Then I bought her a car.
It was nothing much really, just a boxy little three year old two-door sedan with a dented left front fender that got good gas mileage and sported a neon yellow paint job all her friends were jealous of, but by her reaction you would have thought I had bought her a fire engine red Ferrari. Katie immediately fell in love with the thing, using it to buzz around town, hanging out with her friends and driving back and forth to school.
The night she died was a typical midsummer New Hampshire evening, clear and warm and utterly unremarkable but for the horror that followed. Low humidity. Light breeze. Nothing to suggest she would get T-boned by a drunken asshole in a decrepit pickup truck as she was crossing a desolate county two-lane on her way home from a night spent watching movies at her best friend Hilary’s house.
I found out my little girl had been in an auto accident when a somber-looking young sheriff’s deputy rang my doorbell just before midnight and changed my life forever.
“She’s alive,” he said, “but you need to get to the hospital immediately.” The poor kid had to raise his voice in order for me to hear the end of the sentence, because before the words were even out of his mouth I was sprinting to my car in bare feet, cutting them to ribbons on my driveway as I ran. I didn’t even notice and I certainly didn’t care.
The doctors allowed me to see her for a few precious minutes after she came out of surgery. If I hadn’t known it was her, I might not have recognized my little Katie. Half her head was shaved and bandaged where they had sewn up a deep gash in her skull, her pelvis was fractured, her legs broken, and she had suffered a severe concussion from serious head trauma. The swelling of her brain inside her skull was what worried the surgeons the most and for good reason. Shortly after speaking with me, Katie lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered.
During the short time she was conscious she was able to relate exactly what had happened during the final car ride of her much-too-short life. As she stopped and checked both directions for crossing traffic at the intersection, the only vehicle which was a factor had been the pickup truck, approaching from off her right, passing the empty Baptist church, directional flashing, indicating the driver was planning a right turn.
Katie started across Route 28, discovering too late that the truck wasn’t slowing to turn; it was in fact speeding, going much too fast, racing almost out of control. She realized a split-second too late that the driver had simply forgotten to turn the directional off after making his last turn.
My daughter hesitated for a split second and then hit the gas hard in an attempt to make it through the intersection—her only option at that point—but the pickup never slowed, never even swerved. It just plowed straight into Katie’s car, driving the little yellow vehicle into a utility pole which snapped in half from the violence of the impact. The pole then smashed down on the roof, crushing it and trapping my injured daughter inside.
She lay in semi-conscious agony inside the ruined car for twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived and rescue personnel cut her out of the mangled mess of sheet metal. She said she was vaguely aware of the man who had hit her walking around his truck examining the damage. He never so much as looked into her car; never checked to see if she was all right or even if she was still alive.
As she finished relating the story, in obvious pain and tiring rapidly, I hugged my baby and told her I loved her, and that I would be right there, sitting next to her bed when she awoke. She never did.
I found out later that the driver of the other vehicle in the accident that took Katie’s life, the pickup with the continuously flashing turn signal, was none other than the son of our local sheriff, a young man who had been in trouble with the law on numerous occasions but had always been spared any serious consequences from his actions thanks to his father’s influence. That explained why he never received as much as a traffic citation on the night he ended my little girl’s life.
A few weeks after the accident, I received an anonymous letter in the mail from one of the sheriff’s deputies who had been on duty that night. He couldn’t come forward publicly, he said, or he would suffer the wrath of his boss and probably lose his job, but he thought I should know that on the night in question, Pete Malone, the sheriff’s son, had been drinking and twelve empty beer cans had been found scattered throughout his truck.
There were no skid marks on the road leading up to the accident site, which corroborated Katie’s recollection that the truck never slowed. The officer concluded the letter by saying he was terribly sorry, but he knew nothing whatsoever was going to be done to Malone. The man would once again suffer no consequences for his reckless and this time deadly actions.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, that letter from the anonymous sheriff’s deputy constituted my life. I chewed on it like a dog worrying a bone. It was the first thing I looked at when I got up in the morning and the last thing I studied before I went to bed. I memorized it. I could recite it forward and backward. It was all I thought about.
After two weeks I knew what I had to do. I went to see Pete Malone.
When he opened the dented and rusting metal front door to his rundown trailer and saw me standing on his tiny landing, the look on his face was that of a guy who has accidentally bitten into a lemon. It was quite obvious he knew who I was, and equally clear he didn’t want to see me. “What do you want?” he asked, as if sharing a few minutes of his precious time with the man whose child he had killed was asking too much.
“I’m not here to cause you any trouble, Mr. Malone,” I told him. “I just wanted to hear from you in your own words what happened that night.”
He shot me a look of utter scorn. His mud-brown eyes were huge and aggressive. “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. That stupid chick pulled right out in front of me. The whole damned thing was her fault and I ended up losing my truck because of that dumb bitch.” He grinned, his thin lips parting to reveal a mouth filled with stained and yellowing teeth. “Maybe you should have spent a little more time teaching her to drive.”
I kept my temper. I had to. I needed to know. “Were you drinking that night, Mr. Malone?”
His grin turned to a snarl. “Drinking? Where did you hear that?” he demanded.
“That’s not an answer. Were you?”
“Screw you,” he shot back. “That accident was her fault and you’ll never prove otherwise.”
I bent my head and sighed, scuffing my foot on the spongy rotting pine of the man’s front deck. My neck felt hot from the relentless sun and I wondered absently whether it was getting burned. The overwhelming sense of sorrow and hopelessness I had felt for weeks began to be replaced by something else. “I have one more question, Mr. Malone, then I’ll go away and leave you alone—“
“You’re good and damned right you will or I’ll call the cops,” he interrupted, making a show of looking at his watch as if he were late for a pressing appointment. The filthy and torn t-shirt he was wearing suggested otherwise.
“Was your turn signal on when you ran my daughter into that telephone pole?” I asked. “Did you forget to turn it off in your drunken haze?” My fury was building and I knew I was pushing my luck.
He coughed and spat something slimy and unidentifiable past my leg onto the punky wood at my feet. There was barely enough room on the deck for the two of us. “Get offa my property. You’re lucky I don’t sue your ass for a new truck.”