Droplet

Ginny turned restlessly in bed, waiting for her body to catch up with her mind. She’d gone to bed hours ago, but the early spring thunderstorm had her thoughts racing. Nights like this, with high winds thrashing the trees, always reminded her of university. University had been a fiasco all around, and she hated to remember it. The broken leg, the failed courses, the bad relationship, the car crash...

It had been a remarkably unlucky few years, even for the department. They’d lost two professors to a rival school and during Ginny’s junior year there’d been a plumbing leak in the department’s offices. Even the clubs had fallen apart. And finally, just three months before Ginny’s graduation, there’d been the unexpected death of Professor Whidee’s baby daughter. Ginny tried to remember the details; the police had been involved, hadn’t they?

People had whispered about it being unexpected, but Ginny had taken a film criticism elective with Dr. Whidee and knew her daughter had been constantly in and out of the hospital. And honestly, Dr. Whidee hadn’t seemed that upset about it. Maybe the kid had just died at home instead of the hospital? That sounded right. At any rate, Dr. Whidee was not popular in the department or well-known with the students, so there was no public outpouring of sympathy.

The thunder grumbled low in the distance, and a muted flash visible through her bedroom window brought Ginny back to the early morning in February, five years ago, when she’d totaled her – well, her parent’s – car. She and her roommates had been going to the 24-hour store at 1am for something inane (soda, maybe?), taking the unlit back roads, listening to music. In retrospect, Ginny wished she’d just waited to go shopping until Sprouts opened in the morning, but it’d been an absolutely normal outing until she drove full speed into a four-way intersection.

The bright flash of close lightning coincided perfectly with the suddenly visible headlights of the small, black, soft-topped Audi. The now-visible car was backlit against the wet road and low-hanging storm clouds, too close, far too close. And then the crash. Ginny rolled over again, snuggling into her pillow to banish the uncomfortable feeling she still got from the memory. She was grateful everyone had walked away uninjured. She allowed herself to take just a touch of pride in that fact, aside from everything else; in the moment after the crash, her deft steering had kept the hydroplaning car on the road and out of oncoming traffic.

The scene reasserted itself in her mind. The driver, a middle aged woman, stood in the road, yelling and swearing at the silently crying Ginny as the girls got out of the car to stand in the mud on the side of the road. Ginny had always charitably assumed that crash had been the last in a long series of awful things for the other driver, too. The Audi’s driver had paced the intersection, waiting for the police Ginny had called to arrive and make a report. The other driver had stood by the police car, crowding the officer and telling a long story about how she’d been coming from the grocery store. The droplet-spattered Sprouts bags visible when she opened the trunk attested to the fact that her produce would be bruised and warm by the time it got home.

They’d all been stuck in the pouring rain extra long because the other driver still had dealership plates on the car. Apparently she was on her way to her shitty ex’s house to get a screwdriver to put on the new plates, which was another ordeal she needed to tell the police officer. When they’d exchanged insurance information, Ginny had discovered that the other driver was Dr. Bonfaulk, dean of the college of architecture. It could have been worse. She could have been someone in Ginny’s department.

…………………………………………………………………………………..

Birdsong and sunlight woke Ginny to a world refreshed. She yawned and stretched luxuriously, the gloomy thoughts of the night before incongruous with the beautiful morning outside her window. Besides, things hadn’t really been so bad; she’d met her roommates at college after all, faithful friends who still kept in touch. She decided to call Kate over of a cup of morning tea. After a few pleasantries, Ginny felt the urge to reassess the previous night’s thoughts in the light of day.

“You remember that car crash?” she asked, hesitant to bring up the negative feelings again, “I still feel shitty about it.”

“Of course I do!” Kate answered, joking, “How could I forget? It was my Dean you hit!”

“Please, don’t remind me. I really am sorry about that.”

“It’s fine, Ginny, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I mean, it was my fault, on paper. Trust me, I paid for it.”

