The Accident Read online

  I watched her walk back to her house.

  I decided not to call Ann Slocum that night. I would sleep on it. In the morning, I’d decide what to do.

  When I went upstairs, Kelly was out cold in my room, curled up on her mother’s side of the bed.

  Saturday morning, I let Kelly sleep in. I’d carried her back into her room the night before, and peeked in on her as I headed down to the kitchen to make coffee. She had her arm wrapped around Hoppy, her face buried into his (her?) furry ears.

  I brought in the paper, scanned the headlines while I sat at the dining room table, sipping coffee and ignoring the shredded wheat I’d poured.

  I wasn’t able to focus. I’d settle on a story and be four paragraphs in before I realized I wasn’t retaining anything, although one article interested me enough to read it to the end. When the country was going through a shortage of drywall—particularly in the post-Katrina building boom—hundreds of millions of square feet of the stuff that was brought in from China had turned out to be toxic. Drywall’s made from gypsum, which contains sulfur, which is filtered out in the manufacturing process. But this Chinese drywall was loaded with sulfur, and not only did it reek, it corroded copper pipes and did all sorts of other damage.

  “Jesus,” I muttered. Something to be on the lookout for from now on.

  I tossed the paper aside, cleaned up my dishes, went down to the study, came back upstairs, looked for something in the truck I didn’t need, came back indoors.

  Stewing.

  Around ten, I checked on Kelly again. Still asleep. Hoppy had fallen to the floor. Back in my office, sitting in my chair, I picked up the phone.

  “Fuck it,” I said, under my breath.

  No one locks my daughter in a bedroom and gets away with it. I dialed. It rang three times before someone picked up and said hello. A woman.

  “Hello,” I said. “Ann?”

  “No, this isn’t Ann.”

  She could have fooled me. Sounded just like her.

  “Could I speak to her please?”

  “She’s not … who’s calling?”

  “It’s Glen Garber, Kelly’s dad.”

  “This isn’t a good time,” the woman said.

  “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s Janice. Ann’s sister. I’m sorry, you’ll have to call back later.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be in?”

  “I’m sorry—we’re making arrangements. There’s a lot to do.”

  “Arrangements? What do you mean, arrangements?”

  “For the funeral,” she said. “Ann … passed away last night.”

  She hung up before I could ask her anything else.

  ELEVEN

  Sheila’s mother, Fiona Kingston, was never a fan of mine. Sheila’s death only served to reinforce that opinion.

  Right from the outset, she’d believed her daughter could have done better. Way better. Fiona never came right out and said it, at least not to me. But I was always aware she thought her daughter should have ended up with someone like her own husband—her first husband—the late Ronald Albert Gallant. Noted and successful lawyer. Respected member of the community. Sheila’s father.

  Ron died when Sheila was only eleven, but his influence persisted. He was the gold standard by which all prospective suitors for Fiona’s daughter were measured. Even before she’d reached her twenties, when the boys she went out with were unlikely to become lifelong companions, Sheila was subjected to intense interrogations about them from Fiona. What did their parents do? What clubs did these boys belong to? How well were they doing in school? What were their SAT scores? What were their ambitions?

  Sheila had only had her father for eleven years, but she knew what she remembered about him most. She remembered that there wasn’t much to remember. He was rarely home. He devoted his life to his work, not his family. When he was home, he was remote and distant.

  Sheila wasn’t sure that was the kind of man she wanted. She loved her father, and was devastated to lose him at such a young age. But there wasn’t the void in her life she might have expected.

  Once Fiona’s husband was dead—a heart attack at forty—whatever tenderness she might have had as a mother, and there was never that much to begin with, was displaced by the burden of running a household solo. Ronald Albert Gallant had left his wife and daughter well fixed, but Fiona had never managed the household finances and it took her a while, with the help of various lawyers and accountants and banking officials, to figure everything out. But once she had it all down, she became consumed with overseeing her business affairs, investing wisely, studying her quarterly financial statements.

  She still had time, however, to run her daughter’s life.

  Fiona didn’t take it well when her little girl, whom she’d sent to Yale to become a lawyer or a titan of industry, who with any luck should fall in love with some high-powered attorney-in-training, met the man of her dreams not in law class arguing the finer points of torts, but in the ivy-draped building’s hallways working for his father’s company, installing new windows. Maybe, had Sheila not met me, she would have completed her schooling, but I’m not so sure. Sheila liked to be out in the world, doing things, not sitting in a classroom listening to someone pontificate on matters she didn’t give a rat’s ass about.

  The irony was, of the two of us, I was the one with the degree. My parents had sent me north to Bates, in Lewiston, Maine, where I’d majored in English for reasons that now elude me. It wasn’t exactly the sort of degree that had prospective employers begging you to submit a résumé. When I graduated, I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to do with my piece of paper. I didn’t want to teach. And while I liked to write, I didn’t have the Great American Novel in me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read another one, at least for a while. I’d had Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville up to here.

  That fucking whale. I never did finish that book.

