Long Drive Home

by Will Allison

  No getting away from it, Rizzo had said. As if he knew how my mistakes had converged in that no-man’s-land along Thomas Boulevard, a coincidence of geography I couldn’t help being spooked by, looking for meaning where there was none, feeling like the universe itself had it in for me.

  When we got home, I called Liz to tell her Rizzo no longer needed to talk to Sara because it was an open-and-shut case now—Juwan had been on his cell phone. She was more suspicious than relieved.

  “He stopped by for that? Why didn’t he just call?” “He wanted to ask me about some photos too. No big deal.”

  “What photos?”

  I took a deep breath and told her the rest, even though I knew she wouldn’t like it. Then I counted to five-one-thousand, the way you count seconds between lightning and thunder.

  “No big deal?” she said. “Are you kidding me, Glen? He pretty much has it figured out. He knows you started to turn.”

  “He doesn’t know anything. I told him my foot came off the brake when I reached for Sara.”

  “And let me guess,” she said. “You think he believed you.”

  The next morning, I got a call from an attorney in East Orange. I was in the kitchen packing Sara’s lunch, and Liz was upstairs prodding her to get dressed for school. We picked up at the same time, and I asked her to stay on, knowing she’d want to hear for herself whatever he had to say.

  The attorney explained that he’d been engaged by Tawana Richards to explore the possibility of a wrongful death action involving her son. He was wondering if I might stop by his office to talk about the accident.

  “I understand you and your daughter were the only witnesses,” he said.

  “She was with me,” I told him, “but I’m the only one who saw what happened.”

  I knew I wasn’t under any obligation to talk to him, but I also knew it would look bad if I didn’t. I agreed to meet with him the following week. As I hung up, Liz came into the kitchen in a camisole and flannel pajama pants, holding the phone to her chest.

  “See?” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  I put my arms around her and pointed out that I wasn’t being deposed, that there wasn’t even a lawsuit—this was just an informal thing, what the lawyer had called prelitigation discovery. “It’s a fishing expedition. It’s where he finds out there’s no one to sue.”

  She turned away and spread her hands on the countertop, as if all her strength were needed to keep it in place. “Jesus, Glen,” she said. “We could lose everything.”

  As soon as she got to work, Liz emailed me the name of an attorney that a friend of hers in the bank’s legal department had recommended. She phoned later, that afternoon, to see if I’d followed up. I was in the waiting room at Kim Lee’s office, trying again to listen through the door as Sara told her about the funeral, Tawana, the axe. I stepped out into the hallway and told Liz I didn’t want a lawyer, that it would just make me look guilty. There was more to it than that, though. Getting a lawyer would have felt like admitting my guilt to the world, and at that point, I could hardly admit it to myself.

  “I’d rather wait until there’s actually a lawsuit,” I said. “Which there won’t be.”

  “Just call her, honey. Can’t you do that for me?”

  I said I was sorry, but I really didn’t think hooking up with a lawyer was a good idea.

  She gave an exasperated sigh. “Okay, we obviously can’t have this conversation now. Get a sitter for tonight, all right?”

  We went straight from the train station to the Indian restaurant in Maplewood. Liz had brought a bottle of wine from the city. No sooner had we sat down and gotten it poured than she picked up where she’d left off, wanting to know how I could be so mulish.

  “You don’t go see a lawyer unless you’ve got a lawyer,” she said.

  “I already told you. I’ll get one if I need one.”

  “If you need one?” She reached across the table for my wrist. “That boy is dead, Glen. Do you really think that’s the end of it, that there aren’t going to be consequences? It doesn’t matter if he got himself killed. You were still involved, and now Rizzo knows it.”

  The waiter came over. Neither of us was hungry, but I ordered some nan and samosas. Once we were alone again, Liz poured more wine and started speculating about how I’d fare in criminal court (pretty well) versus civil court (not well at all). I tried changing the subject. I told her Kim Lee wanted to keep seeing Sara. I asked if she’d given any more thought to quitting her job. I said I’d heard about a position at a firm in Hoboken that I could apply for. She was still obsessing over the possibility of a lawsuit, though. It was a lose-lose, she said: they take you for everything you’ve got, or you spend everything you’ve got trying to stop them. Good-bye house, good-bye savings, good-bye college. She said she knew what her dad would say.

  “He’d tell me to get out while I can. If you won’t even protect yourself, why should Sara and I suffer too?”

  After we got home and put Sara to bed, Liz poured another glass of wine, took it into the living room, and lit a fire in the fireplace. At midnight, I was still waiting for her to come to bed. I didn’t agree with what she’d said at the restaurant. My father-in-law might have been hard-nosed, but he was first and foremost reasonable. If anything, he’d have advised her not to lose her head.

  Twice Liz came upstairs to look in on Sara, passing our bedroom without a word. At 1 a.m., I stood at the window watching her come back from the woodpile with an armful of logs. Later, I could hear her opening the metal fireplace curtain to put another one on.

  I came down at dawn, before Sara woke up. Liz was asleep on the sofa. Her laptop was on the coffee table, next to a glass and a half-empty bottle of wine. The embers in the fireplace were still glowing. I got some aspirin and water. She sat up, took the pills, and drank the whole glass.

