The Bad Thing That Happens to Good People by Ellen Herbert

       It was the summer of the red eye pulsing from my dashboard. Whenever it appeared I had two minutes to pick up the long tube attached to the ignition, put its end in my mouth, and blow. Hard. Or else Arlington County would cause my Honda Civic to come to a stop and a probation officer named Chuck Corleone- yes, like the godfather- would give me a not so godly or fatherly summons to appear at the courthouse, the courthouse attached to the jailhouse.

            “Bing,” the eye announced itself one rainy afternoon just after we merged onto the beltway. We were coming from the sports camp on Braddock Road where we’d picked up seven year old Penny, who was riding shotgun.

            “Wish I could puff for you,” Penny said handing the tube to me.

            But only the breath of the person awarded the magic car by the I-66 unicorn could make it go. That was because the air vampire who lived curled under the hood demanded carbon dioxide from Sasha Wheeler, me. This vamp’s name was Andrew, coincidentally the same name as my arresting officer, and instead of blood, the favorite drink of most vampires, Andrew lived on my breath.

            I put the tube in my mouth and began to puff while down-shifting just as rain picked up, slapping at the windshield. We were in a lane squeezed on both sides by trucks. As one of the behemoths rumbled past, the Civic trembled.        

            “Blow, blow, blow,” four-year-old Cash called from his throne, a car seat anchored into the back.

            It was the summer I worked as nanny to Penny and Cash. In order to start my car to get to the Hermann-Novak household in ritzy North Arlington, I had to blow alcohol-free breath into the tube. Every 35 minutes afterward, the red eye came on demanding more of my breath so the State of Virginia could be assured that since the time of starting the car, alcohol had not passed my lips.

            That rainy afternoon I blew so hard I got light-headed and euphoric as well when the eye disappeared. The kids cheered because I had satisfied Andrew the vampire again. But when the tube dropped from my mouth, I swerved slightly into a neighboring lane, an action met by the rude honk of a tractor trailer.

            Cash, who loved big creatures, yelled and shook his Hulk Hogan Rocking Wrestler figure at the trucker as he passed us.

            It was the summer of secrets I shared only with Penny and Cash, who had become my best friends.

            “Never tell mommy my car is magic and runs on air,” I cautioned them.

            “She wouldn’t like it,” Penny said, already wise beyond her years. With the yo-yos she had as parents, she needed wisdom.

            The mom, Dr. Adele Hermann, an overworked, overweight, and under-beautiful plastic surgeon, would have me prosecuted if she ever discovered I had a drunk driving ticket when I took the job caring for her children in May. Because of this job, the court had given me a restricted license, allowing me to drive only for work and to A.S.A.P. meetings. And because of the kids, I hadn’t consumed anything mood-altering, vodka or otherwise, since I started caring for them.

            Not yet anyway. Tonight for my first A.S.A.P. class, a little weed might ease the ordeal. My mind kept returning to the plastic baggie of organic matter hidden in my underwear drawer.

            Another gnawing fear: Penny might spill the secret of the tube to Dr. H.

            “What if she wants to know if your car is magic?” Penny asked often. She hated Andrew, the mean vampire curled under the hood who winked his red eye onto my dashboard whenever he wanted my breath. She made me describe the I-66 unicorn often. I’d made her hot pink, Penny’s favorite color.  It was cool with Cash if I changed the details from one telling to the next, but not Penny. She didn’t like deception and needed to believe my story.

            “If she asks if it’s magic, tell the truth,” I said to Penny. “Say yes.” 

            Penny was at the age when she’d begun to wonder about right and wrong, good and evil. At 26 I also pondered these. At one time I’d imagined the world was made up of good and bad people, and I was the former, but this was the summer I came to identify with criminals of all ilk, even sex offenders, because according to Arlington County I was one of them: a criminal. Sex offenders have to register with their local police, so their names can be put on a website alerting the public that these evil ones live in their midst. What if the police did the same to drunk drivers?

            In my rearview I watched Cash talk to Hulk Hogan. There was a good chance that Cash had told his parents about my “wind-powered car,” but Doctors Hermann and Novak never paid much attention to him. The dad, Dr. Jeff Novak, also a plastic surgeon, had a face like a creepy Ken doll, too perfect for nature. When I first started working for them, Dr. N. invited me to his office on a Saturday when he wasn’t too busy, so he could show me a computer simulation of my face with an eighth of an inch less nose. “You have lovely bone structure,” he’d said, his fingertips lightly grazing my cheekbone. Ever since then my nose and I had managed to avoid him.

