“I saw him this morning. He was laid out on a piece of steel.
He was broken. He wasn’t my boy any more. It wasn’t Bruce. It was some thing-with its head all busted up. You jammed that gun into him and pulled the trigger.’
‘You know I didn’t do that.’
‘Don’t tell me what I know,’ he yells. ‘You don’t have the right to tell me what I know! He was my boy! My boy! And you killed him.’
“He killed himself.’
‘I’ve always thought about what you did,’ he says, ‘and I always wished I had the courage to do the same thing.’
‘What?’
‘When Lucy died. It was the same thing, you know. But I did nothing. I let it eat me up all these years and I did nothing. But not this time.’
I unfold the newspaper clippings. They’re not big articles, because it wasn’t a big enough story to hit the front page. Just like with my family. They’re small stories jammed in the back pages with the opinions and reviews and the ‘who-gives-a-damn’
sections of the paper. Alderman’s wife was killed by a learner driver who was still mixing up the difference between giving way and not giving way. There’s a quote: She just came out of nowhere. It’s similar to my own story, but not that similar. Though maybe enough that there could have been a bond between Alderman and me. His wife went shopping for groceries and lost her life because of an accident. It was a run-of-the-mill routine: you climb into your car and an hour later you’re cut out of it. No malice. No intent. Just bad luck combining for everybody involved. A left turned instead of a right, ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later: any of those, and she’d still be alive. Similar in some ways to my own story. Different in others. My wife and daughter weren’t driving. They were walking. It wasn’t a learner driver who hit them, but an experienced one. He was experienced in a lot of areas. Mostly proficient in drinking more than he was in driving.
He had a criminal record a mile long. He was a repeat offender.
He would be pulled over and fined. His car and his licence would be taken off him and he would get them back. It became a routine.
He just kept on going back out on the roads, and the world just kept on letting him. When the fines increased, it didn’t matter.
He just kept on paying them, racking up his mortgage account with drunk-driving conviction payouts. There wasn’t anything the criminal system was prepared to do about it except take a collective breath each time to see if this would be the one when he killed somebody. Nobody cared. As long as he paid his fines, he was a source of income. He was revenue. He was good for the country.
The connection between Alderman’s wife and my own is a strong one in some ways but not in others. We both lost our own lives the day we lost parts of our family. He spiralled into an abyss that he is still in now. I have an abyss of my own. I figure if Alderman had done something all those years ago, maybe he would be a different man. But like he said, he did nothing.
I figure if I’d done nothing, I’d be a different man too.
Better men? We could be. Or we could be worse.
‘You took the law into your own hands,’ he says. ‘You did it after the accident, and you did it again last night. You killed my son. You killed him for doing nothing. Ten years ago, when Lucy died, I did nothing. Not this time. This time you are going to pay. Your wife is going to pay. And this time your friends in the department can’t do a damn thing to help you.’
The temperature in this impossibly cold house drops even further. It’s like somebody has just strapped a block of ice onto my back. I can feel the weight of it pushing me down. I tighten my grip on the phone. The air is thick and damp and tastes like sour sweat, and all the words in the newspaper article seem to swirl around as if the ink is wet and running.
‘You better be fucking kidding right now, you son of a bitch.’
‘You think the police are kidding and my son isn’t really dead?
What do you think, Tate?’
‘My wife has nothing to do with this.’
‘How can you be so stupid as to think bad things don’t happen all the time to innocent people? You know that first hand. You experienced it last night when you killed my boy. You experienced it two years ago. And you’re experiencing it right now.’
The phone goes dead. I look at the display. The battery hasn’t gone flat. Alderman has hung up.
I dial him back. He doesn’t answer.