Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
“I understand your little one didn’t make it,” Detective Sparks says. “I’m very sorry for your loss, sir.” It sounds rote, but I manage a thank-you. “My officers tell me your wife wasn’t at home when the accident occurred, but she’s here in the hospital now. Is that correct?”
I nod. Tell her the doctor we talked to has taken Emily and her mother to see our son. “I think she’s having trouble accepting that he’s…” I squint hard but the tears come anyway. She waits, watching me. When I regain my composure, I apologize.
She shakes her head. “I can appreciate what a difficult time this must be for you, Mr. Ledbetter, but we need to go over some details about what happened. Okay?” I can’t respond. “Your first name is Corbin, right? Can I call you Corbin?” I don’t give a shit what she calls me.
“That’s fine. But look, I’ve already told these officers everything.”
She pulls up a chair and sits, facing me, close enough that our knees almost touch.
“And I’ll go through their report, of course.
But I always like to hear things firsthand from the people who were involved.
For their own protection. So why don’t you tell me in your own words how it happened? Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
She slides a small notepad from her large black bag. Pulls out the pen stuck in the metal spiral. Says, “Go ahead. Whatever you can remember.”
“Well, like I told these guys, I got the kids ready because they were going to my mother-in-law’s.
She was going to babysit them for the day.
And I… buckled his sister, Maisie, into her car seat.
See, I usually buckle him in first, then her, but he was looking at this swarm of ants in the driveway and… so I buckled her in first.”
“They’re twins. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Any other children?” I shake my head.
“And these are your biological children, right? Yours and your wife’s? Not stepchildren or children you adopted.”
Why did that matter? “No, they’re ours.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-five months. Close to twenty-six.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So our neighbors from across the street drove into their driveway and when they got out of their car, they said something to me and—”
“Said what? Do you remember?”
“Nothing significant. Just chitchat.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
I nod. “Linda—the wife—called over and said they’d just picked up some breakfast at McDonald’s.… And I remembered I had borrowed a splitting maul from Shawn, the husband, and I told him I’d bring it back to him.”
Sergeant Fazio breaks in to tell her these were the two eyewitnesses and he has their names and contact info. Sparks nods and tells me to go on.
“Linda, the wife, asked how the twins were doing and I told her how they’d scribbled on the floor with crayons the day before. It was just friendly neighbor talk, know what I mean? But I guess our conversation distracted me. I got in the car and I must have just assumed… I must have thought…”
I close my eyes tight to squelch the tears I feel coming.
Do the deep breathing thing. “This is just so fucking painful,” I say.
“He was still alive when they put him in the ambulance and I thought… And then I find out he died before he even got here. And now I’m here, answering your questions while my wife is…
That doctor tried to talk her out of it, but she said she needed to see him.
And what is it? Maybe an hour since we found out he didn’t make it.
You say you can appreciate how hard this must be, but then you pull out your notebook and make me relive… ”
“Just doing my job, sir,” she says.
“Yeah well, don’t say you can appreciate how hard this is when you have no idea what it’s like to know that your little boy has just died and it’s your fault because you got distracted. Made a simple mistake.”
We stare at each other, at a standstill until I ask her whether she has kids.
“I do, yes. Two daughters.”
“What are their ages?”
“Twelve and fifteen. But let’s stay focused, okay? The more we get sidetracked, the longer this interview’s going to take.”
I nod. All I want is for her to leave me alone. Leave us alone. Emily is bound to be a mess when she comes back from seeing him and I need to protect her from this third-degree bullshit.
Sparks flips to a new page in her notebook. “Okay, so let’s back up a little. I’d like you to take me through your morning before the accident? You wake up, get out of bed, and…”
“I went out to the kitchen. Started making breakfast while my wife was getting ready for work. She’s a teacher.”
“And what about you, Corbin? What do you do for work?”
“I’m a commercial artist, but I was let go a while back.
Laid off, not fired. I was planning to spend the day looking for another position, which is what I do on the days when my wife’s mother can take the kids.
” It’s a lie, yes, but in fairness, it’s what I had been doing in good faith in the beginning.
In all those weeks of trying, I’d only gotten as far as showing my portfolio twice.
And neither of those times led to anything.
“By the way,” I tell her. “Corbin’s my official name, but most people call me Corby. ”
“Okay,” she says. “So on the days when your mother-in-law babysits, you do what? Send out résumés? Do internet searches? Make follow-up calls?”
“Yeah, all of that.”
“And otherwise, you’re the stay-at-home parent?”
“Yes. For now.”
“Do you enjoy that role, Corby, or has it been difficult?”
“Not one or the other,” I say. “Both.”
She jots something down. “Okay, so you were making breakfast and your wife was getting ready for work. Then what?”
“I heard the twins babbling to each other. Amusing each other, you know? They almost always wake up in a good mood.” She smiles.
“So I went in to change them and pack the bag for their day with their grandmother. But I’d forgotten to turn off the burner and the friggin’ smoke alarm started wailing, so—”
“Why do you think you forgot to do that, Corby? I would have thought, if you were going to leave the room, turning off the stove would be something you’d do automatically.”
I shrug. “Don’t know. I guess I was just spacing out a little.”
“Huh,” she says. “Were you drinking this morning, Corby?”
Curveball! Don’t panic. “Was I drinking? Yeah. I was drinking coffee.”
