Klara had put Zoe down for her afternoon nap, and she and I were sitting out on the deck reading and watching the tide come in. I heard Zoe start to fuss and went in to check her; it was hot, North Carolina hot, and the house wasn’t air-conditioned; I figured the heat had wakened her early. But when I saw her I was horrified—she was standing in the rented Portacrib, her red face sweating and swollen like a melon, with a pathetic froglike smile sliced across it. I touched her bare shoulder gingerly: she was feverish, her skin as hot as I’d ever felt it. I grabbed her up, rushed her out to the kitchen, and splashed water on her face, shouting for Klara to call the doctor, I think she’s been bitten by an insect or something!
In that splendid isolation there was no doctor—or rather, there was only one, and he was off fishing in the Gulf Stream for yellowfin tuna. The nearest hospital was in Elizabeth City, forty miles inland, across the Great Dismal Swamp on a narrow, badly paved road. Zoe’s face, arms, and legs continued to swell, although she seemed not to be in any pain or even discomfort. Klara took her in her arms and continued washing her body down with cold water, searching in vain for signs of a bite—snake or spider, I knew it mattered which—while I frantically dialed the hospital.
I finally got a doctor on the line; he sounded young, Southern, but cool. Instantly, he surmised that there was a nest of baby black widow spiders in the crib mattress. “They have to be little babies, or else with her body weight she’d be dead,” he said. “You’re way out there in Duck, eh? If Dr. Hopkins has gone fishin’, then you’ll just have to rush her here. I’m alone here and can’t leave. There is a good chance you can get her to me before her throat closes, and then we can control the swelling with insulin,” he said. But keep her calm, he told me, don’t excite her. “Is she more relaxed with one of you than the other?”
“Yes,” I said. “With me.” Which was true enough, especially at that moment. Klara was wild-eyed with fear, and her fear was contagious. I was a better actor than she, that’s all. Zoe loved us equally then. Just as she loathes us equally now.
“All right, then, you be the one to hold the child in your lap, Mr. Stephens, and let your wife drive the vehicle. And you better bring a small sharp knife along with you. Do you have one that’s clean? You don’t have time to sterilize it properly.”
I said yes, my Swiss army knife. Clean and sharp. But what the hell for?
“Use the small blade,” he said, and then he explained how to perform an emergency tracheotomy, told me how to cut into my daughter’s throat and windpipe without causing her to bleed to death. “There will be a whole lot of blood, you understand. A whole lot.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I said, but I heard my voice go flat and toneless as I spoke, as if I were already doing it.
“If her throat closes up and stops her breathing, you’ll have to, Mr. Stephens. You’ll have a minute and a half, two minutes maybe, and she’ll probably be unconscious when you do it. But listen, if you can keep her calm and relaxed, if you don’t let her little heart beat real fast and spread that poison around, then you just might make it over here first. You get going now,” he snapped, and hung up.
I relayed the bit about keeping her calm to Klara, but nothing about the knife, and without explanation said that she should drive while I held Zoe, which relieved her, I think. Then we took off down the long sandy beach road to the bridge and over the causeway to the mainland, speeding west through the swamp toward Elizabeth City. It was an unforgettable forty-five minutes. Throughout, I was neatly divided into two people—I was the sweetly easy daddy singing, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence, I’ve got sixpence to last me all my life,” and I was the icy surgeon, one hand in his pocket holding the knife, blade open and ready, the decision to cut unquestioned now, irreversible, while I waited merely for the second that Zoe’s breath stopped to make the first slice into her throat.
I can’t tell you why I connect that terrifying drive to Elizabeth City over two decades ago to this case in Sam Dent now, where children actually died, fourteen of them, but there is a powerful equivalence. With my knife in my hand and my child lying in my lap, smiling up at me, trusting me utterly, with her face swelling like a painted balloon, progressively distorting her features into grotesque versions of themselves, I felt the same clearheaded power that I felt during those first days in Sam Dent, when the suit was taking off. I felt no ambivalence, did no second-guessing, had no mistrusted motives—I knew what I did and what I would do next and why, and Lord, it felt wonderful! It always feels that way. Which is why I go on doing it.