  “I’ll call the lawyer,” I said. “I’m not saying I’ll take her to the meeting, but I’ll talk to her at least.”

  “Good.” Liz pulled a knitted throw around her shoulders and rubbed her eyes. She looked almost as much a mess as Tawana had, sitting in that same spot a few days earlier, but her voice was calm. “That’s not going to keep us from getting sued, though.”

  “Honey, if they sue us, they sue us. That’s out of our control.”

  “Not really. Not if there’s a way to separate our assets so they’d just be suing you.”

  The deliberateness of her logic was making me uneasy. “But there’s not, so what’s the point?” I closed the fireplace, gathered up the bottle and glasses. “Let’s get away for the weekend. If you don’t feel like Philly, we could take the train down to Baltimore.”

  “Glen, listen to me. The statute of limitations on a wrongful death action is two years.”

  “So?” I left her sitting on the sofa.

  She followed me into the kitchen, lowering her voice. “So what if we were apart until then? Until it’s safe to get back together.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” I turned to her in mock wonder. “A temporary divorce. Sara will love it. Let’s go tell her right now.”

  “Stop it, Glen.”

  “No, Liz. You stop.”

  “But I’m serious.”

  She did seem serious. Of course, she’d also seemed serious every time she’d vowed to quit her job, stop buying Sara so many doll clothes, or strangle the next loudmouth using a cell phone beside her on the train.

  “No, you’re not. That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

  Her eyes were surprisingly focused. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Um, yeah. To get a grip on reality. I messed up, Liz—I get it. You’ve made your point.”

  I was trying to get the cork back into the bottle. Liz closed her hand over mine until she had my full attention. She reminded me that she was the one who went to an office every day, she was the one who paid the mortgage, she was the one saving for college and our retirement.

  “Great. Is that
what this is about?”

  “It’s about Sara,” she said. “Her future. I’ve worked hard to give her a good one—we both have—and I’m going to make sure she gets it.”

  By the time Sara came downstairs, Liz was in bed. I told Sara she wasn’t feeling well again. Sara wanted to make her a get-well card.

  “And one for Sicky too,” she said.

  She worked on them in the kitchen while I made pancakes and tried to explain why it wouldn’t be appropriate to add Sicky’s card to the memorial. All the while, I was trying not to get too wound up over my conversation with Liz. Sometimes she got carried away and said things she didn’t mean. It wasn’t the real Liz, though, and sooner or later she always cooled down. I got the fire going again, and we ate breakfast in front of the TV. The World Series had started. We caught the highlights from the previous night’s game, which Sara watched with more than her usual mild interest.

  “I don’t want to be a fairy anymore,” she said. “I want to be a baseball player.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Halloween. “That’s a great idea,” I said, glad to have a project. After we ate, we found a pair of her tee-ball pants, used fabric markers to color stirrups on some tube socks, and turned an old T-shirt into a jersey by drawing buttons and piping and CLEVELAND across the front. She already had an Indians cap.

  Standing at the mirror, she frowned. “I think I need a real jersey, Dad. And spikes, not sneakers.”

  I was telling her they probably didn’t make metal spikes for six-year-olds when we heard Liz moving around upstairs. It was almost noon. I’d been hoping the extra sleep would improve her outlook, but after she made a big deal over Sara’s costume (“Go Tribe!”) and the get-well card (“I feel better already”), she started heading back to bed with her laptop.

  “Come on, Liz,” I said. “Let’s get out of the house. We need a pumpkin.”

  “And a baseball jersey,” Sara added.

  “You two go,” Liz said. “I have some work to do.”

  I asked Sara to wait for me downstairs and looked over Liz’s shoulder at a list of divorce lawyers on the screen. Her plan, she said, was to get on the phone Monday morning and find one who could meet with her as soon as possible.

  I said, as calmly as I could, as though this were a perfectly reasonable thing to be discussing, “That’s no way to find a good lawyer.”

  “It would be an uncontested divorce. We wouldn’t need good. We’d need fast.”

  It occurred to me then that she might really be losing it. I closed the door and sat on the bed. I said maybe the two of us should go see Kim Lee. “Because honey? Honestly? This is getting crazy. This isn’t something a normal person would consider—especially a person with a six-year-old daughter.”

  She said I was absolutely right—a normal person would sit around hoping she didn’t get sued, and then when she did, she’d be screwed. “We’re lucky, though. We see it coming. We have time to do something.”

  “Why don’t you ask Sara what she thinks?”

  That got her attention. She leaned against the headboard, blinking back tears. “I know this isn’t ideal, okay? It fucking sucks. But the alternative is worse. This is the rest of our lives we’re talking about. Two years is nothing.”

  “Honey, what are you doing?” I couldn’t believe she was serious, but I was starting to sense that it was dangerous. Even if she was only trying to scare me, or punish me for scaring her, there was a risk that all her talk would make itself come true—and that my reaction, if I let myself go, would only inflame things. I wanted to throw the laptop out the window, but instead I just reminded her that there wasn’t even a lawsuit yet. She said if we waited until there was, then obviously it would be too late. I reminded her that we had a boatload of liability coverage. She said the insurance company wouldn’t pay if I were convicted of a crime. I pointed out that she herself had said that was unlikely. I said if it would make her feel better, I’d be glad to put everything in her name. She said that wasn’t good enough.

