Penance Drive

Penance Drive - by J.A. Bennett

Lucas Tolbert was driving home from school when it happened. It was almost nine, he’d just finished an evening class, and the route back home took him down a long stretch of dark highway that cut through open grassland. It was becoming a familiar pass, he’d driven it almost every day since the beginning of the semester the week before, but the night run remained eerie and surreal. There were no streetlights in this expanse of nowhere. Not even much in the way of reflective road signs. It was just him, the comforting glow of the dashboard and the 30 feet or so his headlights gave him. The car had been a graduation gift from his grandparents, a black Mazda sedan with dark tinted windows. It was cool and driving it made him feel older, more mature, despite the fact that he was only eighteen and in his first semester at university.

Lucas pushed a CD into the player and tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel to the beat of Drunken Tiger’s “Monster”. The song’s deep bass weighed into the car’s interior, wild and thick in its foreign appeal, making him feel eccentric, ascended beyond the absurdity of the high school masses.  Music was one of many small things he eagerly chewed into, absorbed for the simple joy of discovery and evolution as he remade himself and tried to figure out who exactly Lucas Tolbert was supposed to be.

His cell lit up on the seat next to him. It was his girlfriend, Amanda. Today was their second year anniversary and, since her parents were out of town, they’d made detailed plans for the evening. “I think I’m ready now,” she’d told him over the phone earlier that afternoon. “Tonight’s the night. Just come over after class. I’ll make us dinner.”

The “night” had originally been planned for the night of their senior prom, but when their foreplay became precarious, Amanda had hidden her face beneath the veil of her long blond hair and announced that she wasn’t ready, and as much as Lucas’s body had agonized, his mind had been a little relieved. Back then he wasn’t sure he was ready yet either. But they were in college now, and sex was a bridge he was suddenly anxious to cross, as long as she was ready to cross it with him.

Lucas held the cell in front of his face, careful not to take his eyes off the dark road. The taillights of a diesel he’d come up on cast a glare over his vision. He squinted to read Amanda’s message “can’t wait to see you, xoxo.” Lucas grinned and tossed the cell back onto the passenger seat.  In front of him, the diesel swerved into the left lane. Lucas saw nothing but the yellow and black of a “CAUTION – Wide Turns” sticker until the last portion of the last second, and then he saw the face of a man lying on the road in front of him. The man’s hand lifted to shield his eyes from the bright headlights. This moment would stay fixed in Lucas’s mind like a black and white photograph hung in some macabre art exhibit. The moment of crystallized clarity before Lucas hit him.

. . . . .

The man’s funeral was to be held the week after the accident - that was what the police had confirmed it to be. David James, husband of Coleen James and father of two elementary age daughters, had been intoxicated. His midsize SUV was found twenty feet off the side of the road, head first in a ditch where he’d presumably lost control and wrecked it. Mr. James sustained a nasty head injury, and that, combined with the alcohol, had pushed him to crawl onto the highway.

Lucas’s mother had hung his only suit jacket, freshly dry cleaned, on the back of the bathroom door. Lucas stood in front of the mirror and buttoned up his starched white dress shirt. The last time he’d worn it had been for his high school graduation. Now, it hung from him, too loose around his thinner chest, the result of his recent loss of appetite. His mother came to tie his Sunday tie around his neck. She patted his cheek then wrapped her arms around him. She kissed him. She smelled of Camay soap and Lucas suddenly remembered her rocking him to sleep when he was three or four and how the nightlight cast shadows of carousel horses on his bedroom walls.

 “It wasn’t your fault, Lucas,” she said. She gripped his shoulders, forcing him to look her in the eye. “It was an accident. No one blames you.”

Lucas drew in his breath and let it out slowly.

“It will be fine,” she said. “I’ll be right there with you.”

Lucas wasn’t sure it would be fine. He thought about his car and the truck and wondered if he’d been driving too close. He wondered what would have happened if he’d given himself more distance, wondered if he’d have been able to swerve away in time.

 “It was an accident, Lucas. It wasn’t your fault.”

She left him then.  She said she needed fix her hair and put on her makeup, but Lucas could hear her crying in her room. He heard her call out his father’s name, chastising him for leaving her alone to handle such weighty matters.

When it was time to go, Lucas followed her to the old blue Honda. He kept his eyes closed as they drove, but although he couldn’t see what was coming, the image of what had passed pressed into his eyeballs.

