Death at the Wheel (31 page)

 

 

 

Chapter 24

 

There were no black vans in the hospital parking lot and none as I drove across town. Although my parents' street was crowded with cars, none of them were black vans, either. I could tell I looked good because Sonia gave me three dirty looks before I even got the bluefish to the kitchen. I'd never thought of her as the jealous type. Jealousy is an emotion that takes energy and passion; Sonia never seems to have any energy and her passion is all for herself. Well, it was no skin off my nose. I wasn't there to be admired or disapproved of; I was just doing my familial duty.

I passed bluefish, fetched drinks, chatted with Sonia's relatives, admired children, and made aimless small talk until my jaw ached. Meeting her family made it easier to understand Sonia. A more self-involved crew I've never seen. They all wanted to talk and it was all about themselves, their interests, worries, illnesses, disabilities, opinions. Nothing reciprocal. No other-directedness. No curiosity about the people they were meeting. Just me and I and we, and I have, we want, we are, we need. I almost lost my composure in the middle of Sonia's sister's plantar wart story. I was about to excuse myself when she segued into another story.

"This looks like such a nice neighborhood," she said. "Did you grow up here?" I said I had. "Well, you know, it's funny, but I saw something coming in that I've never seen in my neighborhood." I could see the criticism coming right off. Braced myself for it. "There was a man right out there on this nice street working on his car. All we could see were his feet sticking out. Wearing fancy shoes and suit pants!" She went off into peals of laughter.

I didn't understand why she was laughing. I depend on my car and don't think car trouble is funny. Not many of us keep mechanic's coveralls in our trunks. If something goes wrong we wade in, business suits or not. "Excuse me," I said, "I think my aunt needs me," and scooted away.

It was a thoroughly rotten ending to a day that had begun so well. I was working my way across the room, trying to get to Uncle Henry and Aunt Rita—my favorite relatives—when Mom seized me by the arm, hauled me into the kitchen, and asked if I'd done anything to help Julie. Although she'd hired people to serve and clean up, she looked frazzled and anxious. Her normally full face had a pinched look. I realized that for all her social adeptness, this party was an awful strain. She was trying hard to please Sonia even though it couldn't be done.

The air was rich with lamb, asparagus, and warm bread. A bowl of minty green jelly trembled on the counter. Pots steamed gently on the stove. Dinner was going to be wonderful.

"I don't know if I've helped or not," I said.

"What is that supposed to mean?" she snapped as she tied an apron over her shiny silk dress.

"I found Calvin Bass. He's not dead," I said.

A cut-glass dish full of olives crashed to the floor, glass shards and olives skittering everywhere, the inky black juice running along the cracks between the tiles. Ignoring the mess, she stood staring at me. "That's a disgusting thing to say, Theadora. How could you?"

Did she think I was making this up? "It's true. He was taking the racing course with his cousin Jon. A cousin who looked a lot like him. It was the cousin who was killed. Bass identified his cousin as himself and walked away."

"How do you know? I mean, how did you find out?" she said, stooping down and trying to gather up olives and glass indiscriminately, the hem of her dress trailing perilously close to the pool of juice.

"Here. Use this. You'll cut yourself," I said, thrusting a brush and dustpan at her. "I went down to Connecticut yesterday. Andre and I went to the track with George and Ellen Bradley. You remember George, from high school? And after we'd all done some driving on the track, we had lunch with—"

"I just don't understand you," she interrupted. "You say you're so busy at work that you never have time for fun, yet every time I talk to you, you've just come back from some outing where you've been playing. Biking, until you fell off, and now you're playing at being a race car driver when you say you're too busy to help Julie... and now this nonsense about Calvin Bass not being dead.... You don't realize how lucky you are, when other people have such trouble." She stood up and held out the dustpan. "Here, you clean this up. I've got to get dinner on the table."

She wasn't going to let me talk, nor would she listen if I did. She'd called me in here only to complain. I knelt down, carefully tucking my skirt out of the way, and swept up the mass of olives and glass, mopping up the juice and tiny glass shards with wet paper towels. Time suspended, inside a shimmering haze of fury, I worked meticulously at getting every bit of glass, waiting for the return of enough control to speak.

"I'm sorry, Mom," I said, "I lied to you. I didn't fall off my bike. I hurt my hands and skinned my knee when Julie Bass's brother forced me out of my car at gunpoint and then threw me into the travel lane of a highway. But I was lucky. He didn't shoot me and the car that was coming missed me by a few inches. And Julie Bass's brother did that because I went to talk with him, to see if I could help Julie, and he didn't believe I was her friend, so he followed me and saw me eating with Andre and another trooper and he thought I was a cop who was trying to trick him. But I'm lucky, Mom, because he didn't kill me." I spoke slowly and carefully through an anger that left me breathless.

I crossed the kitchen and emptied the dustpan into the trash. "I'm really very lucky, Mom, and I do have a lot of fun. For instance, that same night, two thugs came to my door, claiming to be Connecticut cops. Only they weren't cops, Mom. They were two guys looking for some papers I'd taken out of Julie's house because she asked me to. Two guys with fists and guns they were ready to use..."

She was standing across the room, staring at me like I'd gone mad, her spoon frozen in the air above a pot, her mouth slightly agape.

"But I got lucky, because I have such a fun life, don't you know, never doing anything for anyone else. He hit me a few times and twisted my arm and scared me to death but because I'm so lucky, when he shot me, it only grazed my leg." I pulled up my skirt and showed the Band-Aid. "So it bled a lot and hurt like hell, but, Mom, I have such a happy, easy life that I didn't get killed." Her mouth opened and shut a few times, like a landed trout, but no sound came out.

