hearing it, both of them turning towards the sound. Emily’s tiny hand tight inside my wife’s grip. The look on Bridget’s face as she realised there was nothing they could do, that the SUV was going to knock them around like rag dolls.
She pushed Emily out of the way. That’s what they tell me. She did what any mother would do and tried to save her daughter.
Only it wasn’t enough. The four-wheel-drive slammed into them
both; it knocked my wife onto the hood, it rolled my daughter
beneath the wheels, and it broke them. It broke my little girl up inside beyond repair. It did the same to my wife. It did the same to me. And to my parents.
And still Quentin kept driving. He would tell me two weeks
later, when I took him away to a small corner of the world, that he couldn’t even remember running into them. He told me
that it wasn’t him, not really, but the man he became when the booze took over. Therefore I had the wrong man. He was sick,
he said, and it was the sick Quentin who ran over and killed my daughter. The Quentin pleading for his life in front of me wasn’t the man who had killed my girl, at least according to the sober Quentin, but that didn’t matter to me. It was the bullshit plea of a weak and cowardly drunk during one of his few sober moments.
He said he couldn’t remember running them over but that didn’t matter either. I could. And so could witnesses. They told me the impact sounded dull, like heavy suitcases being dropped on the pavement from a second-storey window. They told me my wife
rolled across the hood of the SUV and was thrown hard into
the concrete. They told me my little girl tumbled and bounced
beneath the chassis until she was spat out the end, ejected from between the wheels all twisted and bloody. They tell me my wife and daughter ended up in the same place, side by side on the
pavement. Quentin kept on driving.
Quentin James was caught within an hour. His four-wheel
drive with the bull bars on the front that was never once used off road in the four years he owned it was impounded. It was
kept as evidence. He was charged with manslaughter and reckless driving, but he should have been charged with murder. I never
figured that one out. The guy chose to drive drunk. He chose to do it every single damn day of his life. That means it didn’t come down to fate or bad luck, but down to a conscious choice. That and statistics. It came down to mathematics. It means it had to happen. Put a drunk guy out on the roads every day and he’s
bound to kill somebody. Has to happen, the same way if you keep flipping a coin it has to come up tails.
So for me, manslaughter didn’t cut it. Didn’t come close. He
got released on bail and he tried to get his car back, but for the first time ever they wouldn’t let him have it. They couldn’t — because people were outraged by the accident. They were angry at the system that allowed him to keep going free. So this time the courts weren’t giving his car back, not at least until the trial was over. It was as though the judge finally figured out that giving this guy his car back was like handing Jack the Ripper a scalpel, that in this case it couldn’t all be about revenue gathering. This time James would do time. That was for sure. They’d lock him away
for two years in a cell that was a hell of a lot bigger than the coffin my daughter got locked in.
But everything worked out different. Quentin James never
went to jail. My daughter is no longer in her resting place. The world has gone topsy-turvy and I don’t know what to do. I’m
kneeling in the grass next to a mound of dirt and an empty
coffin. Sidney Alderman has come along and dug up her grave in the same way his son dug up others. He has dug up and torn the stitches from the memories, and the pain of losing my daughter is as strong as it was the day Quentin James stole her from me. James is no longer around to direct my anger towards, but Alderman is, and I’m going to find the son of a bitch.
I stand up. I turn my back on the grave of my little girl. The sky has cleared even more and it looks like it could actually turn into a pretty good day. As good as it can get, weather wise. As bad as it can get in every other way. I start my car and drive to Alderman’s house. I’m tempted to drive right into it, just hit the sucker at a hundred kilometres an hour and shred the weatherboards and
plasterboard to pieces. Instead I bring the car to a fast stop up his driveway, skidding the shingle out in all directions and creating a thin cloud of dirt that drifts past the front of the car and towards the house. I get out and slam the door, wishing I had access to the gun the caretaker’s son used on himself. All I have access to is my anger — it should be enough. I think in the end anger will beat out sorrow on any given day. Even on a Tuesday.
chapter nineteen
The house still smells of alcohol and the air is damp. The furniture bugs me in a way that furniture shouldn’t be able to do. I want to set fire to the place. Pour gasoline all over the walls and floors and the clawed-up lounge suite and turn the whole fucking lot to ash.