Sorrow Road Read online

  Time for a break. She stomped her booted feet. She stabbed the business end of the shovel into a nearby mound of snow. It stayed upright without a fuss. She slapped her gloved hands against the sides of her black down jacket, encouraging her circulation to work a little faster. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath. The cold air was instantly painful, a pain that reached deep into her chest. Yes, she should have been expecting it, but for some reason, she wasn’t; it took her a few seconds to recover. She blinked back the water that sprang into her eyes. Then she dislodged the shovel and got back to work. Back to her thinking.

  The second kind? The second kind were the subtle drunks.

  They were the sly, hidden ones, the ones who were convinced of their own cleverness when they refused a glass of wine at a social occasion, making a great noble show of sliding a hand over the top of the glass when the waiter came by—Oh, no thanks, none for me!—and then later, in the privacy of their own homes, finishing off a fifth of Jack straight from the bottle and getting stinking, puking, shit-faced drunk. They awoke hours later to a battering-ram headache and upended chairs and shattered glassware and a large lurking pocket of nothingness where the memory of the night before ought to have been.

  Darlene Strayer had been the second kind. No doubt about it. Because Bell had never had the slightest inkling of a problem. There were no hints, no rumors. Yet the evidence seemed pretty clear. The sobriety chip, for one thing. And for another, nobody drove drunk on a winter-slick mountain road except somebody who could not help it, somebody who had given up command and control over herself a long time ago when it came to drinking.

  Between the two kinds of drunks, Bell preferred the first. Public drunks made no bones about who they were. You knew what you were dealing with. The second kind—the sneaks—were far more challenging. She’d had a friend in high school, Mindy Brewer, whose mother was the second kind. Linda Brewer showed the world a smiling, cheerful face, and was fond of reciting homilies about self-reliance and facing up to your problems and the sacred gift of each new day, but in private—Mindy confessed this to Bell one night when they were seniors, as they sat in Mindy’s silver Mustang after clocking out from the Hardee’s—Linda Brewer drank vast quantities of vodka every night, and ended up in a sloppy rage. They were all her mother’s co-conspirators, Mindy said, herself included. Everyone kept the secret: her dad, her little brother Arthur, and her mother’s sister Paige, who came over sometimes to help when Linda could not get out of bed because she had “the flu.”

  Yeah, Mindy said. The flu. Like that fooled anybody.

  The first kind of drunk was a nuisance, and they annoyed you. The second kind broke your heart, over and over again.

  And over and over again after that.

  With each accumulating thought, Bell thrust the shovel forward, hooking it up underneath a too-big hunk of snow, bending over to lend an extra oomph to her maneuvers. As she straightened up, the shovel came up with her, along with its fresh burden of snow. She grunted. She turned, dumping the load next to the sidewalk. At first she’d tried tossing it, but the snow was too heavy, and she ended up just letting it slide off the side. Then she inched forward and did it again: bend, thrust, hook, lift, grunt, dump. Repeat.

  Years ago, when she lived in D.C. with Sam and Carla, they had hired a landscaping service to keep the walks and the driveway clear after heavy snowfalls. And the few times since her return here that a major storm had come barreling in, Bell paid a kid in the neighborhood, Ben Fawcett, to handle the aftermath. Trouble was, Ben was away this weekend on a ski trip with his Boy Scout troop.

  Standing at her front window just after the deputy’s departure, she had decided at first to ignore the snow on the porch steps and the walk and the sidewalk in front of her house. Just let it be. No one would blame her; her neighbors understood how busy she was, how the prosecutor’s post is a 24/7 deal, how she needed a little down time. They never judged her. It would be okay, right?

  No. It would not.

  As she had continued to watch, people began trudging out of their houses up and down Shelton Avenue, encased in big plaid coats and thick corduroy pants tucked into blocky black boots and furry hats and earmuffs and insulated gloves, toting shovels and brooms and old blue-tin Maxwell House coffee cans full of salt, attacking the porch steps and sidewalks with a gritty gusto. When they exhaled, their breath was instantly visible. There were moms and dads and small children. There were grandmothers and grandfathers. Even the can’t-miss-a-Sunday churchgoers were out here, digging and clearing. The fancy clothes stayed on coat hangers back in the closet. This was the priority. The pastor would understand.

