The Accident

TWO

I’d lost track of just how long, exactly, I’d been standing there, staring into Sheila’s closet. Two minutes? Five? Ten?

I hadn’t poked my head in here much in the last two weeks. I’d been avoiding it. Right after her death, of course, I’d had to do some rooting around. The funeral home needed an outfit, even though the casket was going to be closed. They’d done the best they could with Sheila. The broken glass had torn into her like buckshot. And the subsequent explosion, even though it did not fully engulf the car’s interior before the firefighters doused the vehicle, had only made the undertaker’s job more challenging. They’d sculpted and molded Sheila into something that bore a remote resemblance to how she’d looked in life.

But I kept thinking about what it would do to Kelly, to see her mother that way at the service, looking only superficially like the woman she loved. And how everyone would be prompted to say how good she looked, what an amazing job the funeral home had done, which would only serve to remind us of what they’d had to work with.

We’ll go with a closed casket, I’d said.

The director said that was what they would do, then, but they still wanted me to provide an outfit.

And so I selected a dark blue suit jacket and matching skirt, underwear, shoes. Sheila had more than a few pairs, and I picked a medium-height pair of pumps. I’d had a pair with higher heels in my hands at one point, then put them back because Sheila had always found that pair uncomfortable.

When I was building her this walk-in closet by shaving a few feet off the end of our large bedroom, she’d said to me, “And just so we’re clear, this closet will be completely mine. Yours, that tiny, pitiful, phone-booth-sized thing over there, is all you’re ever going to need, and there’ll be no encroachment into my territory whatsoever.”

“What I’m worried about,” I’d said, “is if I built you an airplane hangar you could fill it, too. Your stuff expands to the space allotted for it. Honest to God, Sheila, how many purses does one person need?”

“How many power tools does one man need that do the same job?”

“Just tell me, right now, there’ll be no spillover. That you’ll never, ever, put anything of yours in my closet, even if it is no bigger than a minibar.”

Instead of answering directly, she’d slipped her arms around me, pushed me up against the wall, and said, “You know what I think this closet is big enough for?”

“I’m not sure. If you tell me, I could get out my measuring tape and check.”

“Oh, there’s definitely something I want to measure.”

Another time.

I stood, now, looking into the closet, wondering what to do with all these things. Maybe it was too soon to think about this. These blouses and sweaters and dresses and skirts and shoes and purses and shoeboxes stuffed with letters and mementos, and all of them carrying her scent, the essence of her that she had left behind.

It made me mournful. And it made me sick.

“Goddamn you,” I said under my breath.

I could remember studying, back in my college days, something about the stages of grief. Bargaining, denial, acceptance, anger, depression, and not necessarily in that order. What I couldn’t recall now was whether these were the stages you supposedly went through upon learning you were going to die yourself, or when someone close to you had passed away. It all seemed like horseshit to me back then, and pretty much did now. But I couldn’t deny there was one overwhelming feeling I’d been having these last few days since we’d put Sheila in the ground.

Anger.

I was devastated, of course. I couldn’t believe Sheila was gone, and I was shattered without her. She’d been the love of my life, and now I’d lost her. Sure, I was in grief. When I could find a moment to myself, certain that Kelly would not walk in on me, I gave myself the luxury of falling apart. I was in shock, I felt empty, I was depressed.

But what I really was, was furious. Seething. I’d never felt this kind of anger before. Pure, undiluted rage. And there was no place for it to go.

I needed to talk to Sheila. I had a few questions I wanted to bounce off her.

What in the goddamn hell were you thinking? How could you do this to me? How could you do this to Kelly? What on earth possessed you to do something so monumentally fucking stupid? Who the hell are you, anyway? Where the hell did the smart, head-screwed-on-right girl I married go? Because she sure as hell didn’t get in that car.

The questions kept running through my head. And not just occasionally. They were there every single waking moment.

What made my wife get behind the wheel drunk out of her mind? Why would she have done something so completely out of character? What was going on in her head? What kind of demons had she been keeping from me? When she got into her car that night, totally under the influence, did she have enough sense to know what she was doing? Did she know she could get herself killed, that she could end up killing others?

Were her actions in some way deliberate? Had she wanted to die? Had she secretly been harboring some kind of death wish?

I needed to know. I ached to know. And there was no way to make that ache go away.

Maybe I should have felt sorry for Sheila. Pitied her because, for reasons I couldn’t begin to comprehend, she’d done this astonishingly stupid thing and paid the ultimate price for her bad judgment.

But I didn’t have it in me. All I felt was frustration and rage over what she’d done to those she’d left behind.

“It’s unforgivable,” I whispered to her things. “Absolutely un-”

“Dad?”

