This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (10 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Hey,” he said, “plan on lunch tomorrow so we can talk about all this. I’ll give you a call if I hear anything before then.”

“Sure,” I said. I hung up.

When I turned to walk back to my desk, I saw that a sheet of paper had been left in the fax machine’s tray. It was a copy of Easter’s and Ruby’s school pictures. They’d had them displayed on the dresser in their bedroom back at the home. Unlike most kids, whose parents dressed them up for school photos, Easter and Ruby just had on shorts and  T-shirts, and their hair was long and unbrushed. Even though they hardly looked like sisters, there was something in their eyes that told you they’d seen the same things, and I thought about how no one else in this world had a picture of these two little girls displayed in their home, and that the only picture of either of them was on a dresser in a bedroom they’d disappeared from.

There were appointments I needed to make and orders to the manufacturer that needed to be completed, but instead I sat in one of the three chairs in the otherwise empty office’s reception area and watched the sunlight coming through the glass door move across the carpet. Every now and then I’d pick up the faxed pages sitting in the chair to my right and flip through them before sitting them down again, but mostly I just sat there, waiting until it was time to leave. I could’ve gone home already, relied on the answering machine to take any messages that might need taking, but I hated being at my apartment when it was still light out, and I never left the office before dusk, which meant I left pretty late sometimes during the summer. It was the first day of September, and I knew it wouldn’t be dark enough to go home for a while just yet.

There was a television in the back of the office, and I thought about turning on ESPN and trying to catch the pregame news of McGwire against the Marlins. I had $250 on him going homerless tonight, but something told me I’d be wrong.

It had taken a couple of years, but I’d learned that this kind of restlessness couldn’t be helped; the late afternoon still felt like the beginning of the day to me, and habit made me half afraid to go home until full dark, afraid to make something to eat, to sit down and turn on a game for fear that I’d be called away any minute to tramp along railroad tracks on the way to a dead body or to pick shell casings out of a gravel driveway in a dark trailer park. For years I’d laid in bed beside Tina, wide-awake and waiting for the phone to ring. It never rang at my place now, but that didn’t mean I’d stopped listening for it.

I thought about what Sandy had said earlier about Wade Chesterfield not being “father of the year” and his arrests on DUIs, and I wondered if Easter knew about those, wherever she and Ruby were, if she was thinking about those arrests when she’d scratched out his face on that baseball card, if she was thinking about them right now while her dad drove them around God knows where. I wondered if Wade was thinking about them too, if he looked in his rearview mirror at his daughters in the backseat if and when those DUIs popped into his mind, or if he didn’t look because he didn’t want to take his eyes off the road because a split second had already shown him what could happen if you did.

That’s what I’d done: looked at Jessica in the rearview mirror where she sat in the backseat telling me all about the basketball practice I’d just nodded off during instead of watching like the others parents had. We were in the driveway by then, and I’d already found the remote and pushed the button to raise the garage door. I didn’t even know he was standing there until Jessica screamed; by then it was too late.

Tina’s father was in his last days with a failed liver at the hospital in Chapel Hill, and I’d had to take the weekend off and switch to days so I could be there when Jessica got home from school. Before leaving, Tina had taped a note to the refrigerator, reminding me to do two things: take twenty dollars over to Michael, our neighbors’ fifteen-year-old son who cut our grass every Saturday morning, and take Jessica to basketball practice at 7
P.M.
on Wednesday night; I’d forgotten about both. Tina had always looked at our marriage as a years-long investigation that she couldn’t quite get to the bottom of. I was either the uncooperative witness who never gave the right answers or the suspect who’d stumbled his way into doing the wrong thing.

On Wednesday evening, after splitting a Domino’s pizza with Jessica, I’d popped two sleeping pills and knocked them back with a beer, hoping for one good, long night of sleep before Tina came home sometime that weekend. It was mid-October and almost dark at 6:30 when Jessica came into the living room in her tennis shoes, shorts, and sweatshirt and reminded me about her basketball practice through my half-closed eyes.

