Lightning People (31 page)

Passengers departing flight 361 from New York that Wednesday afternoon were witness to the strange sight of an obese, elderly Sikh wrapped in a powder-blue turban sobbing into the white V-neck T-shirt of a slim, young man. After five minutes, Raj crossed the street with his father who carried his two suitcases, and they left the airport headed north in a dented Oldsmobile Cutlass. If anyone could listen through the windows they would have heard sacred verses being read over the car speakers while the father and son sat staring forward in silence.

The hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib played on the car radio from the audiobook Sikh Scriptures Series: “Ye fear lions, jackals, and snakes; but they shall make their dwellings in your graves. Oxen shall root up your graves, and even your enemies' hatred of you shall cool. The sinners who have committed transgressions are bound and led away. Their luggage of sins is so heavy they cannot lift it.”

WILLIAM FOUND AN open spot on West Twelfth Street. He parallel-parked in front of a silver Lexus, which unleashed an electronic pit bull of sirens and honks when the blue Cressida accidentally tapped its bumper. The owner, leaning from a second-floor window, drew his keychain out and silenced the emergency. William waited until the quiet pooled around him again. Then he opened the door, climbed out with his bags strapped around his neck, and delicately pressed the door shut. He tried to act casual, a loose pace, hands in pockets, but he glanced anxiously at the hood, assessing the work that a garage in New Jersey had performed on hammering out the dent and touching up the scratches for three hundred dollars in cash. In the sunlight, the area of impact looked cleaner and bluer than the rest of the hood.

Now the future came down to gestures: he'd walk in, hope Quinn wasn't home, write a quick thank-you note, and get as far away from the Cressida as possible. It had been five days since the accident, and, sick with desperation, William figured it was best to return the car to its owner, disappear into the normal routine of New York as if he had never left, and try for a second escape plan as soon as he
found more money. The thought of pouring gasoline over the car and letting it bonfire in an abandoned lot had flashed through William's mind more than once, but cars on fire in New Jersey were about as suspicious as guns wrapped in towels in the East River. Anyway, how would he explain no car to Quinn? One thing had been certain: waiting around in a motel room in the far shadows of the city wasn't helping.
Whatever comes, come now.
There was no more waiting to be done.

He used the spare keys to unlock the doors to the garden. Finding no light trailing through the cottage windows, he entered cautiously. Fruit flies buzzed over unwashed dishes in the sink, dirty clothes covered the floor, and ripped envelopes littered the desk. Quinn might not have been devout in his cleanliness, but he was neat, the way anyone who lives in a tiny tinderbox learns to be, so the state of the apartment set off a nervous jolt of panic. William threw his bags on the sofa and walked into the bathroom where more gnats floated dead in the yellow toilet water. He opened the medicine cabinet and flipped through the prescription bottles—multivitamins, herbal immune system boosters, iron and zinc tablets, Emtriva and Viread (both marked experimental), Valtrex, Viagra, Xenical, drugs with names like undiscovered planets that once sounded like the future but now reeked of terminal illness. He finally found the Klonopin stashed behind an ancient bottle of Brut, shook out two pills in his palm, popped them in his mouth, and scooped water from the faucet to push them down. He breathed hard as he waited for the medication to take its effect, carrying him over into a lighter, fragile world.

William stood so long staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror that when he heard Quinn open the front door, he wasn't sure if minutes or an hour had passed. The door hinges squealed out of tune, and house keys clattered on the desk. Then he heard
William?
—uncertain, distrustful, like the name of someone who wasn't supposed to be there. William practiced an easy smile in the mirror before he fixed his hair, slicking it back with wet hands, and walked out into the living room.

The pills were supposed to make all movement easier, but they only worked properly when situations were already easy, and instead
William felt like he was walking too slowly, so he jerked his legs forward to overcompensate. Quinn, zipped in a red nylon windbreaker, spun around and stiffened at the sight of him. His hands darted into his windbreaker pockets, and his fingers pinched their inner linings.

