Page 81 of The Ground Beneath Our Feet
The light rain covered the ground on a warm, late spring day.
I was going stir crazy cooped up here. Fucking El Niño weather. I knew California had a drought, but it messed with my plans.
On today of all days.
Jessica curled up next to me on the couch snoozing while Schmedley purred on her legs.
I let out a breath.
“Babe?”
She smiled. She was so pure, so loving. What I was gonna do next terrified me.
“You wanna go for a drive?”
Shaking her head, she said, “Not really. It’s raining.”
“Please?”
She furrowed her brows. I never asked her to do things like this, so maybe the novelty moved her to action. Regardless, she got her shoes and her purse and was ready to go ten minutes later.
We drove north from Santa Barbara up along the coast to a more rural area, passing through tunnels cut decades ago.
“I love seeing road cuts,” she enthused. “You can always see such interesting layers. It’s so funny how the ground bends and shapes when there’s tremendous force on it. It’s like it can’t help but morph into something else.”
“Like people.” She glanced over at me. “People have layers like that. You don’t see them until they’ve been cut so deep and so cruelly that all you can see are the strata. And you can read through the years and see what made them that way.”
“You’re all poetic, Dr. Mikey.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t feeling poetic. I was feeling fucking anxious.
A little ways up, when the road had a dangerous forty-five mile per hour curve on the freeway, now lit with yellow signs and blinking lights, I pulled over to the side next to a white cross.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
I let out all the air in my lungs. Then I looked at her and started talking.
“Six years ago today, I had an accident here.”
Her eyes widened so large they were saucers. She gasped. “What? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“I had a fatal accident here six years ago. I killed someone. Someone died because of my stupidity. My human failings. And every year since then, I’ve come to pay my respects and make my atonement.”
“I’m so sorry. What happened? I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. Did you get hurt?”
“Not a scratch. I walked away.” I paused. “And it was totally my fault because I’d drunk so much that I was three times the legal limit.”
She froze. “I don’t understand. You don’t drink.”
“That’s because I’m a recovering alcoholic.”
Shock registered across her face, and she blinked repeatedly. Then she started saying, “No. No. You can’t be. No.”
“I was, Jessica.” I paused. “I am. I’d just finished another year of school and had been out with some friends. We’d been partying hard—like we did every weekend—and ended up out here. I don’t know how. We stopped by a roadside tavern and had more. Then I dropped them off.”
With the look on her face, I didn’t want to keep going, but I had to tell her.
“I was headed home at the end of the night, tired, drunk. I drove way too fast. It was too much for this curve. Even sober, this curve needs finesse. I lost control, hit another car, and bashed it into this road cut. The driver of the other car was killed instantly.”
