The Accident (12 page)

Marcus still did some consulting here and there for importers who valued his expertise and connections. He dined out a night or two a week with these people, and liked to brag about how the business world just wouldn’t let him rest. Sheila and I had, privately, observed that he could be a bit of a blowhard, an asshole, frankly. But Fiona appeared to love him, and seemed happier with him in her life than she had been before he showed up.

They visited a lot so Fiona could see her grandchild. I could find plenty of reasons to dislike Fiona, but there was no question that she did adore Kelly. She took her shopping, to the movies, to Manhattan to visit museums and attend Broadway shows. Fiona even endured the occasional trip to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square.

“Where was this woman when I was a kid?” Sheila had asked me more than once.

Fiona and I maintained a kind of truce through these years. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t care much for her, but we remained civil. There was no out-in-the-open warfare.

That pretty much ended with Sheila’s accident.

After that, there was no holding back. Fiona blamed me. If I knew Sheila had a drinking problem, why hadn’t I done something about it? Why hadn’t I spoken to Fiona about it? Why hadn’t I forced Sheila into a program? What was I thinking, letting her drive around half the state of Connecticut, when she might very well have been under the influence?

And how often had she been drunk like that with Kelly—their granddaughter, for Christ’s sake—in the car?

“How could you not have known?” Fiona asked me at the funeral. “How the hell could you not have seen the signs?”

“There were no signs,” I told her, dazed and unhappy. “Not really.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’d say if I were you, too,” she shot back at me. “That’s what you have to believe, isn’t it? Gets you off the hook. But believe me, Glen, there had to have been signs. You just had your head too far up your ass to notice.”

“Fiona,” Marcus said, trying to pull her away.

But she wouldn’t stop. “You think she just decided one night, Hey, I think I’ll become an alcoholic and get plastered and fall asleep at the wheel in the middle of an off-ramp? You think someone just does that all of a sudden?”

“I suppose
you
saw something,” I said, stung by her fury. “
You
never miss a trick.”

She blinked. “How was
I
supposed to see anything? I didn’t
live
with her. I wasn’t there with her seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. But you were. You’re the one who was in a position to see something, and in a position to do something about it when you did. You let us down. You let Kelly down. But most of all, you let Sheila down.”

People were staring at us. If it had been Marcus saying these things, I would have decked him. But that wasn’t an option with Fiona. But maybe the reason I so badly wanted to do it was because I knew she was right.

If Sheila’d had a drinking problem, surely I’d have seen
something
. How could I not have known? Had there been signs? Had there been warnings I’d chosen to ignore? Was it because I didn’t want to face the fact that Sheila was going through some kind of difficulties? Sure, Sheila liked a drink, like everyone else did. On special occasions. Lunch with her friends. Family get-togethers. We’d been known to kill off a couple of bottles of wine at home when Kelly was staying over with Fiona and Marcus in Darien. I even caught her one time when her foot slipped on the carpet as we headed upstairs on one such occasion.

But those couldn’t have been signs of something more serious. Or was I just kidding myself? Did I not want to see the truth?

Fiona was right: A woman didn’t just decide one night to get blind drunk and set off in her Subaru.

Three nights after Sheila’s death, I quietly tore the house apart after Kelly had gone to bed. If Sheila had been a closet drinker, she’d have been hiding liquor somewhere. If not in the house, then the garage, or the shed out back where we kept the lawnmower and rusted, old garden chairs.

I searched everywhere and came up with nothing.

So then I talked to her friends. Everyone who knew her. To Belinda, for starters.

“Okay, once, at lunch,” Belinda recalled, “Sheila had one and a half Cosmos and she got a little tipsy. And another time—George just about had a fit when he found us, he’s such a tight-ass—we smoked up. I had a couple of joints and we kind of mellowed out one evening when we were having a girls-only night. It was just a bit of fun. But she never really lost it, and any time she’d anything more than one drink she insisted on calling herself a cab. She had good sense. She was a smart girl. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, what happened, but I guess we never know what someone else is going through, do we?”