  But despite that piece of paper, I belonged to that class of people who were invisible to Fiona. I was an ant, a worker bee, one of the faceless millions who kept the world running smoothly and whom, thankfully, you didn’t have to spend a lot of face time with. Fiona probably appreciated, on some level, that there were people to build and renovate houses, just as she was pleased there were others who picked up the trash every week. She lumped me in with the folks who cleared out her gutters and cut her lawn—when she still had her big house—and tuned her Caddy and fixed her toilet when it wouldn’t stop running, even if you jiggled the handle. It didn’t seem to matter to her that I had my own company—granted, it had been handed down to me by my father—or that I employed several people, had a reputation as a reliable contractor, did okay for myself, that I was not only able to put a roof over my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s heads, but that I was able to build the damn roof myself. The only person who worked with his hands who might impress Fiona would be the latest darling of the gallery crowd, some twenty-first-century answer to Jackson Pollock whose paint-stained trousers were evidence of talent and eccentricity, not just of trying to make a living.

  I’d had clients like Fiona over the years. They were the ones who wouldn’t shake your hand, afraid their soft palms might get scratched by your calluses.

  Since I’d first met Fiona, I’d had a hard time getting my head around the fact that Sheila was really her daughter. While there was a physical resemblance, in every other way the two women were different. Fiona cared deeply about maintaining the status quo. That translated into protecting tax breaks for the wealthy, praying that same-sex marriage never became legalized, and double life sentences for petty thefts.

  Fiona’s horror at Sheila marrying me was matched only by her disdain for her daughter’s occasional volunteer work at a legal aid clinic and the time she spent volunteering on Democratic senator Chris Dodd’s campaigns.

  “Do you do it because you really care? Or because you know it drives your mother nuts?” I asked her once.

  “Because I care,�
� Sheila answered. “Driving Mother nuts is just a bonus.”

  The first year we were married, Sheila told me, “Mother’s a bully. I’ve learned over the years the only thing you can do is to stand up to her. You’ll never know the things she said to me when I told her I was marrying you. But you have to know the most hurtful things she said were not about you, Glen. They were about me. For the choices I’ve made. Well, I’m proud of those choices. And of the ones you’ve made, too.”

  I had chosen to build things. Decks, garages, additions, entire houses. After graduation, I sought employment at my father’s contracting company, where I’d worked every summer since I was sixteen.

  “I’m gonna need references,” he’d said when I walked into his office right after college, when I was twenty-two.

  I loved what I did. I pitied friends who spent their days sitting in cubicle prisons, who went home after eight hours unable to point to a single thing they’d accomplished. But I made buildings. Things you could point to as you drove down the street. And I was building them with my father, I was learning from him every day. A couple of years after I started working with him, I met Sheila on that window job, and before long we’d moved in together, something that didn’t sit well with my parents any more than it did with Fiona. But two years later we stopped living in sin, as my own mother liked to call it, in part because Mom was dying of cancer, and knowing we were legally married would give her some peace of mind.

  Four years later, there was a child on the way.

  Dad lived long enough to hold Kelly in his arms. After his passing, I became the boss. I felt orphaned and overwhelmed. The shoes were too big to fill, but I did my best. It was never the same without him, but I still loved what I did. I had a reason to get up in the morning. I had a purpose. I felt no need to justify the life I’d chosen to Sheila’s mother.

  Sheila and I were both surprised when Fiona started seeing someone.

  His name was Marcus Kingston, and while his first wife was still somewhere out in California, his second had died eight years earlier when some yahoo in a souped-up Civic ran a red light and broadsided her Lincoln. Marcus had been an importer of clothing and other goods, but had recently wound up his business when Fiona met him at a gallery opening in Darien. He’d spent a career mixing with the well-off and well connected, just the kind of people Fiona liked to be associated with.

  When they decided, four years ago, to get married, Marcus sold his Norwalk house and Fiona put her place in Darien on the market. They went in together on a luxury town house that overlooked Long Island Sound.

  Sheila’s theory was that Fiona woke up one morning and thought, Do I want to live the rest of my life alone? I had to admit that it had never occurred to me that Fiona might have any emotional needs. The woman put up such a chilly and independent front that one could be forgiven for thinking that she didn’t need people. But beneath that icy exterior was someone who was very lonely.

  Marcus came along at the right time for her.

  Sheila and I had wondered, on more than one occasion, whether Marcus’s motivations were slightly more complicated. He, too, had been on his own, and it made sense that he might want to wake up in the morning with someone next to him. But we also knew that Marcus had not sold his business for what he’d hoped to get, and that a sizable portion of his income still went to his first wife in Sacramento. Fiona, who’d been so careful—I might be inclined to say “tight”—with her money for so many years, appeared to have no problem spending it on Marcus. She’d even bought him a sailboat, which he moored in the Darien harbor.

  Marcus still did some consulting here and there for importers who valued his expertise and connections. He dined out a night or two a week with these people, and liked to brag about how the business world just wouldn’t let him rest. Sheila and I had, privately, observed that he could be a bit of a blowhard, an asshole, frankly. But Fiona appeared to love him, and seemed happier with him in her life than she had been before he showed up.

