Long Drive Home (3 page)

“No way,” the dog walker said.

We stood back as she clapped her hands over the body. “Hello in there,” she said. “Anybody home?”

Two more squad cars were coming down the street, lights and sirens going. Sara had her hands over her ears. The older EMT fitted Juwan with a neck brace while the woman held a stethoscope to his back.

“Nothing,” she said. “Let’s roll him.”

She put a hand on either side of his head and counted to three; her partner took him by the thigh and shoulder. As they turned him onto the board, I caught a glimpse of his face. I wished I hadn’t. There were raccoon bruises around his eyes; clear liquid was leaking from his nose. The older EMT, immobilizing Juwan’s head with foam pads, said something about a skull fracture. The woman got a tube in Juwan’s mouth, attached a bag, and started squeezing. Juwan’s chest rose and fell, as if he were only sleeping.

She’d just switched over to pushing on his chest when another ambulance arrived, this one with two paramedics from the hospital. They called off the EMTs, cut Juwan’s shirt open, and hooked him up to a monitor with wires they attached to his chest.

“Okay, sir,” a tall officer said to me. “I need you over there.”

The dog walker and mail carrier had already joined a group of neighbors in front of our house. I started down Clarice’s driveway but looked back as I reached the street. One of the paramedics was peeling off his rubber gloves. The other was saying something into a radio on his shoulder. He checked his watch, disconnected the bag from Juwan’s mouth, and pulled the wires off his chest. By the time
I understood what was happening, they were already covering him with a sheet.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “He just had a pulse.”

The paramedics weren’t happy about the way things had turned out, either. The one with the radio gave me a hard look as he closed a kit full of folding plastic shelves. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said. “He was already dead.”

I looked around to see if I was the only one who hadn’t lost his mind. The EMTs were no help. Neither was the mail carrier. A hand came to rest on my shoulder. It was the policeman again.

“All right now,” he said.

His voice was gentle, as if he were trying to talk me down from a rooftop. I could feel the other cops watching me too, and I wanted to cooperate, but my feet wouldn’t move, so I just stood there staring at Juwan. Under the sheet, he somehow seemed smaller. It could have been anybody under there. It could have been Sara.

The officer escorted me halfway across the street, then turned me loose and stood there to make sure I kept going. Sara wasn’t in front of the house anymore. I knew she was with Clarice, but I didn’t like not knowing where. A fire truck had arrived, and the firefighters were checking out the Jaguar and the downed gaslight. The police had barricaded each end of the block with flares and a cruiser. On the sidewalk in front of our house, a sergeant was asking for eyewitnesses. The gun on his belt made the Suburban guy’s look like a toy.

“Here’s your man,” the dog walker said.

The sergeant looked up at me from a metal box that doubled as a clipboard. “You saw it?”

My mind went blank. I was afraid to speak. I remember telling myself people didn’t go to prison for accidents. Then again, just because I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone didn’t mean what I’d done was accidental.

“That’s my car,” I said. “He almost hit us.”

The sergeant didn’t need details. He took down some information from my driver’s license and told me to stick around until the detectives got there.

“Can I wait inside?” I said. “I live here.”

“Fine by me.”

Another officer was calling to him from across the street. As he turned to go, a few of the neighbors asked me what happened. I wanted to tell them it was all the kid’s fault—he’d gone and gotten himself killed—but I was sure they’d see through me as soon as I opened my mouth.

“Drinking, probably,” the mail carrier said. He nodded toward the officer who’d called out to the sergeant; he was holding what looked like a pint bottle.

Clarice had taken Sara around back to the swing set. When I found them there, she ran to me, asking if the boy had died.

“I didn’t know what to tell her,” Clarice said.

I explained that he was already dead when the doctors got there.

“Was it our fault?” she said. “Did we make him crash?”

The question almost stopped my heart. “Of course not.”

Clarice gave me a sympathetic look and asked if Sara could have another candy bar. The pocket of her bathrobe was bulging with them.

“Can I?” Sara said.

I was so relieved by that look of Clarice’s, I would have let Sara eat them all. “Sure,” I said, wanting to get her into the house before she talked to anyone else. “But then we need to call Mom.”

