Guilt by Association (10 page)

“I think it’s best that we stay with the people we started with,” she said. “They’re most familiar with Karen’s case and I don’t mind the drive.”

Actually, Beverly hated driving into the city, fighting traffic in every direction. But this way, she reasoned, none of the personnel at the local hospital, including their long-time family physician, would need to know the truth.

Aside from those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, Karen stayed at home, making one excuse after another not to leave the house.

“Come to town with me,” Beverly would suggest. “We’ll do a little shopping. It’ll do you good to get out.”

“My knee hurts,” Karen would reply, even though her physical therapist repeatedly told her to use the leg as much as possible.
But she was sure that all anyone would have to do was look at her to know immediately what had happened to her, despite her mother’s fiction, and she wasn’t prepared to cope with that just yet.

She tried, on a number of occasions, to talk about Bob and that night, but she was always cut off.

“You had a terrible accident,” Beverly would say. “And we’re not going to dwell on it anymore.”

“But I really need to talk about it,” Karen would press, wanting only the chance to explain her side of things so that her parents could forgive her for being so careless.

“What you need is to put it all behind you and forget it ever happened,” Beverly would declare firmly. “Believe me, I know what’s best.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Just before she left the hospital, Dr. Waschkowski had suggested she talk to a psychiatrist.

“We here are dealing with your physical healing,” he said, giving her a slip of paper with a name and telephone number on it. “But that’s only part of the problem.”

The idea of being able to ask a doctor why things in the park had gone so wrong seemed rather tempting to Karen, but when she mentioned it to her mother, the woman exploded.

“Only crazy people need psychiatrists,” Beverly fumed. “You may have been careless, but that doesn’t mean you’re crazy. My God, that’s all we need, on top of everything else— a psychiatrist messing around in this.” And she tore the piece of paper to shreds.

Two weeks after Karen’s return home, Jill and the baby came to see her.

“Don’t worry about the details of the accident, in case she’s rude enough to ask,” Beverly counseled in advance. “It’s very normal to be fuzzy after such an ordeal.”

“Yes, Mother.”

It was eerie the way the woman actually seemed able to blot out reality and convince herself that her daughter was indeed the victim of some reckless automobile driver. Part of Karen wished she could do that, too.

Motherhood had transformed Jill. In addition to a healthy, happy glow, her figure, which had always been a bit too thin, had filled out in all the right places.

“It took having a baby to get boobs,” she said, laughing.

But it was the little pink bundle in the crib that most fascinated Karen—a perfect miniature person, with innocent blue eyes,
the softest skin, and a fuzzy halo of honey-blond hair.

“She’s so tiny. I never expected her to be so tiny.”

Jill grimaced. “You wouldn’t think that if you’d had to deliver her.”

“Do you think I could hold her?”

“Sure.” Jill swung the four-month-old baby out of her carrier and into Karen’s waiting arms without hesitation.

Rebecca turned trusting eyes on the stranger who now cuddled her, and smiled.

“I think she likes me,” Karen cried.

“She likes anyone who’ll hold her.”

Karen ran her fingers along a round pink cheek. “If she were mine, I’d hold her all the time.”

“Tell me that after you have one of your own,” Jill retorted. “When the house has to be cleaned and the diapers have to be washed and dinner hasn’t even been started and your back is killing you.”

Karen bit down on her lower lip. Before she left the hospital, right before he gave her the name of the psychiatrist, Dr.
Waschkowski had told her there would be no children. Of all the bad moments she had endured up to then, that was the worst—to hear her dreams and her future shatter against his words and know that she would pay for her carelessness for the rest of her life.

It was almost agony to hold Rebecca, to feel the warm little bundle snuggle up against her so trustingly, to smell the sweet scent of baby powder, to hear the contented little gurgles, to feel the tiny hand close itself around her finger and know that she would never experience this joy with a baby of her own.

Karen heaved a sigh of infinite sadness, and, despite her best efforts, a hot tear slipped out of the corner of her eye, rolled down her face, and dripped onto the baby’s pink-and-white romper suit.