“Well, I don’t see it that way. I only saw that car a second before you did, and we were both sure that they couldn’t possibly have had their lights on all the way down that road… and really, you took Flood Ave. in the middle of a storm? Nature was not on your side.”

Ginny sighed and took a sip of her sweetened black tea. “She sure was kind of awful though, Dr. Bonfaulk. I mean, yah, crashing your new car is pretty bad, but she didn’t have to stand there swearing at us.”

“New? What do you mean new? She had that Audi the entire time we were there. Her husband gave it to her right before he ran off to Argentina or whatever. But yah, I mean, she was a bitch for most of my undergrad, too. Never really got better after that whole thing with her husband.”

“Wait, you mean she used to be… not awful?”

Kate laughed into the phone, “Yah, all the upperclassmen talked about ‘the good old days.’ Small college gossip, you know.”

“I was in arts and sciences, Kate. And I’m not the kind of person anyone talks to, anyway. But spill! I need the scoop on what made her a horrible, awful person.”

“Dude, this was like six years ago. She’s not even at the University anymore.”

“Beans. Spill. Come on.”

Kate sped through a summary in a bored monotone, “She used to be really awesome and talk to students and stuff, but then she found out her husband was cheating on her, and then, like our last year, she found out it was with some university employee that he’d had an illegitimate child with. And on top of all that the kid was really messed up. Like, had some sort of birth defect and had to be on equipment.”

“What. There’s no way that’s real.”

Kate suddenly grew animated “No, it’s totally real. She was screaming into her phone in her office and people heard. Well, I don’t know about the birth defect, but her husband totally had an affair and then just left.”

Ginny drank down the rest of her tea, her mind reeling from the overload of details. But something was nagging at her, something important.

“But I swear her car was new. When I hit it, remember, we all had to stand out in the rain while the cop figured out how to run the paper plates?”

“I don’t remember that, man, I just remember freezing my ass off.”

Ginny stared the wood grain of the kitchen table. That entire semester was blurry, out of order. Her mind kept pulling her back to the images of the rear of the Audi, water drops on the plastic laminate over the white paper license plate. Dr. Bonfaulk, standing in the road, looking uncannily furious. Water drops on the plastic bags in the trunk. Dr. Bonfaulk, talking angrily, and in too much to detail, at the annoyed police officer.

.........................................................................................

After doing two loads of laundry and thinking about doing some much-needed yard work, Ginny settled into the couch with the day’s second cup of tea. The afternoon light was just starting to slant into the living room, and the dazzle reminded her of golden college days and after-class walks down the quad.

Somewhere in the cushions, her phone began ringing. After a brief fumble, Ginny answered to find Joy’s overly-cheerful voice on the end of the line.

“Eyyy, roomie! It’s been forever! How are you?”

Ginny found a flat spot for her mug and settled in for a long, too-excited conversation. Joy could be exhausting sometimes, but she had good intentions. After fifteen minutes of glee about home décor, the conversation turned to college.

“Funny you should mention how gloomy that last semester was. I was just thinking of Dr. Whidee today, and her kid,” Ginny admitted.

“Oh, that was awful. I don’t know how anyone gets through that kind of thing. We had to have this all-hands meeting to decide how the Bugle was going to treat it and—”

Ginny cut Joy off before she had to hear about the escapades of the Bugle staff.  “I thought the kid wasn’t, uh, expected to live very long anyway. It sounds bad to say, but what was the big deal? Why cover it at all? She was in my college and it didn’t really cause any commotion there. She just took leave.”

“Oh, you didn’t know? I guess it would be hard for someone outside of Journalism…”

Ginny almost groaned. She was NOT talking about the college of journalism today.

“Just give me the summary, Joy.”

“Well, the death was suspicious. Kid was found tangled in some medical equipment that was near the bed. She was actually charged with negligence. Whidee, I mean, because she wasn’t home at the time. Which is probably why everything got hushed up by the college. But apparently the kid was so sick that they couldn’t tell if being tangled up or whatever had been the actual cause of death, and it all went away. Pretty quick, really.”

