Crushed (17 page)

Chapter 55

Wickham's Version

It was completely dark outside now, and the snow fell past the window in huge, somnolent flakes. Wickham didn't immediately speak. He folded his arms, then unfolded them. The radiators ticked and gave off a peculiar smell, like a curling iron wrapped around hair.

“Okay, then,” Wickham said, staring off as if at some distant place. “Jade was in the front seat, seat belt on. Same with me; same with Boze and Herffman, the two guys in the backseat.” Pause. “It was a sunny day.”

For a moment he just stared silently.

“I hadn't had anything to drink. Nothing. Boze and Herffman had had some beers, but Jade and I hadn't.”

Wickham rubbed at a worn spot on his jeans, and Audrey, taking a sip of her cocoa, felt an overwhelming sensation of relief. He hadn't been drinking, and if he hadn't been drinking, how could he have been at fault?

“Jade wasn't my girlfriend or anything,” he went on. “She was Boze's cousin, and the other guy, Herffman, had a thing for her, but she wasn't interested in him, probably because he's an idiot. But I was talking to her, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, and that got on Herffman's nerves.”

Audrey remembered Wickham in the hallway with Sands Mandeville and the way Sands had touched his arm and laughed. She felt a stab of pointless jealousy, and could sympathize with Herffman.

“Herffman started mouthing off and being a complete ass, and I could tell Jade didn't like it. I was smoking, and he was saying the smoke was just one of the several pollutive emissions I brought into the car. I looked at him in the rearview and said, ‘You know, maybe we ought to pull over so we could settle this thing,' but Boze—he was always the peacemaker— Boze calmed us down and I kept driving. But Jade, you know, I think at this point she just wanted to jerk Herffman's chain, so she undid her seat belt and scooched closer to me, and of course Herffman says something really crude, and that was when I made a terrible mistake.”

He looked for an instant at Audrey, then beyond her.

“Two mistakes, actually. I sped up, and then I twisted around to say something to Herffman eye to eye.”

In the apartment, the relentless ticking of the radiator.

“The car drifted, and when it caught the soft shoulder it was like the steering wheel was jerked out of my hands, and that was it.” Wickham took a deep breath. “The car flipped. Jade was thrown like fifty feet.” A pause. “They said she died instantly.”

Audrey waited.

“I never saw her body.” Wickham stared off. “The family wouldn't let me come to the funeral, or even the viewing.”

After a few seconds, Audrey said, “How about the other two boys?”

Wickham shrugged. “Boze broke some ribs and so did I.” He made an unhappy smile. “Herffman walked away with a few bruises.”

“So why was there a trial? It was an accident, right?”

“If someone dies, there's an investigation, and I was the guy who was driving.”

The radiator ticked, and Audrey's heart pounded.

“Everybody makes mistakes like that all the time,” Wickham said, his voice hardening slightly. “You get mad at someone, you drive too fast, you don't look where you're going, and most of the time, it's a near miss. You could've hurt someone but you didn't, and you're grateful. Well, this time nobody got off the hook. The mistake was fatal. And I paid.”

The argument had a strangely organized feel, as if he'd made it before, but it was forceful, and Audrey could feel the truth of it.

“I paid big-time,” Wickham said again.

Audrey sat still, trying to picture Wickham with a cigarette. She wondered why he didn't say it was Jade Marie Creamer who paid. She opened her mouth and closed it again. She had a feeling she shouldn't say it, but then she did.

“And Jade,” she said.

Wickham lifted his chin and gave her a sharp look. “What? You don't think I know Jade paid? Jade paid huge.” He paused. “But she paid fast. I've been paying ever since.” Another pause. “And it looks like I'll keep paying as long as I live.”

Audrey couldn't help herself. She moved toward Wickham, slid onto his lap, and touched his eyelids closed so that she could kiss them. “I know,” she whispered.

But Wickham just opened his eyes and said, “I'd better go. Talking about this stuff makes me feel funny.”

This surprised Audrey, and she didn't know what to say. Finally she said, “Want me to drive you?”

He shook his head no.

“You want to call a taxi, then?”

He barely took time to consider this. “I think I'd rather just walk.”

It was as if he couldn't stand to be there even long enough to wait for a taxi—that's what it seemed like to Audrey. “Is anything wrong?” she said.

Another shake of the head.

“Will you call me later?”

“Sure.”

He shifted so that she would stand up—which she did, though she didn't want to. She followed him to the door, where, instead of a kiss, he gave her a stiff, perfunctory hug. “Bye,” he said. He barely looked at her.

“Are you sure nothing's wrong?” she asked as he went down the hall.

He shook his head without looking back, and Audrey could do nothing but watch him go.

Chapter 56

Is That You?

Wickham Hill shoved open the heavy front door of the Commodore Apartments and tightened his scarf against the snow. He knew that if he looked up, he'd see Audrey staring down from the living room windows—as she'd done sometimes from her bedroom in the old house, giving him one last wave—but he didn't want to look up.