Sally Diehl, from the office, had a hard time making sense of it, too. “But I had this cousin once—well, I still do—and she had a coke habit like you wouldn’t believe, Glen, but what was really unbelievable was how well she’d kept it hidden for so long, until one day, the cops came into her house and busted her. No one had any idea. Sometimes—and I’m not saying this was the case with Sheila—but sometimes, like, you just don’t know anything about people that you see every day.”

So it seemed there were two possibilities. Either Sheila had a drinking problem and was extremely good at hiding it, or Sheila had a drinking problem and I wasn’t good at picking up the signals.

I supposed there was a third possibility. Sheila did not have a drinking problem, and did not get behind the wheel drunk. For that possibility to be true, all the toxicology reports had to be wrong.

There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest they were.

In the days after Sheila’s death, as I struggled to make sense of something that made no sense at all, I tracked down students from the course she’d been taking. Turned out she never even went to class that evening, although she had shown up for all the other sessions. Her teacher, Allan Butterfield, said Sheila was the top student in the all-adult class.

“She had a real reason to be there,” he told me over a beer at a road-house down the street from the school. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing this for my family, for my husband and my daughter, to make our business stronger.’ ”

“When did she say that to you?” I’d asked.

He thought a moment. “A month ago?” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Right here. Over a couple of beers.”

“Sheila had a couple of beers here with you?” I asked.

“Well, I had a couple, maybe even three.” Allan’s face was flushed. “But Sheila, actually, I think she was having one. Just a glass.”

“You did this often with Sheila? Have a beer after class?”

“No, just the once,” he said. “She always wanted to get home in time to give her daughter a kiss good night.”

The way the police figured it, Sheila had skipped her class that night to drink away her evening somewhere. They never found out where she’d gone to do it. A check of area bars didn’t turn up any sightings of her, and no area liquor stores remembered selling her any booze that night. All of which meant, of course, nothing.

She could have sat in the car for hours drinking stuff she’d bought at another time, in another town.

I asked the police several times if there was any chance there’d been a mistake, and each time they told me toxicology reports didn’t lie. They provided copies. Sheila had a blood-alcohol level of 0.22. For a woman of Sheila’s size—about 140 pounds—that worked out to about eight drinks.

“I don’t just blame you for not picking up the signals,” Fiona fumed, at the funeral when Kelly was out of earshot. “I blame you for making her turn to drink. You swept her off her feet, no doubt about it, with your common touch, but over the years she was never able to stop thinking about the life she could have had. A better life, a richer life, the kind you’d never be able to give her. And it wore her down.”

“She told you this?” I said.

“She didn’t have to,” she snapped. “I just knew.”

“Fiona, honestly,” Marcus said, in a rare moment that made me quite like the guy. “Dial it down.”

“He needs to hear this, Marcus. And I may not have it in me to tell him later.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“If you’d given her the kind of life she deserved, she’d never have had to drown her sorrows,” she said.

“I’m taking Kelly home,” I said. “Goodbye, Fiona.”

But like I said, she loved her granddaughter.

And Kelly loved her in return. And Marcus, too, to a degree. They doted on her. For Kelly’s sake, I tried to put aside my animosity toward Fiona. I was still reeling from the news that—evidently—Ann Slocum was dead, when I heard a car pull in to the driveway. I eased back the curtain and saw Marcus behind the wheel of his Cadillac. Fiona sat next to him.

“Shit,” I said. Before Sheila died, Kelly would stay at their town house one weekend out of six. If I’d been informed that this was one of those weekends, I’d certainly forgotten. I was confused. Neither Kelly nor I had seen Fiona or Marcus since the funeral. I had spoken to Fiona a few times on the phone, but only until Kelly had picked up the extension. Each time, Fiona made it clear she could barely be civil to me. Her contempt for me was like a buzz over the phone line.

I bounded up the stairs and poked my head into Kelly’s room. She was still asleep.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said.

She rolled over in bed and opened one eye, then the other. “What is it?”

