breakfast. As I was taking off my boots, she said maybe the funeral wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “We’re strangers, Liz. Why would we go to his funeral? Anyway, Sara’s too young.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was her age when I went to my grandmother’s funeral, and it scared the crap out of me.”

  “I don’t think that ever changes,” she said. “No matter how old you are.”

  * * *

  An hour later, water was pooling in the basement, coming right through the wall in brownish trickles. Liz was still stuck on the funeral.

  “I think you’re being overprotective,” she said, fashioning a makeshift dam of old rags around some moving boxes we’d never unpacked.

  “She doesn’t even know what she’s asking for.” I wanted to say, Now you’re giving me the creeps. First the vigil, now the funeral—it was as if she knew I hadn’t told her the whole truth about the accident and was messing with me, trying to torture it out of me.

  “Can I help?” Sara said, coming down the stairs.

  I found a mop for her to push around and was bringing in the shop vac when the doorbell rang. Sara ran back upstairs.

  “It’s the detective!”

  Liz shot me a look of confusion. I tried to seem unconcerned, but my first thought was that he’d come to arrest me. Why else show up unannounced at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning? I started for the door, panic rising in my throat. Rizzo was cupping his eyes to the glass. He straightened up as I came into the vestibule. He had on the same suit as before, as if he hadn’t stopped working since Thursday.

  “Detective,” I said, opening the door, relieved to see he was alone. “I’d like to report a Peeping Tom.”

  He thought that was funny, or pretended to at least. Then he apologized for disturbing us. “Just had a few follow-up questions and didn’t want to drag you down to the station again.”

  As I was taking his umbrella, Sara came downstairs wearing her badge. She told him she’d decided to be a policeman when she grew up. “A girl can be a policeman, right? Like Carla.”

  “You bet,” Rizzo said. “Police officer.”

  Then she asked to see his gun.

  “Why don’t you go play in your room?” Liz said. She sounded like she didn’t appreciate Rizzo’s being there. She brought him a cup of coffee but didn’t offer to leave, taking a seat between us at the dining room table. Rizzo didn’t seem to mind. He made small talk, complimenting the house and asking how long we’d been there. He said he lived in the village too, not five minutes away.

  “I guess this whole thing has you working overtime,” Liz said.

  He shrugged. “It’s not every day I get a red ball in my own back yard.”

  I asked if the driver had been drinking. He said they wouldn’t know for sure until the autopsy report, which could take three to six months.

  “Months?” Liz said.

  The labs were slow, he explained, and the medical examiner’s office was understaffed and overworked. “It’s Newark,” he said. “Homicides. What are you going to do?” He blew on his coffee and took a sip. “Meanwhile, I’m just trying to rule out everything else besides alcohol. Not jump to conclusions. I mean, at this point, for all we know, it could have been a bee sting. Seriously. One time we had this poor guy, rear-ends a squad car in the rotary down by the train station. Of all the luck, right? Claimed a bee stung him. We’re thinking, yeah, sure, buddy. But damned if the guy didn’t have a stinger right between his fingers.”

  “Amazing.” Liz glanced at his notepad on the table, clearly wishing he’d get on with it.

  “Let’s see,” he said, taking out a pen. “Meant to ask you Thursday night, Mr. Bauer—were you acquainted with the victim?”

  “No.”

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Recognize his car?”

  “No.”

  And before I had time to worry he’d found out about our first encounter with Juwan, he was on to the next question.

  “Was he driving in an erratic fashion prior to the accident?”

  “He was going fast.”

  “But not weaving?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did he use his horn?”

  “No.”

  “Any debris in the street—tree limbs, garbage cans?”

  “No.”

  “What about cats or dogs?”

  “No.”

  Rizzo jotted a few notes and capped his pen. He said thanks, that was all he needed. Draining the last of his coffee, he stood to leave. “Oh,” he said. “Long as I’m here, would it be okay if I talked to Sara?”

  Now it all made sense, why he’d stopped by instead of just calling. There was no way to put him off that wouldn’t have looked like I was hiding something. Speechless, I turned to Liz. She was the one who saved the day.

  “I’m sorry, Detective,” she said, lowering her voice. “We feel like Sara’s been through enough. As it is, we’ve got her seeing a therapist.”

  The detective nodded in an understanding way. He could appreciate how we felt, he said—he had a daughter too, lived with her mom down the shore. “But Sara might have seen something important, without e
ven realizing it.”

  Liz nodded back in her own understanding way, assuring him that of course we’d call if Sara mentioned anything. Then she handed him his umbrella. Seeing that he wasn’t getting anywhere, the detective forced a smile. “Good enough for me.” Then he glanced toward the top of the stairs. I turned to see that Sara had been spying on us. “Keep up the good work, Junior Detective,” he said.

  “Why can’t I talk to him?” Sara said, after he was gone.

  Liz and I looked at each other. Who knew how long she’d been up there or what she’d heard?

  “Because,” Liz said, “he wants to ask you questions about the accident, and we don’t think that’s a six-year-old’s job.”

  “But what if I want to?”

  “Sorry, honey,” I said. “It’s not up to you.”

  Rizzo’s car was still out front, an unmarked black sedan. He’d gone across the street to secure a corner of the tarp that had blown loose. Seeing him out there in the rain fussing over the memorial gave me a bad feeling. After he left, I went back down to the basement. I had the shop vac going when I noticed Liz standing there with a hand on her hip.

  “Well?” she said, when I turned the vac off. “Want to tell me what really happened?”

  Liz and I met playing buck-a-trick, buck-a-bump dorm Euchre during our freshman year at Case Western—a pilot’s son from Covington who liked to bluff, and a full partner’s daughter from the Main Line who would take a bluff—if it fooled her and she lost the trick—as a personal offense. By the end of the second semester, we were sleeping together and done with Euchre, which had gotten too cutthroat between us.

  Now, facing her in the glare of the basement’s bare bulbs, I knew it was time to put at least some of my cards on the table. And so I told her a percentage of the truth, enough of it for her to understand why I didn’t want Sara talking to the detective. I didn’t mention trying to scare Juwan, or having been scared by him. I just said I’d started to turn in front of him before I realized how fast he was going. Liz bit her lip, studying me, and I knew what a stranger I must have seemed to her then. We’d known each other for eighteen years and been married for ten. She shouldn’t have had to wonder whether she could trust me about something so important.