“Well, I think that’s enough spoiling for a while,” Jill said, missing the tear and interpreting the sigh as a sign of weari
ness. She plucked Rebecca out of Karen’s arms and turned to settle her back into her crib. Karen started to protest, but Beverly chose that moment to announce lunch.

“All right now,” Jill said later, after they had eaten Winola’s tomato soup and tuna-fish salad and the baby had been nursed and changed and put down for a nap, when the two of them were in the garden with a tray of iced tea and cookies between them,
“enough about me and the baby. I want to know about you.”

“What about me?” Karen countered.

“Oh, come on, I’ve been waiting for months to find out what happened,” Jill exclaimed. “The last time I looked, you’re leaving my apartment with the hunk of the evening, and the next thing I know, you’re in the hospital.”

“What did my mother say?”

“Your mother told us you were hit by a car, of course. But how on earth did it happen?”

Karen began to fix pleats in her cotton skirt. In fifteen years of friendship, she had never deliberately lied to Jill. They had shared each other’s triumphs as well as tragedies, had been each other’s counsel as well as critic, and had never broken a promise or betrayed a confidence. She felt certain she could trust Jill with the truth, despite her mother’s warning, and she so desperately needed someone to talk to, so desperately needed someone to understand. She opened her mouth but, just as it was all about to come pouring out, Jill began to giggle.

“When we first heard, you know, about you being hurt,” her friend confided, “before we knew what had really happened and all,
you understand, Andy said that maybe the hunk of the evening had been too hot for you to handle.”

Karen’s mouth snapped shut and she stared at her friend. “What would have made him think that?” she made herself ask.

“Oh, you know Andy,” Jill shrugged. “His mind is always up somebody’s skirt.”

“What did you say when he said that?”

“I told him it was ridiculous, naturally,” Jill replied. “Any-
one who knows you, knows that your heart is pure and your body belongs to Peter.”

“Now that you mention it, I think the hunk
was
pretty strong,” Karen said cautiously, testing the waters. “I suppose it’s not implausible for someone to think that he might have … overpowered me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jill retorted. “With those looks, why on earth would he need to overpower anyone? He must have women falling all over him at every turn.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Sure,” her friend asserted. “And I set Andy straight about it, too. Anyway, we all know that I’m the weak-willed one. I was destined to jump the gun. But you—you’re the original iron maiden. You’ll never be seriously swayed by anything short of a ring on your finger. So, come on, let’s have all the details.”

Weak-willed or iron-tough, Karen digested silently. Were those the only acceptable options? She wondered how Jill could so arbitrarily reject any other possibilities, completely forgetting that, less than six months ago, she herself would have rejected them, too. It was the police and her parents all over again.

“It was a drunk driver,” she recited woodenly. “A drunk driver hit me with his car. He came out of nowhere.”

“How awful,” Jill exclaimed, having already heard this from Beverly. “But where were you when it happened? I mean, what were you doing?”

Karen’s heart began to pound in her chest and a line of perspiration popped out across her forehead. She couldn’t remember what her mother had told her to say.

“I don’t really know that much about it.” She shrugged. “It’s mostly just a blur.”

“Oh, come on, you must remember something,” Jill urged. “Like what street were you on? I mean, let’s start with the hunk.
You left the apartment with him. Was he involved in the accident?”

“Yes,” Karen began. “I mean, no,” she hastily corrected herself. “I mean, yes, I left the apartment with him, but no, he wasn’t hit by a car.”

“Wasn’t he going to get you a cab?”

“Yes, he was, but he didn’t. I mean, we waited but—that is, yes, he did.”

Jill smiled encouragingly. “Which is it—yes or no?”

“Well, you see, it was very late, and I—” Karen was now so flustered she made the only excuse she could think of, rubbing at her eyes with feigned weariness. “I’m exhausted,” she mumbled. “I’d really like to talk some more, but I think I have to lie down for a while.”

“Absolutely,” Jill agreed with alacrity, noting her friend’s sudden pallor. “Your mother made me promise not to wear you out.”

