She paused, and while she was quiet, I looked at the view to which her face was turned. What I saw was blue, blue, blue; but to an artist, how many other hues, or even shapes and movements and designs were visible, that were not apparent to me?
“Do you know,” she said, as if reading my mind, “that you can look through polarized sunglasses at twilight and see a latticework of Celtic crosses in the sky? One bar of each cross will be yellow and one will be blue. What you’re actually seeing is the electromagnetic field of the earth. The blue band is the electric field, the yellow band is the magnetic field. If you do that enough, eventually you can detect it with your naked eye, and then you can’t even look at a blue sky without seeing those crosses. I was wearing really dark polarized sunglasses that evening, because I was driving into the sun, and I saw the crosses in the sky. That was my painting: that skyful of ancient symbols. I was staring at the crosses when I hit that man.”
I waited a beat, then asked her, “Had you stopped at the sign at the top of the hill?”
“Stopped?” She laughed bitterly. “I didn’t even see the damn sign! I just drove right through it.”
“Were you speeding?”
“I don’t honestly know, Jenny.” She shrugged. “They say I was, by maybe five miles an hour, because I guess they can judge by the force of the … impact” She bit her lower lip. “There weren’t any skid marks, I understand. That’s because I never saw him before I hit him, so I wasn’t even trying to put my brakes on. When I hit him, I was so shocked, I let my foot off the pedal, and the car just died and rolled … Oh, God …” She lowered her head onto one hand. “Over him. It rolled into the trees then, and just stopped dead. I ran out and I saw him, and I was hysterical. Big help, huh? I just couldn’t believe I had done that!” She shuddered so heavily I could see it, and she clenched both of her hands into fists and began to beat them against her forehead as if she could beat the memories out of her brain. “I still can’t believe it! I can’t have done that! I can’t! I can’t have killed somebody!”
She jumped up, as if somebody had pushed her off the couch, and she walked over to the wall of glass. “He was still alive. In such pain. Oh, God. I didn’t know what to do. Should I move him off the road? Call for help? Run to a nearby house? People, other drivers, stopped right away, and they kept asking, what happened, what happened? It was like I couldn’t even hear them, not really, as if the only two people in the world were that poor man and me.
“I ran over and touched him—I think I may have even kissed him, on his forehead, isn’t that odd?—and I said, please, please, hang on. I’m so—God! Sorry! And I have a phone in my car, so then I ran back to it—when I knew other people were there to watch him—and I called 911. And then I ran back to him, and when people asked what happened, I just kept saying, I did it, it’s my fault.”
She pressed her forehead and her hands against the glass.
“What’s going to happen to you?” I asked her.
She turned to face me, so that she was now pressed backward against the window. “I was charged with a whole bunch of terrible things. There’s been a hearing, and I was declared guilty of everything except World War II. There will be a sentencing in a few weeks. I could go to prison. I could pay a lot of money in fines. I could get some kind of probation, even something really lenient. There’s no way to know until the sentencing. Mrs. Barney will probably sue me. A lot depends. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket before. Lots of parking tickets, I’m bad about those, because I’m always leaving my car someplace too long while I’m off painting in the sand dunes, or some crazy place like that. But no wrecks, at least none that were my fault, and no moving violations. Not one, and I’m sixty-five years old.” She smiled, painfully. “My lawyer says I’m a model citizen—except that I killed a man.
“The system’s really cynical and biased, he tells me. He says that if I’d hit a white child and I was a poor black man without much education, they’d probably throw the book at me, but since I’m this respectable, senior citizen white lady, I could get off easy, even though I killed a young man with two children. He says the courts are starting to get tough with older drivers who cause accidents, but that it’s not like I’m eighty-four years old, and half-blind and feeble. He’s trying to decide whether I should dye my hair, to look younger, but he says I can probably get more sympathy looking like this, and besides, the judge has already seen me with white hair. It’s not too good that I’m rich, and an artist, he says; it would be better if I were a struggling widow or a retired schoolteacher. Isn’t that terrible? Don’t you hate it?”
She said all that in a hard, biting tone of voice, but it was obvious that the hardness was all directed toward herself.
I said the only thing that came to my lips, “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be, be sorry for him. I was careless. Negligent, as the law says. And he’s dead.”
“But it sounds like something that almost anybody could do if the circumstances were right.” I said. “Or wrong. Everybody’s driven on autopilot, as you described it. Everybody gets distracted from the road, at least for a second or two, now and then.”
“You don’t have to try to make me feel better.”
“I’m not really, I wouldn’t presume to think I could. It’s just that it’s so scary, it’s so there-but-for-the-grace-of-God …”
“Well, I called you,” she said, “because I can’t bear the thought of anybody else on the face of the earth ever feeling like this, like I do. And, of course, as bad as it is for me, it must be immeasurably worse for Melissa Barney and her children. My husband was never much of a father, but that doesn’t mean our children wouldn’t have missed him horribly, if he’d died when they were as young as those boys.” She squared her thin shoulders and faced me. “Can you put up a real stoplight, instead of just a sign that idiots like me can drive right on by without seeing?”
