All the Little Pieces

The garbage can? Maybe it was that garbage can …

She ran her hand over a smaller dent on the lip of the hood, as if that might tell her something, like where and when it had gotten on her car.

Maybe someone hit you at Charity’s, but you didn’t see the damage when you looked in the cane fields because it was so dark.

She crouched down and stared at the grille. She ran her hand over the dented bumper and looked at her palm. It was wet from the rain. Even though her brain screamed at her not to do it, she tentatively ran her hand back up and under the bumper, her fingers exploring places in the twisted, cracked plastic and metal undercarriage that her eyes could not see. She looked again at her palm in the beam of the headlight. There was a dark substance on it this time. It looked red. It looked like blood. She fell back onto the wet pavement.

It was a deer. Or a dog. It wasn’t what you’re thinking, Faith! Oh God, don’t let it be that …

She quickly wiped her hand on her jeans and stood up. A tiny, ragged piece of fluff clung to the dented grille. She pulled it off. It was a thin, white material. Maybe from a rag.

Or a T-shirt.

She bit her hand and forced back the scream of horror as the tears started up again.

What had she done? What the hell had she hit back there in those cane fields?

9 (#ulink_c29aab4e-be71-51c4-85ce-6ce81b59543a)

The clock read 1:50. Almost forty-five minutes had passed since … Faith stared through the windshield at the glass doors of the motel.

They’d ask questions, the police. Some she couldn’t answer.

‘Where were you, Mrs Saunders? What was the name of the town? We can’t send someone out to do a check if we don’t know where to go.’

Then there were the other questions …

‘Mrs Saunders, when this girl was banging on your window asking for help, why didn’t you let her in?’

‘You’ve had an accident. You have damage to your bumper and grille. Did you call the police? That’s required by law, you know.’

‘There’s blood on your bumper. You obviously hit something that bleeds. Was that something human?’

She looked desperately around the parking lot and tried to think of the right answers. I don’t know! There was nothing there.

‘How hard did you look? Or did you just leave?’

She shook her head. There was nothing there.

‘Mrs Saunders, have you been drinking?’

She covered the gasp with her hand. She had had a couple of glasses of wine, true. And maybe a drink – a seven and seven – but it wasn’t that strong. And those hurricanes … She tried to swallow the awful, sweet taste but it still wouldn’t go down. Yes, she had been drinking, but she hadn’t expected to drive. She’d felt fine, really. Maybe a little off when she first left Charity’s, but that’d been a couple of hours ago. She remembered her head spinning when she first got out of the car in the cane field to look at the front end. She breathed into her cupped hand. The same hand that had rubbed the … substance … off the underside of the bumper. A wave of nausea came over her and she wiped it furiously again on her pant leg, so hard and fast her palm grew raw.

They would smell it on her breath for sure.

‘Mrs Saunders, please step out of the car. I’m going to need you to perform some tests for me. Can you walk a straight line, please?’

They’d make her take a Breathalyzer.

She could refuse, but they could arrest her even if she did. She bit her lip hard, put her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

They’d run her license.

When she was a senior at the University of Florida, Faith had been arrested for DUI and leaving the scene of an accident. It was a night out with friends. They were at a party off campus. There was too much beer and too many shots. She wasn’t supposed to drive home, her sorority sister was, so she’d partied hard. She was in college – everyone partied hard. Then Regina went home with a boy and told her she’d see her in the morning. It was less than a ten-mile drive back to the dorm. It was late – no one was on the roads, anyway.

The car had come out of nowhere. She didn’t actually remember hitting anything at the time – just looking at this sedan that was coming at her, thinking, ‘Wow, that guy is kinda close.’ So close she could see his eyes, his open mouth, his facial expression. He looked surprised. She’d made it back onto campus with a bent axle and no headlights. The other car had flipped.

‘Thank God the old guy was wearing his seatbelt,’ the cop who’d arrested her had said when he placed the handcuffs on her. She was standing on the lawn outside her sorority house, crying, her knee bloodied from where it had smashed against the steering column. ‘Or else this coulda been real bad, honey. Real bad.’

They’d see the prior conviction. They’d smell the wine and hurricanes. They’d examine the dented fender and grille and take samples of the dark substance underneath the bumper.

