This Is Not an Accident

by April Wilder

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

From a truly distinctive voice brimming with wicked humor, tales of the little disasters that befall and befuddle us

April Wilder’s characters (some normal, some less so) have this in common: they are spiraling (or inching) toward self-destruction. An almost poetic range of disasters are sought out and savored in This Is Not an Accident, from bad romance to iffy adoption decisions to unsteady liaisons with animals and dolls; from compulsive driving to compulsive written correspondence with oneself.

A house sitter hides among poets in Salt Lake City after his canine charge dies tragically. A grandma’s boyfriend holds a backyard barbecue under siege—with the kids as his pint-sized guards. The world of these slightly off-center individuals is similarly off by a few degrees. But by the end, we realize it’s not as far off as we would like to think: this is modern American life. What Wilder captures is not a dark side, but rather the side we all know well and hide from others, and ourselves. In the tradition of Wells Tower and Jim Shepard, This Is Not an Accident signals a bold new voice and delivers the kind of insanely incisive moments only a master of the human condition can conjure.

Release date: January 30, 2014

Publisher: Viking

Print pages: 224

Sample

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright © 2014 by April Wilder

This Is Not an Accident

Each week the driver who’d made the least amount of progress took home the Decelerator Award. The thing itself was an actual gas pedal removed from the instructor’s late-model Tacoma, a pedal she believed to be not only faulty but the true cause of her multiple citations for unnecessary acceleration. “As it happened,” she told the class, “Toyota recalled these pedals for that very reason, among others.”

Kat raised her hand. “Among other reasons or among other pedals?”

Everyone laughed, though Kat wasn’t sure why. She wondered, too, why an accelerator was being used to denote deceleration, but the one question was enough to let everyone know she was awake.

The instructor backed up, half-sitting on the lip of the desk and crossing her short sturdy legs. She was an all-business blonde who worked for a bail bondsman and claimed to be related to Houdini (a fact the class wise guy, Roger, had pounced on: “Yeah? I’ll bet he coulda got himself out of those acceleration tickets”). Behind her on the whiteboard was this week’s Thinking Point:

passenger ≠ hostage

“So how did it go for everyone this week?” she asked.

A girl in braces raised her hand and said it hadn’t gone well. She’d forgotten to close the door of the car before backing out of the driveway and an elm ripped it clean off. Yes, she whispered, the driver’s side. People said Aw supportively as the girl sat blinking like someone in front of a cake who can’t think of a wish.

Next the guy with the multiple ripped-apart-heart tattoos said he’d caught himself driving too fast four times.

“All right,” the instructor said, “OK. Who can help us with that?”

A shy kid raised his hand, his skull cap pulled down level with the eyelids. “Should he try and leave earlier?”

“Good! Yes!”

Encouraged, he added, “That way he wouldn’t have to speed because he’d have more time to get where he was going.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

The offender said, “But I wasn’t really going anywhere so I don’t see how it’d help to leave earlier. So I mean, leave earlier for what?”

The instructor looked puzzled. “I guess we’re wondering why you would need the use of your vehicle in that instance.”

“Just cruising, trying to cool down when everyone’s done pissing me off.” He looked around for allies, flipping an obvious hand over.

“OK,” the instructor said. “This raises a good point—let’s all pull out our workbooks and turn to page ninety-seven.”

There was the pulling out of the workbooks and the locating of page 97, which had a self-evaluation form that began: I drive best when ______________. Kat couldn’t think of a time she drove best or even better so she wrote “N/A” in the blank, and then, over in the margin, drew a picture of herself driving. Kat was not all there today. She’d slept in her car three nights in a row and could honestly say the only thing she wanted in the world was to make it home after class instead of driving the two-hundred-plus miles to Iowa, sleeping in her car again, driving home, then possibly, if it happened again (whatever it was that happened between the times Kat wasn’t-then-was driving to Iowa yet again) turning around and repeating the whole horrible awful awfulness. It didn’t seem like much to ask, to know where she was going when she got in her car. To have some basic say in the matter of her whereabouts.

