Long Drive Home (18 page)

We got the lawyers involved. I admit, I was as much to blame as she was. I knew I didn’t have a chance, knew I’d lost her and our marriage and that it was my own doing, but I fought her for Sara all the way. It wasn’t so different from hurling myself at Derek, only this time I had plenty of opportunities to reconsider, plenty of chances to pull back
before the day came that Sara was standing in front of the mediator, being asked whom she’d rather live with, refusing to give him any answer except “Both of them.”

_______

Once the papers were signed and it was official, I was afraid she’d make things hard on me, but here it is, almost a year later, and your mom has been true to her word. She has never tried to keep us apart. If anything, she’s gone out of her way to make sure we have time together.

Not that you initially wanted much time with either of us. Remember? It was months before you stopped threatening to teach us a lesson and run away from home. You also said we should stop apologizing, because if we were really, truly sorry for what we’d done, we wouldn’t have done it, or we’d undo it.

You had a point. Nothing we’d done, after all, was inevitable. I’d made mistakes, she’d made mistakes, and we’d ended up in a place I don’t think either of us ever envisioned. It seemed like we should have been able to say, “Oops, we got carried away, let’s start over,” but of course it doesn’t work that way.

I
am
really, truly sorry, though, and I’ll probably still be apologizing when you read this ten years from now.

_______

A couple of weeks after the statute of limitations expired, I overheard Sara in the school yard explaining to a
friend that the reason her parents split up wasn’t that they didn’t love each other, it was because of a car crash. I stood and stared, too stunned to move. In the two years since the accident, I’d never heard her say such a thing. Certainly she hadn’t gotten it from me or Liz. We’d explained the divorce simply by saying we couldn’t get along anymore—something that sometimes happened to grown-ups, we’d said, even ones who still cared about each other. No, Sara had come up with this on her own. Now she noticed me watching and quickly turned away, instructing her friend not to tell anyone.

“It’s a secret.”

On the drive home, she said she didn’t want to talk about it, she hadn’t been talking to me, I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would you think the accident had anything to do with the divorce?”

I didn’t think she was going to answer, and for a good ten minutes, she didn’t, just sat in silence, staring out the window. A few blocks from the apartment, though, she suddenly said she didn’t know why, that’s just how she remembered it.

“You and Mom got along fine until the accident, and then you started fighting.”

“About what, exactly?”

“About whether it was your fault.”

We were stopped at a light on Scotland Road. Composing myself, I turned until I felt the twinge in my ribs that has never gone away. “I don’t remember us fighting about that,” I said, “but you’re right about the timing. That’s when we started having trouble getting along.” I turned back to the road so she couldn’t see my face. “Do
you
think it was my fault?”

She drummed her feet against the back of the passenger seat. The light changed. We turned onto West Montrose, then Vose. “Not if you didn’t mean to,” she said, finally. “You didn’t mean to scare him.”

My knuckles went white on the steering wheel. So there it was. She’d known all along, or at least suspected. Of course I’d meant to scare him. If she hadn’t seen it in my eyes as I cut the wheel that day, watching me in the rearview mirror as she was watching me now, then it was only a matter of time before the full truth dawned on her.

“But you always said it was his fault,” I reminded her. “You never said anything about me.”

She resumed kicking the seat. “I know. I thought you’d be upset.”

I called Liz and asked her to meet me for lunch in Millburn. She would have preferred someplace closer to home, but ever since the night with Rizzo, I’d avoided South Orange’s
shops and restaurants. We got the last sidewalk table at a little Mexican place on the main drag, its entrance decorated with skulls and orange marigolds for the Day of the Dead. After we ordered and made plans to meet for Sara’s parent-teacher conference, I told her what Sara had said to her friend on the playground and what she’d said to me. Liz was as surprised as I’d been.

“Thank God we never let her talk to Rizzo,” she said.

Trails of red leaves swirled in the traffic, catching sunlight as they sifted onto the sidewalk. It was the sort of glorious autumn day that will always remind me of the accident. But I told Liz it was time—more than time—to be putting the accident behind us. It had been two years. We should have been getting on with our lives. “What would you think about moving?” I said. After all, we’d come to New Jersey for a job she no longer had. Why stay in that house, on that street, with all those memories? We were both self-employed; we could go anywhere we wanted. “You pick a place. I’ll follow you.”

She pointed out that she couldn’t go just anywhere because most of her clients were in the city. “Besides, I don’t want Sara having to switch schools.”

“Then how about just to another town?” I said. “Someplace closer to Montclair. No more fifty-minute trips.” I started ticking off places that fit the bill—Bloomfield, Nutley, Verona, Montclair itself, if we could find something affordable—until she interrupted to say okay, it was a possibility, she’d think about it. She said she’d start by bringing
it up with Kim, whom Sara had continued to see after the divorce. Then she asked if I’d called about the autopsy lately. The medical examiner had never publicly released the report, so we could only assume the case was still open, technically at least. I’d resigned myself to this, knowing there was no statute of limitations for a criminal charge involving a death. And knowing that even if he wasn’t actually working the case anymore, Rizzo would have wanted that hanging over my head.

“No,” I said. “I’m done calling.”

_______

Which brings me to why I started this letter in the first place. Call it stress or remorse or whatever you like, but after our conversation in the car, I knew I had to tell you the truth, that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t. I hated the thought of you carrying around suspicions, wondering about me every time you looked over at Clarice’s yard or saw me behind the wheel of a car.

