by Will Allison
By now he’d noticed me at the pay phone, watching him. He stopped talking to the mechanic and fixed me with a stare. He didn’t seem to recognize me, though. I returned his stare long enough to convince myself I wasn’t afraid of him, and then I went home.
When I picked Sara up, I told Warren I needed to switch to the afternoon, like I’d promised Liz; the fringe benefit was that I probably wouldn’t be crossing paths with the Suburban guy at that hour. I made sure not to drive past his shop on the way home. I didn’t drive past the cemetery, either.
Sara asked why I’d changed shifts.
“So we’ll have more time with Mom in the morning,” I said.
“Is she going to quit her job?”
Liz hadn’t said anything else about quitting to me. “Did she tell you she was?”
“No. She just asked me would I like it if she worked at home.”
“Would you?”
“I think you both should.”
I said that would be great, but one of us needed a regular job. I was starting to explain health insurance when she interrupted.
“Hey, isn’t that the mom from the funeral?”
We’d just passed a woman on the sidewalk that led into our neighborhood. I slowed down and looked back, a knot already forming in my stomach. After the funeral, I’d been hoping never to see Tawana again, but here she was, in jeans and a too-big sweater that might have been Juwan’s, carrying a shovel.
“Sweetie,” I said. “I think you’re right.”
And for a split second, before I realized Tawana must have been headed for the memorial, I thought she was coming for me.
“Why does she have an axe?” Sara said.
“I think it was a shovel,” I said, reminding myself that Tawana had no reason to blame me.
“Dad, I’m not stupid. It was an axe.”
I circled the block and came up behind Tawana again. It was an axe. She was holding it near the blade, its long wooden handle swinging at her side. She looked determined to get wherever it was she was going. It occurred to me that if she tried to hurt herself, there was no one else around to intervene. I put the window down.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you all right?”
She kept walking. I couldn’t tell if she even knew we were there. How far had she come? I wondered. Why was she on foot? Why hadn’t anyone stopped her? At that point, I decided the best thing to do was call the police, and this time I wasn’t ashamed of the impulse. I sped up, put the car in the garage, and took Sara inside. As I was closing the curtains in her room, she asked what was going on. I said I wasn’t sure, but I wanted her to stay away from the window. Then I parted the blinds and waited. A couple of minutes passed. Tawana came around the corner, walking with more purpose now, carrying the axe with two hands. She crossed the street into Clarice’s yard. When she reached the tree, she didn’t hesitate. She planted her feet, drew back, and swung with all her might. There was a dull thud. A crow lifted off from the branches above her. She swung so hard she fell, knocking over some flowers. The axe was lodged in the tree. At first it wouldn’t budge. She had to choke up and use both hands to loosen the blade. As soon as it was free, she took another swing. She swung as if she intended to fell the tree with one blow, as if her life depended on it. I took out my phone.
“She’s trying to kill Sicky!” Sara cried. “Stop it!”
I found her banging on the bathroom window, trying to get Tawana’s attention. I pulled her away, telling her I’d take care of it, and hurried downstairs. Tawana ignored me as I crossed the street. There were grass stains on her knees, leaves stuck to her sweater. Her hair, burnt orange in the afternoon light, was unkempt. The tree trunk was nicked with axe marks. Now that I was out there, I wished I’d gone ahead and called the police first. I wasn’t worried about the axe so much as simply having to face her.
“Ms. Richards?”
As I approached her, she drew back and took another swing, her eyes so full of tears I don’t know how she could see what she was doing. Down at the corner, a woman pushing a stroller turned around and went back the way she’d come. On the next swing, the axe got stuck again. That’s when Sara’s voice reached us. She was standing just outside our front door, begging Tawana to stop. Tawana didn’t bother trying to free the axe. She let go of the handle and looked at Sara and then me, her chest rising and falling.
“Your daughter,” she said.
I nodded.
“She doesn’t want me to hurt the tree.”
“Come on,” I said, hoping to get her away from the axe. “Come inside.”
She righted the bouquet she’d knocked over, then brushed leaves from her sweater. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I know the tree didn’t kill him. I just can’t stand the sight of it.”
“Me, neither.”
She followed me back across the street. Sara was standing on the porch, looking at Tawana as if she were on fire.
“It’s just a few scratches,” I said to Sara. “No big deal.”
Tawana took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m sorry, baby. Sometimes grown-ups get upset and do things they shouldn’t.”
Sara nodded, staring at her feet now.
“Why don’t you go up to your room,” I said.
Tawana waited until Sara was gone before she covered her mouth and started to cry. I have never felt like more of a monster than I did at that moment, too shamed with guilt to even put a hand on her shoulder. I asked if she wanted to sit down. She went to the sofa. I got a box of tissues and set it on the coffee table in front of her. She had her face in her hands.
“I’m Glen,” I said. “I saw the whole thing.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Bauer,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Your neighbor told me. You thought they gave up on him too soon. You were the only one who spoke up.”
She was looking at me as if I might be able to tell her something about her son’s death that no one else knew. I could no more meet her eyes than I could have gazed into the sun.
