Dumb Luck Read online

  “I’m Stephen Coombs,” he said rather casually, “and I’m going to test your blood-alcohol content. Ever done this before?”

  “No,” I said, the full weight of the moment starting to catch up with me.

  He held out a tube. “Well, you blow a good lungful of air into this tube and then I’ll get a reading on this machine.”

  I hesitated to take the tube.

  “It’s easy,” he said sarcastically. “But if you burp, we have to wait fifteen minutes before we test you. Otherwise it throws off the reading.”

  As if on cue, I had to burp.

  “Okay. We have to wait. Want to tell me anything about yourself?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “How much did you have to drink?”

  “One, maybe two beers.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  I looked down at the floor. After a little while, I burped a second time. Coombs checked his watch. The policeman who arrested me hovered nearby. It looked like he was writing out a report. After some time passed, I burped a third time. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Coombs looked at the other cop and they both rolled their eyes.

  So I made a point of not burping anymore.

  Finally, Coombs handed me the mouthpiece again. I blew into it. He wrote down a reading.

  Not long after, he took a second reading.

  Looking at a printed read-out he said, “You’re well over the limit. Blood alcohol content of 0.05.”

  After that, the first cop took over again. He handed me some paperwork. “As of now, you no longer have a beginner’s driver’s license. And it’s gonna be a long time before you can even apply for one again. You’ll find out all about that later.” He handed me a legal-size yellow form. “This paper here states you were driving under the influence of alcohol. You’ve been charged. And you are to appear in court on the date stated there. Do you understand?” He asked that last question like I was a little kid. A bad little kid.

  I nodded yes.

  Another phone was handed to me. “Call someone to pick you up.”

  I must have looked at the phone like I’d never seen one before. My mind was a muddle. I was scared. I was confused. And the beer and wine had me feeling both buzzed and very, very tired. I tried to think rationally.

  I should have called my parents.

  But I didn’t.

  And I couldn’t call Taylor or Chelsea on their cell phones. If either one of them or anyone else from the party showed up, that would just make things worse. The cops would end up busting my party. The one that was probably still going on at my place without me there.

  I thought about calling Kayla.

  And I should have. Even if it meant her coming here with her parents. I should have done that.

  But I didn’t.

  “Let me call a cab, okay?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” the arresting cop said. “I can’t let you do that.” Then he looked frustrated and ran a hand through his short cropped hair. “Look, we’ve wasted enough time on you already.” And, with that, he shocked the hell out of me by putting the cuffs back on me. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out.”

  We went down two flights of stairs, me stumbling once and almost falling, except he was hanging onto my elbow.

  A uniformed woman in another brightly lit room asked me for everything from my pockets.

  “Belt?” she said. “We need your belt.”

  I took it off and handed it to her.

  “Watch?”

  I gave it to her.

  “Wallet?”

  I handed it over.

  “Shoe laces?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I said

  “Not kidding.”

  I took the laces out of my running shoes and handed them to her. She asked me to sign a document. I signed it without reading it. Panic was settling into my head but everything around me was fuzzy.

  Next, I was led through the jail. My first image was of a young man, maybe twenty-five years old, standing at the front of a cell, completely naked, holding onto the bars. Some men were in group cells and looked up at me as I walked by. Some were obviously drunk and shouted at the cop who led me.

  It was the real thing. A jail. I walked past the shouting men, some kicking at the bars. It was like some terrible nightmare. I kept wanting to say, “There must be some mistake.” But there was no mistake. This was reality. This was my life. I had got myself into this. I had screwed up really bad. All I wanted was to be out of there.

  As I stumbled forward, I began to wish I could turn the clock backwards. I wished I was still a kid, living at home, still going to school. Yeah, waking up in the morning from a bad dream and getting myself ready to go to school.

  Fortunately for me, I was led to my own private cell. Four feet by eight feet. I walked inside. The door closed with a heavy metallic clang. And I was locked in. No one had said anything but I knew I was there for the night. Possibly more. I was in jail. Holy Christ.

  Then the cop was gone. I had two concrete walls on either side of me. If I sat sideways on my bed, I could brace my feet against the far wall, it was that narrow. The floor was concrete and one caged light bulb hung from the ceiling. There was no one in the cell across from me. I felt isolated and alone.

  I sat down on the hard stainless steel shelf that was to be my bed. Beside it was a seatless stainless steel toilet attached to a sink. But when I tried to turn the water on at the faucet, nothing came out. I was very thirsty. But it looked like the only water to drink here was from the toilet. And that wasn’t going to happen.

  I lay down on the steel bunk and tried to calm myself as the panic began to set in. I felt nauseous and almost threw up a couple of times. But I didn’t. My watch had been taken. I had no idea what time it was. And no idea how long I would be held here.

  There were no police officers walking by to ask for water or to ask about the time.

  I felt very, very alone.