We didn’t make it, though. The sergeant was coming up the driveway with three other men. “Here you are,” he said. “We’ve been ringing the bell out front.” He introduced a traffic investigator and two detectives, Johnson from the village police department and Rizzo from the county prosecutor’s office. Glancing at their badges, I had no hope of their believing anything I might say. This is it, I thought. It’s over.

Rizzo said they’d need me to stop by the station to give a full statement later on, once they were done working the scene. “For now, could you just show us what happened?”

I steadied my hands on Sara’s shoulders and stared at the crooked part I’d combed into her hair that morning, willing her to keep quiet. “Sure. I was about to take my daughter inside.”

“I want to stay,” Sara said.

Rizzo squatted down to her level. He had close-cropped, wiry hair that almost matched his charcoal suit. “What’s your name, young lady?”

She mumbled around the candy bar.

“I’m glad to meet you, Sara,” he said. “Would it be all right if we borrow your dad for five minutes?” He took off his wristwatch and handed it to her.

Sara held the thick, gold band, stared at the dial. She didn’t know how to tell time, but I knew she wouldn’t tell Rizzo that. “Okay.”

I let her into the house, then followed Rizzo back down the driveway, where the traffic investigator was asking Clarice if she was the property owner. She cinched her bathrobe.

“If you mean is that my house, yes, it is,” she said.

The police had cleared the street, moving everyone behind the barricades. Two TV news trucks were parked there too.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Rizzo said.

I tried to imagine how the accident might have looked from where we were standing, whether it would have been clear what I’d done. Not that telling the truth crossed my mind, though—not so long as Sara and I were the only ones who’d seen what happened.

I kept my explanation short. I didn’t mention the first time we’d seen Juwan, over on Kingsley, because I didn’t want them thinking I might have had it in for him. I just said we’d been on the way home from school and indicated
which direction I’d been coming from, where I’d turned, where I stopped when I saw the convertible. I explained how the car had hit the curb and started to roll.

“It was like a football,” I said. “You couldn’t tell which way it was going to bounce.”

“Any idea why he lost control?” Rizzo said.

I shook my head. My throat was so dry I was having trouble talking. Someone had apparently pointed me out to one of the reporters. From behind the barricade, she tried calling me over. A guy with a big camera on his shoulder was standing next to her. Sara was at the window, holding Rizzo’s watch. I held up a finger to let her know we were almost done, then asked the detectives when I should come to the station. Rizzo said from the look of things it would be two or three hours, minimum.

“Meanwhile,” he said, nodding toward the news trucks, “I’d steer clear of them.”

I needed to find out how much Sara knew. We gave Rizzo his watch back, then went up to her room and opened the window so we could hear what was going on.

“See how the detectives are taking pictures?” I said, sitting next to her on the bed. “They’re trying to figure out why he crashed.”

“I feel bad for the boy,” she said, “but I also feel bad for the tree. Trees are living things, too.”

From up there, the damage to the tree didn’t look so bad. A few scrapes and gouges. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Not the boy, though.”

“No,” I said, wishing they’d hurry up and take him away. Then I asked Sara why she’d thought the crash was our fault.

“I didn’t. I just wasn’t sure.”

“He was probably drunk. That’s why a lot of crashes happen.”

She nodded. She knew about being drunk from an episode of
Little House on the Prairie
we had on DVD—the terrible things it could make a person do. She was rubbing her shoulder. I pushed up her sleeve to see if the seat belt had left a bruise.

“Do you think I did anything wrong?” I said.

“Like what?”

Our cat, Chairman Meow, had jumped onto the windowsill. I reached over to scratch his chin. I didn’t want to put ideas into her head.

“I bet he was drunk
and
on the phone,” she said. “Mom says talking on the phone when you’re driving is against the law.”

“We should call her.” I went ahead and dialed Liz. I told her there had been an accident on our street, that the driver was dead, that I had to give a statement at the police station and probably wouldn’t be able to meet her train.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Sara saw somebody
die
?”

I had to talk her out of coming straight home.

