Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  Patsy let her mouth fill, the in-head sound a metallic gargle. Swallowing, she pulled back. Don’t know, she said. D’n’D. De-dicking some cretin. No idea.

  Not what I heard, June said. And lookit your face.

  Patsy resumed drinking, but her fingers went right to a ridge of scab crystallizing along her cheekbone, down to her jaw. No wonder her head hurt.

  Returning to the shelf, she noted the itchy rasp of the prison gown. Lead blue, unrippable, it was made of 45 percent stainless steel, according to the label. She was naked beneath, not even panties.

  I hear you’re in deep shit, Professor. Impossibly, June’s bangs were set in a pink foam curler. How do you get curlers in jail? June had a real mirror too, not the stainless-steel square provided before you face the judge, but a small, plastic-framed mirror propped up on her sink. And a hair dryer. A zippered sack of makeup spilled open on her sleeping shelf. Like she lived here.

  Patsy’s own home, 729 Pomelo Street, was just six blocks away. Walking distance. Hell: crawling distance, if only they’d let you—ten minutes of sidewalk, then left on Pomelo, with its shingled cabins, thick-armed oaks, mountain views. So close, if only she could get there.

  Hey, Professor, wanna borrow my brush? A turquoise paddle with mashed black plastic bristles slid through the bars, but Patsy knew better than to reach for it, lest the brush be retracted again and again, as many times as she’d fall for the ruse, only to be offered at a price, as if she kept a twenty rolled up in her privates for such expenditures. Naw, Juney, thanks anyway. Patsy gathered her long, damp, sharply sour hair—the mats as large and thick as trout—and wound it into a loose knot. But this proved too much tug on her scalp, and she shook it free, three painful shocks, each a silvery flash behind her eyes.

  She couldn’t be in too deep shit, she thought, if she was still in this small-town dump. When’d I come in, Juney?

  You were here when I come. Snoring in your own mess. Stinking up the place. We made ’em spray you down. What’d you do to make ’em so mad?

  Who knows? said Patsy. Maybe I used too many big words, or lectured ’em on the progressive era. Hell, Juney, I have no idea. Oh, but we’ll find out.

  O’Mallon was at the cage door. Hiya, Bitsy, Patsy said, using the jailhouse joke about a supposedly small part of him.

  He opened the door, beckoned with a curt tilt of his head.

  Lemons for breakfast? Patsy asked, though she couldn’t say for sure what time of day it was down here where the sun never shone. Standing, she realized she was still quite drunk. Well, they needn’t know that. She straightened her spine, causing more quick bright flashes of pain, and set off at a stately pace. O’Mallon, blocking her, produced cuffs.

  Uh-oh. Daddy’s mad.

  He drew her hands behind her back, clasped them in chrome, shoved. God damn, Bitsy. See ya, Juney, over her shoulder.

  O’Mallon steered her by the upper arm down the floor-waxed hall to what Patsy thought of as the conversation room, another drab and battered place with a stoic oak table, plastic schoolroom chairs, and street-level windows with chicken wire in the mottled glass. Benny, the lawyer who had represented her in other drunk-driving episodes, sat inside the door. Did I call you? Patsy asked, for she had summoned him on more than one previous occasion with no memory of doing so. She grazed his shoulder with her hip. We have to stop meeting like this, she said.

  Benny ignored her—her own counsel!

  Lieutenant Peterson sat across the table. Also, Ricky Barrett, who had just last year been a continuing education student in her twentieth-century cultural history course. Those continuing ed credits had paid off; he was Detective Barrett now, working out of Monterey Park, as she’d learned during her last incarceration.

  Everyone’s mouth was a down-turned crescent. She was not invited to sit.

  To what do I owe such a . . . summit? she said. Such a meeting of the minds? None but the county’s best and brightest?

  Shut up, Patsy. That was the world-weary Peterson. White-haired and monotoned. Just shut the fuck up.

  But then nobody else said anything.

  Really, you guys. What’s up? Why the faces? I can’t remember a thing.

  Try, suggested Peterson.

  Patsy pulled out a chair, sat, and tried. Monday morning survey, America 1865 to the present. Office hours. Personnel committee dinner at Anne Davis’s house, blankness setting in around the soup course, not her fault, the wine so cheap and bad. What time is it, anyway?