  And then another prisoner who I couldn’t see in the next cell beside me began screaming something unintelligible. It was a horrible, unearthly scream. He began kicking hard and relentlessly on the cell door. Maybe he was crazy violent, maybe he was on drugs. I’d never heard anything like that before. I lay on my back now, closed my eyes, and tried to make everything go away.

  It didn’t.

  Another prisoner from nearby screamed at the first screamer to shut up. An argument followed. A really angry, stupid, pointless name-calling argument between two men, with me invisibly sandwiched in my cell between them. I remained silent and squeezed my shut eyes tighter. I tried again to make it all go away.

  chapterthirtytwo

  I’d never before been in serious trouble in my whole life. The worst thing I ever did was accidentally break a neighbor’s window while playing backyard baseball as a kid. I’d never imagined myself arrested and thrown in jail.

  But here I was.

  I was dead tired but my mind was racing. Was my apartment trashed by now? Was the party still going? Did anyone notice or care that I wasn’t there? Would Taylor take charge and make sure everything went okay? But that was the least of my worries.

  And Kayla. Kayla had told me not to have the party. Kayla was wise. Why didn’t I listen to her?

  What would my parents say when they found out? And they would find out.

  I found myself thinking of Stephanie. I had really liked her. Did she do what she had to do by calling a cab? Could she have helped in the situation, helped me? Did she really have a driver’s license and lie so as not to be drawn into my problems? Maybe she saw me for what I was. A screwup. Trouble. I took out her picture. It was in my shirt pocket and I had failed to leave it with all my other stu
ff. I stared at it. A very beautiful young woman who had been interested in me. I turned it over and looked at her phone number. I almost laughed.

  But the fear and panic was setting back in. I wondered if this was what Kayla felt like when she had her panic attacks. I reminded myself that I was the one creating the panic in me. In my mind. All I needed to do was control it.

  Further away, there was another loud, angry man having what sounded like an argument with himself. Then the image of the naked young man, his face contorted and pressed up against the bars, came back to haunt me. I began to see that I had one small bit of good luck with me tonight. The cops had decided to lock me in my own private cell. Oh, my god. What would it have been like to be locked up with the naked guy or the shouting, insanely angry men?

  I sat up again to stop the racing thoughts; I put my back up against the cold concrete and my feet up against the opposite wall. My entire world was whittled down to this. All I had to do was get through the night. If I was lucky, they’d let me out in the morning. I just needed to keep myself sane through the night.

  I failed to fall asleep at first, but eventually faded off a little; the light was very bright and, just when it seemed to get quiet in the jail, someone began to scream again. And again.

  When I heard the first screaming voice of a woman, I realized there were women housed in cells at the far end of this basement we were in. A woman screaming a name. “Darren! Darren!” she wailed at the top of her lungs.

  And then Darren answered. A raw, raspy shout from the guy next door who had been screaming and kicking his door. “Carla, is that you?”

  At first, I almost thought it romantic. Two drunk crazies, both arrested and shouting at each other from opposite ends of the jail. But it wasn’t like that.

  “Darren, you stupid piece of shit!” she screamed for everyone to hear. “Look what you got us into!”

  Darren wasn’t about to take the insult quietly. “Shut up, Carla. I’m gonna break your face when we get out of here!”

  Nope. No romance at all. It went on like that for fifteen minutes, along with other jailbirds shouting out for them to shut up. If I wasn’t feeling so desperate, I might have actually laughed out loud.

  When things settled down, I faded again but did not really sleep. Someone else started shouting out, “What time is it? Does anybody know the time?” But none of us had watches. And there were no police walking up and down through the cell block. None that I saw. Like the others, I wanted to know what time it was. There were no clocks, no windows. And no water to drink. And it was getting harder to control my mind, my panic.

  I took several deep breaths. I remembered something I once learned from a magazine about self-hypnosis. I concentrated on relaxing every part of my body. Then my mind. Then counting backwards ten to one. But just about when I’d get there and just about when I relaxed enough that I thought I’d fall asleep, Darren or Carla or someone else would let out an unearthly shriek or curse, and I’d be wide awake and fully aware of where I was.

  Keeping myself sane was my most important task.

  I remembered back to days from my childhood. The good days with my parents. Car trips to the parks, the beach, the mountains. The trees. I started to picture the green of the leaves of trees. And then I was climbing them. It was a long time ago. Kayla and I were maybe twelve. She was above me in a crabapple tree we’d discovered in an empty lot.

  I closed my eyes and climbed tree after tree. I could not see her in my visions but I knew I was not alone. A shadowy but reassuring someone was always there in the tree above me or below me. And there was sunlight, bright sunlight sifting through the branches.

  I guess I did finally fall asleep but I don’t know for how long. The human wails and howling had stopped. I was out of it. But then, suddenly, I must have sensed myself falling. Falling like in those childhood dreams when you’re falling out of the night sky and you wake instantly as you feel you’re hitting hard onto the surface of the earth.