  They visited a lot so Fiona could see her grandchild. I could find plenty of reasons to dislike Fiona, but there was no question that she did adore Kelly. She took her shopping, to the movies, to Manhattan to visit museums and attend Broadway shows. Fiona even endured the occasional trip to the Toys “R” Us in Times Square.

  “Where was this woman when I was a kid?” Sheila had asked me more than once.

  Fiona and I maintained a kind of truce through these years. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t care much for her, but we remained civil. There was no out-in-the-open warfare.

  That pretty much ended with Sheila’s accident.

  After that, there was no holding back. Fiona blamed me. If I knew Sheila had a drinking problem, why hadn’t I done something about it? Why hadn’t I spoken to Fiona about it? Why hadn’t I forced Sheila into a program? What was I thinking, letting her drive around half the state of Connecticut, when she might very well have been under the influence?

  And how often had she been drunk like that with Kelly—their granddaughter, for Christ’s sake—in the car?

  “How could you not have known?” Fiona asked me at the funeral. “How the hell could you not have seen the signs?”

  “There were no signs,” I told her, dazed and unhappy. “Not really.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’d say if I were you, too,” she shot back at me. “That’s what you have to believe, isn’t it? Gets you off the hook. But believe me, Glen, there had to have been signs. You just had your head too far up your ass to notice.”

  “Fiona,” Marcus said, trying to pull her away.

  But she wouldn’t stop. “You think she just decided one night, Hey, I think I’ll become an alcoholic and get plastered and fall asleep at the wheel in the middle of an off-ramp? You think someone just does that all of a sudden?”

  “I suppose you saw something,” I said, stung by her fury. “You never miss a trick.”

  She blinked. “How was I supposed to see anything? I didn’t live with her. I wasn’t there with her seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. But you were. You’re the one who was in a position to see something, and in a position to do something about it when you did. You let us down. You let Kelly down. But most of all, you let Sheila down.”

  People were staring at us. If it had been Marcus saying these things, I would have decked him. But that wasn’t an option with Fiona. But maybe the reason I so badly wanted to do it was because I knew she was right.

  If Sheila’d had a drinking problem, surely I’d have seen something. How could I not have known? Had there been signs? Had there been warnings I’d chosen to ignore? Was it because I didn’t want to face the fact that Sheila was going through some kind of difficulties? Sure, Sheila liked a drink, like everyone else did. On special occasions. Lunch with her friends. Family get-togethers. We’d been known to kill off a couple of bottles of wine at home when Kelly was staying over with Fiona and Marcus in Darien. I even caught her one time when her foot slipped on the carpet as we headed upstairs on one such occasion.

  But those couldn’t have been signs of something more serious. Or was I just kidding myself? Did I not want to see the truth?

  Fiona was right: A woman didn’t just decide one night to get blind drunk and set off in her Subaru.

  Three nights after Sheila’s death, I quietly tore the house apart after Kelly had gone to bed. If Sheila had been a closet drinker, she’d have been hiding liquor somewhere. If not in the house, then the garage, or the shed out back where we kept the lawnmower and rusted, old garden chairs.

  I searched everywhere and came up with nothing.

  So then I talked to her friends. Everyone who knew her. To Belinda, for starters.

  “Okay, once, at lunch,” Belinda recalled, “Sheila had one and a half Cosmos and she got a little tipsy. And another time—George just about had a fit when he found us, he’s such a tight-ass—we smoked up. I had a couple of joints and we kind of mellowed out one evening when we were having a girls-only night.
It was just a bit of fun. But she never really lost it, and any time she’d anything more than one drink she insisted on calling herself a cab. She had good sense. She was a smart girl. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, what happened, but I guess we never know what someone else is going through, do we?”

  Sally Diehl, from the office, had a hard time making sense of it, too. “But I had this cousin once—well, I still do—and she had a coke habit like you wouldn’t believe, Glen, but what was really unbelievable was how well she’d kept it hidden for so long, until one day, the cops came into her house and busted her. No one had any idea. Sometimes—and I’m not saying this was the case with Sheila—but sometimes, like, you just don’t know anything about people that you see every day.”

  So it seemed there were two possibilities. Either Sheila had a drinking problem and was extremely good at hiding it, or Sheila had a drinking problem and I wasn’t good at picking up the signals.

  I supposed there was a third possibility. Sheila did not have a drinking problem, and did not get behind the wheel drunk. For that possibility to be true, all the toxicology reports had to be wrong.

  There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest they were.

  In the days after Sheila’s death, as I struggled to make sense of something that made no sense at all, I tracked down students from the course she’d been taking. Turned out she never even went to class that evening, although she had shown up for all the other sessions. Her teacher, Allan Butterfield, said Sheila was the top student in the all-adult class.

  “She had a real reason to be there,” he told me over a beer at a road-house down the street from the school. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing this for my family, for my husband and my daughter, to make our business stronger.’ ”

  “When did she say that to you?” I’d asked.

  He thought a moment. “A month ago?” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Right here. Over a couple of beers.”

  “Sheila had a couple of beers here with you?” I asked.