“Could I?”
“You’re here,” he said. “So yes.”
He never drove again.
That is not a figure of speech. Abner Lachance was thirty-nine years old in 1985 and had been driving commercially for eleven years, and after that October he did not get behind a wheel again — not a truck, not a car, not once in forty-one years.
He got a job at a lumberyard and rode a bicycle to it for nineteen years, in all weather, until his knees went. After that his wife drove him.
Since she d*ed he has taken the bus.
“You came to the fun*ral on the bus,” I said.
“Two buses.”
“Mr. Lachance, that’s four hours.”
“I had the day,” he said.
He was never charged. I checked; I did not want to be told by somebody else later. The light was contested, there were no witnesses, the report is inconclusive and the file was closed in January.
He has spent forty-one years being certain he entered on green and equally certain that it does not matter, and he explained the difference to me in a way I have not been able to improve on.
“I might not have run the light,” he said. “I was awake fifty-one hours that week. Whether the light was red is the law’s question. Whether I should have been on that road at all is mine, and I’ve had four decades to answer it, and the answer is no.”
I asked him the thing I had driven eleven miles to ask.
“Why did he keep writing to you?”
Abner looked at his hands for a while.
“Because I was the only one who wasn’t getting better,” he said. “Everybody else was going to get better. Her sister, the neighbors, the people at the church — they were all going to be fine in a year or two, and he knew it, and he couldn’t stand it.” He shook his head slowly. “He needed somebody who was going to be exactly as sorry in 1998 as they were in 1985. And the only person in the world who qualified was me.”
Chapter 4: What Was Underneath
There was more in that drawer than the shoebox.
Underneath the folder — right at the bottom, flat, in a plastic sleeve — was a child’s shoe.
One red canvas shoe, size 8, with a broken buckle.
I have no memory of owning it. I have no memory of anything from that night; my first real memory is Marlon’s kitchen and a bowl of cereal with too much milk, at some point in the year after.
I took that shoe to my therapist before I took it anywhere else.
Her name is Odile and I have seen her since my second child, and she is the person who told me the thing that finally let me put it down.
“Vera, you’re asking the wrong question.”
“The question is why he lied to me for forty-one years.”
“That’s the one you’re asking. It’s not the one that matters.” She put her pen down. “The question is what a four-year-old does with the information. He didn’t have a policy. He had a four-year-old, at midnight, in a corridor, and a choice about whether she would grow up as a girl whose mother d*ed or a girl who survived the crash that k*lled her mother. Those are two completely different childhoods.”
“He could have told me at eighteen.”
“He could have. What would you have done with it at eighteen?”
I thought about eighteen.
I was a mess at eighteen. I am not going to put the details here, but I was a mess, in the ordinary way of a girl with one parent and a hole in her, and I know exactly what I would have done with it.
“At thirty?”
“I had two babies at thirty.”
“At forty?”
And I sat in that office and understood that there is no good year.
There is no age at which a woman is well placed to hear you were in the back seat. He looked for one for forty-one years and did not find it, and then he ran out of time and did the second-best thing available to him, which was to leave it where I would find it, with all the context, in his house, after.
“Do you think he was protecting himself?” I asked Odile.
“Partly. Of course partly.” She never softens anything. “He was also a man who wrote to the driver every year for forty-one years and never once told you that either. Did you notice that? He didn’t tell you about the letters, which cost him nothing to hide and would have made him look extraordinary.”
She’s right.
That is the thing about the drawer that I keep returning to. Every single item in it makes him look better, not worse — and he kept all of it in a garage, unmentioned, for four decades.
A man hiding his own goodness in the same drawer as his one lie.
I told my children in March.
Eleven and fourteen. We did it at the kitchen table on a Sunday, with Odile’s four rules written on an index card in my pocket, and it took about nine minutes.
My son asked one question: “So you were actually in the crash?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember it?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Okay,” he said, and ate a banana, and went back to whatever he had been doing, because he is fourteen and it happened to a stranger forty-one years before he was born.
My daughter did not ask anything at the table.