Across the table, Roger said, “Your face looks better this week.” He was smoothing down the legs of his mustache, while their third tablemate, a man with a recent-looking brain-surgery scar, nodded along. It didn’t help to ignore Roger, on whose constantly sunburned face was the smug, slightly obscene expression of a man who’s dodged every major responsibility in life. Halfway through the first class, he’d yawned and asked when the movies were going to begin. “Red Asphalt, anyone? That’s a classic.”

In front of the room now, the instructor was clapping and hollering: “Everyone! In front, please! I’m seeing a lot of erasing and I’m wondering why that’s happening. This is a self-evaluation, people. Your self is supposed to evaluate itself, OK?” She looked from face to face, settling on the Spanish couple who huddled over their Safer U Safer Me workbook like they were picking out patio furniture. “Comprehen-day- vous?”

The couple nodded.

In forty-six minutes class would end. Half an hour before that, Kat would start to panic. In the goals box she sketched a map of streets between the Technical Institute and her apartment a mile and a half away, darkening in the quickest route home, mouthing the mantra she’d adopted from (the entirety of ) page 7:

ALWAYS BE COGNIZANT:

YOU

ALONE

CONTROL

YOUR

VEHICLE!

It was set in boldface, in some maniacal font—36? 48?—and though it looked true, even axiomatic, controlling your vehicle was really just the goal, the hope.

Kat was not an obsessive person. Which was what made it so disheartening to run out for coffee only to find herself—just this morning this was, and yesterday morning, too—shooting past the corner café, past two Starbucks and a Pete’s and the Octopus Car Wash, then seeing signs for the Beltline and thinking she should turn around; noting a few miles later, I did not turn around. It was hard to say when she fully understood she was headed back to Iowa City. Maybe at the Wisconsin–Iowa border. Definitely by Verona she knew. Absolutely by Dodgeville.

Copies of that week’s News Clipping were passed around the room while her tablemates complained about how difficult it was to get to class—Roger because he had “people to take care of,” while the other guy just sort of vaguely didn’t like the time class started. They made Kat think of her sister’s stream of boyfriends. It’s not enough to just walk around not drooling, Angel would tell the men, reach for more—a line she and Kat laughed uproariously at because Angel was a forty-two-year old mermaid who considered overdraft protection a source of income.

BEAUTY QUEENS DIE IN HEAD-ON CRASH.

The assignment was to read the article and fill in a “Could This Incident Have Been Prevented?” form, but they never got that far when there was a photograph with the article.

A girl at the next table said, “If that’s her jaw, there then what’s that supposed to be?”

“Her elbow?” Kat was trying to figure out which paper would even print a picture so graphic and ghoulish. Roger made a game-show-buzzer sound. “That would be the steering wheel, ladies.”

Both drivers had been local beauty queens, a fact that made the accident seem less than accidental to Kat, or at least not random. Kat had no opinion on beauty but trusted that things of seemingly infinite complexity would be the worse for any substitution on any level: the cashier in the joke who threatens to staple the duck’s feet to the floor must be driven to do so by refusing the duck grapes, grapes exactly. The idea of the duck wanting instead a doughnut or a roll of film disorients Kat profoundly. She ekes a living out of a syndicated gag cartoon called The End Times, so she thinks a lot about what’s funny and not funny. Probably a third of her own cartoons, the most popular ones, she doesn’t entirely get herself.

“One lesson to gleam here,” the instructor said, “if you think it’s just idiots and drunks getting killed, stop and ask yourself whose vehicles those idiots and drunks are running into. Yours and my’s vehicles, that’s whose.”

“Another lesson to gleam,” said Roger, “is that even hot people die.”

 

Could this incident have been prevented? Kat often asked herself this question. Months back, before all of this started—and despite her status as the worst driver anyone she knew knew—Kat’s record had been clean. Mysteriously clean. The kind of clean that made her wonder if the cops were really paying attention, if they cared the way they used to. Then her answer came in the form of two speeding tickets in one night.