            And both doctors ignored Cash because he talked all the time. Cash carried on a constant conversation with something out there in the universe. Of course he had half a dozen imaginary friends, many of whom possessed superpowers, such as the ability to go back in time and change events. I discovered this one day in the car after dropping Penny off when I wished aloud that I could return to the night of April 13,   the night I read my poetry for the first time at the Arlington Arts Center and went out afterward with my fellow poets to a brewpub. “If only I could go back and have a do-over like Dad used to give me when we played Putt-Putt,” I said to the windshield.

            “Bernie the Bear goes back before he was borned,” Cash said, surprising me that he was even listening. “He stopped the warming, so everything is still cold at the North Pole.” Ever since Cash saw a program on global warming, he’d fretted about our planet.

            But unlike me, Bernie the Bear had done nothing to be ashamed of.  He was a superhero, yet Cash’s stories about him comforted me somehow.

            As I pulled into their driveway, I saw that all three garage doors were open, revealing Dr. Hermann’s new VW Touareg, Dr. Novak’s sporty Miata, and their extra car, the ubiquitous yuppie-mobile, a Volvo wagon. Rarely were the pair of doctors home together. A knot began to form in my stomach, especially after I noticed Dr. Hermann watching us from the kitchen door, eating something crunchy, and talking on the portable phone. She did a lot of multi-tasking.

            Sensing she had found out about me and would soon fire me or worse, I jumped out of the car, unhooked Cash, and followed the kids into the house. This could be the end.

            In the beginning I had assumed the doctors must have a great sense of humor what with their kids’ names, but no. Penny was named for Adele’s mother, Penelope, and Cash got his from Jeff’s favorite singer, Johnny.  The Hermann-Novaks were your typical over-stressed Northern Virginia family with more money than time, and as such they would not take the state-installed tube attached to my ignition lightly.

            Dr. H. put her hand over the receiver. “Sasha, I would prefer it if you drove the kids around in the Volvo.” Not for the first time she had suggested this. Granted my ’95 Civic had over 200,000 miles on it. “That way you won’t have to worry about gas.”

            But I was forbidden by law to drive a car that had no tube. “The gas allowance you give me is more than enough,” I told her.

            In fact the salary she paid me was outrageously generous. While it had attracted me to her ad in the first place, the money seemed even more generous once I got to know and love Penny and Cash. I hoped to stay on in the fall when I returned to grad school if I could coordinate my classes with the kids’ schedules.

            And certainly I needed the money--what with the court fines, lawyer fees, and astronomical insurance payments. I had come to dread my mail and phone messages. Arlington County and the State of Virginia made drunk drivers pay and pay.  Sometimes I wished I had just let them put me in jail for a year. But what would I have told people?

            For fear of letting my secret slip, I’d stopped calling Mom or talking to my friends. Instead I e-mailed everyone fictions about how busy and happy I was. If Dad was still alive, I would have been able to tell him since he’d had booze problems of his own.

            Dr. H. returned to her phone conversation, as I made the kids a snack, sliced apples with cheese, and got ready to leave for the day.

            Dr. H., who had followed me, bent over the table and picked up some cheese. She was still talking to someone about swelling and what to do about it, a conversation I’d overheard before. In her favor Dr. H. always seemed to care tenderly for her patients and would talk to them for forever about the aftermath of their surgery or their fears before they went under her knife. The voice she used when she spoke to them was soft and reassuring.

            I made it to the door before she put her hand over the receiver again. “Could you stay later tonight, Sasha? Jeff and I really need dinner out.”

            I turned to her. “Sorry. I have a mandatory class.”

            I couldn’t believe the truth had leaked out of me. My heart began to pound against the cage of my chest. I’d been so worried that the kids would tell on me and here I told on myself. I’d never been a good liar. That’s why I wrote poetry, not fiction, artful lies.

            I held my breath, waiting for her to ask me what kind of class.

            But Dr. H. merely nodded and went back to talking about bruising and discoloration.

            It was the summer of my court-ordered A.S.A.P., Alcohol Safety Action Program.

            We were going around our circle of 13 drunk drivers, sharing how we came to be here--the specifics, not merely that we got arrested, were convicted, and paid $480 in cash, no checks or credit cards accepted.  Marge, our instructor, had instructed us to tell the exact circumstances of our drunk driving, which after the third person began to fit a pattern.

            We were women and men, white, black, Hispanic, and other. We were old, young, and in-between. We had tattoos, pinkish hair, and a nose ring. Two men wore expensive suits and carried briefcases. A genteel old lady with purple hair and a string of pearls around her neck smiled at the rest of us as if she were serving tea at a church meeting instead of sitting on a metal folding chair in this small brightly lit room on the fourth floor of the court house.

            And thus far not one of us had drunk too much intentionally. Our drunk driving tickets were not our fault. Some admitted to having one or two on an empty stomach. One of these had hit a line of parked cars and broken his leg in the process; the other was the designated driver for her friends, so she couldn’t have been drunk. Another was taking medication under doctor’s orders, medication that made her arresting officer think she was drunk. Never mind that the breathalyzer thought so too. The nose ring guy said the police were after him. “I’m like their pet project. They have my license number. They wait outside bars for me.”