At the gravesite, they stood at the back of the crowd. Through the barrier of shoulders and heads bathed in midday sunlight, he could see Coleen, the wife, the widow. Her swollen eyes traveled the faces around her as if she were searching for someone. Her ash blond hair was pulled into a severe knot around her pale face and her hands hung at her sides, limp and slightly trembling. Though worn, Lucas thought she still looked impressive, a statuesque model out of a women’s magazine, all angles and icy allure. He imagined that she drank red wine and went to art galleries. When her gaze locked onto his, Lucas stopped breathing. Then she looked away and reached up to cover her face.

When the casket was lowed, Lucas and his mother joined the crowd lining up to pay their respects.

“We’re so sorry for your loss.” This phrase repeated over and over in hushed voices and after each telling, Lucas took a small step closer. The sun climbed higher in the sky. A wasp hummed overhead. Gnats rose from the freshly cut grass underfoot. Lucas took a step closer.

Lucas jumped at a sudden stinging on his neck. He smacked the spot with the palm of his hand, drawing a few curious glances, but before he could inspect the damage he caught sight of a pair of stormy blue eyes glaring at him from a break in the mourners. It was the eldest of the James daughters. A miniature of her mother, she seemed to pack every ounce of hatred her small body could muster into her stare. Lucas took a step backwards. “Murderer…” her gaze shouted at him, and he felt something slipping inside and something terrifying opening in its place. He turned and hurried back to the Honda. His mother chased after him.

 When she got back into the car , she grabbed hold of him. “What’s wrong? Good God what happened to your neck?” Lucas pulled down the visor to get to the mirror. A nasty red welt the size of a quarter had swollen just under his jaw line. In its center was a tiny telling red dot. Lucas leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes.

“What if they won’t forgive me?”

His mother sighed.

“Mom …” Lucas rubbed at the swollen spot. “What was it like for you when Dad died?”

“Well … that was different. You were so young. You probably don’t remember much about that time.”

“I don’t. But I miss him. I wish he was here.”

“So do I. But your Dad was sick for a very long time. It was different …” Her gaze drifted to the lingering crowd gathered around the James family. “… we had plenty of time to say goodbye.”

. . . . .

From that day on, Lucas spent the majority of his time locked in his bedroom. He hadn’t been back to school since the accident.  His mother had offered to drive him, but he was paralyzed, terrified of the thought of facing his classmates’ curious stares and even though his grades were spiraling into unsavable failure, he couldn’t seem to muster the will to care.

Amanda came over to see him, but their words to each other were stilted and awkward. She ran her fingers through his hair, pulling the curls into a pony tail and teased him about how long it was getting. Lucas forced a smile for her. She started to kiss him, slipping her fingertips beneath his t-shirt.

“Not now,” he told her.

“Let’s do what we planned before,” she breathed into his ear.

“Stop it, Amanda.” He pushed her away. “I can’t deal with this right now.”

“You won’t talk to me anymore and now you don’t even want to touch me?” She threw the words at him and Lucas thought they sounded childish and vain and suddenly he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

“Just go home, Amanda,” he told her. “I’ll call you later.”

“No you won’t. You never call me anymore.” She slammed the door behind her.

. . . . .

The local newspaper had been keeping up with the story and Lucas had a morbid fascination with the webpage that allowed for user comments. He refreshed at least once an hour and read each post with the dread of unhealthy addiction. People he’d never met, who didn’t know him from the punk kid living across the street from them, all had an opinion on the events of that night.

“How could he not see a body lying in the road in front of him? The bastard needs to pay for what he did to that family!”

 “David James was driving drunk people … this was just an accident. It could have happened to anyone.”

“That poor family. I pray for those kids.”

“I heard from someone who knows the family that the driver who hit him was texting with his girlfriend at the time of the accident.WTF?? Why don’t the police charge him with involuntary manslaughter???”

“Murderer!!! I hope you rot in hell!”

The accusations spread to his social networking pages, vicious and crass in their finger pointing. When he stopped leaving his bedroom altogether, his mother took to bringing trays of food to him. “Lucas honey?” she’d call for him to open up. “I’ve brought your lunch.” He tried to eat what she brought, knowing it would ease her mind. But after reading the online comments judging his culpability, he usually ended up hugging his plastic Texas Rangers wastebasket and gagging on the bile that came up after the last foul food particles had been expelled from his stomach.

