Blame: A Novel

by Huneven, Michelle

  And Patsy, what he did’s a whole nother order of magnitude, Mark said with enough sharpness to give her a small shock. He left my wife and child to die, and you to take the blame. How Martin and I’ll ever square with you—

  We’re square now, Patsy said. And she didn’t regret the money. Giving it away had cost her some degree of self-sufficiency, but that was fair and adequate compensation for her actual role in the debacle, whereas before, when she thought she’d been driving, no amount of prison time or cash would have been sufficient. I mean it, Mark, she said. I don’t begrudge a penny.

  And then, like that, she wanted to be done. Transfer the blame and close the door.

  Ricky offered to get more coffee. No, thanks; no, both Mark and Patsy said, and then they stood, and hugged. Mark, in his new stylishness, walked off into the cool afternoon. Patsy noticed stillness in her chest, a solidity, as if indeed a door had shut. Possibly, and without regret, she would never have to see or talk to Mark Parnham again.

  Ricky lifted his coffee cup, swirled the dregs, and drank. He took that well, he said.

  He’s always taken it well.

  How are you taking it?

  Up and down, she said. It’s hard to know what it means.

  It means you had a real bad rap for a long time and now you’re out from under it. Ricky hitched his pants and looked up and down the alley. I’ll talk to the prosecutor, see what we can do about the conviction. Find out what kind of hoops we got to jump through. I think we’ve got a good shot at it, though.

  One more thing, he said. Don’t let that crocodile you swallowed eat you alive. They tell ’em in anger management depression’s just anger kept inside.

  Just. She smiled to hear Ricky Barrett attempt psychology. I’ll keep an eye on it, she said.

  •

  March routinely cooked dinner, but now, at four-forty, the kitchen was empty and mum. Patsy, her stomach sour from the black coffee, took out bread, peanut butter, jam. Then a commotion of doors, a baby’s cry, and in came March with husband, children, and many shopping bags from Whole Foods.

  So much traffic on the 2, March said. It took forever, and I have to get these children fed before they completely freak out.

  Let me make them a sandwich, Patsy said, lifting the peanut butter so March could see the label. Organic!

  Okay, a half one, split in two, March ordered. Just to tide them over.

  Patsy started to smile at her imperiousness when March said, Thanks, Patsy. That would help a lot.

  The sandwich half, halved, was taken by Forrest, along with the children, into the garden room. March began emptying the bags. Dad gave me his credit card, she said.

  Oh, good, said Patsy, who had already guessed as much.

  Here, said March. You want a banana with that?

  Sure, thank you. Patsy added banana slices to her sandwich, put it on a plate, then helped March put away groceries.

  So you’ve started teaching, Patsy? Or are you still on break?

  Tuesday was my first class, Patsy said.

  But you’re also doing research. Going to libraries and such?

  She’s asking, Patsy thought, why I’m never home.

  Mostly I’ve been reading for my next class. And today I met with a couple of guys about some old, old business. Patsy straightened boxed cereals in an overhead cupboard. I don’t know if your dad said anything yet, but I’ve had some unusual news.

  Nobody’s told me anything, said March. Just a sec, she added, turning. Does anyone want some blood orange juice? she yelled to the garden room.

  After a chorus of noes, she slung the jug into the fridge. Sorry, go on.

  It turns out that I’m actually not guilty of the crime I went to prison for. You know, I was in a blackout, so I never knew what actually happened, but it’s come out that I wasn’t driving the car when those two people were killed.

  Ava ran up and clasped her mother’s legs.

  March glanced down at her daughter and held up a finger—Time-out!—to Patsy. Ava, honey, did you eat anything? she said.

  Daddy ate my sandwich.

  Forrest, called March. Why did you eat her sandwich?

  I’ll make her another real quick, said Patsy.

  No, it’s okay. Here. March tore open a bag of rice cakes. Take one to Daddy too. Patsy?

  No thanks.

  So what will you do now? March said. Are you going to sue?

  Patsy flattened a bag, then folded it. No, I won’t sue.

