Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

All the oxygen is sucked out of me. I stare down at the coffin with the silk linings and soft pillow, and the world outside of the grave fades away and goes black. There are crumbs of dirt where my daughter should have been. The brass handles have pitted, the glossy sheen of the wood long since gone. There are cracks and dents in the wood. My first reaction is to climb down and make sure with my hands as well as my eyes that Emily isn’t in there. My second reaction is to scream. Instead I fall back to the third reaction, the one I had two years ago when I got the call about the accident. I drop to my knees and start to weep and try to convince myself this isn’t really happening.

It should be simple to know which is worse-my wife missing or my daughter-but suddenly I don’t know. Suddenly they both seem as bad as each other. I guess the worse of the two is the one that is happening. I’ve dealt with a lot over the years, but never somebody’s dead child being stolen from a graveyard. Kidnapped. I don’t even know if that’s the term for it.

I have no real idea what to do. No real direction to take. A dead child is every parent’s worst nightmare. What is it when all the nightmares come true?

I have lost Emily. Again.

Two years ago it had been on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a nothing day. People don’t make great plans for a Tuesday. They don’t get married. Don’t leave for holiday. They don’t organize housewarmings. But the fact is one in seven people dies on a Tuesday. One in seven is born. What better day to lose your family? Is there a worse day? That Tuesday should have been like the others. I kissed my daughter and my wife on the way out the door, and the next time I saw them Emily was lying on a metal slab with a sheet tucked up to her neck so I could see her face. Bridget was in a world between life and death, hooked up to machinery and surrounded by doctors.

Hours earlier they had gone out to see a movie. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Disney was entertaining my seven-year-old daughter on the big screen with animals that could talk and evade capture and do taxes and everything else clever animals can do. It was school vacation. My wife was a teacher, so it was vacation for her too. At quarter to four the movie ended and my wife walked my daughter outside along with dozens of other parents and children. They walked around the shopping complex sidewalk toward her car. It was ten to four, and already Quentin James was drunk. It was ten to four in the middle of the afternoon, and Quentin James was behind the wheel of his dark blue SUV, which he had paid a four-hundred-dollar fine to get back that morning. He had no driver’s license, but that didn’t stop him from paying the fine; it didn’t stop the courts from handing over the keys. I can only imagine how it happened-bits of imagery I added together with details from eyewitnesses. The SUV swerving through the parking lot. The SUV jumping the curb onto the sidewalk. My wife and daughter hearing it, both of them turning toward the sound. Emily’s tiny hand tight inside my wife’s grip. The look on Bridget’s face as she realized there was nothing they could do, that the SUV was going to knock them around like rag dolls.

She pushed Emily out of the way. That’s what they tell me. She did what any mother would do and tried to save her daughter. Only it wasn’t enough. The four-wheel drive slammed into them both; it knocked my wife onto the hood, it rolled my daughter beneath the wheels, and it broke them. It broke my little girl up inside beyond repair. It did the same to my wife. It did the same to me. And to my parents.

And still Quentin kept driving. He would tell me two weeks later, when I took him away to a small corner of the world, that he couldn’t even remember running into them. He told me that it wasn’t him, not really, but the man he became when the booze took over. Therefore I had the wrong man. He was sick, he said, and it was the sick Quentin who ran over and killed my daughter. The Quentin pleading for his life in front of me wasn’t the man who had killed my girl, at least according to the sober Quentin, but that didn’t matter to me. It was the bullshit plea of a weak and cowardly drunk during one of his few sober moments. He said he couldn’t remember running them over, but that didn’t matter either. I could. And so could witnesses. They told me the impact sounded dull, like heavy suitcases being dropped on the pavement from a second-story window. They told me my wife rolled across the hood of the SUV and was thrown hard onto the concrete. They told me my little girl tumbled and bounced beneath the chassis until she was spat out the end, ejected from between the wheels all twisted and bloody. They tell me my wife and daughter ended up in the same place, side by side on the street. Quentin kept on driving.

Quentin James was caught within an hour. His four-wheel drive with the grille on the front that was never once used off road in the four years he owned it was impounded. It was kept as evidence. He was charged with manslaughter and reckless driving, but he should have been charged with murder. I never figured that one out. The guy chose to drive drunk. He chose to do it every single damn day of his adult life. That means it didn’t come down to fate or bad luck, but down to a conscious choice. That and statistics. It came down to mathematics. It means it had to happen. Put a drunk guy out on the roads every day and he’s bound to kill somebody. Has to happen, the same way if you keep flipping a coin it has to come up tails at some point.

So for me, manslaughter didn’t cut it. Didn’t come close. He got released on bail and he tried to get his car back, but for the first time ever they wouldn’t let him have it. They couldn’t-because people were outraged by the accident. They were angry at the system that allowed him to keep going free. So this time the courts weren’t giving his car back, not at least until the trial was over. It was as though the judge finally figured out that giving this guy his car back was like handing Jack the Ripper a scalpel, that in this case it couldn’t all be about revenue gathering. This time James would do time. That was for sure. They’d lock him away for two years in a cell that was a hell of a lot bigger than the coffin my daughter got locked in.

But everything worked out different. Quentin James never went to jail. My daughter is no longer in her resting place. The world has gone topsy-turvy and I don’t know what to do. I’m kneeling in the grass next to a mound of dirt and an empty coffin. Sidney Alderman has come along and dug up her grave in the same way his son dug up others. He has dug up and torn the stitches from the memories, and the pain of losing my daughter is as strong as it was the day Quentin James stole her from me. James is no longer around to direct my anger toward, but Alderman is, and I’m going to find the son of a bitch.

I stand up. I turn my back on the grave of my little girl. The sky has cleared even more and it looks like it could actually turn into a pretty good day. As good as it can get, weather wise. As bad as it can get in every other way. I start my car and drive to Alderman’s house. I’m tempted to drive right into it, just hit the sucker at a hundred kilometers an hour and shred the siding and plasterboard to pieces. Instead I bring the car to a fast stop up his driveway, skidding the shingle out in all directions and creating a thin cloud of dirt that drifts past the front of the car and toward the house. I get out and slam the door, wishing I had access to the gun the caretaker’s son used on himself. All I have access to is my anger-it should be enough. I think in the end anger will beat out sorrow on any given day. Even on a Tuesday.