In the case of the drive to Elizabeth City, as in so many of the suits I’ve since undertaken, it turned out that I did not have to go as far as I was prepared to go. But this is only because I was indeed prepared to go all the way. I was at peace with myself and the world, and consequently Zoe, too, stayed calm and placid, her tiny heart beating slowly, normally, even after I ran out of songs and had to go back to the beginning of my repertoire, which usually irritated her; she almost fell asleep at one point.
Klara raced into the hospital lot, drew up at the emergency room entrance, and I stepped out of the car and calmly carried Zoe inside, where the doctor and two nurses with a gurney and an IV hookup awaited us. Five minutes later, her swelling had started to recede. By evening, the three of us were back at the beach, watching from the deck as the sun set behind the dunes and out near the eastern horizon the red sky streaked the sea in plum and cobalt blue. We had removed the mattress from the crib as soon as we got back from the hospital and, unsure of what to do with it, had tossed it into a patch of witchgrass beside the deck; but that night I built a driftwood fire on the beach and burned the thing, and Zoe slept with us.
Now in my dreams of her, and I dream of her frequently, Zoe is still that child in my lap, trusting me utterly—even though I am the man who secretly held in his hand the knife that he had decided to use to cut into her throat, and thus I am in no way the man she sees smiling down at her, singing ditties and rondelets and telling stories of owls and pussycats.
And sometimes when I wake, for a few moments I’m like Risa Walker and Hartley Otto and Billy Ansel and all those other parents whose children have died and who have been unable to react with rage—the dreamed child is the real one, the dead child simply does not exist. We waken and say, “I can’t believe she’s gone,” when what we mean is “I don’t believe she exists.” It’s the other child, the dreamed baby, the remembered one, that for a few lovely moments we think exists. For those few moments, the first child, the real baby, the dead one, is not gone; she simply never was.
After explaining to the Ottos the contingency fee agreement, which, like the Walkers, they quickly signed (once they realized it would cost them nothing up front), I returned to my car and drove along Bartlett Hill Road from their house back into town, following the route of the school bus, which took me past all the houses of the families who had entrusted their children to it. A morbid drive, but it gave me some insights and let me usefully imagine the event, despite the different weather and time of day. So that when I passed the town dump, pulled out onto the Marlowe road, and headed down from Wilmot Flats, I saw that wide snow-covered bowl open up before me and naturally picked up speed, as the driver of the bus must have, and my attention momentarily left the roadway altogether, as hers must have, and took in the marvelous view of valley and village, snowy mountains and deep blue sky, and I almost missed the place where the bus had gone over, where there remained all kinds of signs of the disaster—the broken and trampled roadside snowbank and the state police barriers still up, the tracks of trucks and ambulances, of snowmobiles and crowds of rescue workers on the embankment and the snow-covered ground around the water-filled sandpit below. The pit, although it had frozen solid again, was now an ice crater of sorts, with huge gray wedges and chunks sticking out of the new ice and lying along the bank like the walls of a building destroyed by a bomb.
I parked my car a ways beyond the scene a
nd slowly walked back along the highway to it. No other vehicles in sight. The sun was bright, and a steady breeze was blowing out of the valley below, hissing in the trees and sending the powdery snow across the pavement in tiny fantails. It was definitely ghostly out there, but I’ve visited hundreds of scenes like this and can recreate the tragic event in my mind without being distracted by the atmosphere of the aftermath.
I saw where the bus had gone through the low three-cable guardrail and noted that it had been a relatively new rail, properly installed. On the other side of the highway, the posts were rusted near the base from the salty runoff; soon those rails, too, would have to be replaced. But, regretfully, Dolores Driscoll hadn’t gone through over there; she’d snapped off the new poles here on this side, half a dozen of them, dragging the cables with her. From my point of view, the best thing you could say about the new guardrail was that it was utterly incapable of stopping or even diverting a fast-moving bus.
