Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [68]
She didn’t tell them to put on their coats, so they climbed into the backseat without a word, wearing only sweaters and dungarees. It was frigid in there—they could see their breath. Clare tried to catch hers in her hand.
The snow fell heavily outside. Kathleen and Clare held Patrick tight between them. He kept the towel pressed against his head with his fingers.
In the front, Alice began to cry softly. “I can’t do this,” she kept saying. “I cannot.”
Patrick raised his little voice. “I’m okay, Mommy. Don’t cry.”
She pulled the car out of the driveway. The snow came down in sheets. She switched the windshield wipers to high.
The chains on the tires grated against the street. Kathleen willed the sound to vanish. She recited the Lord’s Prayer in her head. She counted backward from one hundred, whispering the numbers softly, though somehow Alice heard her and jolted her head backward. “Stop. That,” she hissed.
Alice drove straight, crying loudly now. There were few cars on the road. She sped up. Kathleen watched the houses whiz by and held her brother tighter. They seemed to be going too fast. She wanted to tell her mother not to cry because she was scaring Patrick. Kathleen wished her father were there, that he might find them somehow.
They were moving along the road, same as ever, when suddenly it felt as though something had lifted them up. The car swerved to the side of the street, sailing, sailing across wet grass until it slammed into a tree. The impact hit Kathleen’s body and went straight through. Patrick flew into the front seat, landing with a thud against the dashboard before falling backward. Kathleen and Clare hit the backs of the front seats, and Alice’s head cracked the windshield.
There was silence for a moment, before Alice turned to them, her face covered in blood.
“Oh, my babies,” she said, hysterical. “Are you all right? Is everyone still here?”
In the end, they were lucky. The doctor said God had been watching. Patrick was hurt the worst: he lay unconscious for several hours in a hospital bed, and when he woke up he had two broken arms and a shattered jaw. Kathleen got a slight concussion and lost two grown-up teeth, resulting in a painful string of root canals later that year. Clare somehow made it through with only bruises and scrapes, and Alice broke her wrist and sliced her face wide open. They used their savings for her to visit the best surgeon in Boston, but still she needed thirty stitches, some of them inside the skin. For months, she wore a bandage wrapped around her head and covered it with a navy blue turban, which made her look like Norma Desmond. She rubbed vitamin E on the scar every morning and night. Within a year, it had all but vanished.
They told neighbors and relatives that Alice had been in such a rush to get Patrick to the hospital that she’d driven too fast on a stormy day and lost control of the car.
But the night after the accident, Kathleen crept from her bed late and followed the sound of her parents fighting. She stood outside their bedroom door.
“Goddamn it, Alice, you could have killed them all.”
“I know it, I know.”
“You were drunk,” he said. “What have I told you about drinking when I’m not here?”
“But you’re never here!” she yelled bitterly. “I’m alone with them all day long.”
“I go to the insurance company every day, not because it’s so damn fun, but because it’s my job,” he said. “I have to do it for this family. You’re their mother! That’s your job. I can’t be here to watch you every minute.”
She sobbed.
“I told you I couldn’t do it years ago,” she said.
“That’s nonsense. You’re a wonderful mother,” he said, his voice a bit softer now.
“Oh yes, clearly.”
“Listen to me, Alice. I love you. I want to stand by you. But the drinking has to stop. I mean it. Cold turkey. I don’t care how you do it, but you’re going to do it. If you don’t, I’ll take those kids and I will leave. Do you understand me?”
Kathleen didn’t hear any response, but in the morning when she woke up, her father was standing at the sink, pouring the