Sweet Misfortune: A Novel (24 page)

“And?” she asked, wondering if she’d missed part of his story. “How does that tie you to the accident?”

“I thought you said you read the report?”

“I did,” she shot back. “And for the record, I know you did too—just a week before you left.”

“Well maybe you didn’t read it as closely as I did.”

“What do you mean?”

Garrett sighed, and a look of agony swept across his features. “Sophie, before I say what’s in the report, there’s something else you need to know.”

A familiar pit formed in Sophie’s stomach. “So help me, if you tell me you’ve also discovered that we’re, like, related, or something twisted like that, I swear I’ll puke all over you.”

He pressed his lips into a quick smile, but it faded just as fast. “Nothing like that, but you’re probably not going to like it.”

“It can’t get any worse than it already is,” she said pragmatically. “Fire away.”

With a deep breath, he began. “Even if I wasn’t real close to him, losing my dad as a boy was tough. You know that better than anyone. Mom kept all of the newspaper clippings and stuff from the accident, and whenever I’d get to feeling sorry about what happened, she would say, ‘Yes, you lost your father. But read this, and tell me you’re not grateful for what you have.’ She’d give me those newspaper clippings and point out—” He stopped, choking back tears. “— and point out a little girl, not much younger than me, who’d lost everything that night. ‘Sophia Maria Jones lost her whole family,’ she would say. ‘So count your lucky stars, Garrett. You’ve still got a mom who loves you.’ ”

Sophie was crying now, too, but Garrett continued.

“I often thought about that little girl—what happened to her after the accident, how things turned out for her. So when my mother was transferred to Ellen’s precinct two years ago and she got to know her on a personal level… well, she figured out pretty quickly that Ellen was the officer from the accident who had taken in that little girl. Of course, Ellen would have had no reason to connect my mom to my dad, since she’d taken on a new married name by then. When it came out that they both had single adult children, they decided it would be fun to set us up on a blind date.”

Sophie’s emotional engine fired up again. “So you knew!” she bellowed. “You knew even before we met that our parents were in the same accident!”

He tipped his head ever so slightly.

“Then why the hell did you agree to the date in the first place? Was I just some charity case to you? Make the poor girl who lost her parents feel good about herself?”

“It was nothing like that, Soph.”

“Then why?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “You’d always been this person in my mind who I admired. You’d given me hope at a very difficult time in my life. Even though we’d never met, I’d always told myself, ‘If that girl can make it, then so can I.’ And so I guess I was just intrigued. I wanted to meet the grown-up version of the little girl I’d read about in the newspaper. But I swear, I never…” His voice tapered off into nothing.

Sophie studied Garrett’s face. He looked like a wounded dog, and as mad as she was, part of her felt sorry for him—even understood him. “You never what?” she pressed.

His response was hardly audible, but Sophie could read his lips. “I never expected to fall in love.” Garrett looked up when Sophie didn’t reply. He cleared his throat. “I only wanted to meet you—to see for myself what a phoenix looks like after rising from the ashes. But meeting you was… intoxicating. After we met, part of me wanted to tell you the truth, but most of me just wanted to leave the past alone. To me, the history that we shared as children was just that—
history
. And when I thought that there was a legitimate chance for us to have a future together, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of that, especially a twenty-year-old car accident.”

Sophie was completely still, quietly contemplating everything she’d just heard. “Then what changed?” she asked at length. “Why did you suddenly decide that the past mattered?”

“The police report,” he said softly. “I wish I’d never read it. After seeing how visiting the accident site upset you, I really did want to know as much about it as I could. I figured the more I knew about what you’d been through, the more you could lean on me for support. So I went to Ellen’s, and she said she had a copy of the report that I could read. And that’s what screwed things up.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “There’s nothing in the report.”

“No? Did you happen to read that bit about the UPS driver holding a CB radio in his hand when they pulled him from the wreckage?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice growing more concerned. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe not to you, but to the kid who’d been pestering to talk to his dad immediately, it means a lot. After reading about the CB in Ellen’s file, I tracked down that old UPS receptionist. It took a private investigator nearly a week to find her, but eventually I got my hands on her phone number.” He paused.

“And?”

“And she said she remembered talking to him that night on the radio. He was annoyed and wanted to know what the emergency was, and of course I hadn’t told her, because I knew he wouldn’t think it was important enough. But she was a mother herself, and started arguing with him. And then she said he stopped responding. She thought at the time he was ignoring her, but she found out later it was because of the crash. So just like I said before,
I
caused the accident. Not directly, maybe, but if I hadn’t called… who knows? Maybe he wouldn’t have been so distracted, and things would have ended up differently for your parents.”

Sophie’s eyes were now very wet. “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted. “You’re… you aren’t making this up, are you?”