I spun around.

Kelly was standing by the bed in a pair of jeans and sneakers and a pink jacket, a backpack slung over one shoulder. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, secured with a red scrunchie thing.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Didn’t you hear me? I called you, like, a hundred times.”

“Sorry.”

She looked past me into her mother’s closet and frowned accusingly. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just standing here.”

“You’re not thinking about throwing out Mom’s things, are you?”

“I wasn’t really thinking anything. But, yeah, I’ll have to decide what to do with her clothes at some point. I mean, by the time you could wear them they’ll be out of fashion.”

“I don’t want to wear them. I want to keep them.”

“Okay, then,” I said gently.

That seemed to satisfy her. She stood there a moment and then said, “Can you take me now?”

“You’re sure you want to go?” I asked. “You’re ready for this?”

Kelly nodded. “I don’t want to sit around the house with you all the time.” She bit her lower lip, and added, “No offense.”

“I’ll get my coat.”

I went downstairs and grabbed my jacket from the hall closet. She followed me. “You got everything?”

“Yup,” Kelly said. “Pajamas?”

“Yes.”

“Toothbrush?”

“Yes.”

“Slippers?”

“Yes.”

“Hoppy?” The furry stuffed bunny she still took to bed with her.

“ Daaad. I have everything I need. When you and Mom went away, she was always reminding you what to bring. And it’s not the first time I’ve ever gone on a sleepover.”

That was true. It was just the first time she’d been away overnight since her mother had gotten herself killed in a stupid DUI accident.

It would be a good thing for her to get out, be with her friends. Hanging around me, that couldn’t be good for anyone.

I forced a smile. “Your mom would say to me, have you got this, have you got that, and I’d say, yeah, of course, you think I’m an idiot? And half the things she said, I’d forgotten, and I’d sneak back into the bedroom and get them. One time, we went away and I forgot to pack any extra underwear. How dumb, huh?”

I thought she might return the smile, but no dice. The corners of her mouth hadn’t gone up much in the last sixteen days. Sometimes, when we were snuggled up on the couch watching TV, something funny would happen, she’d start to laugh. But then she’d catch herself, as though she didn’t have the right to laugh anymore, that nothing could ever be funny again. It was as though when something made her start to feel happy, she felt ashamed.

“Got your phone?” I asked once we were in the truck. I’d bought her a cell phone since her mother’s death so she could call me anytime. It also meant I could keep tabs on her, too. I’d thought, when I got it, what an extravagance a phone was for a kid her age, but soon realized she was far from unique. This was Connecticut, after all, where by age eight some kids already had their own shrink, let alone a phone. And a cell phone wasn’t just a phone these days. Kelly had loaded it with songs, taken photos with it, even shot short stretches of video. My phone probably did some of these things, too, but mostly I used it for talking, and taking pictures at job sites.

“I have it,” she said, not looking at me.

“Just checking,” I said. “If you’re uncomfortable, if you want to come home, it doesn’t matter what time it is, you can call me. Even if it’s three in the morning, if you’re not happy with how things are going I’ll come over and-”

“I want to go to a different school,” Kelly said, looking at me hopefully.

“What?”

“I hate my school. I want to go someplace else.”

“Why?”

“Everyone there sucks.”

“I need more than that, honey.”

“Everybody’s mean.”

“What do you mean, everybody? Emily Slocum likes you. She’s having you for a sleepover.”

“Everybody else hates me.”

“Tell me, exactly, what’s happened.”

She swallowed, looked down. “They call me…”

“What, sweetheart? What do they call you?”

“Boozer. Boozer the Loser. You know, because of Mom, and the accident.”

“Your mother was not a-she was not a drunk, or a boozer.”

“Yes, she was,” Kelly said. “That’s why she’s dead. That’s how come she killed the other people. Everyone says so.”

I felt my jaw tighten. And why wouldn’t everyone be saying that? They’d seen the headlines, the six o’clock news. Three Dead in Milford Mother DUI.

“Who’s calling you this name?”

“It doesn’t matter. If I tell you, you’ll go see the principal and they’ll get called down and everyone will have to have a talk and I’d rather just go someplace else. A school where there’s nobody that Mom killed.”

The two people who’d died in the car that hit Sheila’s were Connor Wilkinson, thirty-nine, and his ten-year-old son Brandon.

As if fate hadn’t been cruel enough, Brandon had been a student at Kelly’s school.

Another Wilkinson boy, Brandon’s sixteen-year-old brother Corey, had survived. He’d been sitting in the back seat, belted in. He was looking forward through the front windshield and saw Sheila’s Subaru parked across the off-ramp just as his father screamed “Jesus!” and hit the brakes, but not in time. Corey claimed to have seen Sheila, just before the impact, asleep behind the wheel.