  But this is a big deal. Your whole reputation was ruined, said March. If I were you, I’d definitely sue.

  •

  Cal was watching the news in the dark, alone. Patsy slid into the chair next to his and waited for him to press the mute button. In the blue glow, the broad planes of his face made her think of granite escarpments.

  Is everything okay? he said.

  Yes, but I thought I’d bring you up to date. I was just talking to March, and I didn’t want you to feel out of the loop.

  So loop me in, he said, and leaned toward her as she told him about the meeting with Ricky and Mark.

  I could tell you were chewing on something, he said. And of course I had some idea.

  Ricky thinks we have enough to get the conviction overturned.

  Good, Cal said. I’m glad you followed up on that. His eyes, ink-blue as ever, gazed at her a moment longer. Then he picked up the remote.

  I’m sorry, she said. Were you involved in the news?

  No, not really.

  Are you annoyed because I didn’t tell you about this earlier?

  I’m not annoyed. If you can get the conviction overturned, I’m glad for you.

  But that’s not the point, at least not as far as I’m concerned, she said. I don’t really care about the conviction.

  Okay, said Cal.

  God, she said. What’s wrong with you Sharps? March just asked if I was going to sue someone. What about everything I went through? Prison, twenty years of guilt and remorse! Doesn’t that merit sympathy? How ’bout a little outrage? And aren’t you a little bit relieved to find out I didn’t kill anyone?

  I suppose.

  You suppose? You suppose what?

  I suppose the fact that you weren’t driving mitigates some responsibility.

  A sickening fear hit. Cal, do you think I’m still guilty of killing them?

  It was your car, he said gently. Your house. Your lower companion. You took that first drink and set the whole thing in motion. As a participant, you have some responsibility for how things played out.

  Oh! she said, suddenly seeing things his way. All could be traced to that first drink, that willful abdication of control. She’d known full well that if she drank, all bets were off and anything might ensue: hilarity, oblivion, tragedy. Yet she drank willingly, even knowing she’d be powerless over whatever madness she’d begun. And madness had ensued. So whoever was or wasn’t driving at the moment of impact was somewhat immaterial. After all, everyone in the car is guilty in a drive-by shooting. In a bank robbery. In the Weathermen’s planting of a bomb. Sharondel at fire camp said she’d no sooner climbed into a car with a john than he stopped for a bottle and held up a 7-Eleven. And she got twice the time he did. For sitting in the car.

  A hot tide of guilt, familiar but with a fresh new froth of shame—shame that she’d thought she was free of wrongdoing—spread through her. She imagined standing alongside Bill Hogue before the judge and being sentenced as a team, two hapless drunks whose shenanigans turned fatal.

  She’d posited this very idea to Ricky and Mark, but they’d resisted her. Ricky had a soft spot for her, and Mark had forgiven her from the get-go for his own peace of mind. The moral truth, which Cal insisted on, was not so easily sidestepped. She covered her face with her hands as sobs—deep, painful coughs of despair—burst out of her. Cal drew his hand down her back again and again.

  I thought I could be free of it, she said, once she could speak. I felt so relieved.

  I know, he
said. I could see that you did. Come here. He pulled her gently. Come here, my love. My sweetheart.

  In standing to enter his embrace, she bumped the table and sent a stack of magazines to the floor. Sorry, sorry, she said, crouching to pick them up.

  On her haunches there on the carpet, gathering New Yorkers and Stanford alumni magazines as Cal daintily held his knees to one side, another thought arrived, this one in a man’s voice, a cowboy’s voice: Now just a gol durn minute.

  She hadn’t been driving. She’d given over her keys when asked—and by all accounts, without a struggle. Bill Hogue was driving because he’d asked to. But he hadn’t been familiar with her old, heavy car or the steepness of her driveway. Nor had he anticipated pedestrians in his path—who could have? In many ways, the accident was just that. An accident.

  Patsy? said Cal. You okay down there?

  Of course she never should have taken the first drink. By the same token, what were the mother and daughter doing out at dusk, the hard-to-see time, the witching hour? What were they doing on private property where they were uninvited, unexpected, unwanted?

