Snowblind (25 page)

The window had shattered, so Allie crouched and peered in at Lauren. “Are you okay?”

Ordinarily full of confidence and sarcasm, the girl had gone pale, but she nodded.

“Feel like I got kicked in the chest, but I think I’m okay.”

“You can breathe all right?” Allie asked.

Lauren smiled wanly. “If I say no, does that mean I don’t have to go to school?”

“You probably should have a doctor look you over anyway,” Allie said.

“I can breathe fine, but my ears are ringing,” the girl replied.

“Sit tight. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of,” Allie said, turning back to the Cadillac.

A shouting match had begun. Mrs. Cappuccio seemed to be trying to calm everyone’s nerves but the driver of the Cadillac had the misfortune to have included the queen bitch of the PTO, Helen Smith, in his collision.

“Is everyone okay?” Allie asked, looking for injuries.

Heads turned.

“Does it look like we’re okay?” Mrs. Smith barked.

“Actually it does,” Allie said. “But Mrs. Cappuccio’s daughter might have a concussion.”

And how lucky you all are,
Allie thought.
Banged up but alive. Your children alive.

“Oh my god, Lauren,” Mrs. Cappuccio said, rushing around the back of the Cadillac so that she could get to her daughter, passing right by Allie.

Only then did Allie realize that she recognized the driver of the Cadillac. Tall and broad and carrying thirty extra pounds, Eric Gustafson had won election to the city council the year before. His son, Kurt, was one of Allie’s students, though Mr. Gustafson had not come in for parents’ night or parent-teacher conferences—his wife had come alone. Allie recognized him only from his pictures in the local paper. With his Nordic features, chubby face, and buzz-cut red hair, it would have been hard not to remember him. She wanted to be furious with him but his expression was so pathetic and he was surrounded by so much anger that she could only pity him.

“Are you drunk?” Mrs. Smith demanded, poking Mr. Gustafson in the chest. “Is that it? Don’t think you’re going to get away with this just because you’re on the city council!”

The other parents—three of them, not including Mrs. Cappuccio—had seemed angry before, but with Mrs. Smith’s tirade ringing in the air they all seemed to be feeling more awkward than angry now. All the students had slunk away to a safe distance on the snowy lawn where they could watch and mock with their friends. Even Kurt Gustafson stood twenty yards away, looking alternately enraged and humiliated by his father.

“I’m sorry! It was an accident!” Gustafson protested, his face reddening. He looked on the verge of tears.

“Drunk driving isn’t an accident, it’s a crime!” Mrs. Smith snapped.

“I’m not drunk!” Mr. Gustafson cried. He looked around as if searching for someone to back him up, and when his eyes lit on Allie, he pushed past the other parents to approach her. “Ms. Schapiro, please. You can smell my breath. I swear I haven’t been drinking.”

Allie stared at him. Maybe he hadn’t been drinking but his behavior was certainly odd. Mr. Gustafson seemed on the verge of panic, like a child in trouble for something and trying to get out of it instead of a grown man—a city councilman, no less—facing people who were angry about the damage he’d caused.

“Mr. Gustafson, I have no interest in smelling your breath. You need to calm down.” She looked at the other parents, focusing on Mrs. Smith. “You
all
need to calm down. It’s a fender bender. They happen every day. I’m sure you’ve all been in one at some point or another.”

“I am going to be late for work!” Mrs. Smith declared, crossing her arms defiantly. The sun glinted off her glasses and picked out the cat hairs that clung to her jacket.

A siren blared in the distance; someone had called the police. Allie turned around and saw the principal, Mr. D’Amato, and the gym coach hustling the students toward the school. Relief flooded her. She would be happy to leave this mess to Mr. D’Amato.

“All of you please go back to your cars,” Allie said, glancing over at Mrs. Cappuccio, who had knelt down on the sidewalk to encourage her daughter. Lauren had begun to release herself from her seat belt and the airbag, making her way to the driver’s door.