Dad burst through the door at that moment, carrying a tray of empty glasses. "The natives are getting restless out there...." He stopped at the sight of our tense faces. I continued as though he wasn't there.

"Then yesterday, when I could have slept late and stayed home and read a book, or gone out and had all that fan you think I'm having, I drove to Connecticut and back so I could go to the race track and find out what really happened there the weekend Bass was killed. It was a good day. No one hit me and no one shot me. I did find out, by questioning the people at the track, that the man who was killed was not Calvin Bass, but his cousin, Jon Bass, who was there with him taking the course. And that Cal Bass identified his cousin as himself and then walked away and disappeared. Wait!" I interrupted as she made a sound that was the beginnings of speech.

"Then I found Calvin Bass, when the police wouldn't have known where to look. I found him because, when I wasn't roller-blading and eating bonbons and watching TV, I had interviewed a bunch of the people he worked with, and I'd located his girlfriend, who inadvertently let it slip that he had a cozy little place by the river where he took his lady loves. No, wait...."

Absurd as it was, I wanted to be factually accurate. "It was his secretary who told me the place was by the river. You don't appreciate me, really. You know that? While you have been calling me up and whining about how I don't do anything to help poor Julie, I have conducted endless interviews, spent countless hours, and driven hundreds of miles, all while holding down a more than full-time job."

"Thea, we—" Dad began.

"Wait!" I held up my hand. "Before you say anything, let me finish. On her behalf I have been stalked, rammed, run off the road, terrorized, slapped, beaten and shot, because
you
think I ought to be helping her. And every time I talk with you, you complain because I am not doing enough. Now would you please tell me what more it is that you would like me to do?"

I was as close to hysteria as I have ever been, yet cold to the core with a shaking fury that tightened my vocal cords until I could barely speak. When I finished, I was trembling and as winded as if I had just run a hard race.

"Thea!" Dad's low, furious voice cut across the kitchen like a whip. "How dare you! We have a houseful of guests and a family celebration under way. This is not the time to indulge in a hysterical outburst."

I stared at the two of them. Two of the people I thought I loved best in the world. At their tight, furious faces. "She asked what I was doing for Julie. I told her."

"That's no excuse for this... for this..." He sputtered as he looked for proper, lawyerly words. "This dreadful, undisciplined attack on your mother. You should be ashamed. You've upset her terribly. Really, I thought you'd learned some self-control, being in a business like yours." He set the glasses down on the edge of the sink with a crash.

"I was trying to make her understand—"

"You were attacking her. Viciously. I heard you."

I put the dustpan and brush, still held out stiffly in front of me in one tense, white fist, back in the cupboard. A piece of glass stuck in my finger like a tiny dagger. I pulled it out and dropped it in the trash. One small, perfect drop of blood rose from the spot. I watched it, mesmerized, as it swelled and stopped.

Metal clashed on metal as my mother attacked her pots. Dad was still watching me in the uneasy way you watch a potentially dangerous stray.

"I'd just like to understand why you two care more about Julie than you do about me." I choked on the words. "Why whatever I do, it's never enough."

He groaned. "Don't start up with that what-about-me crap now. We don't have time for it."

"I know."

In the other room, I kissed Henry and Rita and murmured something about a broken pipe emergency and having to leave. I did the same to Michael and Sonia and a few other people I bumped into on my way to the door. I retrieved my coat and purse from the closet and drifted outside and into my car, oblivious to the rain that was starting. We were working our way toward the longest day of the year, still eight weeks away and yet so much nearer than on those dark, close days in December, and even with the rain, there was a lingering sense of light in the air. I felt strangely detached, light-headed, dazed. Recovering from the effects of a powerful drug, which fury absolutely was.

Mechanically I put the car in gear, switched on the wipers, and headed home. I wanted to speed—wanted my car to respond to the explosive rage I felt inside—but the rain and heavy traffic kept me doing a nice, legal 55.

Route 128 isn't so much a loop around Boston as a cup handle, one side of the loop being precluded by the presence of the sea. As it swoops around, an aging, high-speed road plagued by too much traffic, other roads connecting more far-flung places rush to meet it, disgorging intrusive streams of traffic into the already far too clotted lanes. Sometimes Massachusetts drivers send me into a rage with their antics but tonight I hardly noticed, responding like an automaton as people around me played their absurd, death-defying, high-tech game of chicken. A game where if someone wants your spot, he just puts himself there and to hell with you.

When it came, it came at me so suddenly I didn't even have time to think. It was at the merge where traffic comes in from the left instead of the right, pouring into the high-speed lane beside me. A vehicle, materializing suddenly on my left, brushed the side of my car with a metallic
clunk,
horn blaring. I glanced in the rearview mirror, saw a window of open space beside me, and jerked the wheel sharply to the right.

My car responded, moved over, and when I turned the wheel to correct the veer, it didn't respond. I just kept turning right, heading for the breakdown lane and the guard rail, across a lane of heavy traffic. I hit the flashers, I hit the horn, glancing frantically in the mirror for an opening that didn't exist, breaking, sawing at the unresponsive wheel, slewing through a blare of lights and horns, distorted by the rain. There was a bone-jarring
thunk
as I was hit, the car spinning, turning, careening toward the rail, driver's side first now.

Time seemed endless, meaningless, gone into slow motion as I rocketed through the cacophony of sounds and lights. The tearing rasp of metal on metal, the window beside my head dissolving in a spiderweb of cracks. The car tipping, tipping, making me seasick as the ground came up and slammed into me, hurting my head. Then I was over, upside down, down on the other side and over again. I was at a carnival, the ride spinning and tilting and going upside down and the belt cut into my shoulder and my lap and my lap was full of something, someone, an enormous pillow that filled my lap, smothering me and slamming me back in my seat.