  She gave the magazines a few sharp bounces to neaten the stack, and stood. Cal reached for her hip. Come on, sweetie, he murmured. Come here.

  Cal, she said, no.

  He looked up at her, perplexed. Some of his white eyebrows were so long that they looked like tendrils seeking a trellis. My love? he said.

  I’m going out, she said.

  •

  She drove over to the Rose Bowl, where her cell phone had decent reception, and parked alongside the golf course. It was a beautiful, cold evening. White and gray cloud masses slid over each other, tore apart, light breaking through. The wind came in gusts. People were walking and running and skating around the old stadium and greens. She looked like one of them, on the phone before or after a jog.

  Burt was home alone, he told her, practicing the banjo.

  Cal still thinks I’m guilty, she said.

  Oh, he’s just afraid that you’re going to kick up your heels and run off.

  If he’s not careful, that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, said Patsy. I can’t stay guilty for his sake.

  You’ve been too haunted for too long as it is. You took the whole thing so damn hard. I always wished you could forgive yourself more than you did.

  I know, said Patsy. It’s temperament. Some of us take stuff too hard.

  And some of us don’t take stuff hard enough, Burt said. Which was always Bonnie’s complaint about me.

  The banjo sounded a twangy flourish.

  It amounts to the same thing, said Patsy. Inappropriate response—Freud’s definition of neurosis. My last shrink would say it’s the result of all that madness in our house growing up. How we dealt with it.

  Probably, said Burt. But don’t you find as you get older, you say to hell with that psychology and self-help crap and just start doing what you want?

  I have no idea what I want, said Patsy.

  You will. Especially now. Don’t you feel all freed up?

  It’s only been a couple weeks, Burt. I don’t know how to feel freed up.

  •

  Gloria said, I’d take it easy for a while. Don’t make any major decisions. Maybe hit a meeting a day till you’re through some of this.

  That advice! The last time Patsy went daily to meetings, her higher power was channeled by that other prospective adulteress, Yvette Stevens. Patsy hadn’t seen Yvette again until a few months ago, when they ran into each other during intermission at a chamber music concert. Patsy had drawn Yvette aside. You probably saved my marriage, she said.

  Me? Gosh. That’s funny. How?

  Patsy lowered her voice. The last time I saw you, you talked about that curator you liked and how you’d decided to sidestep the insanity. I was so impressed.

  Yvette’s dark, round eyes began to flash; she ducked her head, her perfect smoke gray pageboy swung over her face. But Patsy, she whispered, we had eighteen months of insanity. Buzz and I separated, the kids chose sides. I left my job. She laughed softly. Oh, Patsy, you must have caught me on a day I was talking a real good line.

  •

  Night was sinking down to earth, the hillsides west of the Rose Bowl darkening to black. Clouds sealed the sky. Tall mercury-vapor lamps flickered on around the greens. Patsy considered whom to call next. She couldn’t reach Audrey from this phone. She thought of phoning Lewis. God, how she’d love to tell him her news, although who knew what he’d make of it. He had found her original story, what?—resonant and powerful?—and therefore might find the new revised version (and the present, revised her) somewhat less compelling.

  Prison was only romantic or dismissible to those who’d never been.

  And if she hadn’t gone . . . she probably would’ve gotten tenure two years earlier, then landed a better job. She might have met a man her own age, perhaps the hyperintelligent, talky Jew she’d promised herself in college. They’d have a small, book-stuffed house in some college town, Palo Alto, say, Poughkeepsie or Middlebury.

  Assuming, of course, she’d gotten sober. Cal was right: she couldn’t have kept on at the rate she was going. After her second DUI, she knew she’d have to quit, and sooner rather than later. Her drinking had even taken on a certain elegiac tone. She might well have quit right around the same time anyway.

  And if she’d gone to Pasadena AA two years earlier, she definitely would’ve run into Cal and she would’ve revered him; everybody did back then. I am powerless over those ink blue eyes. But without her postprison abjection coinciding with the mere blip of his widowhood, the chances were they never would’ve married.

