Long Drive Home (2 page)

At the risk of offering too tidy an explanation, it was the kind of thing that makes you appreciate waking up every morning, but also the kind of thing that can make you edgy just driving to the store for a gallon of milk, or watching a lead-foot cop run a light.

Three years later, after we’d paid twice as much for a house in South Orange that was half as big as the one we’d left in Cleveland, the driver of the moving truck, taking a smoke break behind the semi trailer, warned me about Jersey drivers. The lowest of the low, he called them. He was from the city, he said, and therefore in a position to know.

I remember thinking, oh please. I’d heard the jokes about New Jersey and frankly didn’t believe motorists in one place were any worse than in another. The next few weeks changed my mind, though. I’d never seen so much hostile, reckless, flat-out incompetent driving. Running the gauntlet to and from Sara’s school—twenty-five minutes each way, twice a day, part of the price we paid to send her to a crunchy private school—I’d pass the time tallying infractions and coming up with theories to explain it all. Maybe New Jersey, with its sky-high taxes and neglected roads, simply had more pissed-off drivers than other states. Or maybe New Jerseyans, with their second-highest-percapita income, felt traffic rules were beneath them. Maybe, living in the shadow of New York City, they suffered a collective inferiority complex that found its outlet on the road. Maybe the police were to blame, for letting them get away with anything they pleased. Or maybe it was our politicians, for being so corrupt that nobody respected the law anymore.

Obviously, I got carried away. Maybe even a little obsessed. Too much time in the car can do that.

The officer didn’t notice me flipping him off, or if he did, he didn’t care.

“What are you doing?” Sara said.

“Nothing,” I told her. “Waving to the policeman.”

The patrol car was already a block away.

“The light’s green,” she said.

A black Suburban in the oncoming lane was turning left in front of us, a tricked-out model with four wheels in back instead of two. Halfway through its turn it stopped, blocking our path. I thought the driver must be lost, or having second thoughts about turning, or car trouble. I couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows. It wasn’t until he came around the tailgate with his middle finger up, glaring out from under a Yankees cap, that everything clicked into place.

“Yo,” he said. “You giving me the finger?”

He was a big guy, maybe thirty, with a green Puma track suit and bloodshot eyes. Stoned, probably. He also happened to be black, which wouldn’t matter except that Juwan was too, and I’ve always wondered, as much as it shames me, if that was a factor in what happened later.

I held up my palms to show him I’d meant no harm. “The cop,” I said, “not you.”

He glanced over his shoulder, unimpressed; the cruiser was long gone.

Common sense kicked in. I locked the doors. But before I could get the window up, he was sticking his finger in my face.

“Apologize, bitch.”

I stared straight ahead and took a deep breath, arms spring-loaded, ready to put the car in reverse. My teeth were clenched so hard they hurt.

“Dad?” Sara said.

“It’s okay, honey. Just a misunderstanding.”

The guy lowered his finger—yes, I thought, thank you, there’s a
child
in the car—but then he unzipped his jacket. I didn’t have to turn to see the pistol in his waistband. The dark grip stood out against the white of his T-shirt. The gun rose and fell with his breathing. By now traffic was weaving around us. Someone started honking.

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” he said.

I told him I was sorry.

“Can’t hear you.”

“I’m
sorry.
”

He laughed. “You got that right.”

As I watched him drive off, my legs were shaking so much I could barely keep my foot on the brake. What kind of psychopath flashes a gun with a kid around? I wished I’d closed the window on his arm and dragged him, pushed him into traffic with my door, grabbed for the gun and fired it down his pants. Instead, I’d sat there apologizing.

I turned down the side street and went after him, fumbling for my phone. I had an idea that I’d follow him until the police caught up. If he saw us before then and stopped, I’d run him down. I’d tell the police it was self-defense.

“Dad,” Sara said. “What’s happening? Where are we going?”

And just like that, I snapped out of it. I pulled over as the Suburban rounded a corner up ahead and told Sara not to worry, everything was fine. I couldn’t stand seeing her afraid.

“Can we go home now?”