“That’s a real possibility,” I hedged, not wanting to promise.
She nodded. “Good.”
I stood up, unable to think of any reason to justify my further presence in her life. I wasn’t even sure I’d had a good one to begin with, although she had certainly pounded one more nail in my determination to take on the project.
“Pardon me for asking,” I said, “but you’re not from here?”
“You hear the South in my accent?”
I smiled. “Just a touch, yes.”
“New Orleans. But my three children grew up, and my second husband found my new hobby of tap dancing to be incredibly annoying.” Suddenly Dorothy Wilhelm smiled at me, the first glint of humor and warmth that I’d seen on her face. She was instantly likable, and I felt just as immediately sorry for her. “And who can blame him? Maybe I took up tap to drive him out of the house.”
We both laughed a little, at that.
She continued: “But I’d always wanted to paint the Atlantic. This kind of light is different from Gulf light, which is moist and heavy and warm and glowing. This is hard, clear, rational light, I call it. Gulf light is emotional light. So, anyway, I found this place to rent with an option to buy if I really want to move here permanently.”
“You won’t stay, probably?”
Her glance at me was bleak. “I don’t know. The question is: Will I have a choice?”
“Are you happy with your legal team?”
“‘Team’ is right,” she said wincing, “and by the time this is over, I’ll think I could have bought a football franchise for what these guys are costing me. But, yes, I think I’m happy with them, although how will I know until the sentencing? I had to rely on somebody else’s advice in order to find them at all, since I’m new here. There was a woman at the accident—she’s one of the neighbors—who has been extraordinarily kind to me. She gave me the name of several excellent local defense attorneys. I don’t know where I’d be without her, or them. Jail, maybe.”
That sounded like Tressa Solberg to me: Tressa and Appy knew every lawyer in town,
and the Solbergs always weighed in on the side of the underdog. I asked Dorothy Wilheim if that’s who it was.
“No, her name is Nellie Kennedy. She’s been my own personal saint. Why, do you know her?”
I was so surprised, I could barely get out, “Yes.”
“She was so kind to both of us—Mr. Barney and me—at the accident. In fact, I think she even rode in the ambulance with him. But she also said to me that she felt terrible for me, and that she knew I hadn’t meant for it to happen.” Her voice quivered at the mere mention of sympathy and understanding from another person. “She gave me some lawyers’ names, and she has called here a couple of times since then, just to see how I’m doing, and to tell me to keep the faith.”
“Bless her heart,” I said.
“Amen,” responded Dorothy Wilheim, with feeling.
As I drove away, putting the ocean behind me, I thought that it really was wonderful of Nellie to help Wilheim, but wasn’t it also a little weird? Or, if not weird, at least it was a difficult balancing act, helping Melissa Barney on the one hand, and also offering moral support to the very person whom Melissa hated for killing Ben.
“You’re a strong woman, Nellie Kennedy,” I said to her image in my mind. “When I’m in trouble, I definitely want you on my side.”
After those conversations—with the Kennedys, the Solbergs, and Wilheim—I returned to the office and phoned Melissa Barney to tell her I could definitely recommend to my board that we take on her project.
“Maybe we’ll solve it with signs,” I said, feeling hopeful.
“Small children can’t read,” was her sharp retort “That little girl who was killed by that hit-and-run driver was only six years old. She probably barely knew her alphabet! No sign is going to keep a child like that from running out into the street, Jenny.”
I was taken aback, both by the truth of what she said and also by the anger with which she said it. Her voice was shaking with it, and she cracked out the words as if they were twigs she was breaking: snap, snap, snap!
I couldn’t say, “Melissa, is everything all right?” because obviously everything was never all right for a newly widowed young mother with two sad children. So I disengaged from the conversation as quickly and tactfully as I could. I’d wanted to ask her not to mention my decision to anybody else—at least not until the festival was over—because I thought that way we might avoid any problems with Lew Riss and his First Things First gang. But then, who was she going to tell who would tell Lew?
I hung up—gently—feeling sure the secret was safe with her.
It had been a revelation, that visit to Dorothy Wilheim, as I told Geof later. I’d thought there were only four principal victims when Ben Barney was killed: him, his wife, and their children. Now I felt there were five, including his “killer.” Depending on how the legal system disposed of her case, and on how she responded to this black hole in her life, I might have to extend that number of victims to include her family, too.
“You hear about victimless crimes,” I said that night, “but now I wonder if there aren’t also some—for lack of a better word—villainless crimes.”
“She ran the sign, Jen.”
“Hasn’t everybody, once?”
“She wasn’t paying attention to her driving.”
“Do you, every single moment?”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes,” I agreed, with heavy and accepting irony. “There is that.”
But I couldn’t help it: As bad as I felt for Melissa Barney and her sweet boys, I also couldn’t help but feel dreadfully sorry for Dorothy Wilheim.
Geof had brought home with him the accident reports on both the Barney fatality and the fatal hit-and-run involving the child six months earlier.