“Ah, Quinn, my man,” William said, stepping forward in the first movements of a hug, but he only got a foot before he noticed Quinn's sleepless eyes and the deep wrinkles across his forehead. “Who'd you think it was?”

“You're back.” Flat as pavement.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “I hope I'm not interrupting. You don't have a young guy outside, do you?” The mention of a hustler should have sent Quinn into a spree of winks and complicit sexual innuendos, but he remained frozen, glaring at him. William wiped his mouth and continued laughing. He could laugh for days. He'd laugh until Quinn would start laughing along with him and then he‘d know he was safe.

But Quinn didn't so much as breathe, and William stopped laughing. He hadn't spoken to anyone he knew in five days and had hardly eaten, preferring the numbness of weed to food and water. Suddenly William missed the quiet indecision of the motel room.

“Guess I had to come back sometime.”

“I guess,” Quinn snorted.

“What's wrong?” He turned his eyes to the attention of the mail fanned out on the counter.

“You know what's wrong.”

“You saw the car outside.” William refused to look at him, slipping his finger across a Verizon bill on its third and final payment notice, hoping one last second for the leniency of a world that would work in his favor. Don't admit anything. Play dumb. Don't say a word.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Quinn replied.

“Then you know I'm back,” he sighed softly. “The Catskills were perfect. Did you know—”

“Cut it out,” Quinn said roughly, groping his nylon pockets before yanking his hands free to point one in his direction. “You know what I mean.”

“No. I don't.”

Quinn rummaged through the contents on his desk and pulled a newspaper from under a blanket of envelopes. Quinn turned the front page over and wiped it flat with his palm. Then he thrust it out in front of him, rattling the paper as if it would come alive and speak. It did. MEAN STREETS, ran the headline. In an instant, William read the aftermath of the freak accident in Tribeca and what price had been paid while he had kept driving away from the scene. He took a step back and grabbed the counter. He smiled, but the verdict was already swimming through his eyes. Dead. The woman had died right there on the street as she vanished in the rearview mirror. He had done that, or at least the car had. The victim hadn't just suffered broken bones or been knocked unconscious like William had imagined for all of those days hiding in the motel room. She had been killed, her whole life wiped out as he continued to speed away. He looked up at Quinn, hoping for him to contradict the report, because he couldn't accept what a split second of carelessness now made him. But Quinn's face didn't ease. He was not a murderer. Even with the fact spelled out right in front of him, William hated Quinn for suggesting that he was one. He filled his cheeks with air and blew.

Quinn brought the paper closer, shoving it against his face. “See that car,” he yelled. “That blue shape in the picture. Do you see it? That's my car. I can see the fucking bumper sticker, that little tab right there!” His finger jabbed the blur. “I noticed the paint job outside. You had it fixed. You hit her. You hit her, and you drove away in
my
car.”

Now that Quinn had gotten his accusation out, he backed away sheepishly, clenching the paper over his belly like it was in danger of being ripped to shreds. William shook his head, vowels muscling their way through his teeth, and he reached his arm out, but his balance was failing. He held himself against the counter. His knees gripped the cheap wood paneling of the sink. His fingernails dug into the cold metal basin. He had killed that woman. In one second she had been alive, and in the next she was dead. The realization kept returning, like he'd shielded the information off and it found
another way of penetrating. He had no way of dealing with that kind of news, and his whole body was struggling to adjust. If he didn't submit to it, if he didn't let it sink in, it still didn't need to be true.

“Don't lie to me. I don't know where the hell you've been for the last few days, but it wasn't upstate with friends.”

“You're wrong.”

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Quinn hissed. In their years of friendship, William had never seen Quinn angry, and he almost didn't recognize the tattered, swollen face now cracking in blood vessels. “How the hell could you just keep going? In
my
car.” Quinn mentioned his car again like that was the most gruesome detail in the entire situation.