Beyond the broken guardrail, the embankment fell off precipitously, and the angle between the road and the line that ran from the road to the point where the bus had entered the sandpit below was twenty or twenty-five degrees. No way the bus could have cut that sharp an angle unless, when it left the road and broke through the guardrail, it was speeding, or damned near speeding. A hundred yards farther down the road, at a point directly opposite the sandpit, the drop was gradual. If the vehicle had gone off there, no matter how fast it had been going when it left the road, it wouldn’t have traveled the several hundred feet down the slope to the sandpit: the impact of the guardrail and then the snowbank and the field of deep snow beyond would have stopped the vehicle first. Up above, though, all you had, after the guardrail and the snowbank, was free-fall.
It was inescapable—when the bus left the road, it had been moving pretty fast. And because of the drop-off, once through the guardrail, the bus was gone. There was no way for the driver to have kept it from going down the steep embankment and into the sandpit, even at that oblique an angle, without having immediately, deliberately, flipped it over on its side, which would have kept it out of the sandpit, at least. But what kind of driver could have pulled that off? Not the kind that’s terrified of losing the lives of children, that’s for sure. Not Dolores Driscoll.
I stepped over the rail opposite the sandpit and made my way down the trampled slope to examine the site up close. A chain-link fence surrounded the pit, most of it flattened now, smashed first by the plummeting bus and then by the rescuers. It had been a sturdy six-foot fence with a wide gate that no doubt had been padlocked. I thought, if one hot summer night some teenaged kids climbed over that fence to skinny-dip and one of them drowned there, the town would be negligent for not having drained it. That’s a case I could win, despite the fence. But that, I had to note, was not the case I was chasing here. What I had here was fourteen kids on their way to school one winter morning dying in a sandpit a hundred yards off the road. They did not get there on their own. Concentrate on how they got there, I decided.
Which presented certain problems. Unless I could establish that the driver of the bus, this Dolores Driscoll, had been safely under the speed limit when she came down the highway that morning, there was no way I’d be able to blame the town or the school district or the state or anyone else with deep pockets for negligence. To nail them, I’d have to defend her. I’d have to defend her even if the brakes or some part of the steering had failed. No matter what the immediate cause of the crash, I’d still have to establish that at the time it left the road the bus was being driven in a proper way and at a safe speed for the conditions.
I damn sure did not want to go after Dolores Driscoll, and, for somewhat different reasons, neither did my clients. Never mind that her pockets weren’t an inch deep; she was well-liked, sober, hardworking, from an old respected Sam Dent family, sole support of her crippled husband, and she’d been driving local kids to school safely for more than twenty years. Worse, the parents viewed her as having been victimized just as much as they were themselves, and a jury would agree with them. “Poor Dolores,” Risa had said. “She must be destroyed by this.”
My case would have to be built on the assumption that Dolores Driscoll was not at fault. The lawyers opposing me would simply hope to prove the opposite and go home early and type up their bills.
Two ways to establish the speed of the bus at the time it left the road, I figured: use the testimony of the driver and, more important, use the testimony of the sole witness, Billy Ansel. Which meant, of course, that he could not be one of my clients. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. For him to testify that Dolores had been driving under the speed limit (and I couldn’t even be sure of that yet), he could not be in a position to profit from his testimony. But with his impartiality established, I could then begin to hope that Ansel had in fact clocked the bus from behind with his truck and that neither of them had been traveling at more than fifty-five miles per hour. If he had not actually monitored the speed of the bus from behind, then I would have him testify as to his own safe driving habits—which, when challenged, I could support, if not verify. It would still be self-serving testimony, of course, but it would be enough for a jury that was inclined to believe him and did not want to blame Dolores Driscoll anyhow.
My first task, though, was to keep him impartial. Keep him clean. It would be easy to make him resist signing on with me, but I’d also have to help him resist the impulse to sign on with any of the double-knit sharks that were cruising these waters. I was sure he’d been contacted already, but my best guess so far was that he’d rebuffed them. Assuming that what I’d been told of him by the Walkers and the Ottos—that he had holed up in his house alone and was staying drunk—wasn’t just village gossip. Drunks don’t sue.
