Under the Influence (24 page)

“This was when Mr. Havilland noted a Jet Ski on the starboard side. Coming at a reasonable speed but close enough that it was important to keep a close watch. The Jet Ski gets closer, and to Mr. Havilland's surprise, the Jet Ski is being driven by his son, Cooper. Naturally, then, the two wish to pull their two crafts up, one alongside the other. They'd almost reached each other,” the officer continued. “Close enough that they could speak to each other. Mr. Havilland, senior, calls out to his son, does he have sunscreen?”

Here the officer interrupted his story with a detail from Swift's account of the events. “Mr. Havilland, senior, wanted number fifty,” he said. “He explained to his son that he had twenty-five, but out on the water, it wasn't enough.”

At this of all moments, Swift had been talking about sunscreen. What was that about? A memory came to me of Ollie playing cards
by the pool, and Swift instructing him on the secret of winning at poker.

You want to make a lie sound like the truth?
Swift had said to Ollie.
Surround it with smaller details that are real
.

I knew this, too, from the stories I made up. It had been true that Audrey Hepburn worked for UNICEF. It was true, she made a movie with Gregory Peck. She just wasn't my grandmother.

“They were evidently close enough that Mr. Havilland, senior, reached to grab the tube of sunscreen from his son. It was in this moment, when he looked away, that your son Ollie wrested the helm from Mr. Havilland and proceeded to gun the engine.”

I drew in my breath. I looked at the officer hard. I didn't know this man, but I knew my son. He wouldn't do something like that. I thought I knew Swift, too, but I'd been wrong. He was lying.

Swift never wore sunscreen. He had told Ollie that sunscreen was for pussies.

“When Ollie gave it gas,” Officer Reynolds continued, “the boat shot forward, full throttle. That's when the boat rammed into the Jet Ski. Mr. Havilland's son was knocked off his seat, sustaining only the minor injury of a sprained wrist.

“Unfortunately, the injuries incurred by Ms. Hernandez were much more severe. When she was thrown from the Jet Ski it appears that she sustained a head injury. She lost consciousness. It was no doubt due to the efforts of Mr. Havilland—the senior Mr. Havilland—who dove into the water to rescue her, that this young woman is alive at all.

“Given what he was facing,” the officer concluded, “I'd call that man a hero.”

I asked if there was any more information about how Carmen was doing. “Has anyone contacted her mother?” I asked.

“The doctors are saying it's too early to tell much,” he said. “Her mother's on her way up now.

“Of course we understand that Oliver is too young to be held
responsible for this,” the officer went on. “He couldn't have anticipated the consequences.”

“My son wouldn't have done anything like that,” I said. “My son worships the ground Swift walks on. I can't picture him grabbing the helm of a boat and trying to drive it himself. He doesn't have that kind of confidence. That's more the kind of thing Swift would do. Or Cooper.”

“With all due respect, Ms. McCabe,” Officer Reynolds said, “mothers never seem able to view their sons with a totally unbiased eye. My wife would be the same where our son was concerned.”

“It's not like that,” I said.

“Of course we'll be speaking with your son about all of this, when he's ready,” the officer said. “Meanwhile, given his age, no charges will be filed against him. What he did, according to Mr. Havilland, was a prank. A stupid prank, with terrible repercussions for the young woman involved, though we can thank God nobody else was seriously injured. And nobody's suggesting that Oliver injured Ms. Hernandez intentionally.”

“He didn't do it at all,” I said.

“In Oliver's case, we understand your son has had a lot of traumatic experiences,” Officer Reynolds went on. “We managed to reach his father by telephone earlier this evening. He was deeply troubled, of course, but confirmed that Oliver has displayed a lot of anger lately, particularly to authority figures.”

They'd spoken with Dwight. The walls seemed to be closing in on me now. Not unlike that courtroom, three years earlier. But worse.

“Kids from divorced families can often act out,” the police officer said. “Your DUI arrest was probably confusing to your son. Seeing an authority figure placed under arrest.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Havilland explained to us that your drinking is no longer an issue. I understand you're in AA.”

This wasn't happening. No,
this was
.

Maybe I would have said something, but I heard Ollie calling out for me and I went back in the other room.

They wanted to talk with Ollie, of course. He wasn't in good shape for that, but it seemed important. Particularly after the account I'd heard—Swift's account—of what had happened out on the lake.

First they got him a Coke. The officers sat him down in a comfortable chair. This time there was a female police officer, and someone I figured must be some kind of child protection officer. I was not allowed in the room.

“I'm sorry about this,” Officer Reynolds told me. “It's just policy.”

He was gone only briefly—five minutes at most. When Ollie emerged from the room—his face pale, his eyes hollow in their sockets—the female officer took me aside while Ollie was in the bathroom.