She was racing to meet a man from a dating site whose username was ONE&ONLY99; he seemed relaxed and educated enough for her to ignore his constant referencing of the ex-wife, or the many pictures he’d posted of himself standing beside or seated in the cockpit of a helicopter he apparently couldn’t fly. (Helicopter? one&only99 replied, Oh that, yeah, there was a story there but I forgot.) Kat’s free trial on the site was ending and this was going to be her well-intentioned honest last stab before she quit men forever (then waited a day and quietly joined a new site). “Maybe if he was local,” Angel had said, scrolling through the guy’s profile on Kat’s laptop. “But you can’t drive to Iowa for this hairline.”

Kat swiveled the screen on the bar so she could see. “We’re not young. Men lose their hair.”

“I give him two years before he goes clown top,” Angel said. She tipped her head, looking deeply into Kat’s life. “Did you not date a thirty-year-old albino with, as I recall, full dentures? What is your attraction, do you think, to people who are missing things? Appropriate pigmentation, couth?”

Kat frowned. “At this point I’m more interested in, you know, is he sober and does he have a job.”

“Yeah?” Angel said. “Owns his own business, does he? That’s probably what his helicopter is for.” She glanced down the bar, eyeballing the regulars’ glasses, then came forward on her palms, her gray-spoked green eyes intent, her chlorine-fried hair bristling. “It’s all guys like that have left—the power to stand up people like you.”

“And what is ‘people like me’?” Kat asked.

Angel sighed to indicate the summoning of her limited patience. “People willing to drive three hours to meet a total doofus. Listen, if you don’t want doofuses standing you up, then you have to be a person doofuses wouldn’t stand up. And that’s not me talking, that’s science.”

Kat said, “Fix your clams.” Angel retracted and glanced down at her clam-shell bustier, which was more cute than denigrating when it was on straight, but when one or both clams were tilted it was like watching someone grope her right in front of you.

It’d been a rough week for Angel, too, as she and the Castaway’s other career-term mermaid, V, had been pressing Stan for new equipment for a year or years, then earlier in the week V comes waltzing in with a top-of-the-line Atlantis monofin. “This thing’s got fucking scales,” one of the bartenders, Mitch, had said.

Now they were watching V in the tank, and there was something legitimately fishier in her locomotion. Covetously, Angel said, “You know the price tag on an Atlantis?”

Down on his permanent stool Jerry said, “So blow Stan and get an Atlantis for yourself.”

“Do it for the nutritional value,” the disbarred attorney said.

Angel said, “The only way I’m blowing Stan is if I need gas and he’s got some in his”—here shifting into a don’t-wake-the-kids whisper—“penis.”

Angel was always right about Kat and men. She did herself no favors, but if Angel was right, wouldn’t one&only99 have to be waiting at the bar to know Kat had shown up so he could stand her up as a punishment for showing up? And if one&only99 were there waiting, then (it seemed to Kat) he hadn’t stood her up. But maybe only the kind of person Angel was talking about—the kind that got stood up for being a person who got stood up—would try and think this through. The other kind would just know not to go. She went home and shaved her legs and tried to decide which kind of person she was. It was a long drive to Iowa, after all, one she didn’t want to make if she were the kind of person she suspected, the kind who got stood up more or less because her much cooler sister predicted she would. By the time she Googled directions it was too late to drive to Iowa City safely, anyway.

So she drove there the other way.

The first cop pulled her over in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. He fingered a hearing aid made of beige rubber and said, “Didn’t you see me? I thought you saw me but then you sped up.” Kat apologized and said she had to go to the bathroom. He said she’d just sped past five gas stations, all with bathrooms. Kat said yeah but that she had to go too bad to stop. He chewed on that, then removed his hearing aid and wrote her up for twelve over. She’d need a police escort to make the date now, but she figured she’d try since no one got two speeding tickets in one night.

The second cop nabbed her forty miles outside Iowa City. He shook his head and said he couldn’t see risking lives for an online date. “You hear those things work out with the younger crowd, but I don’t know that that technology suits people of a certain age.” He glanced up from her license, clipped to his mini-clipboard. “I’m not sure we can handle the power.”