“They said he was already dead.”
She sighed. “And were they white? The medics?”
“Yes.” I supposed, in her shoes, I might have asked the same question.
“I just don’t see how they can quit before they even get him to the hospital.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head. “I should be apologizing to you. They told me he could have hit you instead of the tree. But you know what my first thought was? Not ‘Oh Lord, what if he’d hurt someone?’ It was ‘Why him? Why not them instead?’” She closed her hand on the tissue and bit her lip. “I’m a Christian, Mr. Bauer.”
I took a step toward her but couldn’t go any farther. I asked if she wanted me to call someone, or give her a ride. She didn’t seem to hear me.
“It was my car,” she said. “He wasn’t supposed to be driving it.”
She was looking out the window. There were two police cruisers out front. Both officers, a man and a woman, were talking to Clarice. Tawana stood and smoothed her sweater. Then she walked out the door and met the female officer as she was coming up the steps. They seemed to know each other. The officer gave me a nod. Tawana opened the door and got into the police car by herself. Clarice was in her bathrobe again, watching from the porch. She didn’t come out to check on the tree until after they were gone.
_______
Maybe when you read this you’ll wonder why I didn’t just do the right thing and tell her the truth. Believe me, it’s not like the idea hadn’t crossed my mind. But having a clearer conscience wasn’t worth getting us sued and maybe going to jail. When I thought about what my confessing would do to you and your mom, that was all the reason I needed to keep quiet.
And yet. The point here is to be completely honest. I have to admit that even without you, I’d probably still have found an excuse to keep covering up what I’d done. I wanted to do right, but the price was just too high.
_______
; Liz had barely gotten into the car that night when Sara announced that Juwan’s mom had tried to chop down the tree.
“With an axe,” she said. “But Dad saved Sicky. He got her to come inside.”
“Into our house?” Liz looked at me like I was crazy. I shook my head and explained what happened, and she calmed down once she realized Tawana hadn’t brought the axe inside.
“At least she didn’t hurt herself,” she said.
“The tree’s not hurt either,” Sara said. “Not too bad. Dad let me put some more gauze on even though the flowers are still there.”
It wasn’t until later, when Liz and I were alone in the kitchen, that she asked if Tawana and I had talked about the accident. I told her what Tawana had said about me being the only one who’d spoken up for Juwan and how terrible that made me feel.
“It wasn’t your fault, Glen. Having a guilty conscience isn’t the same as being guilty.”
I had a pot roast going in the slow cooker, the first decent meal we’d had since the accident. I checked to see if the potatoes were done.
“And if there’s ever a lawsuit,” she said, “maybe what you did today will count for something.”
“I honestly don’t think she cares about that.”
Liz held a plate while I served. “She will. That’s what people do. Your child gets killed in an accident, sooner or later you hire a lawyer to make sure somebody pays.”
I told her Clarice had said Tawana’s ex was a radiologist. She had a big house in the historic district. She’d already replaced the Jaguar with a BMW.
“You know as well as I do,” Liz said, “it’s not about the money. It’s about not being able to do anything else.”
After the accident in Cleveland, we’d have been happy to settle with the insurance company and be done with it, but the guy who hit us didn’t have insurance, and for us to collect on our uninsured motorist coverage, we would have had to sue him first, make him pay what he could. We were in a tough spot. Liz was due in two months, and we didn’t want the hassle.
Liz’s dad offered to help, but we went to see the guy instead, to see if he wanted to settle out of court. We were looking for just enough money to replace the car and cover the emergency room. The guy didn’t have it, though. He was renting a little two-bedroom place out in Euclid with his wife and kids. The delivery truck was all he owned, and he couldn’t even afford to get the bumper fixed. So we let it go.
But it’s not like Liz and I were saints. We never talked about it, never said the words, but it was always there between us: if there had been a problem when Sara was born—anything even remotely attributable to the accident—we would have sued him into the ground.
* * *
On Thursday, while Sara was at school, I met with a client from the neighborhood, a stockbroker named Carlos who was getting audited. I gave him my standard pep talk. I said some people thought my job was to help clients get away with as much as they could, but the way I saw it, I served them best when they paid exactly what they owed—not a penny more, not a penny less. I would run the numbers every which way, I’d dig up all the tax breaks I could find, I’d turn the code inside out, but in the end, everything had to be legit. Otherwise you risked paying a lot more later.
“So don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ve already paid what you owed.”
Back home, going over Carlos’s returns, I was happy to lose myself in the numbers for a while, but at some point my screen saver kicked in, and I found myself watching a slide show: Sara playing tee-ball, Sara learning to ride her bike, Sara touching noses with Chairman Meow. It was impossible not to think of Tawana and what it would be like to look at those pictures knowing I’d never see Sara again.
I put on a sweatshirt and went outside. The front yard was covered in leaves. I’d been avoiding raking because I didn’t want to be out there when one of Juwan’s friends stopped by, which they’d continued doing since the funeral. But I figured I was safe until school let out. I unfolded a tarp, the one I’d covered the memorial with, and started raking. As I was dragging a load of leaves to the curb, a black sedan came down the street. I thought to duck behind the hedge a moment too late. Rizzo parked and got out, holding a manila folder.