  “As long as we’re married, they can get to it.”

  Sara and I found pumpkins at a roadside stand and baseball jerseys at the mall. She was adamant about not wanting the Yankees and got a Mets jersey instead. I wondered if her choice had something to do with the Suburban guy’s cap but didn’t ask. Why remind her of things I was hoping she’d forget?

  When we got home, Liz was going through the file cabinet in the office, pulling out papers. I thumbed through the stack—life insurance policies, the deed to the house, bank statements, paperwork on Sara’s 529 and our retirement plans.

  “Is there anything else going on that I should know about?” I said.

  “You mean other than the fact that you’ve jeopardized everything we’ve worked so hard for and now you won’t do anything about it?”

  “So you’re not in love with some guy at work? You’re not just pissed off at me in general?”

  She looked as if she were out of patience.

  “I’m not trying to be flip. I just don’t understand you.”

  “The feeling,” she said, turning back to the file cabinet, “is mutual.”

  That’s when I told her to make no mistake—if she filed for a divorce, I most certainly would contest it. She’d need a court order to get me out. And of course I’d fight for custody. “So anyhow, we’re carving the pumpkin now. Want to take a break and rejoin your family?”

  _______

  I’m trying not to make your mom out to be the bad guy, but it’s hard. I have to keep reminding myself how scared she must have been—not just of what might happen to us, but of me. I’d shaken her faith in my judgment. I’d gone from being the person she could always rely on to a liability, a question mark, a threat.

  But for her to plow ahead, knowing what a separation would do to you—even now, that still boggles my mind. It’s not as though all she cared about was money. And despite the fact that she could be severe, it’s not as though she had a hard heart—far from it. The only thing I can figure is that fear got the best of her, plain and simple. Maybe it had something to do with being a lawyer’s daughter, a childhood of legal horror stories at the dinner table—the same way, say, Rizzo’s daughter might have grown up with a dark view of human nature.

  _______

  That night, Liz called her mom to ask if she’d come stay for a while. She told her we’d decided to take some time off from each other.

  “Not true,” I said, coming out of the bathroom.

  “Who’s cheating on who?” Helen said, loud enough for me to hear.

  I couldn’t take it; I went downstairs and got on the other phone. “Helen?” I said. “I was almost involved in a car accident last week. A boy died. Liz is afraid I’ll get sued and we’ll lose everything, so she wants a divorce. Then she wants to get back together when it’s safe.”

  There was the sound of Helen lighting a cigarette. She was quiet for a long time. I was hoping she’d tell Liz she was out of her mind.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s some plan.” Then she said it wasn’t her place to judge, of course she’d come if we needed her. She’d been planning to stay with us during tax season anyway, like she always did. “I’ll just come earlier.”

  “You don’t need to go along with this,” I said. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Will you get off the phone?” Liz said. “Mom, listen, I’ll call you later.”

  When she hung up, Liz was furious. “What if she tells someone?”

  “I hope she tells everyone.”

  “They could make her testify.”

  I just stared at her. She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead.

  “All right,” she said, “that didn’t make any sense. But dammit, this has to stay between us.”

  “What about Sara? What are you going to tell her?”

  The next morning, Liz called in sick for the first time in two years, then started calling lawyers. She found one out in Livingston who co
uld meet with her at noon, and she was home from his office in time to ride with me to pick up Sara. On the way, she went over the eight grounds for divorce in New Jersey, ticking them off on her fingers: extreme cruelty, adultery, desertion, addiction, institutionalization, imprisonment, deviant sexual conduct. She said the lawyer, Floyd Braun, had recommended extreme cruelty, because it was the easiest.

  “It’s just a term of art. It doesn’t mean anybody was actually cruel.”

  “Why are you even telling me this crap?” I said. “And I thought there were eight.”

  “There’s also no-fault separation,” she said, “but that takes eighteen months.”

  That night, I got on the computer myself, wanting to find out what I might be in for and what I could do about it. After an hour or so, I was coming to the conclusion that I’d need a divorce lawyer myself when I happened across an advice column, a lawyer responding to a question about debts and marriage in New Jersey. Referring to a precedent in the state case law, he said that the courts typically didn’t hold separated spouses accountable for one another’s debts.

  Separated, as opposed to divorced.

  Reading the column again, it occurred to me that I was going about things all wrong. Fighting wasn’t getting me anywhere; it only made Liz dig her heels in. Maybe the best thing to do was play along, ride it out until she came to her senses. In the meantime, I’d be in a better position to keep her from doing any real harm.

  I printed out the column. Liz was in bed, circling ads in an apartment finder. “Good-bye, divorce,” I said, laying my discovery in her lap. “We could just separate instead.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it, but I didn’t plan on being gone long, just time enough for things to cool off. “We’ll make it look like we’re planning a no-fault divorce while we wait out the statute of limitations.”