What You Have Left (7 page)

“Look at you,” Maddy said. “You're a natural.” For the first time all day, she seemed relaxed. She slipped her hand in his, swung her arm as they walked. Wylie stroked Holly's head and glanced up at the stars.
This
was how he'd always imagined life with a baby, he and Maddy exhausted but not defeated, pulling together.

They were nearing the end of the lane when they heard the crash. At first Wylie thought somebody had hit a deer, but
then there was another crash, and another. As they got closer to the highway, he could see in the moonlight a figure standing on the hood of the Fairlane, stomping the windshield. He wanted it to be some local kid, Bluff Road riffraff, but he recognized the Dart idling on the roadside. After one last stomp, Lester hopped down and grabbed what looked to be a crow-bar from his backseat. Wylie tried to pass the baby to Maddy, but she held on to his arm.

“Don't,” she whispered. “He's drunk off his ass.”

And then Lester began to whale on the Fairlane's fender. The first blow woke Holly, but Lester didn't hear her crying until he'd taken three or four more swings. Turning, he peered through the darkness, the crowbar cocked in his hand. Wylie took a step toward him.

“All right, Lester,” he called. “Better get on home now.”

For a moment Lester stood and stared, his shoulders heaving with each breath. Holly continued to howl. In the distance, headlights appeared, the rumble of a tractor trailer. Finally Lester reared back and flung the crowbar into the underbrush across the road. The Dart sprayed a rooster tail of gravel as he pulled away.

When his taillights faded, Wylie and Maddy walked over for a look at the Fairlane, saw what a number he'd done—all four tires knifed, the driver's seat shredded down to foam and springs, the windshield intact but caved in. Wylie picked up the
FOR SALE
sign, brushed it off, tossed it onto the seat. Once upon a time, he'd poured his heart and soul into that car. Now all he cared about, really, was how he'd get Lester to pay for the damage.

“Guess he changed his mind about the car,” Wylie said.

Maddy just shook her head like she'd been expecting this all along. Wylie thought she'd be more upset, but he saw
then that she'd let go, too, that whatever happened to the Fairlane now didn't much matter to her.

The next morning, when Wylie called the police, the dispatcher asked him to repeat Lester's name, said wait a minute, then came back on the line and informed him that Lester Hardin was already in custody. She asked Wylie to come down to the station to file his report. When he got there, he was greeted by a detective, an older man with puffy eyes and a dark suit that looked slept in. They knew each other from the dealership: the detective brought in his '68 Fastback GT for an oil change every two thousand miles on the nose. His office was as tidy as his car, a small, bright room with photos of his wife and daughter arranged on the windowsill. He pulled up a seat for Wylie. When Wylie asked what Lester was doing in jail, the detective took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and told him.

Shortly after he'd finished with Maddy's car, Lester had walked into the Richland County sheriff 's office and confessed to the first officer he saw, a young deputy at the front desk. Lester told him about the night he'd been home alone with Nat while Gladys was waiting tables at the Waffle House. They'd been having their usual fight before she left, and he was sick of hearing her complain about money, about his job at the car wash, about having to leave her baby four nights a week just so they could make ends meet. Lester spent the evening in front of the TV with a bottle of whiskey, listening to the baby cry and trying to decide what to do about his life. When he'd had enough of the noise, he went into the nursery and held Nat, muffling the baby's cries against his chest. All he was trying to do, he told the deputy,
was shut Nat up, get him to go to sleep. But the harder the baby cried, the harder Lester held him, and by the time he let go, Nat wasn't breathing. Lester then placed him facedown in the crib, and that's how Gladys found her baby when she got home. When he was done talking, Lester begged the deputy to shoot him.

At first, Wylie couldn't quite get his head around what he was hearing. It was so horrible, he thought Lester must have made it up. What was worse, every time he tried to make it real, every time he tried to picture Lester smothering his baby, what he saw instead was himself cramming that bottle into Holly's mouth. The two events ran together like water in his mind. For a moment
he
had an impulse to confess, if for no other reason than to hear the detective tell him he'd done nothing wrong. He sat quietly while the detective finished the story. He was saying that Lester finally confessed to Gladys last night, had actually gotten down on his knees and pleaded for forgiveness, at which point she'd told him she wished he were dead.

