The Cleaner

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

She doesn’t know this is where she is driving to until she pulls up the long, twisting driveway lined with beautiful trees, which is ironic because she wanted to come here earlier and found herself driving in a different direction. She can’t park in her usual spot because the church has become a crime scene, so she parks out on the street and uses a smaller entrance to walk through.

Sally makes her way to her brother’s grave and crouches down next to it, not over it. She’s always careful about that. She has a whirlwind of scenarios racing through her head, but she can’t comprehend any of them, and the ones she can almost grasp keep floating away from her.

Joe and the second man had been inside for at least an hour. She had been relieved when Joe came out okay, and tempted to follow him, but she was more curious about who the second man was. She’d waited another half hour, but he hadn’t shown up. Most likely he lived there.

She starts brushing her hands back and forth through the grass, letting the soft textures tickle her palms. The grass is wet. She had written down the address before leaving. What she would do with that information she wasn’t sure. Probably just leave it scrawled across the notepad in her front seat for the next few weeks before balling it up and tossing it out.

Joe driving different cars. Joe with files at his house. Joe with a missing testicle. Joe secretly meeting people.

Well, okay, Joe went to somebody’s house, the same way she’s gone to other people’s houses. Gone there and had coffee, played some cards, killed some time, ate some dinner. What is so suspicious about that?

Nothing. Except Joe parked two blocks away and left in a different car. Plus the house-somehow she knows that house.

“So what do I do, Martin?”

If her brother could reach out from his grave and offer her some advice, it wouldn’t be Do nothing. It was her doing nothing that had got Martin killed five years ago. It has been her lack of responsibility, her laziness, her unawareness. She was doing nothing five years ago when she should have been doing something. She should have been doing anything to stop Martin from being hit at forty miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone. It wasn’t the school’s fault. It wasn’t even really the driver’s fault. It was her fault. She knows some people would blame God, and she suspects her parents split the blame between her and Him.

That’s why her mother flinches when she puts an arm around her. That’s why her parents didn’t try to convince her to stay at nursing school, and allowed her to give up her career to help them pay the bills.

It was difficult not to hate God. It was His fault for making Martin intellectually handicapped. It was easy to lay blame with her, though. It was her fault that Martin had run out into traffic. Her fault for forgetting how excitable he could be when she finished her studies early and got the chance to pick him up from school. She’d rung home to say she could pick Martin up. Her mother had told her not to worry, but Sally had gone ahead and worried. She loved the look on Martin’s face when he stepped out of school and saw her waiting there for him.

The rules were always simple. Her parents had told Martin a thousand times. He was never to cross the road. And she knew the rules too. She was never to park across the road and wait for him there; she either parked on his side of the road, or she walked over. Her parents reminded her time and time again, but the problem when people remind you so often is that you start to ignore it. The words go in, but they don’t settle anywhere. The other problem was she was late. Only by two minutes. How many times has she remembered the route she took to his school that day? A red light there that could have been green. A person towing a trailer ahead of her at twenty-five instead of thirty miles an hour. A pedestrian crossing with people taking their time to cross it. It all added up, and in the end it came to two minutes. It all added up the same way all the ages in the graveyard add up and divide to get an average of sixty-two. Just simple mathematics combining to end a life.

She’d pulled up outside the school two minutes later than she should have. She’d opened her car door two minutes after she should have opened it. And Martin had seen her from across the road. It all came down to mathematics, basic physics, and human dynamics. Martin getting excited. Martin running over the road to meet her while she was getting out of her car. Martin getting in the way of an object moving much faster than he was, weighing much more than he did. She’d run to him and knelt by his side. He was alive, but that had changed two days later. She’d let her brother down when he’d needed her most.

She won’t let Joe down. He needs her. He needs somebody to look out for him, to protect him from whatever madness he’s got himself involved in.