Is anything wrong?

How could she ask that? How could somebody so smart be so stupid?

Everything was wrong. Audrey's hot apartment, the forced confession, the way it all sounded, the way it all was. It was like being back in Cypress again, with people looking at him over the produce bins at Piggly Wiggly or the gas pumps at the Shell station. At least once a day, he would run into the mother of a friend from school, a teacher, a neighbor, a nurse from his mother's shift, his dentist. They all said hello, but they never knew what to say after that. Silence, pity, blame. Never just a normal conversation, never again.

Wickham shoved his hands into his pockets and walked with his eyes straight ahead. Snowflakes clung to his sleeves, and he could almost feel Audrey's eyes willing him to look up and reassure her that everything was fine, but he kept walking, and when he turned the corner and knew she couldn't see him anymore, he felt relief.

Wickham crossed the street and, leaning into the snow, climbed a steep hill, past three-story wooden houses, faded and chipped, that leaned out over crooked porches. At the top of the hill, sturdier houses decorated with holiday lights ringed the park.

He walked quickly past the park's forested shadows, and his leather shoes grew damp from the deepening snow. He was closer to the university neighborhood now. Maple trees lined the street, their roots buckling the sidewalk.

His feet were wet and cold, and without knowing why, he blamed Audrey for that.

He should have told her everything. She wanted the truth so badly, he should've given her the story about his father, too, and exactly why he wanted to shut Herffman's mouth. He should have told her about Jade's brown shoulders and back, her delicate vertebrae arching when he rubbed coconut oil between the string tie of her yellow bikini top and the yellow triangle below; about Herffman drinking beers and crunching the cans one-handed and giving them his endless monologue on the mythological significance of the
Star Wars
movies that no one was listening to, least of all Jade.

She was wearing a boys' dress shirt over her yellow bathing suit—the suit was optic yellow, like tennis balls and some BMWs. He tried to remember what her face looked like, but nothing came to him. Well, that was the family's fault, wasn't it, not letting him come to the funeral, which he would have gladly done, even though it would have been hard.

A car passed by, its tires making a shushing noise.

Herffman. He was like those guys that poke alligators to make them bite. On the way back from the lake, Herffman had seen an old newspaper on the floor of the car, a
Cypress
Telegram
that had Wickham's father's picture on the front page. It was some story about a fund-raising gala, and Wickham had shoved it under the seat to prevent his mother from seeing the picture of Dr. Yates with his arm around his wife. Herffman held up the newspaper and read part of the article aloud:
“‘Dr. James E. Yates and his wife, Elaine, donated
$500,000 to build a new children's wing.'
Well, isn't that nice.”

Jade gave Herffman a bored look, then undid her seat belt and scooched close to Wickham. That was something he could remember perfectly—the liquid green trees sliding by against a pink twilight and Jade's long brown bare legs inches from the gearshift and his hand.

Then Herffman said, “Does anyone here know Dr. Yates? He seems like such a generous man.”

Wickham said nothing, but he speeded up a little. In downshifting at the next curve, he let the back of his hand graze Jade's bare leg, and a moment later, as he accelerated past the speed limit, she took his hand and laid it there. Looking at Herffman in the rearview, he'd said mockingly, “What are you trying to prove, Herffman? That you can read the newspaper?” Not a great line, he knew, but he was concentrating on the creamy softness of Jade's thigh as a few more hundred feet of forest and pink twilight shot by. Then red ash fell from his cigarette, and when he felt it burning through his cutoffs and into his leg he began madly brushing it off, which is what made Herffman say, “You spanking the monkey up there, Mr. Wickham?”—and that made Boze laugh, and even Jade, so Wickham had to laugh along with them until things quieted down and he could say, “That's a science you excel in, Hefferman, not me.” And that was when Herffman, asshole Herffman, said what he said: “That makes me and your mom, then. She wasn't wasting any opportunities. She seemed to know whose monkey to spank.”

Just thinking of it now made him clench up a little, as he had then just before he asked Herffman exactly what he was trying to say.

“Trying to say?” Herffman had said. “Hell, I'm
saying
it. Question: Who did Wicky's mother screw to get him into Leighton Hall? Answer: A doctor with his name first among the ‘Y's on the Wall of Patrons.”

Who wouldn't have flipped his cigarette out the window and turned back and reached for the guy who'd said that? Who wouldn't have done exactly what he did?

Wickham found himself walking now in a small business district where the windows of shops were painted with big holly leaves and red-capped elves. He was standing on the corner, shivering in his wet socks and cold shoes and wishing he'd called a taxi from Audrey's or at least that he had enough money to buy a pizza, when a voice, a girl's voice, said, “Wickham?”

He turned woodenly, afraid it was Audrey, but it wasn't.

It was a girl in an Audi A6. She'd rolled the window down, but her face was hard to see because she was on the other side of the street. “Wickham?” she said. “Is that you?”