“Then she gave him a choice,” the detective said. “Turn himself in, or she'd do it for him.”

Wylie sat up straight, heard himself asking if Lester meant to kill the baby. The detective shrugged. “He says he didn't. Says it was an accident. We're just trying to find out what we can, which is why I wanted to hear about last night.” He pulled out a notepad and began asking questions about what happened with Lester and the Fairlane. Wylie had trouble concentrating. He had to force himself to make eye contact with the detective. Starting with the night Lester approached him at the track, he told everything he could remember, hoping he'd say something that would be of use. The anger he was feeling toward Lester went beyond what
he'd done to the Fairlane, beyond Nat's death even. A half hour later, as Wylie walked out of the station and into the morning glare, he wished the policeman had honored Lester's request and shot him on the spot.

Wylie had been planning to swing by Atlas and borrow a flatbed, then haul the Fairlane out to a buddy's junkyard in Irmo and sell it for parts, take whatever they'd give him. Now that seemed like more than he could manage. He stopped for a six-pack and pointed his car home, gunning the engine past the juke joints and matchbox houses along Bluff Road, slowing down only to look at the ruined shell of the Fairlane as he turned off the highway. Halfway between the farmhouse and the cottage, he pulled over and switched off the ignition, sat there drinking and staring across the field at the cows. One beer, two beers, three. He told himself he was working up the courage to tell Maddy about Lester, but mostly he was thinking about his father: his brooding, his shouting, the whistle of his belt. It occurred to Wylie that maybe his father had done him a favor, that maybe he'd left to keep from doing more harm.

After the fourth beer, Wylie slid the bottles under his seat and drove the rest of the way home. Maddy was out front with Holly and a fistful of Kleenex, sitting on the porch swing where she and Wylie used to spend evenings watching the sun set behind Cal's silos. She looked like she was done for. At first Wylie thought she'd already heard about Lester, but it wasn't that—just another morning of trying and failing to please Holly. He was barely out of the truck when Maddy thrust the baby into his arms.

“You take her,” she said. She blew her nose and began
telling him about Holly's latest fit, how she'd tried feeding her on one side and then the other, but nothing was good enough. “She's not even a week old and she already hates me.” Maddy was so worked up, she didn't ask Wylie about his visit to the police station until they were inside. When he told her about Lester, she covered her mouth, shook her head as if it weren't true. “Poor Nat!” she said. “Poor Nat! Poor little baby!” That got Holly going again, and if it hadn't been for the four beers cushioning him from all the crying and misery, Wylie thought he might have started bawling himself.

Later, though, when Maddy had gotten past the shock of it, she told him she was actually relieved. “When it was a baby dying in his sleep, that was even worse,” she said. “That could happen to anyone.”

They were sitting on the floor with Holly between them on a blanket. Wylie lifted her up and blew a raspberry on her stomach but stopped when he noticed Maddy watching him. He thought she was about to accuse him of smelling like beer. “You know, if it weren't for you,” she said, “he might never have confessed. Seeing you must have done it, made him realize what he'd done. Otherwise, why would he bust up our car on his way to the police?”

Wylie stood and carried Holly to the window. He thought about the Fairlane, imagined Lester plunging a knife into its tires, stomping the windshield. He had to admit, he liked the idea of being the one who'd pushed him over the edge. He liked the idea of Lester wishing he were in his shoes. But for all he knew, the only things separating him from Lester were circumstance and a little luck, and he was surprised Maddy didn't see it this way, too.

Maddy got up and went into the bathroom, asked Wylie from behind the door to check Holly's diaper. The toilet
flushed, and then she said, “What I don't get is, how could Gladys not have known? She lived with the guy. She was married to him.” Wylie unpinned Holly's diaper, saw that it was clean, and refastened it. When Maddy turned on the faucet, he picked up a small blue pillow from the rocking chair. Holly was kicking as he held it above her face. He tried to imagine lowering the pillow, pressing down, but he couldn't do it, not even for a second—as if that proved anything. But who was to say? Maybe Maddy was right. Maybe she saw something in Wylie he couldn't yet see in himself. He pulled the pillow away and whispered, “Peekaboo,” trying to make a game of it. He figured Holly would start crying then, but she just lay there, blinking. That was what really got him: she didn't even have the sense to be afraid.

