Regardless, the judge quashed the proposal and the case got underway. The prosecution’s version of the events was identical to what she had been told by the sheriff’s department.
Scott Myers, Aaron Harlan, a former teammate, and Harlan’s girlfriend, Nicole Cason, had gone out together to a local bar, the Red Shed. According to Cason, called as a witness for the prosecution, Myers had drunk between three and six alcoholic drinks. She was certain it had been at least three because they had taken turns to buy the first rounds and she remembered having had just enough cash to pay for the Long Island iced teas for Myers and Harlan, and a low-alcohol beer for herself—the bar did not accept credit cards. During the last hour before they left the Red Shed, Myers and Harlan played foosball while Cason sat in a booth chatting to an old friend. She saw Myers pass by three times with a beer in each hand, on his way from the counter to the corner with the games table. This made her assume that Myers might have consumed a total of six alcoholic drinks.
Around ten o’clock, Harlan got into a fight with another customer, an acquaintance from when he had been playing with the Wisconsin Badgers, the university team. Myers joined in the quarrel and became so loud that the female bouncer asked him to leave. Nicole Cason drove Myers and Harlan to the latter’s apartment in Darbo-Worthington. The plan was that Myers would stay the night. Cason went home then because the atmosphere in the car had become too much like a guys’ night out.
Once at Harlan’s place, Myers started drinking beer and tequila shots. Over the course of the evening, several other guests came and went. When Myers and Harlan were on their own again, they shared a gram of cocaine that Harlan had acquired the night before. In the police interrogation, Harlan had only been able to state how much cocaine he had bought and what they drank, as everything else had been wiped from his memory. The time when Myers had suddenly made up his mind to leave Harlan’s apartment had been determined from an incoherent text message sent by Harlan to Cason, in which he joked that he was so out of it, he couldn’t find Myers in his two-bedroom apartment.
When the police asked Myers if he was a habitual cocaine user, he said he wasn’t, but I had to do it now because we’ve got to be clean by June. At this point, the prosecution explained that the National Football League carried out regular anti-doping checks to reveal usage of performance-enhancing drugs, but tested for intoxicants only once a year.
Scott Myers could not recall the reason why he, at around eight in the morning, went down to start up his white four-door Ram 2500 and drove off on East Washington Avenue. Four blocks east of the Wisconsin State Capitol, a truck driver called 911 after having spotted Myers’s pickup racing along at high speed with two wheels on the planted median strip. An incident of reckless driving had been recorded by emergency services but had not been followed up with an immediate intervention.
Grounds for compensation, Jane’s lawyer had whispered at that point.
Myers carried on westward. At the intersection of Washington Street and Regent Street, he drove through the red light and hit a dark-gray sedan belonging to Gregory Ashland, the driver, who was killed instantly. An employee at a gas station on the opposite side of the railway tracks crossing Washington Avenue heard a noise she at first understood to be a loud explosion. She had assumed a train might be involved. She took the first aid kit that had been lying unused under the counter for years and ran outside to find the scene of the incident. She passed by the smashed sedan because, as she told the sheriff’s officer, she couldn’t bear the thought of what might be inside, and went to the white Ram, which had been less damaged. She saw that the driver’s cab was empty and returned to the first wrecked car, where she discovered eleven-year-old Julie Ashland in the back seat, squashed and immobilized.
Later, Jane couldn’t remember the return journey from the seminar in Chicago.
A bewildered man had been blocking the entrance under the neon sign of the Emergency Department. As Jane squeezed past him, he had exclaimed God is with you, and the smell of his yellow teeth would come back to her for days afterward. Several people in the reception area kept saying her name and talking to her as she sped through the hospital corridors like a corpuscle rushing through the bloodstream.
They had taped a pink, transparent tube to Julie’s forehead and strips of the same tape, spotted with yellow pus, went across the ridge of her nose and down her cheek, where they met and crossed more strips holding the respirator tube in place to the left of her front teeth, which gleamed faintly in the narrow crack between her lips.
No. Please.
Jane noticed that someone was holding her arm in a gentle, painful grip just above her elbow. She didn’t want the supportive hand because it confirmed that all this was true, that it really was Julie lying there, her lustrous, violet eyelids closed and her hair looking oddly dull, glued to her head on one side and fanned out over the pillow on the other. Julie’s eyebrows and her pale lips still formed perfect arcs whose symmetry was emphasized by the crisscrossing tape stuck all over her face by people Jane had never met.
A blanket had been pulled right up to Julie’s chin. Beneath the dark folds, Jane sensed the presence of something she was not meant to see, something broken, aching, packaged in a still-wet cast. Julie’s right hand lay on top of the cover. The fingers were lined up along the edge of the bed and the palm turned upward. An IV tube went up her arm to somewhere. At the edge of Jane’s field of vision, pale beings still hovered, apparently understanding what went on in Jane’s mind and wordlessly telling her what to do: Hold her hand. Jane did. She had felt its surprising weight before when she had held her sleeping daughter’s hand and, with a terrible chill spreading between her shoulder blades, imagined precisely a moment such as this.
She hadn’t been there when it happened. Facing fear alone had been Julie’s last experience. If she had been conscious after the accident, she might have called out to Greg but received no answer. Jane leaned close to Julie’s ear on the side that wasn’t covered in tape. Tears stuck to her cheek and hairline, and when Jane tried to wipe them off with the back of her hand, Julie’s head fell sideways a little.
No, it’s impossible to tell if Julie can sense anything, but it is good that you speak to her. After all, you never know… though, to be completely honest… but of course that is always the way when something has happened to your own child, anyone you are fond of, really, you shouldn’t wait to say…
So Jane tensed whatever muscles would obey commands and tried to whisper that she was so sorry for all the times she had been too strict, or hadn’t listened, or had disappointed Julie, for she must know that she was always in Jane’s mind, never out of her thoughts regardless of what she was doing, and that Jane couldn’t imagine a life without her, and then bad conscience struck her because Julie shouldn’t leave this world being worried about anything. Once more, she put her cheek against Julie’s and hugged her, noticing how different the girl felt, and all the time, her mind swung between feeling that she was observing someone else’s unfolding story and an infernally lucid perception of her own skull, enclosing her brain in a noisy, blood-red space.