Part 3 — Mile Marker Twenty
The woman on the frozen screen was my daughter. Charmaine, in the blue scrubs from the dentist office where she works, leaning through my broken window with her hair tied back and a look of terror on her face that I had never seen on it. She turned to the camera inside my car as if she knew it was there, and then, I think, she did not. Her lips were still moving. The investigator pressed a key, and her voice came out, small and cracked. “Mama. I am so sorry.”
Charmaine had come off the bench and stood now in the middle of the hallway. She did not run. She said to the judge, who had come out of the courtroom to see what the noise was, “Your Honor, I did that. Garrett called me from the road. He said he had frightened Mama and she might be hurt, and that if the trooper found out he had been behind her, he would lose his license and the business. He asked me to get there first. He told me to take her phone, because of the texts, and to put her pills in the coffee so the hospital would find them. He said it was only to help.”
I held on to the arm of the bench. I had thought for three months that I was going to die of the thing my son had done. It had not occurred to me that my daughter might be the one to tell me what it cost. “Charmaine,” I said. “Did you know he hit me on purpose?” “No, Mama.” She began to weep. “I swear to God, no. I thought you had swerved, and he was frightened. When I saw the picture on the screen just now, I understood for the first time what I did.”
The judge asked the bailiff to bring chairs. She did a very sensible thing: she called a recess and told the lawyers to come to her chambers. Within forty minutes the hearing to declare me unable to manage my affairs had been withdrawn by the petitioner, who was Garrett, on the advice of a lawyer who would not have touched it for another hundred dollars. The judge struck it from her docket. She said in open court that she had rarely been so pleased to dismiss a case.
The investigator from the insurance company had the sense not to say anything cruel. He handed the memory card to the judge in a clear bag and explained its chain of custody, which began with a woman in a Toyota who had thought to buy a good camera for her car. He said that in thirty years he had never seen a motorist protect herself so well. I said I was a truck driver. He said, “That explains it.”
Garrett was taken into custody by two deputies of Calcasieu Parish. He was charged with reckless endangerment, filing a false insurance claim, and making a false report to a state trooper, and with an attempt to obtain a finding of incompetence by fraud. His lawyer asked for a bond. The judge set one so high that it was clear what she thought. In the hallway he turned and looked at me over the shoulder of the deputy. “Mama,” he said. I said, “Not today, Garrett.”
The Dodge Ram, bought on credit with the money he got from me, was repossessed by the finance company the next week, and the hot-shot business that had never existed was closed on paper. The $44,700 and the Silverado of Lucius, which Garrett had pawned, were located and returned under an order of the court. The insurance company withdrew his claim and referred the matter to the state. I drove the Silverado home from the pawn shop in Sulphur with the window down.
Garrett pleaded guilty in January. The judge sentenced him to a term of years in a state prison, with supervised release after it and repayment of every cost. When he was asked if he had anything to say, he said only that he had been ashamed for a long time, and that it had been easier to be angry. I wrote that down in my head. I did not say it was all right. But I wrote to him that Christmas, and I told him about the weather.
Charmaine pleaded guilty to a lesser count of tampering with evidence. The prosecutor, who had watched the whole recording, asked for probation. The judge gave her two years of it, with community service, and a requirement that she tell her story to a class of paramedics, which she did, in a steady voice, at the fire academy in Lake Charles. She stood at the front of the room with her hands folded, and nobody laughed at her. That was a mercy, and I knew whose.
She came home to me in the evenings that spring. We did not have a conversation about it for a long time. She brought groceries. I made gumbo on Sundays, with the roux the color of an old penny, and she stirred it, because I have a bad wrist. One night, over the pot, she said, “Mama, how can you stand to look at me?” I said, “I drove a truck for twenty-six years, baby. I know the difference between a wreck and a person.”
A good camera never lies and never gets tired, and a good daughter, in the end, does the same. I have kept the memory card. It is in the hollow heel of the boot of Lucius, in the back of the closet, where I first hid it.
On the first of May I drove the Silverado out along I-10 and pulled into the rest area at mile marker 20, just past the Sulphur exit. I got out and stood by the guardrail, which had been mended with a new, bright piece of steel. The traffic roared by in both directions. I said a short prayer for Lucius and a longer one for my children, and then I climbed back into the truck, turned the key, and let the engine speak. It sounded like home.