They were straightforward police reports, written in proper officialese, but easy enough to comprehend. The first accident happened on Memorial Day weekend on a rainy day when the police and medics were delayed in reaching the scene because the bridge was temporary closed due to flash flooding. (I remembered that weekend, the last wet one of that seemingly endless rainy spring.) The child’s death was not blamed on that delay, however. She had died instantly, upon impact, I read. That accident—just like the one Dorothy Wilheim was involved in—happened on a Sunday.
I flipped back to the first file to see what time of day that was: seven-thirty P.M., it said, and the reporting officer had noted the weather and pavement conditions. “Highway was rain-slick,” she reported, because of storms for several hours previously, but the rain had stopped approximately one hour before the child was struck. At the time of the accident, the sky was clear, with only a few clouds remaining. But, the officer noted, visibility may have been poor because the setting sun might have been directly in the driver’s eyes.
I perused the reports of the subsequent investigation into the accident and the search for the black VW Beetle. As opposed to the Barney⁄Wilheim case, this hit-and-run file was still open. I wondered whether, if I ever met that driver, he—or she—could possibly arouse in me any of the sympathy I felt for Wilheim.
All of that was simple, not very helpful or suggestive information in regard to improving the safety of the crossing. But there was one item in the reports that shot me out of my chair like a ball out of a cannon: The child who died was named Elena Patricia Talbot. The report said there was “no father.” Certainly an impossible biological event, but possible in practical terms. The mother’s last name was also Talbot. Her first name was:
Cleo.
Mother and child were from Bennington, Vermont.
“What should I do?” I asked Geof, even later that day, in bed. “Should I say something to her, or should I pretend I don’t know?”
“I think you’ll know what to do,” he replied, “the next time you see her.”
“But that would be awful, Geof, to say something to her at Judy’s House with so many people around. If it has to be, I think it has to be private.” I swallowed, dreading it. “In case she starts crying, or something.” I stared at the ceiling of our room. “God. They do say it’s the worst thing that can happen to you.”
“Jenny, don’t you think it’s a little unusual that she’d come live here where her little girl—what was her name?”
“Elena Patricia.”
“Where she died? If you had a child who was killed, would you go live in that town?”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, an idea just then forming in my mind, “if I was looking for the car that hit her.”
23
THURSDAY BEFORE THE FESTIVAL, CLEO TALBOT CAME AND WENT, AND I didn’t say anything to her. But I caught myself staring at her, transfixed by a deeper interest and sympathy and—yes—curiosity about her.
“Hi, Jenny,” she said, as usual, each time.
“Hi, Cleo,” I responded, as always, although now I felt selfconscious about adding, “How you doin’?”
She appeared so calm, so efficient, so ordinary—in her unordinary way—that I had a hard time reconciling the woman carrying the boxes with the mother in the accident report. Watching her, while I fielded phone calls and volunteers in our happy last-minute flurry of stuff-to-do, I thought back on our brief history with Cleo, looking for clues to her other, darker life that she had not chosen to reveal to us.
There wasn’t much to recall; I couldn’t give myself much credit, either, for seeing through her cheerful facade to what was surely churning below the surface. Yes, I’d thought she had an aura of an emotional maturity beyond her age, and yes, I had thought I glimpsed loneliness in her eyes, and there had been a movement or two when she had seemed to blink back tears and to retreat into herself. But beyond those few hints, no clues.
Friday morning, Cleo arrived a half hour earlier than usual with her first delivery. She walked up, smiling, to where I sat on one of the love seats as I was going over my notes, and she sat herself down on the facing love seat and plunked three shiny quarters down on the captain’s table between us. She had two books
with her: One was a fat hardback with a gray and yellow cover and the other was a trade paperback edition with a black cover.
“What’s this?” I asked her, laying my notes aside. “You making a contribution to the festival, Cleo?”
She laughed. “No. Well, maybe, in a way. You want a reading, before it happens? I think you’re ready for the I Ching. I thought you might like to see the big picture of what to expect from this weekend, and how it all fits into your own psyche.”
“Wow,” I said, at the ambition of it. “E what?”
“I Ching.” She pronounced it carefully for me, and it sounded like a long e followed by the word jing as in jingle bells. “Most Westerners say it incorrectly, but you’re going to learn it the right way.”
I tried the words, tasting their foreign flavor.
“That’s right,” she approved. “Ever heard of it?”
“Yeah, but without ever really knowing what it is.”
“It’s an ancient Chinese source of wisdom and divination. Another kind of oracle, like the pendulum or runes, but more talkative, by far. Confucius used and explicated it, but its source goes far back, even before him. For the person who has ears to hear and eyes to see, it can be a spiritual guide, like an invisible guru.”
“Exactly what will it guide me to?” I was feeling nervous around her, not quite sure who it was I was dealing with; finally 1 just fell back into being myself—regardless of who she might be, either mysterious oracle, brisk delivery woman, or grieving mom.
“It will guide you to integrity,” she said solemnly. “It guides me toward discovering the integrity—that is, the wholeness—of my self, and it helps me to live a life of ever greater integrity in the world.” She made a face, mocking her own selfimportance. “But if it can’t give me the right numbers to win the lottery, what good is it, right?”