Shaking his head slowly, Garrett exhaled through his nose. “I’m sorry, Soph. I should have told you last year, as soon as I knew myself. I just didn’t know how to.”

Just then a car pulled up next to them. The driver rolled down the passenger window. “Are you Garrett Black? I’m from Enterprise Car Rental.”

Garrett bent down to see him better. “I sure am. Thanks for coming.”

The man smiled. “You’re welcome to sit in the front or back, whatever you prefer.”

“We’ll just get in the back. Can you drop my friend off in Gig Harbor?” The driver agreed, so Garrett opened the door and he and Sophie both climbed in.

The Enterprise driver had lots of things to say—mostly questions about the accident—but a few minutes later he quieted down enough for Sophie to whisper a question to Garrett. “Just so I’m clear, when you decided not to tell me last year, it was because you thought the news would be hard for me to hear, or hard for you to say?”

He thought about how to respond, and then said simply, “Yes.”

“So breaking my heart was a better option than swallowing your pride? I meant that little to you?”

His shoulders slumped forward. “After two decades I’d just learned that I was partially to blame, not only for the death of my father, but the loss of
your
family as well. I figured your heart would break no matter what I said. It took so long for you to trust me—I promised I’d never hurt you, and this would have devastated you.”

“So you took the easy way out,” she deadpanned.

“There was nothing easy about it. But like I said, if I could turn back the clock, I’d have done things much differently. Especially knowing what I know now. I was stupid.”

“Yes. You were.” Sophie turned away and looked out the window. Garrett kept quiet, allowing her time to think. “You didn’t even give me a chance to decide how I felt about it.
You
decided alone that
we
couldn’t get past it.”

When they got to Sophie’s house, Garrett walked her to the door. “Soph,” he said before she turned the handle, “I said before that I’d turn back the clock if I could.”

Sophie didn’t speak, but told him with her eyes that she was listening.

“If I could undo what I did last year, I would in a heartbeat. I’ll never forgive myself for not being honest about what I knew. It was selfish of me, and I’m sorry.”

She shifted her weight. “I understood you the first time.” She dropped her hands to her side. “We really are something, aren’t we? Both of us feeling guilty for the same accident. You know what Ellen would say about that, right?”

“
Divine providence, Sweets, so help me God,
” he replied in his best imitation of Sophie’s foster mom.

Smirking, Sophie said, “Exactly. But then I’d have to remind her that providence would have brought us together on a more permanent basis.”

Garrett frowned. “Good point.”

“Divine intervention can only get you so far, I guess.” Sophie shrugged her shoulders, turned around and opened the door, then stepped inside.

Garrett waited for her to turn back around. “So… that’s it then?”

“I guess so.” She looked straight at him, regretting that they’d let everything between them crumble. She wished he’d come to her with the truth sooner, even though she understood why he didn’t. But it was a moot point now. He’d moved on, and there was nothing she could do about it. “Good luck with… what’s her name? From the phone the other night?”

Garrett’s mouth tightened. “Jane.”

“Jane. Well. I wish you two the best. Whatever happens, it can’t turn out any worse than we did, right?”

Turning on his heels, he quietly said, “Good-bye, Sophie.”

“Good-bye, Garrett,” she whispered back. Sophie closed the door, locked it, and then leaned against it for support. It had been a long day, and she was ready for it to be over.

Chapter 35

What you thought was happiness wasn’t. It’s time to move on.

L
YING ON HER BED AN HOUR LATER, SOPHIE RECOUNTED
everything that had happened since leaving work. Because she blamed herself all these years for causing the accident by distracting her father, she could understand why Garrett blamed himself as well. But he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her the truth, hadn’t given her the opportunity to forgive him. But if she had known it was his father who was killed, too, could she have admitted to Garrett it was her fault? And would she have expected
him
to forgive
her
, or would she have done the same thing he had?

The accident that took her parents accounted for less than a minute of her life, yet the effects of that brief moment had caused her a lifetime of pain. No matter how much she tried to move forward, it seemed that accident always dragged her back. Like Andromeda, she was forever chained to her past.

As she was replaying everything that Garrett had said again in her head, she remembered that she still hadn’t read the letter from Jacob Barnes. Reluctantly, she got up and trudged to the kitchen, found the letter in her purse, then sat down and tore open one end. Reading the date in the top corner of the letter’s first page, she noted with some dismay that it had been written just a few days before Jacob passed away.

With a stomach full of butterflies about what it was going to say, she started to read. By the time she reached the end, her emotional levees were in ruins, with tears running freely down her face. For the first time since she was eight, Sophia Maria Jones felt completely unfettered by her past. And utterly sick over her future—
a future that should have included Garrett Black.

