The Ninth Step (5 page)

Helen stooped down to the front grille and picked off a fleck of white paint embedded there. She stared at the chip of paint balanced on her fingernail. In her mind, a word glowed, and that word was:
evidence
.

Greasy sweat popped out on her forehead. She clamped her hand to her mouth, but it wasn’t enough to stem the flow of guilt and vomit as it erupted through her fingers.

She ran back through the house to the bathroom. Vomiting the whole way.

Edgar looked at his wife’s body laid out on the hospital bed. The blood had been cleaned from her face and hair. Her hair had been combed. It looked wrong. Judy had been very particular about her hair.

An IV catheter remained in her arm; the plastic tubing taped down, connected to nothing.

Edgar sat in a rigid plastic-and-metal chair. He wore a cumbersome neck brace. The doctor had said that Edgar’s intervertebral joints were likely inflamed, but the scan revealed no true injury. The brace was a prophylactic measure and should also ease some of the discomfort.

Sitting directly next to Edgar in an identical chair was Jane Ketchum, Judy’s sister. Jane was holding Edgar’s hand. Jane had
been the only call Edgar had made. She and Judy had been particularly close. They talked every night, even if only for a few minutes. And most weekends, Edgar and Judy would have Jane and her husband, Steve, over to play Rook or spades.

Jane and Edgar had been sitting in the hospital room with Judy’s body for more than two hours. They were waiting for the representative of the funeral home to arrive and take possession of the body. The body. There it was. That was what Judy had now become. The body. The remains. What was left after life had departed.

He and Jane had already said the things that needed saying. There had been hugging and crying and smeary mascara stains left on Edgar’s shirt. But for now, there was nothing left to say. For now they sat side by side and held hands in silence and waited and thought their private thoughts.

Edgar was cataloging all of the bad things he had done in the course of his life. All the wrongs. There were some. Plenty, even. But they didn’t add up. The equation didn’t balance. He was a good man. An honest and accountable man. But that had not always been so. There had been life lessons. Mistakes were made. Every shitty little thing he’d ever done played through Edgar’s mind: the tests cheated on, the cat he’d kicked as a child, the boy he’d picked on in junior high, the car he’d backed into and left without leaving a note, and just a few years ago, the teacher he’d almost had an affair with—there were plenty of bad things, sure, but there was no way in hell they added up to Judy dead, his unborn child dead with her. How could they? Would God do that? Would God kill them to get at Edgar? There was
no sense to it. No way to find equilibrium. Unless. Unless the cheated tests counted. Unless the almost-affair counted. Unless it all added up. Accumulated. Each little transgression amplified by the one before. All of it adding up and counting blackly against him. But maybe if there was just one thing, maybe it was Mark Pitts. The boy. Eighth grade. Why had he joined in the torment of Mark? That was not who he was. That was not Edgar Woolrich. Yet it had been. He had been that person. He’d joined in. He’d swung his fists. He had spit on Mark. His hand had been there, holding him down as others pushed Mark’s head into the feces-fouled toilet. It was not who he was, but, yes, he’d joined in. He’d ruined the boy, glad it was not himself being humiliated, ruined. Glad to be part of the group, not the lone target.

So maybe it did all add up. An accumulation of sins, paid for in one fell swoop. Maybe this was retribution. Perhaps it genuinely was equilibrium. If there was a finger of blame to be pointed, it was Edgar who stood accused. Yes, in the end, it was his fault. He had cost them their lives (the one life never realized). Oh, Jesus Christ, he was to blame. He’d done it.

But no, he rejected that. It was self-pity. It had been a hit-and-run driver. The police had said so. They’d questioned him. He did not tell them that he had been looking at the display on his cell phone. What he told them was that the other car had crossed the line, drifted into Edgar’s lane. He did not know whether this was true but felt certain it was. What
was
true, and what Edgar further told the police, was that the other vehicle had fled the scene of the accident without offering help.

Two men entered the room. The men were wearing dark suits and plastic badges that identified them as attendants from the funeral home Jane had called.

“Mr. Woolrich?”

Edgar uncoupled his hand from Jane’s and rose stiffly from his chair. He shook hands with the man who had spoken. The man handed Edgar a pen and a clipboard. The other attendant motioned a third man into the room. This third attendant wheeled in a gurney with the funeral home’s logo and a purple velvet pad on top.

Edgar handed the pen and clipboard back to the first man, having signed the release for his wife’s body.

“You’re welcome to ride with us, Mr. Woolrich.”

“No.”

“Would you like a minute before we transport Mrs. Woolrich?”

“Yes.”

The men left the room. Jane Ketchum followed them out.

Edgar took Judy’s hand and squeezed it just a bit, aware of the absence of life. He could smell hospital odors. He could smell antiseptic and adhesive, and underneath that the sweet odor of the conducting gel used for the defibrillator paddles. And underneath that, Edgar could smell her perfume, Joy.

Dressed in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, Helen bent over the front of her car with a stiff wire brush. She scrubbed the painted surface until only bare metal was showing. Sweat dripped from her nose, and strings of her hair clung to her wet face.

She stood back and looked. She was satisfied that there was no evidence of the white paint from the other car.

In the backseat she found twelve cans of Natural Light—seven empties and five unopened. She seldom drank beer and didn’t remember stopping to get it. Under one of the cans she found two teeth—central incisors, they looked like—stuck to the floor mat in a congealed pool of blood and spit. She put them in the trash with everything else.

She drove across the state line. She stopped at a phone booth that had a Yellow Pages directory hanging from a chain. She dismissed the larger places, the national chains, and found a small place that felt right to her.