Originally, I’d decided that this guy, drunk or sober, was going to require some careful seduction. I myself had not planned to approach him until after the others had been turned down; let them seed the idea of a negligence suit, was my strategy, and then let me come along with my homework done and several of his more respected friends and neighbors in tow and all ready to file notices of claim, and the guy would sign on, I was sure.
Now, however, everything was different. Now I had to turn him off me, and in such a way that no other lawyer could get to him instead. This wasn’t quite ethical, of course; maybe not even moral. Necessary, however—legal triage.
I’d planned to give Ansel another few days before making direct contact, but that seemed too risky now. Better hit on the guy soon, or better yet, talk to him this evening at his house, late, especially if he’s into drinking. Give him a genteel nudge that pisses him off more afterwards than at the time of delivery, and he’ll want to kill the next lawyer he talks to, I figured.
There was no point in contacting any additional parents until I’d first brought Ansel’s testimony under my control and had answered the question of how fast the bus was moving when it went through the guardrail. So I went to work on the other aspects of the case—checked the state police in Marlowe, the county seat, to find out who had arrived at the scene first; stopped by the county mapping office for a look at the pitch and height of the highway and adjacent roads and lands; that sort of thing—gathering data, mainly, for later.
That night, after the blue-plate special at the Noonmark over in Keene Valley (ham and macaroni and cheese—kiddie food, but at least there weren’t any lawyers or journalists eating there), I drove out to Ansel’s house, which was up on Staples Mill Road. I passed the house by and parked a short ways beyond it with my lights out, thinking I’d reconnoiter a bit before approaching the man in person. It was a lovely moonlit night, the snow a pale blue color under it, the trees black against the snow. And cold—I didn’t even want to know the temperature.
I got out of the car and walked slowly back toward the house, a large well-maintained stone-faced colonial that looked recently renovated, with sharply cleared paths and driveway, two-car garage, breezeway—like a dentist’s house in the su
burbs. The only lights on were in the room adjacent to the breezeway, apparently the kitchen, and from the road where I stood, next to the mailbox, I could see him through the large picture window, seated at the table, alone.
Jesus, he looked sad. Tousled dark hair, shoulders slumped, elbows planted on the table, a single glass and a half-empty bottle in front of him—the picture of permanent depression. Gone to where he thought his kids had gone. If I’d wanted the guy for a client, I’d have been worried.
Suddenly, he stood up and turned and faced out the window, looking across the snow-covered front yard right at me. I froze and stared back at him. Nothing else to do. I remember that for several seconds we seemed to be gazing at one another, me in moonlight at the side of the road, him in the soft light of his kitchen a hundred feet away, neither of us moving a muscle. We were like mirror images of each other, but who knows if he saw me at all, or, if he saw me, what he thought he was looking at? Maybe all he could see was himself reflected off the window glass, a muscular bearded guy in his late thirties in a plaid flannel shirt and khakis; and saw nothing of the tall skinny fifty-five-year-old guy shivering outside in his camel-hair coat. It was a weird moment, though. As if we were long-lost brothers, separated early and passing by accident decades later, not quite recognizing each other, but then, for a second or two, something—something—clicks.
The moment passed. Ansel turned away from the window and poured himself another drink: it looked like straight whiskey. He sat heavily back down at the table, and I quickly walked back to my car. He’s too drunk to talk to tonight, I thought; probably wouldn’t even remember it in the morning. The aftereffect of what I had to say to him was more important to me than the immediate effect. I think I was rationalizing, though. Scared.
I decided to drive back to the motel by way of Ansel’s garage in town, which was where they’d hauled the wrecked bus. I wanted some pictures of the vehicle while I could still get them, even if I had to take them at night with a flash. In a day or two, I knew, once I’d filed notices of claim, the bus was likely to disappear.