“But we invented the power.”

He reached his hand forward into Kat’s space, and said, “I ac- cept all major credit cards.”

By the time she made it to the Hayseed one&only99 was gone. Or had never come. Gone, Kat decided. Come and gone. She couldn’t think Angel was right and he’d stood her up. She couldn’t think it. She drank as much as she needed until every guy in the bar looked like the one she’d come to meet, then she bought cheap champagne in the Conoco next to the Motel motel, which was all she could afford after $300 in speeding fines. In a not-hot bath she drank the stuff warm; drunk, dripping and out of towels, she then dried her face on the bathmat.

Then she was in her car alive and in daylight, tearing home. She needed Gatorade and water and coffee and more water and orange juice and french fries, immediately, all of it, and but she kept her eyes fixed on the hood of the car and she drove. The main thing was that she’d made it through a night that was over now and could never happen again, unless the doctrine of eternal return was right, which was unthinkable when the ultimate aim was to somehow trust that the worst thing you could think of wasn’t always about to happen just as a matter of course. She had to make room for an average day.

An hour outside Iowa City the itching started. Mildly at first, the itch from a too-light caress. On her temple. One on her cheek. Then it spread. She scratched harder and deeper, stopping in the middle of scratching one itch to jump and emergency-scratch another, then back to the first rekindling itch. By the time she reached Wisconsin her face was an anthill-craze of sensation. The worse the itch, the faster she drove. She pulled into the Walk-In Center in a skid.

The doctor said, “Seems to me we’re dealing with athlete’s foot here.”

“But on my face?”

“Let’s not worry about what it’s called. Let’s be glad it’s not the kind that stinks.”

“I’ll definitely tell people that,” Kat said.

He took a scraping and left her on the butcher paper with orders to sit on her hands and not scratch. She looked back on the rush of images—the men in the Hayseed, the one who hadn’t come, the warm beery champagne—and with a long hollowing inside like hunger, she realized she couldn’t remember the actual drive home. She remembered staring down the creased hood of her car, feeling miserable and thinking about feeling miserable, but she couldn’t picture the road or a single landmark—not the scenery or billboards or pulling off.

Had she pulled off ?

When the doctor returned she was sad and anxious and sick. “Apply this sparingly,” he said, handing her a prescription. “Maybe it would help to think of itching as your skin laughing.”

At home she applied the cream sparingly but several times, figuring the only risk in overdoing a topical would be in healing faster than the recommended pace. Whatever you do, the doctor had said, don’t scratch. So she lay in bed with oven mitts on, her cheeks itching on the outside and the inside and whatever was between the inside and outside, itching. In the mad physical buzz she couldn’t think anything through: she thought the phone rang, but maybe it hadn’t. She called her doctor but while she was on hold she forgot who she’d called and hung up.

 

A week later Kat started traffic school. During introductions, one guy claimed to have racked up nineteen tickets with no license. Someone asked how these tickets were even processed; he shrugged and said, “They don’t tell me and I don’t ask. I don’t use blinkers neither, because it’s nobody’s business where I’m going.”

The immigrant couple introduced themselves elaborately, with great joy, and possibly some confusion between the DMV and INS. “Citizenship can be wonderful,” the instructor had said, “but probably the greatest thing about America is the American interstate highway systems and even those plain vanilla back roads that get us to the drugstore.”

“Aren’t those the roads that got us to traffic school?” This from Roger.

“You go to another country,” the instructor continued, “you’ll see what I mean. I honeymooned in Tijuana so I can tell you first-hand: you’re safer driving through napalm than you are on foreign roadways.”

Roger found a seat across from Kat with the air of a man checking to secure an escape route. When he got good and comfortable, he took a long look at Kat and asked, “What happened to your face?”

Everyone turned to look at Kat’s face while Kat sat and had her face looked at. Her rash (as she was calling it) had calmed down, but the healing was ugly. Makeup made it worse: scales, she saw, when she looked in the mirror.