His mother began inviting Alex, his best friend, over every day to distract him. They played video games for awhile, but Lucas felt no joy, no tug of competition at Alex’s giddy howls. It all felt pointless, a complete waste of time. Eventually, leaving Alex to play by himself, Lucas sprawled onto the bed and stared up at the hypnotic rotation of his ceiling fan. He remembered the day his father had installed it. His father had climbed the ladder, balancing the fan on his shoulder. He’d asked Lucas for the Philips and Lucas had passed the screwdriver up to him, then each screw, one by one.

He thought of the months his mother spent crying after his father had died. He thought of her struggle to find a job and pay the bills on her own. He thought of how relieved and how grateful she was each time his grandparents sent them a check in the mail.

Then Lucas wondered what kind of father David James had been. He imagined Mr. James installing a fan in his daughter’s room and wondered if the older girl had held the screws for her father too. He wondered if Coleen James still cried.

His stomach began to churn.

“My game system is jacked up,” Alex complained. “How do you keep yours so pristine?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t use it much anymore. You want it?”

“What?” Alex’s eyebrows shot upward in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

 “Fifty and it’s yours.”

Alex came back the next day with the money and hauled his new Xbox away.  That was when it started, the selling off of each one of Lucas’s valuables for cold hard cash. Stacks of CDs and DVDs, his entire video game collection, the baseball he’d gotten autographed by Nolan Ryan and the coin collection his mother’s father had left him when he died. Then he went to the bank to withdraw the money he’d saved from bagging groceries every summer. When he told his mother that he wanted to sell the Mazda, she began to cry.

In the end, he gathered almost fifteen thousand.

It had been almost two months since the funeral. He placed the cashier’s check into a crisp white envelope and began to gather his courage.

. . . . .

Lucas Tolbert made three passes around the block before finally bringing his bike to a stop in front of the James’s house.  Its windows were dark despite the onset of twilight and the front yard’s elaborate landscaping was overgrown. The sprinkler system coughed then spat out its discharge in blind fidelity, wetting his socks and the wheels of his bicycle.

Lucas swiped at the slick layer of damp covering his face. The day had been a mess of wet drizzle, but this didn’t stop groups of costumed children from their annual rite to a sugar high. “Trick or treat!” A passing skeleton held out his plastic pumpkin hopefully, but shrugged then moved on when Lucas failed to respond.

Lucas couldn’t remember ever feeling so exposed, so vulnerable. His skin tingled as a nervous sweat began to leak from his pores, his breath tangible in a way that was tight and uncomfortable. He moved up the walkway to the house’s front door.

He rang the bell three times before the door finally opened. Coleen James stood on the other side, disheveled and unsteady in a pale pink nightgown. Its silky length pressed against her legs when a faint breeze brushed past her. Her hair fell in messy waves around her shoulders, sticking out in places as if she’d been gripping it in her fist. She held a rocks glass in one hand, half filled with whiskey, and she gaped at him through blurry eyes.

“Mrs. James?” Lucas cleared his throat and swallowed. “I’m so sorry to disturb you. Did I wake you?”

She swayed but didn’t answer.

“I’ve come to apologize.” Lucas felt heat begin to pool in his eyes. “I’ve come to ask for your forgiveness.” There. He’d finally said it, finally admitted to someone the vital need for absolution that had driven him to this moment.

Coleen let out a low chuckle and stumbled back inside. She left the door open.

“Mrs. James?”

She waved to him over her shoulder, beckoning him inside.

Locus followed her into the house’s front living room. The lights were off and the coffee table in front of the white leather couch was littered with stacks of mail and bottles, mostly empty, some still holding telling remnants of whisky and vodka. She moved to the window and pushed aside its heavy draperies. A group of costumed children strolled through the street outside.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I came to apologize. To let you know how sorry I am for what happened.” He held out the envelope still gripped in his fist. “I came to give you this … and to ask for your forgiveness.”

Lucas bent to lay the envelope on the coffee table. The scattered letters came clearly into his view. Envelopes with return addresses stamped from Mutual Insurance of Texas and checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars lay discarded and crumpled, like trash. Lucas blanched. He dropped his offering and, choking at the thought of its impotence, backed away.

“You came to apologize?”

Lucas froze.

“You know the bastard was drunk, right? Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d just left? Just cheated on me? At least then he’d still be around for me to kill. Couldn’t I do that? Can’t I be reckless too?”

Coleen turned and walked towards him. Dark circles framed her eyes and tears streamed down her cheeks. Her hands reached for him.

“You came to apologize?” she repeated.

“I’m so sorry,” Lucas replied.

She grabbed hold and then she kissed him.