“Grandmother alert. Fiona and Marcus are here.”

She sat bolt upright in bed. “They
are?
”

“Did you know they were coming today?”

“Uhhh …”

“Because I sure didn’t know. You better get moving, kiddo.”

“I kind of forgot all about it.”

“Did you know?”

“I might, sort of.”

I gave her a look.

“I might have been talking to Grandma on Skype,” she confessed. “And I might have said it would be okay to come out and see me, but I didn’t say an actual day. I don’t think.”

“Like I said, you better get moving.”

Kelly slithered out from under the covers just as the doorbell rang. I left her to get herself dressed and went down to answer the door.

Fiona was up front, ramrod stiff and stone-faced. Marcus hovered just behind her, looking uncomfortable.

“Glen,” she said. Her voice could cut ice.

“Hey, Glen,” Marcus attempted. “How’s it going?”

“This is a surprise,” I said.

“We came to see Kelly,” Fiona said. “To see how she’s doing.” Her tone implied she doubted my daughter was doing well.

“Was this one of those weekends?”

“Do I need it to be one of ‘those weekends’ to see my granddaughter?”

“We might not have been home. And I’d hate for you to come for nothing.” This sounded reasonable to me, but Fiona flushed.

Marcus cleared his throat. “We thought we’d chance it.”

I stepped back to give them room to come inside. “You’ve been talking to Kelly over the Internet?” I asked Fiona.

“We’ve had some chats,” Fiona said. “I’m very worried about her. I can just imagine what she’s going through. When Sheila lost her father, she was older than Kelly, but she still took it so very hard.”

“The thruway was a son of a bitch,” Marcus said, still trying to cut through the tension. “Seems like they’re ripping up the roads all over the place.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They do that.”

“Look,” he said, “I told Fiona, you know, maybe this isn’t such a great idea, just showing up without calling or—”

“Marcus, do not apologize for me. There’s something I want to discuss with you, Glen,” Fiona said, in a tone MacArthur might have used when he got the Japanese to surrender.

“What’s that?”

“Kelly was telling me, during our Skype chat, that things aren’t going very well for her at school.”

“Kelly’s doing fine. Her grades are even a little better than last year.”

“I’m not talking about her grades. I’m talking about her social situation.”

“What about it?”

“I understand the other children are being horrible to her.”

“It hasn’t been an easy time for her.”

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t think so, considering that the boy who died in that accident was a student at Kelly’s school. She’s being tormented. That’s not a good environment for the child.”

“She told you about the kids calling her Boozer.”

“She did. So you
do
know.”

“Of course I know.”

“I guess I thought, if you knew, you would have done something about it.”

I felt that familiar prickling at the back of my neck. I didn’t want to get into this with her, but couldn’t let her get away with it. “I’m doing something about it, Fiona. Rest easy.”

“Are you moving her to another school?”

“Fiona, she only told me about this last night. I don’t know what it was like where you went to school, but in Milford the schools aren’t open on weekends. But I’ll be getting in touch with the principal first thing Monday morning.”

Fiona glared at me a moment, then looked away. When she met my eyes again, she seemed to have made an effort to soften her look. “I had an idea that might preclude you from having to do that, Glen.”

“What might that be?”

“Marcus and I talked about the possibility of Kelly going to school in Darien.”

He gave me another uncomfortable look. It seemed clear this idea had not originated with him.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She nodded, as though she anticipated my reaction. “I can understand your reluctance. But let’s look at the situation objectively. All the stress Kelly is being subjected to now can’t be good for her academic performance. If she were in another school, where the other students don’t know her situation, or that other boy, it would be a fresh start for her.”

“It’ll pass,” I said.

“And,” she continued, ignoring me, “there are several schools within a few miles of our place that come very highly recommended. Their test scores are far superior to the results being achieved in the public schools. Even if Kelly had not suffered such a tragedy, were not being subjected to this harassment at her school, it would be an alternative worth considering. These are good, solid institutions with impeccable credentials. Many of Fairfield County’s more prominent families have enrolled their children in these schools.”