The Accident

But she wouldn’t stop. “You think she just decided one night, Hey, I think I’ll become an alcoholic and get plastered and fall asleep at the wheel in the middle of an off-ramp? You think someone just does that all of a sudden?”

“I suppose you saw something,” I said, stung by her fury. “ You never miss a trick.”

She blinked. “How was I supposed to see anything? I didn’t live with her. I wasn’t there with her seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. But you were. You’re the one who was in a position to see something, and in a position to do something about it when you did. You let us down. You let Kelly down. But most of all, you let Sheila down.”

People were staring at us. If it had been Marcus saying these things, I would have decked him. But that wasn’t an option with Fiona. But maybe the reason I so badly wanted to do it was because I knew she was right.

If Sheila’d had a drinking problem, surely I’d have seen something . How could I not have known? Had there been signs? Had there been warnings I’d chosen to ignore? Was it because I didn’t want to face the fact that Sheila was going through some kind of difficulties? Sure, Sheila liked a drink, like everyone else did. On special occasions. Lunch with her friends. Family get-togethers. We’d been known to kill off a couple of bottles of wine at home when Kelly was staying over with Fiona and Marcus in Darien. I even caught her one time when her foot slipped on the carpet as we headed upstairs on one such occasion.

But those couldn’t have been signs of something more serious. Or was I just kidding myself? Did I not want to see the truth?

Fiona was right: A woman didn’t just decide one night to get blind drunk and set off in her Subaru.

Three nights after Sheila’s death, I quietly tore the house apart after Kelly had gone to bed. If Sheila had been a closet drinker, she’d have been hiding liquor somewhere. If not in the house, then the garage, or the shed out back where we kept the lawnmower and rusted, old garden chairs.

I searched everywhere and came up with nothing.

So then I talked to her friends. Everyone who knew her. To Belinda, for starters.

“Okay, once, at lunch,” Belinda recalled, “Sheila had one and a half Cosmos and she got a little tipsy. And another time-George just about had a fit when he found us, he’s such a tight-ass-we smoked up. I had a couple of joints and we kind of mellowed out one evening when we were having a girls-only night. It was just a bit of fun. But she never really lost it, and any time she’d anything more than one drink she insisted on calling herself a cab. She had good sense. She was a smart girl. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, what happened, but I guess we never know what someone else is going through, do we?”

Sally Diehl, from the office, had a hard time making sense of it, too. “But I had this cousin once-well, I still do-and she had a coke habit like you wouldn’t believe, Glen, but what was really unbelievable was how well she’d kept it hidden for so long, until one day, the cops came into her house and busted her. No one had any idea. Sometimes-and I’m not saying this was the case with Sheila-but sometimes, like, you just don’t know anything about people that you see every day.”

So it seemed there were two possibilities. Either Sheila had a drinking problem and was extremely good at hiding it, or Sheila had a drinking problem and I wasn’t good at picking up the signals.

I supposed there was a third possibility. Sheila did not have a drinking problem, and did not get behind the wheel drunk. For that possibility to be true, all the toxicology reports had to be wrong.

There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest they were.

In the days after Sheila’s death, as I struggled to make sense of something that made no sense at all, I tracked down students from the course she’d been taking. Turned out she never even went to class that evening, although she had shown up for all the other sessions. Her teacher, Allan Butterfield, said Sheila was the top student in the all-adult class.

“She had a real reason to be there,” he told me over a beer at a road-house down the street from the school. “She said to me, ‘I’m doing this for my family, for my husband and my daughter, to make our business stronger.’ ”

“When did she say that to you?” I’d asked.

He thought a moment. “A month ago?” He tapped the table with his index finger. “Right here. Over a couple of beers.”

“Sheila had a couple of beers here with you?” I asked.

“Well, I had a couple, maybe even three.” Allan’s face was flushed. “But Sheila, actually, I think she was having one. Just a glass.”

“You did this often with Sheila? Have a beer after class?”

“No, just the once,” he said. “She always wanted to get home in time to give her daughter a kiss good night.”