William let go of the counter. His shoulders jerked as he let out a cry that had been building in his stomach since he had watched the city drift out of view on the turnpike. He took a step toward his friend's fat, rigid body, but Quinn lifted his arm to shield whatever he thought was coming for him, an embrace or a punch. William pushed past him and collapsed on the couch, snaking his fingers into the limp bundled fabric. For another second he clung to the lie, he even improvised a deer dazed by headlights on the highway, but Quinn was shaking his head right through it, staring pathetically down at him.

“Don't even try it.”

William dropped his head. He could grab his bags, race out the door, run north toward Fourteenth Street, and keep running. But Quinn would still be there, holding the newspaper, holding keys to a car dented and repaired.

“Okay,” William whimpered. “Fine. Yes.” Quinn moaned. He banged his fist on the top of the bureau, which sent a picture frame that was leaning against the wall to crash face down. Quinn carefully picked up the frame and then shook it at him—a photograph of his former self, young and blond, laughing with a muscular chest and a flat stomach on a beach in Fire Island, like that loss was William's fault too.

“It's sick. You hear me? Sick.”

“What do you think, that I meant to hit her?” William could
scream as loud as he wanted in the cottage. There were no next door neighbors, no eavesdroppers frozen just behind the walls with satellites for ears like there were everywhere else in New York. The strain of William's voice shouting his own defense strengthened him. “I didn't know what was happening. All of a sudden I was driving away. I drove like I wasn't even in the car. And then suddenly I was in the Holland Tunnel, and by the time I reached the other side it was too late to go back. You know I didn't mean to. Quinn, it was an accident.”

“It doesn't matter what you meant. That poor woman was killed, and you didn't bother to stop. Don't you feel an ounce of anything?”

William stared up, waiting for a sign of compassion to ease the corners of Quinn's eyes and mouth. William pumped all of the pleading and vulnerability he could into his face, hoping to catch any splinter of love that Quinn had felt in the years William had visited him. He waited as a minute went by, his eyes begging and insisting,
come on, find me in your heart
, but the coarse geography of Quinn's face refused to weaken. Quinn gazed down in disgust. That expression woke William up. Quinn wasn't going to forgive him.

“I didn't know she was dead. I figured a few broken bones. I'm not a murderer. It was an accident. I didn't even mean to drive away. How are you supposed to know what to do in a moment like that? How can you blame someone for an instinct?”

Quinn's jaw worked at grinding up his words before he spit them out. “How long do think it's going to be before the cops figure out what kind of make that car is? And how many blue Cressidas are registered in the city? And how many have a white bumper sticker, and how many of those just happen to have undergone a nice little patch-up job on the hood?” Quinn was shaking too. Suddenly William realized, with some degree of hope, that his friend also felt complicit, like his own innocence had been pulled out from under him. Quinn slumped down on the couch next to him, slapping away William's arm for the comfort of his own hands. “You really did it. You really did,” he repeated. “I was hoping it was a mistake, that I was embarrassing myself by even accusing you, that you'd come back and tell me I was crazy.”

“I'll fix it,” he whispered. He tried for a second time to put his arm around Quinn, who was staring in a daze out the window. “Quinn,” he begged. “I'm sorry. Please. It's still me. I'm like your son, and I'm in trouble. I'm asking you to help me.”

Quinn took those words with a dismissive hiss, but he accepted the arm that collected around his shoulder, and in another second William's mouth burrowed deep into his chest. He cried into the red windbreaker, releasing all of the guilt and fear that had wracked him for so many days in the motel room. He reached for Quinn's hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed the hairy knuckles, hoping those hands would help share the burden of saving him.

“You did a terrible thing.”

“I know.”

“But I'm going to help you. I told you I'd always be here for you and I won't break that promise now.”

“Thank you.” He pressed his face into Quinn's neck, smelling the chemical flowers of laundry detergent mixed with expired cologne. Quinn would save him. He was older and stronger and lived with death every day. He would protect him. William's eyes closed in relief. He could have fallen asleep in that tight embrace.