“Mr. Bauer,” he said. “Spare a minute?”
I propped the rake against a tree and met him on the sidewalk with what was becoming a familiar sense of dread. I figured he was there about Sara again, maybe hoping I’d changed my mind since the funeral. I steeled myself to tell him I hadn’t.
“Heard you had a little scene here,” he said, glancing over at the sycamore. The gauze had started to sag, revealing the axe marks. “As if that funeral wasn’t hard enough.”
“Sara asked us to take her,” I said, not wanting him to think I’d gone out of guilt but probably giving him that impression anyway, blurting out an excuse like that. “She’s still trying to get her head around the fact that he’s gone.”
“Poor kid,” he said. “Look, never mind about me talking to her. I think we’ve got what we need. Turns out the guy was on his phone. So with the speeding and maybe alcohol too—it should be an open-and-shut case.”
I nodded, trying to play it cool. “So that’s it?”
“Yeah, depending on the autopsy.”
I felt as if my knees might buckle, the relief was so huge. I asked if they’d ever found out where Juwan had been in such a hurry to get to.
Rizzo said they weren’t sure. “But we know where he was coming from. He’d just left his girlfriend’s house.”
“Were they fighting?”
“Apparently the opposite,” he said. “And drinking. His friends say he wasn’t much of a drinker, though. He was probably a lot worse off than he realized.” He noticed me looking at the folder and smiled like I’d caught him at something. “I did want to ask you about these, though,” he said, pulling out a couple of eight-by-tens. “My ex, she tells me I have an inability to leave well enough alone.” They were photographs of the crash scene. He tapped one of them. “Right here. It looks like you overshot your driveway a little. Then I remembered, when the tow truck got here, I think you had to back up so you could pull in. Am I right?”
My scalp tightened as I began to see what he was getting at: if I’d been waiting for Juwan to pass so I could pull into my driveway, why would I have overshot it? He’d probably figured out that I’d started to turn, then didn’t, then had to keep going to get back into my lane. I looked from one photo to the other, trying not to panic.
“Maybe it’s the angle.”
He shook his head. “We got it from a couple angles. See?”
I studied the photos some more. A breeze was whisking leaves off the tarp, but I was burning up inside my sweatshirt, ready to melt. I couldn’t decide which would be worse—pleading ignorance or admitting I might have started to turn. I was still trying to make up my mind, on the verge of what felt like surrender, when it occurred to me that the explanation I needed was already there, just waiting for me, in the statement I’d given at the station.
“Oh,” I said. “I remember. My foot came off the brake when I reached for Sara.” I handed the pictures back to him. “The car started to roll, and I realized it was still in gear, that I needed to put it in park.”
“But why did you cut the wheel?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your front tires—they’re turned toward the curb. Away from your driveway.”
“I don’t know. I guess I still had a hand on the wheel when I reached for her.” I mimed the action of holding the steering wheel with my left hand, turning it as I reached back with my right. “I must have turned it without meaning to.”
Instead of the stony disbelief I was expecting, Rizzo said, “Makes sense.”
I’d managed to regain my composure, but the fact that he once again seemed so willing to take me at my word was starting to worry me. A guilty conscience can be tricky that way: knowing I was lying made it hard to believe anyone else could believe
me. I couldn’t help thinking he was just biding his time, lulling me, waiting for me to drop my guard.
He slid the photos back into the folder and thanked me. I said I was sorry I hadn’t been more help.
“Anything I can cross off my list, that’s a help.” His car window was open. He tossed the folder onto the seat. “Funny thing about that funeral,” he said. “I’m standing there, checking things out, and I realize I’m looking at the county highway building. On Thomas Boulevard, right across from the cemetery? Our crime scene garage is in there. That’s where we have his car.” He took his keys out, spun them on his finger. “I mean, of all the places he could have been buried, he’s right across the street from his car. No getting away from it, I guess.”
Driving to pick up Sara that afternoon, I looked for the place Rizzo was talking about. I had to see it for myself. It was half a block down from where I’d flipped off the cop, a long brick building with a fenced parking lot, two metal garage doors, and a sign that read GOD BLESS AMERICA. All of the ground-floor windows had been sealed off or fitted with bars.
I didn’t stop to talk with the other parents when I got to school. I went straight to the office, picked up my gear, and set the orange cones in the no-parking zones. I was already working the crosswalks by the time Sara’s class was dismissed. She came over to the fence to say hi, then went to play with Lacy.
Warren had warned me that afternoons were more hectic than mornings. The high school let out at the same time as Sara’s school. Kids were everywhere, on bikes and skateboards, darting from between cars, crossing the street in groups. At the pizza place on the corner, the line was out the door, spilling off the sidewalk. There were school buses and parents waiting for parking spots and a convoy of dusty cement trucks from who knew where. I should have been concentrating on making sure nobody got run over, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Jaguar inside that building, picturing a police mechanic breaking it down piece by piece.