“But not alcohol?”
“At six thirty in the morning? No. Why would you—”
“Because Sergeant Fazio said he thought he smelled liquor on your breath when he and Officer Longo got to your house this morning.”
I can feel the thumping of my heart. “I mean, it’s probably…
I had insomnia in the middle of last night.
Woke up a little after two and couldn’t get back to sleep for, I don’t know, an hour and a half maybe?
So I got up, had a stiff drink—well, one and a half—so that I could knock off again.
Which I did.” I look over at Fazio. “Maybe that’s what you were smelling?
Now that I think of it, I may have forgotten to brush my teeth when I got up.
” He stands there, poker-faced. Says nothing.
“What were you drinking to put yourself back to sleep, Corby?” Sparks wants to know. “Whiskey? Vodka?”
My palms feel clammy. I grab on to the arms of my chair so they won’t see my hands shaking. “Rum.”
“Okay. What proof?”
“I’m not sure.” Another lie. I graduated from seventy to a hundred proof two or three bottles ago.
“And you said these were stiff drinks, so maybe the equivalent of four regular-sized pours?”
I shrug. “Probably more like three.”
“Okay.” She’s writing all this down. “Any explanation for why your pupils would have been so dilated this morning?”
“Were they?” I shrug again. “I took an Ativan when I got up. I have a prescription.”
“You took just one?”
“Uh, two maybe. Yeah, two, now that I think of it. I take them for anxiety.”
“You were feeling anxious this morning?”
I nod. “I am a lot of mornings. Since I got laid off. I get nervous about our finances. That’s why I have trouble sleeping some nights, too.”
“So you’re saying that when you can’t sleep at night, you use alcohol. And when you feel anxious during the daytime, you take your medication?”
“Yeah. Although some nights when I have insomnia, I just take some over-the-counter thing like Tylenol PM. Which I don’t like doing too much because when I wake up, I feel groggy.”
“Do you ever take a drink with your anxiety medication?”
“Together? No. It says on the prescription bottle not to mix them like that.” It does say that, although I’ve never paid that warning much attention.
Lately, when one or the other hasn’t been doing the trick, I combine them.
I can still function fine. Coast through whatever I have to do. Whatever I have to deal with.
“And you’re telling the truth about the alcohol. Right, Corby? Because those blood samples are going to tell the truth whether or not you’re lying.”
“Except I’m not lying! Jesus Christ, lady, I’m cooperating as much as I can under some fucking brutal circumstances.”
“Hey,” Fazio says. “Lower your voice. And watch your language.”
Ignoring him, I get up and go to the door, then turn back to her.
“What are you trying to get me to say? That my son is dead because I was drunk? Strung out on benzos? Because that’s bullshit.
” And I mean it, too. I was fully functional, despite whatever those blood tests are going to say.
It was an accident. And if they’re getting ready to accuse me of something that isn’t true, I’ll get myself a lawyer before I say anything else.
I open the door and look down the corridor to see whether Emily and Betsy are coming back.
Don’t see them but, mercifully, there’s a commotion coming from the other direction.
That homeless guy from the waiting room is heading toward where we are, batting away the two guys in scrubs who are trying to subdue him.
“Yeah, and you can go to hell if you think I’m gonna put up with your shit!
You think I’m not onto you two? I know who you are. ”
“Excuse us,” Fazio tells Detective Sparks. “We better see if we can give them an assist with this individual.” And with that, he and Longo leave the room.
“All right, Corby,” Sparks says. “I guess that’s enough for now, provided you’re willing to come down to the station for some follow-up questions. How about tomorrow afternoon at three? Do you think you’ll be able to do that?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “If I have to.”
“Oh, and your vehicle’s been impounded so that the forensics team can examine it. Like I said, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. They’ll probably have it for a couple of days. Would you like me to arrange for a cruiser to pick you up?”
I say no, that I can take my wife’s car. “What are they looking for in my van? Empty booze bottles? Heroin in the glove compartment? Hey, maybe they can lift some DNA off the steering wheel so you can solve two or three outstanding crimes while you’re at it.”
She doesn’t react, other than to say, “Okay then. Tomorrow at three.”
She closes her notebook and drops it back in her bag.
Stands. Thanks me for talking with her and asks me to extend her sympathy to my wife.
Then, in the doorway, she turns back and says, “You know what I think, Corby? I think you were most likely drinking and maybe drugging, too, this morning. I hope those blood test results will prove me wrong, but if I’m not and your impairment is a contributing factor to—”
She stops when she realizes Emily and her mother have come up behind her. Steps aside and lets them come in. My head is spinning. Em has just come back from seeing our son’s mangled, lifeless body. Did she just hear Sparks’s accusation? Is the blood they drew going to prove what she suspects?
I’m nauseous, lightheaded. My heart is pounding. I order myself to refocus—to forget about Sparks and take care of my wife.
“How you doing?” I ask her.
“How do you think I’m doing, Corby?” She rushes me and begins shoving me, cursing me, punching me.
When Betsy tries to pull her away from me, she resists, then collapses against me, taking short, ragged breaths between her sobs.
I put my arms around her. “How can he be dead?” she cries out. “How could you have…”
When I look over Emily’s shoulder, Detective Sparks is standing in the corridor, watching me.