“Soon, honey. I just have to make a call.”

It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk dialing 911 that it hit me: I hadn’t gotten the license plate. By then I had no hope of catching up with him. I could have filed a report anyway, but I knew no cop was going to drive around looking for a random black Suburban. And what if they sent the officer I’d just seen?

So that’s the frame of mind I was in the first time Juwan Richards almost killed us. Sara must have known I was upset, because she didn’t say a word until we were almost home. She was eating grapes left over from lunch. I could feel her watching me.

“Still awake back there?” I said, cheerfully as I could.

“Dad? Why’d that man show you his finger?”

I told her it was just a way of telling somebody you’re angry.

“But why was he so angry?”

“He was angry at
me,
” I said, “because he thought I was angry at
him.
Isn’t that strange?”

“He went like
this
!” she said, raising her finger and screwing up her face.

At least Liz wasn’t there. Telling her what happened was going to be bad enough. She’d want the guy locked up, immediately, and if it took the whole sheriff’s department to bring him in, so be it.

I was putting my window down for some fresh air, thinking maybe I wouldn’t mention the gun, when I noticed the convertible in the opposite lane, a Jaguar with its top down. It was accelerating so fast I could hear it coming. Behind the convertible was a police safety checkpoint. Officers were standing in the middle of South Orange Avenue, directing some cars into a lane marked off by neon cones, letting others pass. A couple of cones had been knocked over, and it occurred to me that the convertible might be trying to dodge the police. I started to make the turn into our neighborhood, half looking for signs of a chase, when the convertible turned onto Kingsley too, veering across three lanes of traffic and cutting us off. There was nowhere for me to go. I stood on the brake so hard I came up out of my seat. My sunglasses hit the windshield. Sara cried out as her seat belt locked across her chest. The kid driving the Jaguar—that was my first glimpse of Juwan—didn’t so much as turn his head. He was steering with one hand and holding his phone walkie-talkie style with the other. I don’t think he ever saw us.

Even as I watched the convertible make another quick turn at the end of the block, I couldn’t believe we’d missed each other. It was that close. My heartbeat was pounding in my ears. The stop had thrown me back against the seat,
but I still felt like I was pitching forward. I managed to turn around and ask Sara if she was all right. She nodded through a curtain of wavy blond hair, but she was crying and rubbing her shoulder.

“My grapes,” she said.

They were all over her lap, the floor, even the dash.

The second time Juwan almost killed us came less than a minute later. At that point, I was feeling like I’d been shot out of a cannon and wasn’t coming down anytime soon. “Is this the craziest drive ever, or what?” I was saying, trying to downplay it for Sara, take her mind off her shoulder. I wanted to get us home. In the time it took to reach our street, though, Juwan had made a loop through the neighborhood, and suddenly there he was again, headed toward us. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone driving so fast on our street. We lived in a sleepy little enclave of shady lanes and tidy 1920s-era homes, a neighborhood so quiet that the local driving schools routinely used it for lessons, the kind of place where you felt okay letting your first-grader ride her bike around the block alone. And here was this joker, practically flying. You son of a bitch, I thought. And then, instead of laying on the horn or just letting him pass, I lashed out. It was instinct, more a reaction than a decision. I cut the wheel to the left—as if I were going to turn in front of him into our driveway—then back to the right, to get out of the way.

I was trying to give him a scare, slow him down, teach him a lesson. I figured at worst he’d slam on the brakes. Instead, he swerved into
our
lane, like he meant to squeeze past us on the other side. But since we were still there, not actually turning, he kept swerving—until his front tire caught the curb. The rest happened in a blink. His back end came around, the car went up on two wheels, and just like that it was rolling side over side, coming right at us.

_______

Later, you told me it happened too fast for you to be scared. I had enough time to be scared but not enough to appreciate what a mistake I’d made. That didn’t sink in until afterwards. Even now, more than two years later, I can hardly admit it to myself, the danger I put you in. Sometimes I look at you and it comes back to me like a sharp blow to the chest.