  I’ll be damned, Bell had thought, if I’m going to hang out here at this window and just watch.

  She needed to pitch in. She wanted to pitch in. There was something about dramatic weather—a big snow or a shingle-snatching wind or an epic rain—that brought a neighborhood together. Shared misery was a great unifier. And so she had gotten dressed, opened the front door, stepped outside. A clear dome of cold had settled over everything, like a lid on a jar. The air was as crisp as a finger-snap. There was a black-and-white simplicity to the world that Bell found appealing. Snow was the only meaningful reality.

  She finally remembered where she had left the shovel—it was propped up against the side of her house, buried in snow up to the handle. She wrenched it loose and got to work.

  She didn’t know what time Carla would be arriving. Between now and then, she had a lot to do to be ready, outside and in. During the past year or so she had begun using her daughter’s old room as kind of spillover area for things that would not fit anywhere else: the 12-speed bike she had bought so that she could accompany Clay Meckling on long rides down the county back roads; plastic bins filled with out-of-season clothes; boxes of notebooks from her law-school days that had outlived their utility but that she could not quite bear to throw away, either. Bell envisioned Carla stepping hopefully into the room that had been her beloved sanctuary until her junior year in high school—and coming to a dead halt when she spotted the box marked ENVIRONMENTAL LAW/PROF JEFFCOAT in purple Sharpie or the one on top of it that bore the label TORTS/PROF STANLEY.

  “Hey, Bell! Betcha woke up and thought you’d moved to Canada, right?”

  She knocked the snow off her shovel and looked to her left. Hank Bainbridge, Myrtle Bainbridge’s youngest son, was waving a heavy-gloved hand at her from the driveway two houses over. He was round, like his mother, and in that puffy white parka he resembled a human snowman garnished with a tuft of gingery hair on top.

  The Bainbridge boys had been in high school the same time as Bell. Hank was a year younger, George was her age, and Wyatt was a year older. They had been wild things back then, surly hell-raisers who seemed destined for the jail or the cemetery or both, the second shortly after the first. Funny: They were all middle-aged now, like her, and you could not find more sedate, respectful, law-abiding men. It was as if the wildness had been knocked off them along the way, like the caked snow on Bell’s shovel. They had gotten it out of their systems. The three of them now took excellent care of Myrtle, who had a revolving drama of health problems. There was always a Bainbridge brother around to drive her to a doctor’s appointment or help her with her weekly shopping at Lymon’s Market.

  “Hey, Hank,” Bell yelled back.

  “You need any help over there?”

  “I got it. Thanks.”

  He waved again and went back to his slow excavation of his mother’s driveway.

  Bell leaned an elbow on her shovel and checked her progress. It was pitiful. She had made such a small dent in the preponderance of snow that the few inroads looked almost accidental—and yet her palms were stinging and her back had already filed multiple complaints. At this rate, she would finish clearing the walk just in time for the spring thaw.

  Occasionally it still felt strange to her, this being a part of a neighborhood, a community. Having people to wave to, people who waved back. P
eople who looked out for her. Most of her childhood had been spent in foster homes, where she had never been able to put her full weight down, and as a young married woman in D.C., she moved frequently, as Sam’s promotions and career jumps had propelled their rise into better and better areas. They never established roots. Sam did not want roots. Roots were for losers. Roots were for people with no ambitions. Stuck people.

  And during all those moves, Bell had begun to notice a peculiar thing: The more dazzling and exclusive and ritzy the neighborhood, the less it felt like a neighborhood at all. Nobody ever seemed to be home when she knocked on a neighbor’s door to say hello. Nobody took walks. In the last home she and Sam shared, just before she had filed for divorce, she looked around one day and realized she did not know the names of any of the people on their street. Not one.