“Can I at least speak to her?” she said. I handed Sara the phone. Three times Liz asked how she was doing, and three times Sara said she was fine. Then Liz asked her to put me back on. “Is she really all right?”

The medical examiner’s van was at the curb, waiting. When the detectives finished photographing Juwan and using a tape measure to mark his location, they helped the examiner zip him into a bag.

“How is he going to breathe in there?” Sara said.

“He can’t breathe, sweetie, remember? He died.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Then she asked where they were taking him, and I tried to explain what a morgue was. Meanwhile, the traffic investigator was going door to door, looking for witnesses. Rizzo brought out his camera again. Down by the barricade, the dog walker was giving an interview. Sara left the room and came back holding a box of Band-Aids.

“Are you bleeding?” I said.

“They’re not for me. They’re for the tree.”

“I told you, the tree’s fine.”

I opened the curtains wider. Rizzo had started taking pictures of our car, and it made me nervous to think he considered it part of the accident scene. Sara asked if she could go over. I said no. She asked if I’d take her. I said maybe later. She said she was going now.

“Please, sweetie,” I said, “I’m busy here.”

Then suddenly she was crying, saying I didn’t care about her or the tree. I should have been paying more attention to her.

“Look,” I said, pulling her onto my lap. “Those Band-Aids aren’t going to do the trick, okay? What we need is some gauze.” I promised her we’d bandage the tree later, after the police were gone. I turned back to the street. I’d thought Rizzo was done with our car, but now I saw him in our yard, getting it from another angle.

Not long after they took Juwan away, Detective Johnson, the one from the village police, left in a patrol car with a uniformed officer. It was starting to get dark. The police brought out generator-powered floodlights that lit up the whole street. I turned off the bedroom light. Sara was watching TV, which was keeping her occupied enough that I could stay at the window, waiting to see if they found any witnesses. Our neighborhood was mostly commuters who didn’t get home until seven or later, but there were a fair number of stay-at-homers and work-at-homers, not to mention the nannies and kids and yard crews who were usually around in the afternoon. It was hard to believe nobody had seen what happened.

Rizzo and the traffic investigator bagged the last of the debris from Clarice’s yard. Things were starting to wind
down. A tow truck was waiting at the corner. The sergeant came to the door and asked me to move the station wagon. I pulled into our driveway and watched as they turned the convertible over and winched it to the truck. Then the sergeant had his men take down the barricades. Rizzo said they’d be ready for my statement as soon as Johnson got back from notifying the family. Up until then, I’d managed not to think about Juwan’s parents. Now it was starting to sink in, the fact that he wasn’t just some anonymous punk. I didn’t think I could go through with the statement.

I told Rizzo I was supposed to meet my wife’s train and asked if I could come to the station some other time.

He shook his head.

“What about in the morning?”

He said no, they’d be at the morgue. “We have to get somebody from the family down there to ID the body.”

I must not have looked so good.

“They don’t see the actual body,” Rizzo said. “We just show them a Polaroid.”

It was barely a mile to the station. I stayed under the speed limit the whole way, in no hurry to get there. The car felt unfamiliar, like when it comes back from the shop and the side mirror is wrong, the seat is too far back, the radio is tuned to someone else’s station. An officer named Carla introduced herself to Sara and took her into the break room
for ice cream while the sergeant led me to a desk where Rizzo was waiting with Johnson, who looked like he was ready to call it a day. I thought about how it must have been, telling Juwan’s parents. I’d heard they bring along a priest—you know why they’re there as soon as you open the door. Johnson explained that Rizzo would be taking my statement while he typed it up. He offered me a glass of water, but I said no, not wanting them to see my hands trembling.

Rizzo pressed a button on a cassette recorder, noted the date and time, then asked me to state my name and address.

“Now just start at the beginning,” he said.

I could feel my shirt grow damp as I told them more or less what I’d told them earlier, trying not to think about the fact that I was being recorded. I worried about contradicting myself. I worried about seeming worried. They were the police, after all; they dealt with liars every day. I finished up as quickly as I could, saying I didn’t know exactly what had happened after the Jaguar started rolling over because I’d turned around in my seat to reach for Sara.