  She remembered with a pang the peanut butter sandwich she’d left on her kitchen counter and, starting her car, drove to Pie ’N Burger in Pasadena. In the overlit, too-warm coffee shop, she sat at the counter among CalTech students and lab workers, ordered what she thought of as the Lewis Fletcher Special—a cheeseburger with grilled onions and boysenberry pie à la mode. She ate all but a puddle of melted ice cream.

  29

  Several dozen brown packing boxes arrived and sat stacked in a solid square mass inside the living room.

  A good number of those boxes were labeled KITCHEN.

  I don’t like it, Cal, she said. But then, you already know that.

  It’ll be fine, Patsy, you’ll see.

  She was curious, probably not in a good way, to see how far March, unimpeded, would go.

  Unfamiliar canisters of crackers and whole meals appeared on the kitchen counters, along with a baby-food processor, a rice cooker, an expensive espresso machine. The baby’s jump seat was hung from a beam in the garden room. Patsy felt twinges—her new kitchen! her new beam!—but did not intervene.

  You’re waiting in ambush, said Gloria. You’re giving her more than enough rope to hang herself. Or martyr you.

  Maybe, said Patsy. But it means so much to Cal to have them here, I’m really in no position to deprive him.

  Sure you are, said Gloria.

  They were driving home with two other AA women from the Women’s Institution at Corona on a Thursday night after taking an AA meeting to the maximum-security unit. There, Patsy had told her amended story from the podium for the first time. She told it in order, her drinking and drugging, her prison time, the twenty years of guilt. Then, about a month ago, I got a phone call from a friend, she said, and found out what really happened.

  After everyone else on the panel spoke, the inmates could ask questions. A tall woman raised her hand and said, I’m just like you. I didn’t hurt nobody, but they put me here anyway.

  Mmmm, said Patsy.

  Another woman said, So how come you here tonight? Why you come back inside if you never have to be here in the first place?

  I’m still a drunk and an ex-con, said Patsy. That part hasn’t changed. I still have to carry the message. Which is that alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful. It can make you plead guilty even when you’re not.

  �
��

  So March is living here again, she told Audrey. With her family, and boat, and worldly possessions.

  How did that happen?

  In pieces. They were visiting, their house sold quickly, and now they’re homeless and here.

  You don’t sound happy about it.

  I’m not. But we do have all this room, and it seems selfish to refuse them. They’re dead broke, it seems. Forrest has to find a job, and he’s not the brightest bulb to begin with. Then, his résumé has a three-year hole in it.

  But that’s not your problem, Patsy. That’s their problem. You don’t have to put up with them for a minute longer if you don’t want to.

  But I’d have to stage a major battle to get them out.

  And you’d win, if that’s what you want.

  I’m not so sure I would win, said Patsy.

  Cal’s kids always mattered in ways that she—the third, childless wife—could never hope to eclipse. She’d known her status when she married him. It was the sham of her marriage, really, the don’t-look-too-close fine print of their agreement. A healthier, more self-respecting woman—Audrey, for example—would never have signed on.

  A soft transatlantic hum filled the silence.

  Oh, but nobody really wants to live with their parents, said Audrey. Just write them a great big check. They’ll leave.

  •

  On Easter Sunday, March took her brood and Cal over to Spencer’s for dinner. Patsy demurred, citing work. She was reading Women in Love, a silly, rant-filled book, although interesting about industrialization and feminism.

  She remembered Lewis saying for some reason that the movie didn’t hold up.

  He’d been short-listed for the Hallen job, with a Korean-American woman and a Mexican-American man. Which meant he didn’t stand a chance.

  Disgusted by her own lethargy, she went outside, dug up a patch of garden. The soil was black and soft and laced with thick pink worms. She filled a few wheelbarrows full of rotted manure, spread it out, turned it under, then planted peas, cabbage, and chard seeds, although nobody but she and Bob would eat from the garden. For the first time in several weeks, she picked lettuce, pounds of it, washing and packing it in individual gallon-sized plastic bags. She gathered avocados and white grapefruits in a shopping bag.