August 17, 2009

Dear Sophia,

With any amount of luck, you don’t remember me at all. But I cannot forget you. How could I? It is the agony of remembrance that now compels me to write to you. Though it pains me to do so, I could not leave this world without putting down on paper all of my thoughts and feelings concerning our brief encounter so many years ago.

My name is Jacob Barnes. Believe it or not, you and I shared a few words and a small patch of sidewalk together in the aftermath of a horrific accident on your ninth birthday. I lost four fingers that day, but I know you lost much more than that. I’m so sorry for your loss.

Please know that I’ve wanted to seek you out, or at least write to you, for years. I should have done so a long time ago. At first I told myself that you were too young to understand. As you got older, I convinced myself that too much time had passed to dredge up things like this. Neither excuse was really true; I was simply a coward.

I’ve tried over the years to keep tabs on your welfare, just to make sure you were getting along okay. Last September I saw in your local newspaper that you were about to be married to Dr. Garrett Black. Congratulations! Hopefully married life is treating you well. My heart leapt for joy when I saw the photo of you and him. The smile on your face told me that you’ve somehow managed to deal with the weighty burden that you were left with on the night we met. Which burden? The burden of guilt for causing the accident that claimed the lives of your family.

Sadly, that burden should have never been yours to bear. It rightfully belonged to a coward. It belonged to me.

Should you ever be so fortunate, I hope you have the chance to meet my son, Alex Barnes. If you are reading this letter, then you can be sure that he’s the one who put it in the mail. He is the greatest joy I’ve ever known, and, regrettably, my guilt and shame are inextricably tied to him. Allow me to explain.

Alex was born just before the stroke of midnight on September 20th, 1989—less than 24 hours before our collision. His mother, Katherine, and I could hardly wait for him to join our family. We were both lawyers and had put off having children longer than most first-time parents. I was nearly forty-five, and my wife was forty-three, when she became pregnant. The entire pregnancy went off without a hitch, right up until labor began. I was notified while trying a case in court that Katherine’s water had broken, so I went straight from the courthouse and met her at the hospital.

Then everything turned sour. My wife started hemorrhaging badly while she was pushing, but the baby was far enough into the canal that they had to focus on getting the baby delivered before they could do much for her. They worked as fast as they could to bring Alex into the world, and then they turned immediately to my Katherine’s needs. We all breathed an enormous sigh of relief when they were able to stop the bleeding and stabilize her pulse, which had gotten very weak.

The doctors took Alex to run some tests on him, but I was too caught up in the worry over Katherine to wonder why. I assumed the tests they were performing were just standard procedure. For the next four hours I sat next to my wife in her hospital room. She had a steady stream of oxygen pouring into her through a mask, but other than that she seemed fine. However, while I was watching her, all of a sudden she looked up at me in a panic. She gasped a few times, closed her eyes, and was gone. She died, just like that. No good-byes. No
I-love-yous
. She never even had a chance to hold our son. I learned later that a blood clot from the earlier bleeding had gone to her brain, effectively shutting down her vital organs in one quick stroke.

Needless to say, I was in shock. I spent the better part of that day in a stupor, filling out hospital paperwork while trying to wrap my head around the fact that she was gone. It wasn’t until five or six at night that I finally had a quiet moment to sit and think about our son. When I asked for him, an entire team of doctors responded to my request. The head of pediatrics explained that my new baby had some chromosomal abnormalities, and that raising him was going to present some unique challenges.

When I heard the words “Down’s syndrome,” I panicked. And though they tried to get me to hold him, I refused. My head was spinning. How could I hold him without my wife? How could I raise a child like that on my own? Those thoughts led to self-pity. Why me? How unfair and cruel was life that I, who just lost the love of my life, should have to endure the burden of a child with special needs?

I’m not proud of those feelings, but my regret over my thoughts at that moment pale in comparison to the shame of what I did next.

I left.

I told the doctors I couldn’t do it, and I simply walked out of the hospital into the night. I was mad at everything: mad at the doctors for letting my wife die, mad at my wife for dying, mad at the world for the perceived injustice, and, sadly, mad at my new son for his genetic makeup. In a rage, I went to my car, and I drove away. I didn’t have a clue where I was going; I just wanted to drive, and I wanted to drive fast.