  Noon.

  Day?

  Wednesday.

  Shit. When’d I come in?

  Last night.

  So she’d missed the 9:00 a.m. survey that morning. They’d finished Reconstruction on Monday and were to start the Gilded Age today. I lost Tuesday, she said.

  Across from her, Ricky Barrett snapped the elastic band on an accordion file, a battered and cloudy-brown thing, the corners worn to white. Patsy couldn’t help but read the word felt-tipped on its side. HOMICIDE.

  The taste of wet metal filled her mouth, and fear hit. She thought perhaps she’d misread, and looked again. HOMICIDE. Yes, but it was an old file, probably used for something else now—used for whatever county sheriff detectives detect: stray dogs, rabid skunks, backyard keggers gone rowdy.

  Something like this was bound to happen, Patsy. Now Benny was speaking, darling, patient Benny. We’ll-get-you-off-this-time Benny who, in fact, never had. She should probably fire him, should’ve done so two cases ago and saved herself some big fines. But he had the clumsy charm, if also the legal facility, of a Labrador retriever, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. The way you were going, he was saying now, you had plenty of warning. There’s what, three priors? A suspended license?

  Is that it? she said. Was I driving again? Moi? Sans license?

  The men gazed at the nicked and thinning oak veneer as if they were poring over a war map, as if, again, she were not in the room.

  Okay, what’d I do? Or do I have to beg? Benny? What, are we going to play twenty questions? Or can we behave like adults here? She was almost shouting, then caught herself. But really, they were so grim-lipped and obtuse. What is it? I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?

  Peterson’s mouth did something—a wince, or a smile suppressed.

  Understanding flooded her. Oh, you guys! You guys. You’re just trying to scare me. Damn! You really had me going there!

  Then Ricky Barrett, the hopelessly unerudite plodder whose childish, big-shouldered handwriting she recalled from ill-argued essays, reached into his battered file and extracted a sheet of paper. Using his usual word-by-word, finger-pointing method, he began reading aloud. Jane Robin Parnham, female Caucasian, aged thirty-four, massive contusions to ribs and right arm, cause of death, crushed pulmonary cavity, suffocation. Jessica Elizabeth Parnham, female Caucasian, aged twelve, contusions to rib cage, shoulder, spleen, and kidneys crushed, cause of death, extensive internal bleeding.

  The words flew at her like bats, but before she made any sense of them, and before everything else that was to follow—arraignment, indictment, preliminary hearing, sentencing—and even as guilt stood poised to swallow her in a towering black wave, she took one swift, light-washed sweep through her Pomelo Street home: the red Formica kitchen table and gleaming toaster in the breakfast nook, a blue vase stuffed with homegrown daisies on the baby grand, the front yard’s white-limbed sycamore and deep grass, all of it simmering, soaking in the thick yellow sunlight of late afternoon.

  That life, she thought, that beautiful life is over.

  2

  Patsy’s mother came down from Bakersfield, posted bail, and drove her to Pomelo Street. Patsy went immediately into the shower, then slid into her bed, under the covers, turned her back to the door, and refused to open her eyes or say why she’d left the water running or what she wanted to eat.

  For a week she did not speak or look at anybody. She barely ate, and waited until her mother was asleep or on the phone to use the b
athroom. Once, when they met each other in the hall, Patsy brushed past as if they were strangers. All the liquor had been cleared out from all of her hiding places—her father’s handiwork. He knew the drill firsthand.

  Patsy lay in the dim, pleated shadows beneath the sheet, perfectly still, because to move hand or shoulder was to stir up the new facts of her life, which arrived anyway, in waves, to their own inexorable rhythm. Arc of steering wheel, booming car hood, a terrible tumult in the dark. The rasp of soft ridges, like corduroy. And with them, a horror without bounds.

  •

  They were Jehovah’s Witnesses, mother and daughter. They’d been walking down her driveway, having left two tabloids rolled in the handle of the screen door. Patsy hadn’t been going fast. Her car, a 1963 Mercedes sedan so dark green it looked black, weighed forty-eight hundred pounds, according to the registration. Two and a half tons! The girl died at the scene, the mother some hours later in intensive care.

