by Nicolai Houm
When the police asked Myers if he was a habitual cocaine user, he said he wasn’t, but I had to do it now because we’ve got to be clean by June. At this point, the prosecution explained that the National Football League carried out regular anti-doping checks to reveal usage of performance-enhancing drugs, but tested for intoxicants only once a year.
Scott Myers could not recall the reason why he, at around eight in the morning, went down to start up his white four-door Dodge Ram 2500 and drove off on East Washington Avenue. Four blocks east of the Wisconsin State Capitol, a truck driver called 911 after having spotted Myers’s pickup racing along at high speed with two wheels on the planted median strip. An incident of dangerous driving had been recorded by the emergency services but had not been followed up with an immediate intervention.
Grounds for compensation, Jane’s lawyer had whispered at that point.
Myers carried on westwards. At the intersection of Washington Street and Regent Street, he drove through the red light and hit a dark-grey saloon car belonging to Gregory Ashland, the driver, who was killed instantly. The shift-working assistant at a gas station on the opposite side of the railway tracks crossing Washington Avenue heard a noise she at first understood to be a loud explosion. She had assumed a train might be involved. She took the first aid kit that had been lying unused under the counter for years and ran outside to find the scene of the incident. She passed by the smashed sedan car because, as she told the sheriff’s officer, she couldn’t bear the thought of what might be inside and went to the white Dodge, which had been less damaged. She saw that the driver’s cab was empty and returned to the first wrecked car, where she discovered eleven-year-old Julie Ashland in the back seat, squashed and immobilized.
Later, Jane couldn’t remember the return journey from the seminar in Chicago.
A bewildered man had been blocking the entrance under the neon sign of the Emergency Department. As Jane squeezed past him, he had exclaimed God is with you, and the smell of his yellow teeth would come back to her for days afterwards. Several people in the reception area kept saying her name and talking to her as she sped through the hospital corridors like a corpuscle rushing through the bloodstream.
They had taped a pink, transparent tube to Julie’s forehead and strips of the same tape, spotted with yellow pus, went across the ridge of her nose and down her cheek, where they met and crossed more strips holding the respirator tube in place to the left of her front teeth, which gleamed faintly in the narrow crack between her lips.
No. Please.
Jane noticed that someone was holding her arm in a gentle, painful grip just above her elbow. She didn’t want the supportive hand because it confirmed that all this was true, that it really was Julie lying there, her lustrous, violet eyelids closed and her hair looking oddly dull, glued to her head on one side and fanned out over the pillow on the other. Julie’s eyebrows and her pale lips still formed perfect arcs whose symmetry was emphasized by the criss-crossing tape stuck all over her face by people Jane had never met.
A blanket had been pulled right up to Julie’s chin. Beneath the dark folds, Jane sensed the presence of something she was not meant to see, something broken, aching, packaged in a still wet cast. Julie’s right hand lay on top of the cover. The fingers were lined up along the edge of the bed and the palm turned upwards. An IV tube went up her arm to somewhere. At the edge of Jane’s field of vision, pale beings still hovered, apparently understanding what went on in Jane’s mind and wordlessly telling her what to do: Hold her hand. Jane did. She had felt its surprising weight before when she had held her sleeping daughter’s hand and, with a terrible chill spreading between her shoulder blades, imagined precisely a moment such as this.
She hadn’t been there when it happened. Facing fear alone had been Julie’s last experience. If she had been conscious after the accident, she might have called out to Greg but received no answer. Jane leant close to Julie’s ear on the side that wasn’t covered in tape. Tears stuck to her cheek and hairline, and when she tried to wipe them off with the back of her hand, Julie’s head fell sideways a little.
No, it’s impossible to tell if Julie can sense anything, but it is good that you speak to her. After all, you never know… though, to be completely honest… but of course that is always the way when something has happened to your own child, anyone you are fond of, really, you shouldn’t wait to say…
So Jane tensed whatever muscles would obey commands and tried to whisper that she was so sorry for all the times when she had been too strict, or hadn’t listened or had disappointed Julie, for she must know that she was always in Jane’s mind, never out of her thoughts regardless of what she was doing, and that Jane couldn’t imagine a life without her, and then bad conscience struck her because Julie shouldn’t leave this world being worried about anything. Once more, she put her cheek against Julie’s and hugged her, noticing how different the girl felt, and all the time, her mind swung between feeling that she was observing someone else’s unfolding story and an infernally lucid perception of her own skull, enclosing her brain in a noisy, blood-red space.
Julie’s body shook momentarily and the small spasm travelled up through Jane’s arm.
‘Julie?’ Jane pressed the girl’s hand hard, rocked it gently.
‘Is this because she can hear me?’
‘Sure… it could be.’
This was a lie, Jane realized.
She examined Julie’s hand. The nails on the thumb and index finger were red, but the other three nails so pale that the white arcs at the torn cuticles were almost invisible.
The same thought recurred roughly every ten seconds: it ought to be possible to wind back time, to remake the end of the story because the definitive moment was just a moment and surely should be much easier to reverse than a long chain of cause and effect. This childish notion emerged and was rejected. Over and over again.
