The Accident (11 page)

“Jeez.”

“Yeah, no shit? But the next day, he says to me, he was wrong. She
didn’t get pushed down the stairs. His dad told him that his mommy tripped. So I figure, he must have gone home, right? And said to his dad, Oh, I was telling the babysitter about Mommy going to the hospital after she got shoved down the stairs, and he must have freaked, tells his kid that he’s got it all wrong, she tripped.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew out hard enough that a few strands of hair momentarily floated.

“So every day he comes by, you think he’s wondering what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Kinda, yeah.”

“When did the boy say this?”

“First time he mentioned it was around three, four weeks ago. He—the dad, Carl, I mean—seemed okay, but lately, he’s been kind of on edge, asking me, did I make any phone calls or anything?”

“Phone calls about what?”

“He didn’t say. But I wonder if someone might have called the police about him or something.”

“Did you?”

She shook her head very slowly. “No way. I mean, I thought about it, Glen. But the thing is, I can’t afford to lose a customer, you know what I’m saying? I need every one of those kids, at least till the money from the oil company comes through. I just don’t want Carl taking it out on me, if someone did put in a call to the police. And I thought, if he knew I had a strong man living next door to me, maybe he’d think twice before he did anything like that.”

I thought she put a little emphasis on “strong man.”

“Well, I’m glad I could help,” I said.

She tilted her head to one side and looked me in the eye. “It’s going to come in, you know. I mean, eventually. And it’s going to be a good settlement. I’ll be pretty well fixed.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It’s about time.”

She let that hang out there a moment. “Anyway, what I wondered was, you don’t think Sheila might have reported him, do you?”

“Sheila?”

“I was talking to her, I guess a few days before the accident and all, wondering what I should do about what Carlson said had happened to his mother, thinking it was kind of a bad thing, knowing some woman got her arm broke and not doing anything about it. I was saying, you think I
should make an anonymous call kind of thing, and if they arrested him, did she think I’d still get to babysit Carlson?”

“You talked about this with Sheila?”

Joan nodded. “Just the once. Did she mention anything to you about this? That she was thinking of calling the police or anything?”

“No,” I said. “She never did.”

Joan nodded again. “She mentioned you were under a lot of stress, with that house you were building that burned down. Maybe she didn’t want to burden you with it.”

She sighed and slapped her hands on her thighs. “Anyway, look, I should go. What a joy, right? Your neighbor bringing her problems over late at night.” She slipped into a mocking voice. “Hey, neighbor, got a cup of sugar and by the way could you be my bodyguard?” She laughed, then stopped abruptly. “So, I’ll see you,” she said.

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.