  Patsy pictured them again and again, as if they were borne on a conveyor belt from some charred storehouse of memory: young and older, two ink-blue skirts and sodden, moonlit blouses, sensible shoes, hair thick and rippled over the ground, faces pressed into deep black grass.

  •

  She had taken her car out before the accident only once that she remembered, when she and Brice Court were breaking up. Although he had disappointed her constantly, she could not bear the thought of not seeing him or talking to him. When he would not answer her phone calls one night, she took the keys from the tiny drawer in the antique coffee grinder and drove to the Lyster. She’d gazed up at his lit rooms, their high plastered ceilings, the curt edge of a mantel, a shifting shadow most likely cast by him. He was alive, and she knew where to find him. She drove home weeping but satisfied and returned the keys to their musty box.

  •

  Her father came down for the weekend to speak to her, do something with her. This was bound to happen, Pats, he said. After a certain point, our disease takes us only to hospitals, jails, or morgues. C’mon, let’s go to a meeting.

  Then Wes, the chair of her department. God help us, Patsy, this could happen to anyone. Your students are taking a collection for your legal fees . . . And her best friend at Hallen, Sarah. I hate that this has happened, Pats, I can only imagine how you feel. Now, Patsy, please talk to me, look, a pot of tea . . . And her brother, Burt. Shouldn’t we turn on the French Open? More people filed in, wraiths from her former life, their voices buzzing across the divide from the everyday world, a place she now knew as cheaply constructed, brazenly false.

  The foot of the bed sank, and a certain voice opened her eyes: Brice himself, who now looked as spurious as the others. Poor husk and wastrel, his big-nosed, well-bred looks were never so useless.

  I have something for you, Pats, he said in a luring tone she never could resist. She hoisted herself on an elbow to see, in the cup of his palm, two jewel-red capsules. And here’s water to wash ’em down.

  He held the back of her neck as she drank. What? What’d you say?

  Leave the others. I know you have more.

  Brice laughed. Not on your life, baby girl, he said. Not on your life.

  Her life. A rathole.

  At least Brice, that chronic charmer, understood what she wanted: to feel neither better nor worse, but nothing at all. He held her hand, not minding that she did not clasp his in return, no doubt preferring it. As she watched, shadows gathered around him like a dirty cloud, cloaking his shoulders, chest, neck, and chin until only the big hook nose floated in the darkness.

  •

  She awoke to hear her mother snoring in the other bedroom. She rose and peed and felt her way down the hall. In the kitchen, she opened the utility drawer, located the black-handled shears. Slipping a thick rubber band from around the kitchen faucet, she gathered up her tangled hair. The scissors, dull as chopsticks, sometimes only pinched and jammed. Her arms grew tired, the handles bore into her thumb.

  In the morning, her mother, emptying coffee grounds, would spot the snarled, flaxen, thirty-inch-long ponytail in with the butter wrapper and junk mail.

  •

  At the arraignment, Patsy had agreed to an early preliminary hearing in ten days’ time. Now, with the date looming, Benny appeared bedside in his budget suit, suggesting, then urging delay—Let’s continue it, he said. He seemed tired, gentler, though distant.

  No, she said into the pillow, why put it off?

  Because prison is hideous, Patsy. Because you don’t want to go there before you need to or stay any longer than you have to.

  Let’s get it over with, she said.

  Then Benny’s mood improved. The district attorney was in a bargaining mood, thanks to a hampering technicality: Patsy had killed in her own driveway and not on a public roadway, and intoxication was only a factor on public streets. Thus they could trade murder/manslaughter for criminal negligence. Though for two bodies, he could not get her less than four years—she’d serve two and some with good behavior. How did that sound, two and some?

  Two and some, five hundred and some. All the same to her.

  •

  For the first hour, she sat in the wood-paneled courtroom between her mother and her brother Burt. She held their hands as if they alone tethered her to safety. Then Burt left to make some calls.

  She had been here before, or in an identical courtroom, where the cherry veneer walls were alternately smooth and perforated and the overhead lights looked like giant ice-cube trays. Five or six such rooms filled this floor alone, with many more above and below. The judge may or may not have been the same balding older white man who had revoked her license and fined her a thousand dollars the last time.