Helen sat in the grimy waiting room. The television mounted to the wall had antenna reception through a digital converter box, and the picture rolled. The magazines were years out of date and yellowed with nicotine and age. She was in the right place. No computers. No online database.

The man behind the front desk was chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. Helen glanced at him and saw that he was staring at her legs in her cutoffs. She tucked her legs together and placed a magazine in her lap. The man kept staring. Finally, Helen said, “Get an eyeful?”

The counterman raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

“You think my legs look good?”

The man nodded and smiled.

“Wonder how they would look sticking out of your ass.”

The man made a great show of putting away his paperwork before stomping away and calling Helen “trash.”

Helen got up and walked to the tiny window overlooking the repair area and watched two repairmen buffing down the hood where the crinkled metal had been hammered out. Another repairman
was applying the last of the sealant to the newly installed windshield.

Once the repairs were complete, Helen drove to a high-end body and paint shop. She paid the shop manager three hundred dollars to put her at the head of the line. The color of her Honda Insight was changed from red to black, including doorjambs, under the hood, and a factory-look clearcoat. It cost thirty-five hundred dollars, which Helen paid from a cash advance on her American Express.

The various coats and something called “baking time” normally took three days, but, for the extra cash, the manager promised an overnight turnaround. He would have to bring in a technician to finish it up on Sunday, which cost Helen an additional three hundred on top of what she had already paid. She considered it a bargain. And she had a feeling that since she was paying everything in cash, this whole transaction would never find its way onto the shop’s records.

She spent the night in a hotel. Mostly sober. Worried about her pets. But she had nobody she could call to check in on them. To let the dog out. To put down food. She had not arranged her life for such things.

Through all of this, Helen had not allowed herself to reflect on what she had done or what she was now doing. She allowed herself to consider only the immediate task. That of covering up her crime.

Helen took one last look at her shiny, newly painted, black car before turning off the garage light and stepping back into the house. The accident had happened on Friday. She’d had the car repaired and repainted on Saturday and Sunday, and tomorrow she would have to explain why she’d decided to have her car repainted a new color. She could have had the Honda painted the same red color so as not to draw attention to herself, but that seemed too risky to her. If white paint had transferred to her car, then her red paint had certainly transferred to the car she had hit. The police would be looking for a red car. As she had been in a blackout at the time, she had no way of knowing if there had been witnesses. If someone had witnessed the accident, then the police could very well be looking for a red Honda
Insight. If someone had gotten the license plate, then it would have been the police waking her up Saturday morning instead of Mitzi. If the police had a partial plate, then they wouldn’t go to the trouble of running hers if she was driving the wrong color car. No, it would be far safer to draw the curiosity of her staff (she didn’t have any friends) than to risk being on the road with too many identifiers.

Helen plopped onto the couch and broke the seal on a fifth of vodka. She had gone an entire day without drinking. Just the maintenance nips, but those didn’t count. Those were just so she could keep her shit together and do what needed to be done. But she hadn’t got properly drunk. And her body was in turmoil. She was not allowing herself to apply rational thought to this. It was simply what she must do. She poured two inches into her glass and settled back to enjoy it.

Molly and Agnes crawled over the back of the couch. Helen reached up and rubbed their bellies.

She filled her glass again. Three inches this time.

After a while, Helen crawled to the floor and wrestled with Mitzi. The Great Dane could pin her easily.

She crawled back over to the vodka and refilled her glass. She picked up the newspaper and read the same column of newsprint for perhaps the twentieth time. It was Judy Woolrich’s obituary.

Later, Helen watched an old movie on television:
Soylent Green
. She watched as bulldozers scooped up America’s overpopulation
while Charlton Heston tried to control the mobs. And Edward G. Robinson checked himself into a suicide center. He was laid out on a gurney watching nature scenes projected on an oversized screen, waiting for his lethal cocktail to kick in.

From time to time, Helen would pick up the folded newspaper and look yet again at the obituary and accompanying photo of Judy Woolrich. Helen looked at the photo and then at Edward G. Robinson. She screamed.

Helen grabbed the lamp from a side table and smashed the porcelain base to pieces. She freed the electrical cord from the wall and gathered it up. She scanned the room, looking. Her eyes were beyond bloodshot. They were vacant. Helen was gone.

Finally, her gaze settled on the ceiling fan/light fixture. She fashioned the cord into a crude loop and placed it around her neck. She used a kitchen chair to stand on and tied the other end of the cord to the ceiling fan. Helen looked down at Mitzi and said, “Bye.” She kicked the chair away. And by some obscene miracle, the half-assed noose worked. Helen hung suspended, her breathing cut off. In that moment, a rational thought penetrated her alcohol-benumbed mind: She had forgotten about the animals. Who would feed them? Who would take care of them? This was a mistake, she realized. But by then the booze and lack of oxygen had shut down this avenue of coherent thought.

After about forty-five seconds, Helen’s legs kicked in a muscle spasm. The ceiling fan creaked. Then gave way.

Helen fell to the floor. The ceiling fan landed inches from her head but left her unmarked. Her breath was ragged, coarse,
but there. Mitzi, scared away by the crashing fixture, cautiously returned and licked her unconscious new owner. Molly and Agnes, more cautious, watched from a reasonable distance.

On the television, Charlton Heston screamed, “Soylent Green is people! It’s people!”

Outside Edgar’s well-kept Dutch Colonial home, people came and went. Cars filled the driveway and spilled out onto the street.

Inside, hams and casserole dishes overflowed the dining room table. The funeral had ended an hour ago, and most of the people were wearing suits and dresses. Edgar sat in his well-worn leather recliner and let the mourners come to him. He accepted them as a head of state might. They patted and hugged and stroked him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He accepted those gestures with grace. His motions were stiff, partly due to the neck brace.