Without turning round, Jane asked if anyone had any nail varnish. No one answered.
From some distant place, she heard her own voice.
‘In my bag, maybe in the waiting room… I don’t know.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll find it.’
Six months later, she woke in the dark. She didn’t know if it was early in the morning or late at night. There was a smile on her face when she woke, a fool’s smile that lasted for the few seconds it took her to realize what was what. Then she had to start her breathing practice. These are my toes, I can curl them. Breathe out. Breathe in. These are my legs, they’re tensing now. Upwards next, muscle by muscle.
She connected the charger to her mobile phone and waited until it showed the time of day. Four missed calls, one from her father and three from an unknown number. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she tried to remember how it used to feel before when you had had three unknown missed calls. Then her phone rang. The display showed the same number.
The man at the other end introduced himself as the prison chaplain at the Jackson Correctional Institute.
‘I have tried to reach you at the university because I knew you had been working there. But you’re not there any more, is that right? But the lady who took my call, she might be called Ellen? She told me that you were going away – or?’
The prison chaplain seemed to speak in questions and sounded like a seventeen-year-old. He said that Scott Myers had tried to commit suicide twice. Jane couldn’t cope with holding the phone to her ear just then. The small, boxed-in voice continued to speak into the mattress. A gap between the curtains let in a shaft of blue light that swept the room and read it like the beam of a scanner: naked thighs spreading on top of a crumpled sheet, steely reflections from cutlery on top of a pile of plates, bundles of clothes, scrunched-up papers like trembling small animals taken by surprise.
She shifted position, picked up the phone and carried on listening to the voice. The chaplain had another question on his mind.
‘Perhaps this is too much to ask? I’m not even putting the request as a preliminary que
stion. I simply pass it on.’
Jane longed for a feeling she could do something with.
‘He is very anxious to talk to you. Naturally, I will be present.’
Her voice grew out of the darkness. ‘I’ll do it if I can see him alone.’
‘No problem at all, this isn’t a high-security institution.’
The following Tuesday, Jane parked by the side of the road near a tall blue-painted water tower a little way from the prison, and waited there while the shadow of the tower moved across the car and into the edge of the forest.
The visiting area was a café run by the prison inmates. Jane’s cup of coffee was presumably charged to Scott Myers’s account. Myers ordered nothing for himself. Jane sat opposite him at a picnic table outside the café. Between them on the table lay a key on a loop of white string. Myers had grown paler but also bigger. As if he had been to a training camp, Jane suggested. That extra weight must be an advantage on the field.
‘I got sixteen years, Mrs Ashland. I will be forty-one when they let me out.’
One year older than Jane was at the time.
‘They tell me you’ve been trying to hang yourself.’
He nodded slowly.
‘Is it the slip knot you can’t get right?’
Myers searched her face and eyes for a sign of humour. Jane knew he would find nothing. Other people served as mirrors and, in their blank faces, she saw reflections of her own baffling lack of expression. There was something wrong about the fit between what she said and what she looked like, a disconnect that upset people profoundly. Deep down, they felt impelled to exclude her from the flock. Jane knew she was close to losing her already tenuous grasp of how to be human.
‘It wouldn’t have been so difficult at home in the garage but they take everything away from you here,’ Myers said.
At a neighbouring table, a Latin American family nearly filled the quota of six visitors. Two teenage daughters picked unenthusiastically at a casserole dish and responded in single syllables when their mother urged them to join in the conversation. A little boy had climbed up onto the lap of the prisoner and was hitting his chest with his fists. The sky above was wide open, contradicting the idea that one place should be shut off from another.
Jane put the coffee cup down and fixed her eyes on the clay-like dregs.
‘Where do I come into this?’
‘I wondered if you could forgive me, Mrs Ashland.’
‘Ms.’
‘What?’
‘Ms Ashland. I am a widow. Besides, it is usually regarded as sexist to define a woman by her marital status.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ Myers held out his hands.
He had no idea what she was on about.
‘So, you believe it would be helpful if I forgave you?’
Myers raised his large hands to his face and kneaded his cheeks and his greasy forehead.
‘It might make some things easier for me,’ he said.
He was large and sheepish. Jane thought he was a beast harbouring all kinds of lusts, imagined him grunting on the football field and making coarse comments about the cheer-leaders. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wanted to think he had violated Julie.
He placed his large hands on the table and pushed the key around in little circles.
‘I see. You feel that it’s my job to make things easier for you?’
‘No, Miss Ashland.’
Myers kept looking over his shoulder. There was nothing to see except a soda machine against a cement wall. She registered suddenly that he was trembling inside his green overall.
‘I can’t feel free, if you see what I mean, not free for real, but free inside my head. It’s not about being locked up here. But I’m scared all the time that I’ll go crazy.’
‘Join the club.’ Said in a low snarl.
‘I didn’t mean it like that, Miss Ashland.’
‘Ms!’ A noise like a snake. ‘The s is sounded. It’s not the same as Miss.’
‘Yeah, sorry.’
Myers turned his head towards the drinks machine again.
‘What’s up?’ Jane asked.
He quickly turned back to face her.