“Was the kid actually Whidee’s daughter? She wasn’t married, I thought.”

“It was her biological kid, alright. John spent the entire night looking through records to find…”

Ginny’s mind wandered, but was pulled back by a familiar name. Joy was talking about the ease of obtaining property records “…the newest house on Flood avenue. I don’t know how a single mom affords that. We were trying to confirm where she got her income, just for kicks, but that’s a lot harder—“

“Whidee lived on Flood Ave?” Ginny blurted out, surprised.

“Yah, which is weird on its own, because no one who works on campus wants to live that far away, so you’d have thought…”

The next time Joy took a pause (from talking about John’s roommate’s gay brother), Ginny made her excuses and ended the call, grimacing as she swallowed down her cold tea.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Ginny savored the smell of fresh cut grass clinging to her clothes as she grabbed some pajamas and headed for the shower. She didn’t think one was really supposed to mow the lawn in the late afternoon, but, hey, it got done.

As she stood in the shower letting the hot water flow down her face, she wondered about her memory of the crash. It was more emotional than anything, and her mind seemed fixated on the unadulterated hate on Dr. Bonfaulk’s face as she first stepped out of the car. It was really at odds with the pity she seemed to have been trying to evoke from the police officer. The whole thing felt acted, but Ginny knew her memory of that part of her life was not the best. Kate was practical and responsible, though, and even she had noted some weird things about the crash.

Ginny shoved the day’s obsession out of her mind and enjoyed the shower until the water started to turn cold. As the cold water made its way down her torso and dripped off her hand, the image of the Audi’s trunk flashed unbidden before her eyes. Suddenly, Ginny felt a spike of adrenaline surge through her. Shopping bags. From a store that couldn’t have been open, hadn’t been open for hours. In a car that wasn’t new. On a road that wasn’t anywhere near campus. A road that contained the home of a single mother who happened to be a university employee.

As Ginny toweled dry, she looked at her reflection in the mirror and called herself paranoid. But everything was too odd. She didn’t believe herself, but she trusted her friends. A tingle went down her spine as a thought occurred to her. Hadn’t she taken a picture of the insurance and license plate? A different phone, five years ago, but she had a backup on her computer. And there should be a date on any photo she took on her phone. Still in her bathrobe, she rushed to her computer, dialing on her phone as she went.

 “Kate.”

“Yah? It’s 10pm here, man—”

“Did you ever hear a name for whoever Bonfaulk’s husband was supposed to be having an affair with?”

“Geeze, you called about that? Yah, Whimbly, or Whitly, or something. But there wasn’t anyone in the employee database under those names. People checked. Eventually we just figured it was a janitor or something.”

“Get on your computer and check for obituaries under W-H-I-D-E-E, won’t you?”

“You’re crazy, you know that, right?”

“Mmhmm,” Ginny replied absently, digging through folders of images for anything that looked like paper.

“This is about college, right? Not, like, the whole country?”

“Mmm,” Ginny confirmed, finding a whole series of photos. The damage to her car. The license plates. The ticket she’d been issued for failure to yield. Insurance cards. All from February 4^th, 2015.

Kate was suddenly alert on the phone, “You meant a child? Of a university employee? I never heard about this. You think this the woman who Dr. Bonfaulk’s husband was having an affair with? How do you even come up with this after five years? ”

Ginny copied the images into a zipped file, attaching them to an email to Kate and ignoring the question. “Is there a date of death in that obituary?”

“Uh, February 4^th, 2015, why?”

Ginny opened a shared doc, and Kate was on it in seconds. They spent the rest of the night collecting evidence, building theories, and making dark-but-giddy jokes. Was Whidee in on it? Who had hated whom? Who was in love with whom? What was with the shopping bags? Was Bonfaulk’s husband still alive? They never came to any solid conclusions, but Ginny was never again bothered by uncomfortable memories of the car accident.