“He isn't responding to our questions,” she said. “All he could do when we ran over Mr. Havilland's account of what happened was to stare out the window and nod his head. Mostly he just kept saying ‘I'm sorry' over and over again.”

“Ollie's eight years old,” I told her.

“Of course he's feeling guilty and responsible. He asked if he was going to go to jail. I made a point of reassuring him that we understand he didn't realize the consequence of his actions. It's not like we're going to be charging someone his age with a crime.”

“Ollie agreed he gunned the engine?” I asked her. “He said
he
was the one who crashed the boat into the Jet Ski?”

“He isn't speaking at this point. But he concurred with everything Mr. Havilland and his son had represented.”

“He's exhausted,” I said. “He's confused.”

“Right now your son is a very troubled boy,” she said. “I'm sure you'll want to consult a therapist not only about the underlying issues surrounding his anger but what is likely to be his ongoing sense of guilt and shame concerning this event. The thing to remember is that he's just a child. We all recognize that.”

Later, there might be more questions, but for the moment there was no further reason to stay around. I'd heard that Estella was getting a ride to the hospital with a friend of hers, but there wasn't much I could do for her. She'd have her family around, and even if I spoke Spanish, what could I say? The doctors were waiting for the results of a bunch of tests they'd done on Carmen, who was still in the intensive care unit, not yet having regained consciousness.

Until now, I had not had the time or space to consider this, but now I did: In all the time that transpired between our arrival at the hospital and now—at least eight hours—neither Swift nor Cooper nor Ava had exchanged a word with me or my son. Wherever they were now—at their house on the lake, taking a shower and putting on fresh clothes, or in a car headed back to Folger Lane—they had disappeared without any acknowledgment of me or Ollie.

And what now? I had no idea how we'd get home, even though this was the least of my worries at the moment.

When I tried to think of who to call—a person willing to drive more than four hours to pick up a desperate woman and a messed-up child at Lake Tahoe on a Sunday afternoon—it struck me how, taking Swift and Ava out of the equation, there was nobody.

“Think of me as the person to call in the case of an emergency,” Ava had told me that day, and she'd written her name down on the card I kept in my wallet. This no longer applied.

Once it would have been Alice, but I'd burned that bridge when I abandoned our friendship in favor of my two more glamorous friends.

Then there was Elliot.

He picked up the phone on the first ring. He was home, of course, as he usually was, even on sunny days. I could hear a movie playing in the background. I pictured him sitting on his old corduroy couch in his baggy pants, with the blinds shut to keep the light out, watching
The Lady Vanishes
for the hundredth time. Or
High Noon
.

A wave of love washed over me. Love and regret.

“I wouldn't blame you if you hung up right now,” I said when he answered the phone. No need to say who it was calling. He'd know.

“I wouldn't ever hang up on you, Helen,” he said.

“I'm in a tough place,” I said. “Ollie and me both. I was wondering if you could come get us.”

H
e arrived a little before sunset, with an apple for me and a bag of peanuts for Ollie.

“You're probably hungry for some real food,” he said, lifting Ollie into his arms. It surprised me that my son showed no resistance. “But I figured this would tide you over.”

It wasn't cold, but he had brought a blanket and a pillow for Ollie. “You can tell me about it if you feel like it,” he said to me after he set Ollie down in the backseat. “Or not.”

But Ollie was there. And where to begin? The truth was, I didn't even know what had happened—only that it was terrible and the whole world looked different now.

“You were right,” I said.

“Right?”

“About my friends. The people I thought were my friends.”

“If you think it makes me glad to hear that, you're wrong,” he told me. “I'm just sorry you got hurt.”

We drove in silence after that. After a while, Ollie fell asleep in the back. I still didn't want to chance saying anything he might hear, so I kept to safe topics.

“It's good to see you,” I said. “How have you been?”

“Oh, Helen,” he said. “How am I supposed to answer that?”

It was dark when Ollie woke up, an hour or two down the highway. Elliot asked if he was hungry and he shook his head.

“I think I'll pull into this diner I know, anyway,” he said. “You can get something, too, if you change your mind.”

It turned out Ollie was ravenous. He finished off two chicken tacos and a bowl of chocolate pudding, and when that was done he asked Elliot if he could have one more taco. I realized it had probably been a very long time since anyone had given him anything to eat. He had a glass of milk, and then another one.

“I guess the last time you ate was probably lunch with Swift,” I said to him.

He shook his head. “We were going to have lunch after the boat ride. Only then all the other stuff happened.”

“So, you went out on the boat in the morning?” I asked him. “Before lunchtime, even?”

“I was excited,” Ollie said. “The minute we got to the lake Swift and me took the Donzi out.”