The instructor asked Roger to introduce himself and tell them why he was there.

“Depends how you look at it—my attorney and I don’t quite agree.” He shrugged, and said nonchalantly, “I guess he knows the law, I know women.” He winked at Kat and again she felt the hollowing, followed now by a supernatural sense, before Roger was two sentences deep, where his story was going. “The facts are these,” he began. He was driving an RV on a two-lane road. A woman he somehow didn’t see was driving toward him, then passing him, and in passing nicked the tail end of his RV, sending her blue compact spinning off the road, where it rolled down an embankment into a tree. She died instantly. “But you don’t know,” Roger told the class, “that’s just what they tell you to not be dicks.”

He said it had been windy out, so his back end would jag from time to time and that was normal and why he didn’t feel her car hit him. He didn’t even see her approaching. The first and last he saw of her was in his rearview mirror, when he glanced up and saw the blue car tipping off the road “like off the side of a ship.” He wasn’t even sure he saw what he saw until he pulled over to check.

During break Roger edged up to Kat at the vending machine he had just been banging around. “I was hoping to score those Combos, but free’s free, right?”

She wasn’t at all sure, but it seemed possible he thought he was flirting. She asked, “So she drove right past you and you didn’t see her? Or feel anything? Not a noise or anything? Even later now when you think back? If you don’t mind my asking?”

Spitting pretzel bits, Roger said, “Nope.” Kat saw that that was going to be all he said, then he softened. “You know, I’m driving much higher up, like yay-high and there’s that rumbling nothingness in the middle of the day, and this flat-ass road that goes for-fucking-ever, and you just fall into it. My attorney says Do anything that looks good before trial, like I’m the bad guy. She should be the one in there with those boneheads—” he motioned at their classmates, who were gathered around studying the microwave like archeologists who’d just pulled it out of the ground. He shook his head. “You know why it’s me here instead of her?”

Kat stood blinking.

“Because she’s dead, that’s why.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Yeah? Well there you go, Little Miss Face.” He made explosive sounds in his cheeks, accompanied by crazy titillating fingers going over his supposedly exploding head. “Ka-blam,” he said, or “Ka-blowie.” Kat felt like she had known him all her life.

 

The Woman in the Blue Compact.

Reaching for a dial middle of the day and sunny and no one around but Roger, who doesn’t even notice hitting you, killing you.

It could be so loud inside a car. The inside of your head could get so loud, stupifying.

Of her drive home from Iowa that morning, Kat remembered nothing. It had been like a full-blast waterfall in the far recesses of her head’s interior. And Kat’s car made a lot of noise. It was a hand-me-down from her uncle, an old FBI-style car you’d win in a poker game but never buy yourself.

How could you know you hadn’t hit someone, was the question—know like you knew it was Tuesday?

The grinding brake pads.

The never-checked fluids in her car.

And it had been so loud in her car that morning, with the itching and the pressure, and were there cornfields or was that something she’d imported from Roger’s story into her own? Because beneath it all, all the time she was thinking deeply about Roger and why she seemed to think he could unknowingly hit someone but she couldn’t—as though there were things that could happen to a Roger that couldn’t happen to her. Finally she couldn’t think about Roger without thinking about her car.

It was still dark the first night of class—four a.m.? five a.m.?— when she kicked off the sheets. Out under the carport she ate an apple and circled her car looking for dents, for scratches, for . . . she hoped she would know when she saw it. She turned the engine over and checked the instrument panel for warning lights, but it’d been over a week since the drive to Iowa and there was a light or two on before, for a few years now.