‘Why do you keep looking over there?’
‘I don’t know, Ms Ashland.’ He started to fiddle with the key again. ‘But I think it would be easier to feel remorse properly and really take my punishment if I don’t go sick in the head. If I managed to think the right things. You see, she’s there all the time. With me.’
‘Who is?’
‘Your daughter.’
The Latino family was being told off; Jane heard the guard go on about hands being visible. When the guard turned his back to them, one of the teenage girls did something that made the whole family laugh quietly until the little boy burst out laughing too.
‘What about Greg? My husband? Do you keep thinking about him?’
‘I don’t know, Ms Ashland. No, I don’t. Not as much, anyway. Sorry. I am sorry about that. You see, it’s like I see her all the time. She’s lying there.’
‘Julie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have a problem with saying her name?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t said it ever before. I feel bad about that, Ms Ashland.’
‘Can you stop saying Ms Ashland in every fucking sentence?’
‘Yes.’ Tears were beginning to well up in his eyes.
‘Don’t cry!’ Jane said. She got up and stood with her hands on the table. The guard slowly looked their way.
‘Sorry, Ms Ashland.’ Myers swallowed and clenched his jaw muscles and then looked the other way when he could no longer hold it back. Small sobs kept escaping.
‘Stop it!’ Jane hissed.
Shameful memories made her turn away. She remembered the times she had treated Julie like this and then forbidden her to cry. Like the mid-morning playground session in Olin Park, when Julie had fallen from the climbing frame but Jane hadn’t seen it happen and thought the crying was just attention-seeking.
Oh god, these burning cheeks. How they triggered pangs of anger. She wanted to make him lick the ground. He was as stupid and innocent as a bull calf. She could make him do anything. And it struck Jane that the evil in her mind now exceeded whatever had been in his at the moment when he killed Julie.
‘So, if I forgive you, you won’t hang yourself?’
Myers slumped in the seat, his reddened face sagging between his massive shoulders. As he began to speak to her his eyes rolled upwards, but when his gaze surfaced it cracked and dissolved into thin air. It was similar to his courtroom behaviour but not quite the same.
‘There are these things inside my head that I don’t get… but I’m not really crazy. They say it’s because I can’t sleep. Like soldiers, they’ve found it out in research. But if you said you didn’t hate me then I could remember that every time I think about…’
‘Julie?’
‘Yes. Like, instead of. Because I think about her almost all the time. That’s why I’m training hard.’
Jane was approaching a boundary. She hadn’t uttered so many consecutive words for a long time. The visiting time must be almost over. She was going to check the time on her watch, but it was of course in a locker at the security gate, together with her wallet.
‘Can you say it, Ms Ashland?’
It came out at once: ‘I forgive you.’
Myers was picking at the key again.
‘What’s the matter?’ Jane asked.
‘It didn’t sound as if you meant it.’
‘I don’t mean anything I say, Scott.’
She had addressed him by his name. Why had she used his name?
‘I open my mouth and sounds come out. Mostly, I try to say the things people want to hear. I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’
Myers was twisting uneasily in his seat. Then he rubbed his face again.
‘You want me to say whatever will make your head work properly. There’s a system built into
your mind that makes you want to stay alive. The system asks me to help you. Perhaps I can. But how much is the built-in system worth? What are you worth?’
He looked at her with the eyes of an animal one is about to kill.
‘Please, Ms Ashland, there are so many hours in here.’
‘There are just as many outside.’
Jane rose. As she started walking around the table, he also got up and came towards her. The guard’s hand went up to something in his belt. And then Scott Myers put his arms round her and hugged her tight. A large, soft little kid.
Jane heard the guard say: ‘Five seconds, Myers.’
She noticed that he nodded over her shoulder, and sensed his breath and the smell of his body, stale and boyish, and automatically began to stroke his back as you would with somebody else’s child, a little one who had fallen over and hurt himself in the playground when the parents were not around and you would comfort the child because that is what you have to do, which makes you realize that without feeling anything, it is possible to imitate how it used to be done.
THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON OUTSIDE. It sounds like a heavy object being pulled through the heather. She unravels her arms from the sleeping bag, like a brittle insect. Next, the legs. Now she is on all fours, gathering strength in the glowing light that filters into the tent. Once the zip is down, she sees the moon shining. Only torn-off rags of the fog hang on to the slope, the rest is gone.
She crawls outside and attempts to get upright. She stands, with flashing in her eyes, rocks from side to side, draws the cold air into her lungs. The mountains are there again. A faint, red sheen glows at the far horizon but the cold has stretched the sky until it turned white, leaving only small moth holes that let out the ancient light of eternity.
Now that the air has cleared, she discovers that the tent has been erected on a raised bit of ground next to a marked path. In the moonlight, the cairns show up like lit lamps. Below, she sees the wide vein of silver that is the main road. Two cars move smoothly in the valley with a discreet shushing sound that she can, more or less, distinguish from the blood rushing through her ears. She sees the railway line. The electricity poles along it look like scorched tree trunks after a forest fire. Ulf had taken for granted that she would find her way back. In more ways than one, they were back to where they started.