  I woke up at that instant and sat bolt upright. I didn’t know where I was.

  My mouth was dry and my head was fuzzy.

  And I was in jail. It was all real.

  I think things got harder after that. I was still tired and my back ached from sleeping on the hard metal. I tried to calm myself again but I couldn’t. I felt cold and scared and I started to shake, then sat there with my knees scrunched up, hugging my legs. This was bad, a voice in my head kept saying. Very bad.

  But there was another voice. I can’t say I recognized the voice but I like to think it was the voice of my father. In recent years, he had been so caught up in his ambitions and his work and then the new business that there had not been a lot of warm father/son moments. But he had been different, once upon a time. Back before his falling-out with my grandfather. Back when I was young. I think it was the voice of him back then that I was hearing. “You will get through this, Brandon. Everything will be okay.”

  I heard this voice more than once. And when it receded, I waited for it to return.

  And I did get through it.

  One by one, the other prisoners were escorted from their cells when what must have been morning arrived. I seemed invisible to the attending policemen, so I finally piped up in a croaky voice to one walking by, “What about me?”

  He looked puzzled, as if they had truly forgotten I was there. “I’ll check,” he said.

  When I was finally allowed out and given my watch, it read 1:30. It was the afternoon. I was given back my other things and freed to just leave. Once some more paperwork was signed, it was as if the attending cops suddenly lost all interest in me. I had to ask where the door was to leave the building.

  “Down the hall and up the stairs,” one said and laughed a little.

  I stumbled out into the cool bright afternoon and stood there by the side of the road for a minute. I looked at the police station that I’d seen maybe a hundred times before in my life, never knowing what went on inside. The panic was gone. I’d survived my night in jail.

  A small bubble of euphoria at being free came over me. But it was quickly pushed down by the fact that this was not over. There would be a fine, a court appearance. And God knows how this might affect the rest of my life. Maybe I’d never be allowed to drive my new car or any car.

  I started walking, realizing that I had never been prepared for the chain of events set in motion by winning the lottery. Maybe Mr. Carver was right. But maybe it wasn’t the lottery at all. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to be living in the adult world. My legs ached as I moved forward. The air was chilly and I only had a thin jacket. A thin, very expensive jacket. I saw a taxi and considered flagging it down, but decided I should just keep walking. Even though I didn’t know where I was going.

  My befuddled mind came to the conclusion it was Saturday. And I realized there was only one person I should go see right now. I wasn’t going to go back to my condo just then to see what the partygoers had left of the place. No, I decided I’d go to the one person who might be able to help straighten me out a little.

  chapterthirtythree

  Kayla answered the door and immediately knew something was wrong. “Brandon, you look like crap. What happened?”

  “I spent the night in jail,” I said.

  Her eyes were wide but she didn’t speak.

  “Can we go for a walk?” I asked. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  As we walked, I told her the whole sorry tale. She didn’t tell me “I told you so.” She just looked very concerned and then suddenly stopped and gave me a hug. “You’ll get through this,” she said.

  “I don’t know how I could be so stupid.”

  “You’re human. Things moved too fast. Now you need to regroup.”

  We were in front of the public library. There was a low wall by the sidewalk and I sat down
on it. Kayla sat beside me. I took a deep breath. “I really screwed up. I’m gonna have to go to court. Everyone will know. I’ll have to pay a fine. I may never get my license now. And I’m going to have to tell the truth to my parents. They’ll kill me. But, you know, as bad as all that is, there’s something else that’s bothering me more.”

  Kayla sat silently and studied me. I could see how deeply she was worried about me. “What’s the something else?”

  “I just don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know who my real friends are, and I don’t know where I’m going.” And then I started to cry. Yeah, I cried. Kayla held me again as a couple of elderly women walked by and stared at us.

  “Maybe you should go live with your parents for a while. Give yourself some time to chill out.”

  I shook my head. “Not in their new home. I’d hate that. I’ve hated everything about them wanting to move. That would only make things worse.”

  “Well, then maybe when you move back into your old house, things will settle down and you’ll feel grounded.”

  She was trying to be helpful, but maybe nothing really could help me right then. I’d crashed and burned. In jail, I’d felt like I’d nearly lost my mind. “I’m worried about that, too. It won’t be the same. It will be like a shadow of my old life. My parents gone. A lot of the old familiar things gone. What will I do? Sit in my room and make new friends on the Internet? It’s going to suck, I know.” I blew my nose and felt embarrassed at what a mess I was. “Kayla, would you come stay with me? Live with me for a while?”

  Kayla put her arm around me. “You’re tired, Brandon. You’ve lived through hell. You need sleep.” She paused and drew back a little. “I’ll come visit you. I don’t think I can live with you.”

  Despite the fact that Kayla was here for me and being the best friend anyone could be, I was beginning to realize that something about her had changed. Something about us had changed. I was afraid to say that out loud. I decided to change the subject. “How are things in your life?”