  Well, wait. That wasn’t true. She did know one name. A former secretary of commerce lived on the corner in the overgrown Tudor behind the high hedges—at least when she wasn’t flying all over the world, giving speeches about altruism and other Christian virtues for fees that equaled the annual GDP of a medium-sized country. Bell had never met her, and she had never met her children or her husband or her personal assistant or her nanny or her gardener, but she knew the woman’s name, because Sam had told her. It was the besotted way he said the name—with a sort of holy-grail gleam in his voice—that annoyed her.

  All these years later and here she was, shoveling snow. Not a former cabinet member in sight. And that was just fine with her.

  But would it be fine with Carla? Would her daughter, that is, miss the racket and the romance of a big city, a city filled with the things that everybody else in the world seemed to think were madly desirable?

  Bell yanked the shovel out of the snow mound. Her break was over. Using her other gloved hand as a visor, she gave the sun a quick, vicious squint. Why the hell couldn’t it help a little bit, melting some of this crap? The question was purely rhetorical because she knew the answer: It was just too dang cold. The sun was a stage prop today. Nothing more.

  Her mind was suddenly and unexpectedly filled with an image of Darlene Strayer’s face, the way it had looked the last time Bell saw her: sitting across a wooden table in a booth the night before at the Tie Yard Tavern, her dark eyes going from troubled to calm when the topic switched to her father, Harmon Strayer. And then back to troubled again when she announced that she was responsible for his death, because of her negligence. Because of the hunches she had not pursued. Because of something. Or nothing.

  Was Harmon Strayer’s death worth looking into? It would stand as Darlene’s last request of her, but still—the man was nearly ninety. He suffered from Alzheimer’s, for God’s sake. Plus multiple health problems. Heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, peripheral neuropathy. Name your ailment and, according to Darlene, Harmon Strayer could have checked the box.

  Now Darlene herself had died violently, victim of a fate that Bell would never have foreseen for such a careful, conscientious woman. She had died on a road she knew well, during conditions she had endured many times before. If the toxicology report backed up Deputy Oakes’s surmise, then Darlene had succumbed to an old demon, a secret one, one she had kept hidden from Bell and from other classmates at Georgetown.

  But why had she slipped back into her addiction last night, of all nights? Was it sorrow over her father’s death? What had sent her over the edge—in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the phrase?

  “Hey there.”

  The familiar voice belonged to her neighbor on the other side, Larry Jenrette, a systems analyst for the gas company. He’d come out on his front porch while Bell was contemplating Darlene Strayer’s fate.

  He had a desk-sitter’s body: pendulous gut, soft hands, rear end that seemed to spread wider by the week. He took a deep, shoulder-raising breath and surveyed the white tomb that the world had become. He held his shovel out to one side, as if he wasn’t quite certain what he was supposed to do with it and didn’t want it too close.

  “Morning, Larry,” Bell said. “You and Angie okay?”

  Angie, his wife, had multiple sclerosis. She had recently given in and started using a wheelchair, a concession to reality that did worse things to her spirit, Bell knew, than anything the MS could do to her central nervous system.

  “Fine and dandy,” Larry said, as he always did. Then he grimaced, but in a comical way to let her know he was teasing. “Well, it’s colder than bejesus out here, but other than that—fine and dandy. Heard your shovel scraping the walk and figured I better not shame myself in the eyes of my neighbors.” He pulled a red stocking cap out of his coat pocket and used it to smother most of his head, including the entirety of his ears. “We’ll just be doing it all over again tomorrow morning, way I hear it. Coupla feet more supposed to be comin’ down.”

  “Yep,” Bell said. She had already resumed her bending and grunting.

  Larry used his shovel like a ski pole, pushing off against each step as he descended from the porch and prepared to deal with the snow on his own front walk. “Hey,” he said, before getting started. “How come Clay’s not doing this for you? Don’t tell me you’re letting him sleep in today, the lucky so-and-so.”