It was pitch black by the time we got home from the Y. I’ve gone over and over this in my mind, and every time that driveway gets darker and my headlights seem dimmer. We never knew if Michael was on his way over or if he’d already discovered that we weren’t home, but, when I pulled in, he’d been there in the middle of the driveway only because I’d forgotten to pay him, forgotten to do both of the two things Tina had asked of me before leaving town to go be with her dad.

The paramedics were there by the time the responding officers arrived; I recognized them both through the window in the kitchen, where I leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on my face. They stood out in the yard, talking to Michael’s parents, two people I’d known well for years, the lights from the ambulance flashing across the four of them. Jessica had stopped crying by then, and she was upstairs in her bedroom, not making a sound, probably wishing Tina was at home as badly as I did.

I knew the officers suspected something when they suggested that I let one of them drive me down to the station for questioning, even though I wasn’t arrested. The other one stayed behind at the house. At the station I explained what happened, or what I thought had happened. Most of the eyes I met were looking down at the carpet. They let me decline a drug test, which seemed like a favor at the time, but it ended up the other way around.

I was never arrested or charged with a criminal act, but I was sued by Michael’s parents a few months later, which left plenty of time for made-up stories to spread through town about how I’d passed out during that night’s basketball practice, how I’d behaved after the accident. At the civil trial, other parents lined up to testify that I’d stumbled out of the gym before driving my own daughter home. A couple guys who’d been at the station that night couldn’t remember if they’d smelled anything on my breath or not, but they said they were encouraged not to test me, and didn’t because I outranked them.

By the time the jury found against me I’d already been given the option of resigning from the force—encouraged to resign is probably a better way to put it—and we’d already lost a lot of money to lawyers. The realization that we’d be paying back Michael’s parents for the rest of our lives was a stark one. But there was still the overwhelming feeling that I’d gotten away with something that I shouldn’t have, and I couldn’t help but believe that Tina felt it too: I didn’t spend a second in jail, I was still alive, my daughter was still alive. In some ways, I
had
gotten away with something. But I still wear that guilt like a heavy winter coat because when something like that happens, when a kid would otherwise be alive if it wasn’t for you, you never really “get away with it” because it never really goes away.

If my work or my sleeplessness or our arguing caused rifts in our marriage, then the night of the accident was like a boulder rolling down a mountain and splashing all the water out of a pond that once upon a time only had little ripples to worry about. But we hung on as long as we could. I probably held on longer than she did, probably longer than was healthy for either of us—probably longer than was healthy for Jessica.

The three of us were never the same. Nothing was.

Easter Quillby

C H A P T E R   10

M
y eyes opened to the sound of the car’s engine turning off. The sun was coming up, and I saw that we’d parked in front of a Waffle House. Wade was sitting up in the front seat, staring at me like he’d been waiting on me to wake up. Ruby still had her eyes closed beside me.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We’re almost there.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

“Myrtle Beach,” he said.

I looked over at Ruby to make sure she was still asleep and wasn’t just pretending so that she could listen to what we were saying. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Because neither one of us has ever been to the beach before, and if you’re not telling the truth—”

“I’m telling the truth,” he whispered, “and you need to start believing me.” He nodded toward Ruby. “I ain’t asking you to trust me just for my own sake,” he said. “I’m asking you to do it for your sister. You don’t know how much she looks up to you and how much she wants to be like you.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m telling you because I’m trying to do right, even if I can’t change the past, even if I can’t make up for lost time or undo all the things I’ve done,” he said. “I just want another chance to be y’all’s dad, but if you’ve already made up your mind that you don’t want me to be yours then I understand. But I’m asking you to let Ruby make up her own mind about what she wants.”

“I don’t think you’ve changed at all,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because somebody’s looking for you. He came to school looking for me too. I saw him out in the woods. He asked if you were my dad. I said no, but he didn’t believe me. He knew who I was.”