The weather that night was ridiculous, but that didn’t stop me from being careless. I should have slowed the first time my car hydroplaned, but I didn’t. When I saw a UPS truck in my lane, it upset me. Why, I wondered, should I have to crawl along behind a big brown truck at a time like that? Suddenly I was mad at the truck and its driver, for no other reason than they were slowing me down. Since I couldn’t get around it on the left due to oncoming traffic, I flew alongside it in the right-hand lane, then swerved in front of it as I passed. Just to show the UPS driver that I owned the road, I tapped my brakes as soon as I got in front of him. It was stupid, I know, but I didn’t expect it to cause an accident. When I touched the brake pedal, my car hydroplaned again, and I slammed the brakes even harder. Worried that the UPS truck was going to rear-end me, I looked quickly in the mirror while I was sliding and I saw that instead of hitting me, he’d swerved to the left. Who knows, maybe he was hydroplaning by then as well, as a result of slamming on his brakes to avoid hitting me. Either way, he was too far left. He missed me, but hit your car head–on.

It’s sickening, I know. The accident was entirely my fault. If not for me, your family would still be alive. The driver of the UPS truck, too.

After I saw—and heard—the first impact, I lost complete control of my car. It turned sideways, then caught an edge and rolled—twice, I think. Everything beyond that was a bit of a blur. It is believed that I lost my fingers on the second roll, probably being pinched between the road and the car when my arm swung out through the shattered window. Who knows. It doesn’t matter anyway. Four fingers is a small price to pay for my carelessness… one finger for every person that died.

I don’t remember how the other cars got involved in the mess, but I recall sitting in my car once it came to a stop, feeling utterly sick for what I’d just done. I wanted to vomit. I couldn’t get out of my door, but the rear window was popped completely out, so I shimmied through it. The first place I ran was back up the road to your car. What I found was a little girl—you—in the rear seat, crying. Your door was the only one that would open. Not knowing what else to do, but believing that you needed to get away from the scene inside that Volvo, I pulled you out and carried you a safe distance away along the side of the road, setting you down next to a fire hydrant. That’s when I passed out.

Sometime later—I don’t know how long, exactly—I came to. I was foggy at first, and unsure what was going on. You were there, still crying, and you were saying that the accident was your fault. While I was getting my hand worked on, I learned that your name was Sophia Maria Jones. A police officer took you to an ambulance, and a few minutes later I was escorted to a nearby ambulance as well. That’s when I saw you throw away your fortune. It floated right down the street near where I was sitting on the back of the ambulance. It was wet and in a tiny ball, but I picked it up and read it. I kept it as a reminder of whose life I’d ruined.

At first I resisted when the ambulance team tried to take me back to the hospital I’d just left an hour before. Looking back, I believe it was providence, drawing me back to my responsibilities as a father. When I got there, my thoughts kept turning back to you—all alone in the world. I imagined what your life was going to be like without parents, and I decided that I could not inflict that same fate upon my own son, too. I called the doctors upstairs and had them bring Alex down so I could hold him in the ER. Once I had him in my arms, I never wanted to let go.

So why am I writing this letter now? I’ve wanted to apologize for what I did at least a million times; not only for causing the accident, but for knowing that you believed it was your fault and not correcting that notion. I shouldn’t have allowed you to carry that guilt all these years.

It was my shame that prevented me from saying anything, and even now I cannot bring myself to face you in person. In the years since the accident, I have come to love Alex like no son has ever been loved before. He is a rare gift. Instead of being a burden, he has been my greatest joy. Each time I told myself that I needed to apologize to you and tell you the truth about what happened, I found myself unable to own up to it, because doing so would have forced me to admit to two disgusting truths. First, that when he was born, I left Alex parentless—if only for an hour—because I thought he was less than perfect. How insanely wrong I was! And second? That I would have never had the joy of raising Alex at all, if not for the accident that claimed the lives of your family. I’d have just kept right on driving and never looked back. It’s cruel, isn’t it? Your horrible loss was my incredible gain.

I’ve never been a particularly religious person, but that hasn’t stopped me from thanking God every day for that accident that sent me back to my son. And those same prayers have always included the one unending “wish of my heart”: that someday God will make right what He allowed me to mess up in your life.

I’m so sorry for everything. I wish you and your husband every happiness in the world. Hold on to each other, and live each moment as if it were your last. Someday it will be. Later rather than sooner, I hope, but as long as you’ve lived well, how long you live won’t really matter.

God bless,

Jacob P. Barnes

P.S.: If you’re ever feeling sad or discouraged, I encourage you to meet my son, Alex. He can lift spirits like nobody else. I promise!

P.P.S: Each year on your birthday Alex and I place rocks on the graves of your parents. I hope you’ll let him continue the tradition. I’d like to be able to say there is some profound meaning to it, but that’s not the case. To me, it seems like too many things in life are temporary. The rocks are just reminders that not all things dissipate so quickly. Some things, in fact, last for eons… maybe even forever. My love for my wife and son, for instance, and I’m sure the love you have for your parents as well. And hopefully, too, the love you feel for your new husband. God bless, Sophia Jones.