At least that’s how I felt in the beginning. Now that I’ve gotten it all out, though, I admit, I’m having second thoughts. Why tell you things that are only going to hurt us both? Why assume you’ll eventually figure it out? Why not wait and see?

Maybe Rizzo was right. Maybe I am broken. Because if I felt as bad about the accident as I’ve always said I do, wouldn’t I have confessed and faced whatever the consequences might be?

I originally wanted to tell you all of this in person, at whatever point in time I thought you were ready for it, but it occurred to me that I should write it down too, in case I’m not around when that time comes. My plan was to provide a copy to Linda Schwartz and make arrangements for you to get it when you turned eighteen. I figured this would also keep me from changing my mind. Already I’m anxious thinking about that day. You’ll be the same age Juwan was when he died. I’ve tried to picture you then, whether your hair will have gotten darker and straighter like your mom’s. Whether you’ll have that skeptical look of hers that I’ve seen so much of. Whether you’ll still call me Daddy.

I promised myself I wouldn’t turn sentimental here at the end and go on about how much I love you. I wanted to close with something useful. A lesson you could apply to your own life. The problem is, I’m not sure what that might be. That it’s a good idea to tell the truth? That actually it doesn’t matter if you do? That sometimes your mistakes catch up with you and sometimes they don’t? Or that they always do, though not necessarily in the ways you might expect?

Just this afternoon, as I was helping you with your homework, you started going through my wallet and pulled out the photo of Juwan that Rizzo gave me. Not long after I got beat up, I stopped by Tawana’s, meaning to put the picture in the mailbox, but the house was empty, with a sold sign out front. To just leave it there seemed wrong.

What’s this? you said, pointing to a stain on the photo. Blood, I said. His? you said. No, I said, mine. From when you fell down the stairs? you said. I nodded. You made a face, then took your
own school photo from the wallet and laid them side by side. You asked why I had a picture of Juwan—which was a good question. It’s not like I was stuck with it. I could have left it at the memorial. I could have thrown it out. Instead, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, I’d chosen not only to keep it but to carry it with me. I figured I was doing it out of guilt and a sense of obligation. The truth didn’t hit me until that moment, though, looking into your blue eyes.

To remind me to be careful, I said.

Having a book published—having the opportunity to be read—is an enormously humbling experience. I’m very glad for the chance to thank the people who made this one possible.

This book benefited greatly from the expertise and generous help of Arnold Anderson, S. Scott Haynes, Dr. William Vincent Burke, and Delvan Roehling. Thank you all for going above and beyond the call (and a belated thanks, Scott and Vince, for your invaluable help on the last book too).

On the publishing side, a huge thanks to Julie Barer, who I can always count on—working with you is a pleasure and a privilege—and to the good people at Free Press, most notably Wylie O’Sullivan, Martha Levin, Dominick Anfuso, Jill Siegel, Sydney Tanigawa, Sharbari Kamat, and Meghan Healey. Your collective faith and patience made all the difference.

I will always be deeply indebted to the faculty of the MFA program at Ohio State, especially Lee K. Abbott, Michelle Herman, and Erin McGraw; to the graduate creative writing students at Ohio State, circa 1992–1996 (you know who you are); to Mary Grimm at Case Western; to Dick
and Lois Rosenthal; to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers; and to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, most recently for the friendship and fellowship (thanks, fellows) I enjoyed there in 2008.

Special thanks also to Jen Barrett, for your good eye and good humor.

On the home front, for your immeasurable support, thanks to Beth Cain, Richard and Joanne Way, Jennifer Way, and of course Jeff Weiser.

Last and best, I am most grateful to Deborah—always the reader I write for—without whose tireless editorial care and wisdom this book simply wouldn’t be; and to Hazel—for listening, and for bringing such joy to my life. I love you both so.

A Novel

Will Allison

“Remarkable. … One of the year’s best fiction debuts.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“In spare, transparent prose, Allison captures the truth and irony of being part of a family, no matter how broken it is.”

—
The Washington Post

“Allison gets at a mother’s raw nerve, a father’s desperate evasions, the daredevil rage of an abandoned daughter, and the anxiety of a husband curbing his own destructive impulses as he gauges the risks of love.”

—
O, The Oprah Magazine

I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, a month or so until my mother recovered from her water-skiing accident, but after one week, on the first day she was able to get out of her hospital bed and walk, a blood clot traveled up from her leg, blocked the vessels to her lungs, and killed her. My father had been the one driving the boat, the one who steered too close to the dock. Three days after the funeral, he walked out of the insurance agency where he worked and wasn’t heard from again.

Though my grandfather, Cal, spent months trying to track him down, it was no use, and that’s how, at the age of five, I came to be spending my nights in the bed my mother had slept in as a child. Cal made a gift to me of my mother’s arrowhead collection, which he’d helped her assemble when she was little. He also decided to repaint her bedroom for me and said I could pick the color. He was trying to be nice, but I wasn’t ready for nice. At Taylor Hardware, I chose Day-Glo orange, held the sample card up for my grandfather’s approval, and then proceeded to pick out three more hideous shades of orange—one for each wall—daring him to say no. Instead of stopping me, instead of telling me one color would do, he’d simply nodded. “Anything you want, sugar plum,” he said. Naturally, I threw a tantrum. What I wanted was my mom and dad, not stupid paint for a stupid
room in a stupid old farmhouse. I’m sure everyone in the store thought I had it coming, but rather than drag me out to the parking lot for a spanking, as he’d surely have done with my mother, Cal just picked me up and held on as I kicked.