“It was great seeing you,” Karen added. “And thanks for bringing Rebecca. She’s just adorable.”

“Of course I’d have brought her anyway,” Jill declared as she gathered up the baby’s things, “but I didn’t have much choice.
She and I are joined at the hip until solid food.”

Beverly met them in the foyer. “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked.

“I promised Andy I’d be home early,” Jill replied, maneuvering the crib over the threshold, “and if I don’t hit the road pretty soon, I’m bound to get stuck on the Long Island Expressway until all hours. Besides, I don’t think Karen’s really up to lengthy visiting yet.”

“Well, you must come back when she’s stronger. It’s very important for her to have her friends around.”

“I will,” Jill promised.

“What happened?” Beverly asked the moment the front door closed. “Why did she go running off like that?”

“She wanted details,” Karen replied, turning away.

P
eter Bauer steered the Pontiac off the Long Island Expressway onto Lakeville Road, heading north toward Great Neck. His back was stiff and his eyes burned in their sockets. He had planned on doing the journey from Bangor in something under twelve hours, but the closer he got, the heavier the traffic grew, and the slower he was able to travel. He had been driving now for almost fourteen hours.

A week ago, Peter had left Cornell with his degree in electrical engineering. It was his family’s proudest moment, the first Bauer to graduate from college. He went home to Maine with his mother and father, his four brothers and his two sisters, to bask briefly in the glory of his achievement, and to attend the lavish party his parents had insisted on giving in his honor.

His whole exciting future was before him, and, as he lay in his lower bunk that first night, listening to the sound of his brother’s breathing, he knew that everything was going just as he had envisioned on other nights in this same bed. He had gotten his education, his father was about to take him into the family business—a small company that designed and manufactured electrical components—and he had found the girl of his dreams.

Although he and Karen had not discussed it lately, he was confident that, despite her accident, they would get engaged as planned, and then go on to marry. Maybe not as originally scheduled, but as soon as Karen had recuperated enough to finish her degree at Cornell. He knew she would insist on that. Then they would settle down in Bangor and live happily ever after.

Peter pushed his sunglasses up onto his head and rubbed at his tired eyes as he waited for a traffic light. In the five months since the accident, he and Karen had spoken regularly on the telephone, lopsided conversations—at least until she got the hang of that tube in her throat—but he hadn’t seen her since January. He had wanted to drive down from Ithaca on several occasions,
but Beverly kept putting him off, suggesting that Karen wasn’t up to company and it would be better if he waited until she was stronger.

“Her visitors are restricted to the immediate family,” she told him. “But I can of course keep you posted on her condition.”

Peter didn’t exactly feel like company anymore, but then, he supposed, he wasn’t family yet, either, and Beverly was as good as her word, calling him weekly with comprehensive progress reports, more often if there were some sort of breakthrough, as when Karen drank her first liquid, said her first word, took her first steps.

It was Beverly, not the doctors, who had told him about Karen’s injuries, when he arrived at the Kern’s doorstep at the end of December.

“We won’t know what really happened,” she said, “until Karen herself can tell us. But it appears to have been some sort of accident.”

She told him as much as she knew about the physical damages, except for the hysterectomy, of course. It would have been much too awkward trying to explain exactly why that had been necessary, and she decided there really wasn’t any point in telling him something before he needed to know it. Again, it was Beverly who informed him, the day after she
and Leo had had to hear the appalling account, that Karen’s injuries were the result of an automobile accident.

“She doesn’t remember much about it,” Beverly said. “Which is just as well, all things considered. From what we’ve been able to piece together, she was crossing the street when a car went out of control and hit her. As simple as that. A hit-and-run.
We assume the driver was drunk.”

“Was she thrown by the force of the impact, or did the car actually run over her?” Peter asked.

There was an abrupt pause on the other end of the phone. In the dozen or so times that Beverly had told this story, no one had thought to ask that question, and she found herself unprepared to answer it.

“I don’t know,” she said lamely.

“The doctors should be able to tell,” Peter persisted, “from the nature of the injuries.”