Whoever she was, she seemed pretty and she drove an A6, and so Wickham Hill, who the moment before had been feeling peevish about his wet feet and unfair fate, now fixed his dark eyes on the pretty girl in the A6 and slid into an easy drawl. “That would depend on who's doing the asking”—here his lazy smile widened slightly—“and why.”

“It's me,” the girl said. “Lea. Lea Woolcott. Audrey's friend.” Now she was smiling, too. “You need a ride?”

As Wickham circled the back of the car, he reached into his pocket for his peppermint lip balm and smoothed some across his lips.

Chapter 57

Dark and Stormy

As Wickham opened the car door, Lea was tugging her skirt toward her kneesocks, but not before the overhead light had shone fleetingly on an inch or two of her pale thigh. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks pink, either from the car's warmth or from excitement. She looked out the door and said nervously, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Wickham laughed and climbed in, grateful to close the door against the snow and cold. “You know, that was an actual first line from an actual book.”

Lea smiled brightly. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Wickham said, rubbing his hands together in front of the nearest heater vent. “Nobody reads the rest of it, though.”

Lea looked at the dashboard and clenched the steering wheel a little tighter. She hadn't yet pulled the car from the curb, and seemed uncertain what to do next. She nodded toward his feet. “You want to take off your shoes and socks? You can put them over the heater vent.”

Wickham said they'd have to drive around a long time to get them dry.

When Lea glanced at him, he was freshly startled by the paleness of her blue eyes. Her hair looked very soft, and it fell in a kind of white corona over her dark scarf. “Yeah,” she said, pulling slowly away from the curb and shops. “So?”

Wickham began to work off his wet shoes. “My pants are wet, too,” he said.

Lea glanced over at him again and seemed to regain her wits. “Yeah, well,” she said, “I'm afraid you're going to have to keep those on.”

Wickham watched her drive. Her white hands on the steering wheel were small and precise. Her eyes, when she turned to him and laughed at one of his jokes, did not see anything wrong with him. The slate was clean, he had no past, and the car was warm and expensive-smelling. “New car?” he asked.

“Yeah. I got it this afternoon. It's an early birthday present from my dad. He came by after school and took me down to the dealership. My mother doesn't even know about it yet.” She turned right onto Genesee, away from Audrey's building, and gently accelerated. “She's going to have the grand champion of all cows.”

An easy laugh from Wickham; then he said, “How come?”

“Sixteen different reasons, the big ones being that, one, teenagers shouldn't drive ritzy cars and, two, Audis are part of Volkswagen and Hitler helped design the original bug, so Audis are kind of a Nazi car.”

This was news to Wickham. “Adolf did that?” he said.

Lea made a grim smile. “Probably. My mom's a demon for facts.”

Wickham smoothed a finger over the cherrywood dash; then, closer to Lea's leg, over the soft beige leather. “I don't know,” he said, “I wouldn't call this automobile anything but deluxe.”

“Yeah?” Lea said, and looked pleased. “I wanted to show it to C.C., but she's not home, and”—she paused—“it didn't seem right to show it to Audrey right now.” She looked at Wickham. “You know what I mean, right?”

Wickham nodded somberly and said he did.

“Losing that house would've killed me,” Lea said, “but she's being so brave about it all.”

Again Wickham nodded.

“I really admire her for that,” Lea said.

Wickham said he did, too. Then he said, “So when's your birthday?”

“Wednesday. December 17. I'll be eighteen, which is actually embarrassing. I'm too old for high school.”

Wickham told Lea something he'd never told Audrey. “I'm eighteen already.”

Lea seemed pleasantly surprised by this fact. “You are?” she said.

“Yeah. We were moving a lot, so I did third grade over. How about you?”

“My mother didn't believe in an early start, so when everybody else was in kindergarten, I was with my mother in Tunisia helping the locals build a school.”

The CD she was playing was some kind of retro thing, and all the lyrics were in French. He was surprised how much he liked it.

“You ever smoke?” Lea said.

The question seemed to come out of the blue. “Yeah, I used to.” He gave his next words some thought, then went ahead. “I was smoking when I was in this terrible accident in South Carolina where a girlfriend died, so, I don't know, after that I just told myself I'd quit for a while.” He looked out the window and said in a lower tone, “That seems like a long time ago.” Another pause; then he turned back to Lea. “But the smoking—you can't believe how much I've missed it.”

Lea gave Wickham a sympathetic look, then leaned past him to open the glove compartment and pull out a package of Chesterfield cigarettes.

“You smoke?” Wickham said. This ride with Lea was one surprise after another.

“A little,” Lea said.

On the CD, a woman sang,
“Non, je ne regrette rien,”
which Lea translated as “I regret nothing.”

Wickham pushed in the cigarette lighter. He tugged the pull strip on the Chesterfields' plastic wrapper. He tapped out two cigarettes.

The car rolled quietly down the snow-covered street.