“Not that I blame Gladys,” Maddy was saying. “Besides, she really needs me now. I was thinking I'd go see her tomorrow, if you'd drive me over.” She shut off the water. “Are you listening?”

Wylie leaned over and kissed Holly on the tip of her nose. When he stood up, the room spun a little. He had time to set the pillow aside as Maddy came out of the bathroom, but he kept on holding it, and then he felt her behind him in the doorway, probably leaning there with her arms crossed, wondering why he was standing over their baby with a pillow. “I'm listening,” he said.

 

Holly thinks she can drive as fast as she wants without getting busted. The secret, she says, is whiskey. Drinking lets her believe she's invisible, ergo, she is. “Two cops on the median and me doing ninety,” she told me after the first time she ran off. “They nailed the guy in front of me
and
the guy behind me.”

That's the story I couldn't get out of my head when she went AWOL again. I figured the next time I saw her, she'd be behind bars, or in the hospital, or laid out on a steel table. But somehow, after three days on the road, she makes it back to my apartment in one piece. It's a Saturday morning, early November, and she's knocking softly at my door, like she doesn't want to wake me but if she has to, she will. At first I just lie there on the sofa, making her wait, making her sweat a little of what I've been sweating. She's supposed to be deciding whether she'll marry me—I asked her a month ago—but instead she's been off looking for her father again. Suddenly, after years of
to hell with him,
finding Wylie is the most important thing in the world—more important than school, more important than the farm, more important than us.

When I open the door, she sinks into me, holding on for dear life, and even though I'd like to wring her neck for running off without so much as a good-bye, it's all I can do not to drag her back to my bed like a lovesick caveman. Wanting her that bad makes me feel like a fool. “Well?” I say. “Did you get your joyous reunion?”

That gets the faucets going, a whole river of tears, but it turns out I'm not the reason she's crying. In between sobs, Holly asks me to drive her to the police station. “I have to turn myself in,” she says. “I think I hit somebody.” It takes her a minute to calm down enough to tell me what happened, then the words whoosh out of her like air from a slit tire. She says she finally tracked her father to a garage in Camden, only the other mechanic told her Wylie hadn't been showing up for work. That could have been the truth, or it could have been a story, and she was still trying to decide if she should stay or go as she put the truck in gear. She didn't see the mechanic stepping from between the pumps until it was too late. She swerved. There was a thump. “Maybe it wasn't him,” she says. “Maybe it was just the curb.” What she doesn't mention, of course, is that she was too plastered to know what happened. She'd probably been there since dawn, sitting in her pickup sipping Lord Calvert as she waited for the garage to open, working up the courage to look her old man in the eye for the first time in fifteen years.

“You think he got your license plate?”

She shrugs, wipes her eyes.

“Was anybody else around?”

She shrugs again, and that's when I realize she doesn't really want to turn herself in. But she wants it to be
my
decision not to go to the police—my problem—and pathetic
as it sounds, that's all right by me. At least I'm still the one she turns to when she's in trouble.

“Relax. He probably didn't even see you,” I say, “on account of your being invisible.”

I've been feeling invisible myself ever since I proposed to Holly. After a week of seeing the engagement ring atop the dresser, untouched, I concluded that she didn't want to get married but wouldn't come out and say so because she wasn't ready to lose me altogether. When I tried to reassure her—when I told her that, married or not, I wasn't going anywhere—she asked why, then, had I bothered proposing?

I'd been saving for the ring all summer. I was working for Cal, fixing up the farmhouse Holly would inherit, the one she hasn't set foot in since the day we put her grandfather in the ground. Last fall, when he realized he was sick, he hired me to get the place in shape for her. She'd just started her sophomore year at Carolina and was living on campus, but she moved back to the farm in the spring, after Cal was diagnosed. Like his father, his uncle, and his grandfather, he had Alzheimer's, but unlike them, he wasn't willing to sit around waiting for his brain to go soft. Two days after we finished painting the house—the last of our projects—he took the pills. Holly had seen it coming and thought she'd talked him out of it, but then, just like that, Cal was gone.