Faith banged her head back and forth on the steering wheel as the tears streamed down her face. Jarrod was a defense attorney; he could tell her what the police would think: If you did it once, we know you did it again.

‘Bond is set at one hundred thousand,’ the judge had ordered, while he stared at her over thick glasses, his ancient, oversized brow a mass of judgmental wrinkles. The young public defender who was supposedly representing her actually gasped at the amount. ‘Because you, young lady, are a person who cannot be trusted. You left that man out there to die. Left him on the side of the road. By the grace of God, he wasn’t killed. So you can’t be trusted to do the right thing and you can’t be trusted to come back to court.’ She’d done a year of probation, a hundred hours of community service, apologized, paid a huge fine and spent eight nights in jail before her disappointed mother finally bailed her out.

She banged her head even harder. It wouldn’t matter why she’d called the police – she’d be the one going to jail tonight. No doubt about it. The tears dripped onto her lap. Oh God, what if she got arrested in front of Maggie?What would happen to her? Would they put her in foster care while they waited for Jarrod to show up? She envisioned Maggie screaming out for her as they slapped cuffs on and placed her in the back of a police car, its red-and-blue lights spinning across her little girl’s tear-stained face, like a scene from a movie. And then Jarrod – looking shocked and disappointed as he stared at her through the jail’s bullet-proof glass asking her how she could drink and drive with Maggie in the car. How could she do such an awful thing?

Why did she drink tonight? Why did Charity make her leave when she knew she’d been drinking? Why didn’t she get a hotel? Why didn’t she listen to Jarrod and stay home? Why? Why? Why?

A series of bad decisions – one after the other after the other. The one smart choice she thought she’d made turned out to be the worst one of all – stopping in that godforsaken, Twilight Zone town. She looked around desperately. The windows were fogging again, blurring the motel doors. She felt trapped – cornered in this car, in this deserted parking lot, boxed in by her terrible decisions. It was so claustrophobic, she could feel her chest closing. Her eyes caught on a figure moving across the empty lobby of the motel.

You are a person who cannot be trusted.

I don’t have a good feeling about tonight …

She squeezed her eyes closed. It wouldn’t matter why she’d called the police; she’d be the one going to jail tonight.

Forty-five minutes had passed since she’d woken up in a nightmare. Since she’d seen whatever it was she’d seen. They were all long gone by now – that girl, with her tattoos and piercings and dirty hands and bare feet, and those two creepy men. It wasn’t right to judge, but, well … who … who knows why they were all out there? No one had a weapon. The girl looked tough. She wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t bleeding! That was important.

Faith took a deep breath, wiped her face with her sleeve and put the car in drive while her brain kept throwing around rationalizations.

All three might’ve been on drugs; they might have robbed you.

She pulled out of the parking lot and onto Southern Blvd.

They could’ve hurt Maggie. Or worse. God knows what might have happened if you had opened that door. As Jarrod once said, ‘It’s hard to appreciate the tragedy that would have been when the plot is foiled before the bomb is built.’

She spotted the sign for Florida’s Turnpike.

All three of them were long gone from there. And you don’t even know exactly where ‘there’ is, Faith. You’d have to retrace your steps with the police, and they wouldn’t do that with you once they’d placed you under arrest. You’d be in custody. You’d be headed to booking. Getting ready to have your mug shot taken and be fingerprinted and then strip-searched in some local Podunk jail.

She set off, heading south. There were a few other cars on the road now. That was comforting.

It was a deer, Faith. Deer can cause nasty damage. You weren’t going fast, so it wasn’t hurt too badly and it scampered into the cane. That’s why there was nothing there.

It was past three when she pulled into her driveway. She looked in the back seat. Maggie was like Jarrod – she could sleep through anything. Faith leaned her head back on the headrest, feeling both intense relief at having made it home safe and overwhelming shame for the same reason. Like a character in a Grimms’ fairytale, she had left the haunted forest with all its perils and dangerous, strange inhabitants far, far behind her, and had arrived back at the castle. She took a deep breath and checked her rearview one final time. The rationalizations had worked like shoddy patchwork on a leaky roof: they’d done the job for now. It would hold, but there was no telling for how long.

Then she hit the garage-door button and with a chilling sense of impending dread, watched it close on the night with a heavy thud.