  And that, Bell reminded herself with a silent flourish of unwelcome insight, was the not-so-charming side of living in a place where everybody knew you—and knew your business. And knew that you were dating a man named Clay Meckling. And knew that he almost always stayed over on Saturday nights.

  You got asked questions like this one: Where’s Clay?

  “He’s out of town,” she said, and then she turned her back on Larry Jenrette, ostensibly to move on to another section of sidewalk, but her ultimate intention was to cut off the conversation.

  She was not lying. Yes, Clay was out of town. That was a fact.

  But the facts rarely had much to do with the truth. She knew that from her job as prosecutor, and she knew it, too, from her experience of being human—and of feeling, over and over again, how inadequate the facts were to explain something as savagely complicated and chronically illogical as love.

  * * *

  “You already did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Shoveled the walk,” Carla said. “I was sort of hoping to do it myself.”

  “You’re in luck. More snow predicted for tonight.”

  They stared at each other for a few seconds, Carla poised in the doorway and Bell standing just inside it, as if each needed to be sure that the other was real and not some holographic projection. Not some wishful hallucination. Then the moment passed and practicality returned. It was too damned cold for dramatic pauses on thresholds.

  “For heaven’s sake get in here, you,” Bell said. She held open her arms, the universal summons for a hug. “You’ve got to be frozen.”

  “Pretty much.” Carla took four steps forward. She shut the door behind her. She dropped her backpack on the floor and leaned awkwardly into her mother’s embrace.

  The small talk had been a ruse, a way to keep intense emotion at bay. Both of them were complicit in the scheme, because both of them felt it—felt that surge of tenderness and vulnerability at the sight of the other, after having gone so long with phone calls and Skype sessions as their only points of contact.

  It was just after three p.m. Bell had heard the Kia grinding its way up the street—an hour ago the plow had whittled a path up Shelton Avenue roughly the width of a single car—and she leapt up from her chair and raced over to open the door. By the time she got there, Carla was already crossing the porch.

  The moment Bell touched her, it was all over. Carla’s stoicism crumbled. She wept, just as she had done in the little roadside store. Her body trembled, caught as it was in accelerating waves of an emotion too intense to be held inside a second longer.

  “Mom,” Carla whispered. She was about to say the thing she did not want to say, because her mother was the bravest, strongest, steadiest, steeliest person she knew, and to
admit this to such a person—even if the person loved her, as Bell unquestionably did, and did unconditionally—was shameful, ridiculous, unthinkable.

  But also necessary. If, that is, Carla wanted to be able to take another breath. If, that is, she wanted to live past this moment and on into the next one, and then the one after that.

  “Carla, sweetie—what is it? Is there anything I can—”

  “I’m scared, Mom. I’m just really, really scared.”

  * * *

  And so they talked. Naturally, that’s what they did: They assumed their familiar positions in the living room as if no time at all had passed, as if this were four years ago and Carla was still a junior in high school and Bell still a fledgling prosecutor, both of them feeling their way through new roles in a new place that was also an old place. A known place. Bell automatically went for her favorite spot, the dilapidated armchair with the coffee-stain tattoos on all visible surfaces, and Carla’s straight-line path took her to the green couch, in the middle of which she plopped down and yanked off her boots and settled back against the nubby, pilled, all-but-worn-out fabric.

  Carla closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, and only let the air out in staggered stages.

  Bell looked at her daughter.

  Home, Carla’s expression said, more eloquently than any words. I’m home now. Nothing else matters.

  But the truth was, of course, that plenty else mattered. Time had passed. Too much time, really, for the illusion to last that being home could fix everything. Carla was a young adult now, not a teenager. The brief moment at the door—when Carla had dissolved in Bell’s arms, amid a frantic avalanche of tears and babbled, incoherent talk about having ruined everything, everything—was over. It had passed now. They were different people than they had been when Carla moved out, and even Bell’s furious love for her daughter was not enough to win the fight against all those years, all those changes.