Linwood Barclay - The Accident

“Everybody’s mean.”

“What do you mean, everybody? Emily Slocum likes you. She’s having you for a sleepover.”

“Everybody else hates me.”

“Tell me, exactly, what’s happened.”

She swallowed, looked down. “They call me…”

“What, sweetheart? What do they call you?”

“Boozer. Boozer the Loser. You know, because of Mom, and the accident.”

“Your mother was not a-she was not a drunk, or a boozer.”

“Yes, she was,” Kelly said. “That’s why she’s dead. That’s how come she killed the other people. Everyone says so.”

I felt my jaw tighten. And why wouldn’t everyone be saying that? They’d seen the headlines, the six o’clock news. Three Dead in Milford Mother DUI.

“Who’s calling you this name?”

“It doesn’t matter. If I tell you, you’ll go see the principal and they’ll get called down and everyone will have to have a talk and I’d rather just go someplace else. A school where there’s nobody that Mom killed.”

The two people who’d died in the car that hit Sheila’s were Connor Wilkinson, thirty-nine, and his ten-year-old son Brandon.

As if fate hadn’t been cruel enough, Brandon had been a student at Kelly’s school.

Another Wilkinson boy, Brandon’s sixteen-year-old brother Corey, had survived. He’d been sitting in the back seat, belted in. He was looking forward through the front windshield and saw Sheila’s Subaru parked across the off-ramp just as his father screamed “Jesus!” and hit the brakes, but not in time. Corey claimed to have seen Sheila, just before the impact, asleep behind the wheel.

Connor had not bothered with his seatbelt, and half of him was on the car hood when the police got there. His body had been taken away by the time I’d arrived, as had Brandon’s. The boy had been wearing his seatbelt, but had not survived his injuries.

He’d been in sixth grade, three years ahead of Kelly.

I’d had a feeling things would be rough for her when she got back to school. I’d even gone in to talk to the principal. Brandon Wilkinson had been a popular kid, an A-plus student, a great soccer player. I was worried some students might want to take it out on Kelly, that her mother was being blamed for getting one of the school’s most-liked kids killed.

I got a call Kelly’s first day back at school. Not because of something someone had said to her, but because of something Kelly had done. One of her classmates had asked her if she got to see her mother’s body in the car before they pulled it out, whether she’d been decapitated or anything cool like that, and Kelly’d stomped on the kid’s foot. Hurt so bad the girl had to be sent home.

“Maybe Kelly’s not ready to resume school,” the principal had told me. I’d had a word with Kelly, even made her demonstrate for me what she’d done. She’d stepped around the front of this other girl, raised her knee, then driven her heel into the top of her classmate’s foot. “She had it coming,” Kelly’d said.

She promised not to do anything like that again, and returned to school the following day. When I didn’t hear of any further incidents, I’d hoped things were okay. At least as well as could be expected.

“I’m not putting up with this,” I told her now. “I’m going into that office on Monday and those little bastards who are saying these things to you are-”

“Can’t I just go to another school?”

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as we drove down Broad Street, through the center of town, past the Milford Green. “We’ll see. I’ll look into it on Monday, okay? After the weekend?”

“It’s always ‘we’ll see.’ You say you will but you won’t.”

“If I say I’m going to do it, I’ll do it. But it means you’ll be with kids who don’t live in your neighborhood.”

She gave me a look. The “duh” was unspoken.

“Okay, that’s the point, I get it. And that might seem like a good plan now, but what about in six months, or a year? You end up cutting yourself off from your own community.”

“I hate her,” Kelly said under her breath.

“Who? Is it a girl who’s been calling you names?”

“Mom,” she said. “I hate Mom.”

I swallowed hard. I’d tried hard to keep my feelings of anger to myself, but why was I surprised Kelly felt betrayed as well? “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”

“I do. She left us, and she got in that dumb accident so everybody hates me.”

I squeezed the steering wheel. If it had been wood, it would have snapped. “Your mother loved you very much.”

“Then why’d she do something so stupid and ruin my life?” Kelly asked.

“Kelly, your mother wasn’t stupid.”

“Wasn’t getting drunk and parking in the middle of the road stupid?”

I lost it.

“Enough!” I made a fist and bounced it off the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, Kelly, you think I have the answers to everything? You don’t think I’m going nuts trying to figure out why the hell your mother would do such a dumb thing? You think this is easy for me? You think I like that your mother left me to raise you on my own?”

“You just said she wasn’t stupid,” Kelly said. Her lip was quivering.

“Well, okay, what she did, that was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was as stupid a thing as anyone could do, okay? And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, because your mother would never, ever, drink and drive.” I banged the steering wheel again.

I could imagine Sheila’s reaction, if she’d heard me say that. She’d have said I knew that wasn’t exactly true.

It was years ago. We weren’t even engaged. There’d been a party. All the guys from work, their wives, girlfriends. I’d had so much to drink I could barely stand. There was no way I could drive. Sheila probably would have failed a breath test, but she was in way better shape to drive than I was.

But it wasn’t fair to count that. We were younger then. Stupider. Sheila’d never have done anything like that now.

Except she had.

I looked over at Kelly, saw her eyes welling up with tears.

“If Mom would never do that, why did it happen?” she asked.

I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. “Come here,” I said.

“My seatbelt’s on.”

“Take the damn thing off and scoot over here.”

“I’m fine here,” she said, hugging the door. The best I could do was reach over and touch her arm.

“I’m sorry,” I told my daughter. “The thing is, I just don’t know. Your mother and I spent a lot of years together. I knew her better than anyone else in the world, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world, at least until you came along, and then I loved you just as much. What I’m saying is, this doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you.” I stroked her cheek. “But please, please don’t say you hate her.” It made me feel guilty when she said it, because I believed my feelings were rubbing off on her.

I was furious with Sheila, but I didn’t want to turn her daughter against her.

“I’m just so mad at Mom,” Kelly said, looking out her window. “And it makes me feel all sick inside, to be mad, when I’m supposed to be sad.”

I put the truck back into drive. A short distance later I hit the blinker and turned down Harborside Drive. “Which house is Emily’s again?”

I should have been able to spot it. Emily’s mother, Ann Slocum, and Sheila had met six or seven years ago when they’d both signed up the girls for an infants’ swim class. They traded tales of being new mothers as they struggled to get their girls in and out of their bathing suits, and had kept in touch since. Because we lived not too far from each other, the girls ended up in the same class at school.