“Not until I get an answer,” Mrs. Smith said, striding over to where Allie stood with Mr. Gustafson, who had taken up position behind her as if she could shield him from Mrs. Smith’s wrath.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Mr. Gustafson said, but he wouldn’t meet Mrs. Smith’s gaze. He kept shifting his weight from foot to foot, glancing around with an air of awkward frustration. “But I’m not drunk.”

“If you haven’t been drinking, then what the hell were you thinking?” Mrs. Smith demanded. “You hit that pickup truck back there. I saw you coming in my rearview mirror. You were all over the road and then you hit your damn accelerator instead of the brake, like one of those ninety-year-old ladies who crashes through a convenience-store wall. We all had our children in the car! If you’re not drunk, you must be high—”

“I’m not high!” Mr. Gustafson roared.

“Then what happened?” Mrs. Smith roared right back. “And don’t tell me your pedal stuck, because I will slap you right in the—”

“I don’t know how to drive a car!” Gustafson shouted.

That silenced them all for a moment.

“I mean…” he fumbled, “I mean I don’t remember how. Something happened to me. I … I had to get my son to school and he wanted me to drive him. His mother went in to work early this morning and I was his only ride, but I don’t know … I can’t remember how to drive!”

They all stared. Allie knew there was something he wasn’t saying but she could also tell that much of this was the truth because it hurt him so much to reveal it.

A police car turned the corner seconds ahead of an ambulance that came from the other direction. Principal D’Amato had been striding toward the gathered parents but now he redirected himself to meet the police car. Allie glanced around and saw that all the students had gone inside and only the cars involved in the accident remained at the curb. The school bell clamored inside, the sound rolling across the lawn.

Mrs. Smith abandoned them abruptly and marched toward the policeman, probably to insist that Mr. Gustafson be tested for drugs and alcohol. And that was the right thing to do, Allie knew. It might have been accident, but Gustafson could have killed someone. She didn’t like Helen Smith at all—nobody did, really, not even Mr. Smith—but Allie wondered if the bitch might be the only one who really understood what she could have lost this morning.

Penitent and yet somehow also a little petulant, Mr. Gustafson wiped his eyes and waited for the policeman and the principal. Allie stood close to him, though all the others had turned their attention elsewhere.

“Did you hit your head recently?” she found herself asking.

Gustafson looked at her. “What?”

“Did you hit your head or fall down or something? I mean, people don’t usually just forget how to drive.”

He turned away, unwilling to meet her gaze. As she studied him, something occurred to her that made her knit her brow.

“How did you know my name?” she asked.

His expression changed, turning from irritated to anxious. He cast a quick glance her way, as if he was guilty of something, but he didn’t answer. A chill ran up her spine.

Then the policeman was there with a pad and pen out, ready to take a statement, and Mr. D’Amato swept Allie away for a private chat so that she could fill him in. As she spoke to the principal she kept glancing back at Mr. Gustafson, but he seemed determined not to look her way.

Leaving her to wonder.

Miri lay in bed, looking at the clock on her nightstand, telling herself she ought to get up. The darkness outside her window had begun to lighten with a hint of morning. Soon the sun would rise—as much sun as Seattle was likely to get in February. Sleep had eluded her, save for several brief respites when she had drifted off for fifteen or twenty minutes only to wake again, her late father’s voice fresh in her mind, as if he had been speaking to her in her dreams.

The trouble was that he
had
spoken to her, but not in a dream.

She studied the clock as it ticked over toward six
A.M.
, but her true fascination lay not with the time but with the cell phone on the nightstand, just beyond the clock. She’d plugged it into the wall before going to bed to make sure it would be charged today, but she had also turned off the power. The phone lay dormant and harmless and yet she had found herself convinced that it would ring in the middle of the night. The prospect had alternately terrified and thrilled her.

Daddy,
she thought, as if she could summon him.

Miri had been half convinced that she would have a different perspective in the morning. People said that sort of thing all the time and she had found it to be true, but not today. The passing of night and slow arrival of morning did not chase away the previous day’s events, did not make her suddenly realize that it had all been a dream or that there was some legitimate explanation.