He took his baseball hat off and ran his fingers through his hair, and then he put it back on. He tried to smile. “What did he look like?”

By the time I’d finished describing the man’s eye, his voice, and how big he’d been, Wade’s face had gone white. “Do you know who he is?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is he a bad guy?”

“Yes, but he won’t find us.” He looked from me to Ruby, where she was still asleep beside me. “We just have to trust each other and take care of each other,” he said. “Can you trust me?”

I nodded my head yes.

“Thank you,” he said. “We’ll be okay, and we’re going to have a good time. Who knows, you might even change your mind about me.” He smiled, and then he opened his door and climbed out.

“Don’t count on it,” I whispered.

A couple hours later Wade stopped the car and parked it in front of an old garage he’d found after stopping at a pay phone, and then he turned around and looked at me and Ruby. “If y’all could paint a car any color you wanted, what color would you paint it?”

“Pink!” Ruby screamed. After getting to Myrtle Beach, we’d stopped by a store called Wings, and Wade had gone in and bought us some new clothes while we waited in the car. Ruby’d taken off her socks and shoes and was slipping her feet into a pair of pink flip-flops; neither one of us had ever worn a pair before.

“It might look funny for a man to drive a pink car,” Wade said.

“What about red?” I asked.

“Red might be better,” Wade said. He winked at me like we were sharing some kind of secret. “Wait here.”

“Where you going?” Ruby asked.

“I’m going to see about turning this brown car red,” he said. He rolled the windows down a little and climbed out. “Y’all stay in the car.”

“Okay,” we both said at the same time. We watched him walk into what looked like a little office beside the garage. Ruby opened one of the Wings bags Wade had tossed in the backseat, and I opened the other one. We started going through all the clothes he’d just bought for us: a pink bathing suit for Ruby and a red one for me; two matching white T-shirts with
Myrtle Beach
spray-painted on them,
You Can’t Touch This
written across the bottom in cursive. There were shorts too: a pink pair for Ruby and blue ones for me.

Wade had said we were going to the beach next, so we went ahead and put on those bathing suits and then slipped the shorts and T-shirts on over them. It was the first time I could remember putting on clothes that nobody had ever owned before me.

Ruby had gotten quiet, and I knew she was thinking about saying something, but she wasn’t sure whether I’d like it or not. “What’s Miss Crawford going to do when she finds out we’re gone?” she finally said.

“She’s already found out, Ruby,” I said. “School started a couple hours ago.”

“Do you think she’s worried?”

“Don’t think about that,” I said. “We don’t live there anymore.”

“Maybe we should call and tell her we’re okay,” she said. Her eyes were looking past me, and I turned and saw that she was staring at a pay phone that sat by the sidewalk in front of the garage.

“No, Ruby, we can’t call anybody,” I said. “We can’t tell anybody where we are.”

“But what if they’re scared?”

“Do you want to move to Alaska?” I asked. “Or do you want us to be split up and sent to different homes? You want Wade to go to jail?” She shook her head. “That’s what’ll happen if we call home.” She sat back and stared at the headrest in front of her. I wondered what was taking Wade so long.

“It’s just—” Ruby started to say.

“Stop it, Ruby,” I said. “Stop it. You’re the one who was so happy to see him last night. Now we’re all here, and there’s no way we’re going back. So put all that feeling bad for people out of your mind.”

A few minutes later, the three of us were sitting on a bench out in front of the garage, waiting for a taxi. Wade had gotten a black gym bag out of the trunk, and me and Ruby had stuffed our nightgowns, underwear, and socks and shoes into the Wings bags. The sun was bright and hot, one of those days where the sky looked white.

Me and Ruby were used to riding in taxis with Mom, and sitting there now waiting on this one almost made me feel like we were right back in Gastonia, right back in our old lives, except that now we were with Wade instead of Mom, and we were at the beach instead of out in front of the grocery store or the doctor’s office, waiting for a taxi to take us back home.