She didn’t make an active, conscious decision as far as she could recall. One minute she was looking, deciding which warning light to worry about, then she was steering herself past the corner market and the Starbucks and the Pete’s and a while later she was crossing into Iowa, scanning the roadside for crosses, a single upside-down shoe. She didn’t know. She thought of Roger sitting up high in his machine, of the champagne in the Motel motel, of one&only99. She had the sensation of not being able to see what she was looking at, like an eyeball trying to see itself. It seemed like she could turn around any time she wanted, which made it hard to explain why she wasn’t turning around and didn’t until she reached the Hayseed three-plus hours later, parked, stretched, then drove all the way home; or why, instead of going immediately to bed when she did at last reach home, she sat in the idling car seemingly trying to access a photographically complete and accurate mental picture of the entire two-hundred-plus miles of roadway she’d driven that night; and finally why, when she couldn’t do that, she let herself decide she might have hit someone this time, while she was distracted looking for the body she might have hit last time, and she watched in resigned horror as the car was shifted into reverse by herself and steered out of the parking lot, past the corner market, and on its predetermined path to Iowa again.

In the next four days she drove at least three thousand miles. She wasn’t ready to see a pattern until she’d made the trip enough times, and knew the road well enough, to consider it from the perspective of laps, with everything repeating as regularly as wallpaper: the fruit stand and burned-out barn, the tractor with the upside-down rake at the wheel. She drove and drove, scanning the roadside for glass, for torn-up gravel and grass. She ran over the same rubber strip again and again, twice while eating the same microwavable hamburger bought at the same Shell station. A waitress in an IHOP in Dubuque began filling her coffee on her westbound drive, setting the cup aside, then refilling it on her return east. She called everybody sweetheart in a way that made you feel like Kat imagined people coming out of confession felt. She was beginning to lose herself, trawling the roadside for a detached hand or arm. In place of thinking there was the sound of the road in her head, with every now and then a dull pang reminding her of the deadlines she was missing and had to miss because there was no way to work when she was driving to Iowa, which she usually was. Last time she checked her e-mail, an editor at the Chippewa Herald had written, We wonder if the line between funny and terrifying is as thin as you would make it out to be? This in response to a cartoon where, in a therapist’s waiting room, Princess Di shares a loveseat with an emaciated beggar, his head orbited by flies. At the very least, the editor had written, remove the flies.

Kat wrote back: Remove them how? They’re not real flies. They’re made of INK. Then, crying, she’d gotten back in her car and driven to Iowa again.

In the IHOP toward the end of the week, Kat sat next to a kissyface couple who tried to drive her away with whispering and canoodling and hostile looks. There were open seats all up and down the counter and Kat guessed she could’ve moved. Instead she flipped her paper over and said, “Just pretend I’m not here. That’s what I do.”

The woman picked her head off her man’s neck, looked at Kat, and barked a loud surprised laugh. Then she tried to start a conversation, but Kat was bothered by the exchange, a feeling it had all happened before—which, she soon realized, it had: in one of her first cartoons. That cartoon had come from a whole shit-show she’d choreographed for herself where this man Ralph acted wild about her while standing her up time and again, at restaurants and bars, at the Cineplex and the man’s own house—yes, his own home— and even at the green Octopus Car Wash, through which they’d planned to race (passively, seated in their cars). To complicate matters, string her along, Ralph did make every third date or so, but Kat would just spend the whole time preoccupied he wouldn’t come back from the bathroom. When she tried to break it off six weeks and countless stand-ups later, Ralph yelled, “That’s bullshit! I’m coming over right now! Do. Not. Move.” She waited three hours, then got in bed and cried and sobbed and called everyone she knew and no one was ever home and that was her fault for never answering her phone or calling anyone back and she cried more and decided she would start calling everyone regularly, and she thought about how much time it would take making all those calls, and when that got depressing she looked at the work she’d brought home (she illustrated greeting cards then), romantic scenes with, for instance, a couple riding bikes through a park and only the apples in color in the woman’s bike basket. She normally didn’t bother with the copy, but on this day she wrote inside:

Apparently you’re the best I can do right now.

She loved that. It wasn’t even that funny but she laughed her head off and tore into the other cards she’d brought home, filling them with lukewarm and passive-aggressive sentiments in flowing flowery fonts. She didn’t leave her apartment for days. The cards were taped to her windows and fridge, lined on the mantel and sills, knowing this new work—wherever it came from—was finer than anything she’d done before.

No one liked the mean greeting cards except Angel, but Kat