_______

I was twisted around in my seat. Sara was looking at me and saying something, but the sound of the car hitting the tree was still in my ears. Turns out that’s what had saved us, one of the big sycamores along the curb. Sara had to say it again: “Dad, you’re squeezing me.” I
was
squeezing her. I had her by the wrist. When it had seemed the car would end up on top of us, I’d reached for her in the backseat, as if there were a thing in the world I could have done.

Now I let go, thinking
thank God
but also
oh my God.
Sara wiped her eyes and looked at the convertible lying upside down in our neighbor Clarice’s yard. The soft top had come loose, its fabric and metal frame sticking out from under the car like a broken wing. There were silvery hollows where the headlights had been.

“He knocked down the gaslight,” she said.

I watched the sagging windshield for any sign of the driver. Only when I spotted an orange sneaker next to the car did it hit me, the fact that I actually might have killed someone. And even as the thought flashed through my head, I couldn’t believe it. The idea that my actions could have caused the death of another human being was even more preposterous than the idea of somebody walking away from that wreck alive. I told Sara to stay in the car.

“No,” she said, tugging at her seat belt. “Wait.”

Before I could decide what to do, Clarice was next to our car, frantic in her blue bathrobe, saying something about a boy lying in her yard. I didn’t see a boy, but I saw the phone in her hand and understood the police would be there soon. My first impulse was to drive away. The car was still running, still in gear; if only she hadn’t been there, all I would have needed to do was lift my foot off the brake.

“Clarice,” I said, getting Sara out of the car. “Can you watch Sara?”

I hardly knew Clarice—she was some kind of professor at Seton Hall, or retired professor, and seemed never to get dressed—but she gave a quick nod and put an arm around
Sara. I told Sara not to worry, I’d be right back. By then our mail carrier and a guy in gray sweats with a little dog were coming across the street. They were both on their phones too. They stopped short of the convertible, and when I came around the tree, I saw why. There was a body on the lawn between them—facedown, elbows out, legs crossed at the ankles. It took me a moment to realize it was the driver, that he’d been thrown from the car and not hit by it. He wore a plaid flannel shirt over a brown hooded sweatshirt, loose jeans, argyle socks. One orange sneaker was missing. The dog walker was telling the mail carrier not to touch him, his neck might be broken.

“Is he dead?” I said.

“Don’t know,” the mail carrier said.

The guy in sweats shifted his dog, a Yorkie, from one arm to the other, juggling his phone. “They want to know if he’s breathing.”

The mail carrier got down on all fours. Juwan’s head was cocked at a funny angle, and the shape of it was all wrong, with a dent on one side and a bulge on the other. A thin line of blood was coming out of his ear.

“Can’t tell,” the mail carrier said. “Maybe we should turn him over.”

“Are you crazy?” the dog walker said.

Juwan’s blood was dripping into the grass. I stepped back onto Clarice’s driveway, dizzy and breathless. The Halloween skeleton on her front door clattered in the breeze. Across the street in our yard, Sara was holding Clarice’s
hand and eating a candy bar, looking shell-shocked. I figured she must have picked it up off the ground, which I now saw was littered with debris from the Jaguar—sunglasses, empty water bottles, spiral notebooks, CDs sparkling in the sun. I shouted for her to drop it. She stopped chewing and stared at me.

“What I want to know,” the dog walker said, “is what a kid like that is doing with a Jag.”

“Wait,” the mail carrier said. “I think I got a pulse.”

Seeing his fingers on Juwan’s wrist, I made the mistake of letting myself believe he might make it. The dog walker relayed the news into his phone, then corrected the dispatcher: “No, no. I said
maybe
a pulse.” His dog started to bark. Across the street, Sara was holding the candy bar halfway to her mouth, still trying to figure out what my problem was.

A police car got there first, then an ambulance from the village rescue squad. Hearing the sirens made me want to run, but I stayed where I was until an officer told us to make way for the EMTs. One of them was carrying a duffel bag and a long yellow board with straps and buckles dangling from it. The other one, who didn’t look much older than Juwan, asked if anyone had moved the body.