“But it was still dark when you left home. You would have gotten to Lake Tahoe pretty early,” I said, doing the math in my head. Ten o'clock, maybe. If they stopped for breakfast, eleven at the latest.

“We didn't stop for breakfast. Monkey Man and me had a banana in the car on the way to the lake.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “You mean you spent all morning driving the boat around the lake? And the afternoon too?” I was confused. It had been almost six when the 911 call came in from Swift's boat.

Oliver was looking uncomfortable now. He started playing with the saltshaker, pouring little piles of salt on the diner table and driving the pepper shaker through them. It was the kind of thing he used to do when he was four or five—the kind of thing he'd done during his guardian
ad litem
interviews—and the fact that he was doing it now signaled that Ollie had reached his limit with the current conversation, for the time being, anyway.

Once we were back on the road, I couldn't stop thinking about what Ollie had said—that he and Swift had taken the boat out before lunchtime. It didn't make sense. I knew he didn't want to talk about it anymore, but I was still trying to understand. I started in again.

“I don't get it, Ollie,” I said. “It was still morning when you and Monkey Man got to the lake. But the emergency rescue guys said it was six o'clock when they got the call about the accident. What were you and Monkey Man doing all day? You had to have been driving for hours and hours.”

Up until now, Ollie hadn't said anything about his day with Swift or their time together at the lake. But suddenly the words exploded out of him.

“We only drove the boat a couple of minutes,” Ollie said. “Then we crashed, and after that we didn't drive anymore.”

“But it was starting to get dark when the rescue guys got there.”

Elliot and I enchanged glances. From where I sat in the front, I could see Ollie, in the seat behind us, examining the tread on his sneaker.

“I hate that boat,” Ollie said, yelling now. “I never want to ride on any more boats.”

He put his hands on his ears. He started to sing. Not real singing. Just yelling out notes.
Blah blah blah blah blah.

“I know you don't want to talk about this, Ollie,” I said. “But I need to know. What went on all that time, between going out on the boat and when the rescue guys showed up?”

I had been looking at my son's face in the rearview mirror, but now I turned around to face him, belted into a corner of the backseat of Elliot's car, huddled under the blanket. “What were you doing all that time?” I said.

Ollie put his hands over his ears. “I wish I never went on that dumb boat ride,” he said. “That's when everything went crazy.”

“You can tell me what happened,” I said. “Whatever it is, it's okay.”

“She just kept lying there,” he said, so softly I could just barely hear.
“Her eyes were open and there was blood coming out of her.” Finally, then, he started to cry.

Elliot pulled over by the side of the highway. I got out of the front seat and into the back, where I could put my arms around my son and hold him.

It was a couple of minutes before Oliver calmed down enough to speak again, and when he did, his voice was different, a whisper. Almost as if he was afraid someone other than the two of us might hear.

“Monkey Man said we needed to rest,” Ollie began. “Cooper was throwing up, and doing all this stupid stuff like singing ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,' only he kept getting the numbers wrong. He said twenty-seven bottles. Then he said forty-two bottles. Then he was back to ninety-nine again. He sounded crazy.”

“What about Monkey Man?” I asked him. “What was he doing?”

“Monkey Man was making Cooper drink all this water. Monkey Man kept telling him to drink more water and rest.”

“You mean, you were taking a rest
before
the crash happened? Cooper was drinking this water and you were having your rest, and then the crash happened?”

Ollie shook his head. “The crash happened first. We were supposed to rest after. We rested a long time. Monkey Man kept saying we had to wait for the girl to wake up, only she didn't. She was looking funny, and she wasn't moving, and Monkey Man kept making Cooper drink more water, but he was acting like an idiot.”

I looked at Elliot. He didn't know the story yet—neither did I, really—but he had gathered enough to know this was a far cry from Swift's version.

“I was really hungry. I fell asleep. After a long time, Cooper wasn't acting crazy any more and Monkey Man said we could call some people to come get us.”

Once again, I looked over at Elliot. He wasn't the type to take his eyes off the road, but his face said everything.

“The girl still didn't wake up. She still looked funny.”

“Did you tell this to the police?” I asked Ollie. “The part about taking the rest, and the girl? The part about drinking all the water?”

Ollie shook his head. He was studying a piece of thread on the blanket, twirling it between his fingers. “Monkey Man said not to tell that part,” he said. “He said everything would get messed up if I told.”

From where he sat next to me, Elliot reached over to take my hand. “It's going to be all right,” he said. “Thank God he let you know.”

I knew that tomorrow I'd have to call Officer Reynolds and tell him there was more he needed to know. As hard as this would be, I'd need to bring my son back to Lake Tahoe to speak with the police again. This time, Swift wouldn't be in the next room. Not then, or—I knew now—ever again.