The voice on the phone had belonged to her father. Her father was dead. She had therefore spoken to a ghost.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her hand strayed unconsciously toward the cell phone before changing trajectory. Picking up the TV remote, she clicked it on and climbed out of bed, peeling off her fading Decemberists concert T-shirt and heading for the shower. She splashed some cold water on her face at the bathroom sink and then found her mind drifting as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, studying the small rose tattooed on her hip. Her father had sometimes called her his beautiful flower.

Shaking off her fugue, she turned on the shower and let the water run until steam began to cloud the room. Only when she had stepped into the hot spray did the stiffness in her shoulders and neck begin to ease. As the water cascaded over her and she washed the previous day’s grime from her body, she at last allowed her thoughts to drift.

Miri thought of home.

On an April morning during her senior year in high school, her mother had told her that she could no longer afford their house and that she had stopped paying the mortgage months before. The house was being foreclosed upon, and Angela would be moving into an apartment. Miri could stay with her until she went to college and during vacations, but Angela had made it clear that her one-bedroom apartment was not intended to be Miri’s home. The fight that had erupted over this decision had been short, bitter, and one-sided. Although Angela had always had an ugly temper, she let Miri do all the yelling. The lack of emotion had been the thing that cut Miri the deepest. Her mother had made a decision and she was resolute; Miri’s feelings didn’t factor into that at all.

Angela might not have abdicated her responsibilities as a parent, but she had cast Miri adrift. As a little girl, Miri remembered her mother’s constant refrain about giving a child roots and wings. Roots and wings. Now her mother wanted to set the nest on fire.

Miri had never forgiven her for that.

The idea that her childhood home would be gone had distressed her, yet in some odd way it had freed her as well. She had spent that fall at UMass Amherst, and when her mother had asked what she wanted for Christmas, Miri had told her “a backpack and hiking boots.” The day after Christmas she had abandoned everything she owned except what she could fit into the backpack, laced up her new boots, and hit the road, silently vowing never to sleep on the sofa in her mother’s little apartment again.

Miri had hitchhiked all the way across the country, sleeping in parks and campgrounds. Despite the horror stories she had heard throughout her life, no one had attacked her, robbed her, or raped her. Out on the road she had found only free spirits and lost souls. Along the way, she had spent her time making bracelets and earrings with beads that she had brought along. She had been making jewelry as a hobby for years, and when she reached California she set up a blanket on the beach and began to sell the things she had made on her travels.

For three years she had wandered the roads of America, visiting forty-seven of the contiguous states but not returning to Massachusetts. Never going home. After those three years she had found herself in Seattle, where at last she decided that her odyssey had ended and a new journey ought to begin. She got a job and an apartment and went to college and tried to put Coventry, Massachusetts behind her for good, all except for Jake, her best friend from high school, with whom she had shared the worst night of both their lives.

Thoughts of Jake brought her mind back around to the phone call the day before, and suddenly even the hot water could not drive away the chill that raced through her. Rinsing out her hair, Miri shut off the tap and dried off, wrapping her towel around her hair and stepping out into the steam-filled bathroom. The mirror had frosted over with condensation, so she could not see her reflection, as if she weren’t really there at all. As if she existed in the same world where that
other
phone call had originated.

After she’d dressed and dried her hair, she sat for a time on the edge of her bed in the company of muffled television voices and stared at her cell phone. Gray morning had arrived and muted daylight streamed through the window.

Miri picked up her phone, disconnected it from the charger, and powered it on. She hesitated for only a second before going to Recent Calls, where she saw
JAKE
at the top of the list. Her throat constricted and she felt her pulse quicken; she had thought that in the light of day, without a second call or some other evidence, she would be able to tell herself that it hadn’t happened—that she had not spoken to her dead father on this very phone.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Leaving the cell phone on the nightstand, she went to her closet and dragged out a travel bag. There were preparations she would have to make, work to reschedule, people to whom she would have to apologize, so today was out of the question.