  In the front of the room, beyond a waist-high partition, a small industry functioned with no particular urgency; bailiff, court recorder, clerk, and district attorney stayed put as defense lawyers and defendants came and went, their assorted felonies processed one after another. Assault. Armed robbery. Burglary. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody raised a voice in anger, annoyance, or regret. Another assault. Battery. All but the judge spoke with their backs to the room, so much of what was said was inaudible to those on the long wooden pewlike benches who waited for their cases to be called.

  The bailiff, a big black man dressed all in khaki, followed the proceedings with an alert interest that seemed intelligent to Patsy, as if he, of all the people there, registered everything. Several times, after perusing a paper, he left by a side door, only to reappear minutes later with a prisoner in shackles and faded orange pajamas. Whenever that door opened, Patsy craned to see where they’d come from. A stairwell, an iron banister, ascending concrete steps.

  A woman slid into Burt’s seat, a trim, handsome Latina in a tan leather skirt, a fringed tan sweater, tan high-heeled boots. She touched Patsy’s arm. Do you know how I could find out who’s representing my son? she asked. She did not look old enough to have an adult son. I called Legal Aid. They couldn’t say.

  I’m sorry, said Patsy. I have no idea.

  Nobody does. She lifted her chin to indicate the lawyers, judge, bailiff. Nobody here knows anything.

  A man who’d attempted to rob a small grocery store was given a suspended sentence. A trial date was delayed for a shaved-headed gang member held on three hundred and sixty thousand dollars bond. Led back through the door, the kid blew a kiss, no hands, just kiss and puff. Patsy followed the kiss to an ancient grandmother. After this, another general shuffling ensued. The judge scratched an eyebrow as he turned pages, and the court recorder ate a few quick spoonfuls of yogurt.

  The woman in tan leaned in close. They’re so nonchalant here, she said, pronouncing it with a soft ch, like shhhhh. And they’re dealing with people’s lives. Their lives, she said.

  Yet the calmness of the court was a comfort to Patsy. The routine, the barely audible proceedings. She drifted until she became aware of two women on the other side of the aisle. They searched her out before sitting down, agreed with each oth
er that she was their object. The accusation and loathing in their faces seemed like the first unadjusted expressions Patsy had encountered since the accident, and part of her was relieved, finally, to see such naked dislike, and part of her rose up against it too, some tiny, undefeated shred of self. The judge, glancing at some papers, said her name. Benny looked back at the courtroom door, and his eyes flickered.

  Entering was Ricky Barrett, her former student, and with him a man she would have recognized anywhere, he looked so stunned by sorrow. Like her, he’d been led to this impersonal shuffle of ritual and governance. He slid into the bench behind the two women. They reached back for his hands.

  Patsy faced the front of the court again and let him look at her.

  Her name was called again. She went forward and took an oath. I do, she said, holding up her hand.

  The district attorney was a young and pretty woman. Pale, freckled, possibly Irish, her face was framed in frizzy red curls, and she was solemn to the point of coldness. Do you understand these charges against you? she asked Patsy. Have you had an opportunity to discuss these charges and any defense you would have to them with your attorney?

  The words were certainly rote. Patsy needed only to ignore the surges of confusion that rose in response to them. Yes, she said, nodding. Yes.

  It is my understanding, the D.A. went on, that you wish to plead guilty to two counts of criminal negligence resulting in loss of life. The maximum sentence on those counts would be twenty-five years. But today your attorney and myself have agreed that upon entering your plea, you will receive the following sentence: four years in the state prison. Is that what you want to do?

  Again, a rising intimation of complexity, of weeds tangled underwater, a sensation too vague to address when a simple answer was expedient, and expedience was her goal. Yes, Patsy said.

  And then came the waivers—Benny had rehearsed her—when she relinquished rights, one after another. The right to a preliminary hearing, to a trial by jury or by court. The right to confront and examine the witnesses against her, the right to present her own defense . . . the right not to testify against herself. They flew off like crows flapping off a tree limb, black rags in a wind. Do you understand and give up these rights? The young woman’s seriousness seemed at once stagy and dire.