Connor had not bothered with his seatbelt, and half of him was on the car hood when the police got there. His body had been taken away by the time I’d arrived, as had Brandon’s. The boy had been wearing his seatbelt, but had not survived his injuries.

He’d been in sixth grade, three years ahead of Kelly.

I’d had a feeling things would be rough for her when she got back to school. I’d even gone in to talk to the principal. Brandon Wilkinson had been a popular kid, an A-plus student, a great soccer player. I was worried some students might want to take it out on Kelly, that her mother was being blamed for getting one of the school’s most-liked kids killed.

I got a call Kelly’s first day back at school. Not because of something someone had said to her, but because of something Kelly had done. One of her classmates had asked her if she got to see her mother’s body in the car before they pulled it out, whether she’d been decapitated or anything cool like that, and Kelly’d stomped on the kid’s foot. Hurt so bad the girl had to be sent home.

“Maybe Kelly’s not ready to resume school,” the principal had told me. I’d had a word with Kelly, even made her demonstrate for me what she’d done. She’d stepped around the front of this other girl, raised her knee, then driven her heel into the top of her classmate’s foot. “She had it coming,” Kelly’d said.

She promised not to do anything like that again, and returned to school the following day. When I didn’t hear of any further incidents, I’d hoped things were okay. At least as well as could be expected.

“I’m not putting up with this,” I told her now. “I’m going into that office on Monday and those little bastards who are saying these things to you are-”

“Can’t I just go to another school?”

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as we drove down Broad Street, through the center of town, past the Milford Green. “We’ll see. I’ll look into it on Monday, okay? After the weekend?”

“It’s always ‘we’ll see.’ You say you will but you won’t.”

“If I say I’m going to do it, I’ll do it. But it means you’ll be with kids who don’t live in your neighborhood.”

She gave me a look. The “duh” was unspoken.

“Okay, that’s the point, I get it. And that might seem like a good plan now, but what about in six months, or a year? You end up cutting yourself off from your own community.”

“I hate her,” Kelly said under her breath.

“Who? Is it a girl who’s been calling you names?”

“Mom,” she said. “I hate Mom.”

I swallowed hard. I’d tried hard to keep my feelings of anger to myself, but why was I surprised Kelly felt betrayed as well? “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”

“I do. She left us, and she got in that dumb accident so everybody hates me.”

I squeezed the steering wheel. If it had been wood, it would have snapped. “Your mother loved you very much.”

“Then why’d she do something so stupid and ruin my life?” Kelly asked.

“Kelly, your mother wasn’t stupid.”

“Wasn’t getting drunk and parking in the middle of the road stupid?”

I lost it.

“Enough!” I made a fist and bounced it off the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, Kelly, you think I have the answers to everything? You don’t think I’m going nuts trying to figure out why the hell your mother would do such a dumb thing? You think this is easy for me? You think I like that your mother left me to raise you on my own?”

“You just said she wasn’t stupid,” Kelly said. Her lip was quivering.

“Well, okay, what she did, that was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was as stupid a thing as anyone could do, okay? And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, because your mother would never, ever, drink and drive.” I banged the steering wheel again.

I could imagine Sheila’s reaction, if she’d heard me say that. She’d have said I knew that wasn’t exactly true.

It was years ago. We weren’t even engaged. There’d been a party. All the guys from work, their wives, girlfriends. I’d had so much to drink I could barely stand. There was no way I could drive. Sheila probably would have failed a breath test, but she was in way better shape to drive than I was.

But it wasn’t fair to count that. We were younger then. Stupider. Sheila’d never have done anything like that now.

Except she had.

I looked over at Kelly, saw her eyes welling up with tears.

“If Mom would never do that, why did it happen?” she asked.

I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. “Come here,” I said.

“My seatbelt’s on.”

“Take the damn thing off and scoot over here.”

“I’m fine here,” she said, hugging the door. The best I could do was reach over and touch her arm.

“I’m sorry,” I told my daughter. “The thing is, I just don’t know. Your mother and I spent a lot of years together. I knew her better than anyone else in the world, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world, at least until you came along, and then I loved you just as much. What I’m saying is, this doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you.” I stroked her cheek. “But please, please don’t say you hate her.” It made me feel guilty when she said it, because I believed my feelings were rubbing off on her.

I was furious with Sheila, but I didn’t want to turn her daughter against her.

“I’m just so mad at Mom,” Kelly said, looking out her window. “And it makes me feel all sick inside, to be mad, when I’m supposed to be sad.”