            I half listened until Dave, the tall blond sitting next to me, rose out of his slump, and said, “The restaurant where I work had a big party the end of the Memorial Day weekend. I really got tanked. I thought I could make it to Mario’s for a slice without getting caught.” He shrugged. “But I didn’t.”

            His honesty gave me courage and I told the truth, admitting to being a poet and doing beers and shots at the brewpub. “I was totally trashed,” I said. “I’ve driven drunk before, but this time I got caught.”

            Everyone in the circle including Dave and the instructor were looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. I had been too honest, but it felt so good I didn’t care.

            After class ended, I drifted out, feeling light as air. My secrets had weighed me down for so long. And I was filled with gratitude. Although I’d gotten a drunk driving ticket, I hadn’t had an accident in the process. I hadn’t hurt anyone. Thank God.

            “Hey Sasha, wait up,” Dave called.

            We walked down the damp sidewalk together and ended up at Wendy’s for chicken sandwiches and Frosties. It was the only place close and cheap.

            “Check this out,” he said, lifted his big black shoe, untied it, and pulled out a piece of cardboard. With his blond hair flopping over his forehead, he looked at me through a hole in his sole.

            I laughed and felt myself starting to fall for him. We talked about how broke we were thanks to Arlington County. Eventually we moved on to hopes and dreams. I told him about working on my master’s in literature at A.U. He turned out to be a waiter who wrote and read fiction. “Have you read Price’s latest, Lush Life?”

            I shook my head.  

            “I’ll loan it to you.”

            “So you can afford hardcover books but not shoes?”

            He wiped his cute mouth. “Told you I had my priorities straight.”

            It was almost midnight when he walked me to my Civic parked in the lot in front of the courthouse. “Maybe I was supposed to go straight home from A.S.A.P.,” I said. “I might be in trouble.”

            “Well you didn’t drive anywhere.” He smoothed a long strand of my hair back from my face, his touch gentle.

            I unlocked my door. “See you Saturday.” We had decided to take the Metro to a fiction/poetry reading in Bethesda.

            “If someone asks you how we met, what will you say?” he asked, a sly smile forming.

            “Let’s see…who’s your PO?”

            “Chuck Corleone,” he said.

            “Mine too. So I’ll say we have the same probation officer. That ought to scare them enough to stop asking questions about two hardened criminals.”

            He laughed.

            But ours was false bravado. Without using the word shame, we’d admitted to keeping our drunk driving tickets a secret.  Only Dave’s best friend knew about his. This was the friend he had called the night he was arrested when they locked him up. I called my roommate at the time, a girl I barely knew. For me it was easier to turn to a stranger than a friend. I have trust issues.     

            As I blew in the tube to start the car, I watched Dave dance in almost a Gene Kelly fashion down the rain splattered sidewalk, smiling back at me and I realized that if I had met him after some beers and shots, I might have slept with him right off and ruined things. I was in like. I floated off down the street in my magic car.

            The next morning Penny, Cash, and I watched Mr. Hernandez, the yard man, plant saplings along the driveway. “Some day these will be tall trees,” I told Cash, who was admiring the big post digger used to make holes in the earth.    

            “Andrew made you go to that meeting last night, huh?” Penny asked once we were in the car and on our way to sports camp.

            For a moment I thought she knew about my drunk driving ticket until I realized she meant the despised vampire, Andrew, who lived beneath the hood of my car.

            “Yeah, he did,” I said. “Has anyone ever told you how smart you are?”

            She gave me a wide grin. “Do I have to go to camp today?”

            She hated sports camp, but had gone to please her dad who wanted her to learn to play basketball. If he wanted her to learn so badly, he ought to come home from the office before nightfall and play with her. He’d had a full court built in their back yard. The doctors had so much money that they could act immediately on any whim.

            “You want to go to the planetarium show with Cash and me instead?” This way I wouldn’t have to drive all the way beyond the beltway and back again to the planetarium.  Maybe we could actually get somewhere without the red eye coming on.

            Penny nodded and pulled off her hot pink sports headband and matching wrist bands her mom had bought her as a bribe to go to sports camp. After the planetarium we went to McDonald’s, another no-no, where Penny treated us with her birthday money. “No fast food,” Dr. H. had told me. “I don’t want them having weight problems like me:” 

            And so our secrets began to pile up.

            As July became August, life steadily became better for me except for the pulsing red eye and my poverty. I ate a lot of meals from the Hermann-Novak well-stocked fridge, and Dave and I found many free events to attend, including AA meetings, mandatory for us A.S.A.P.-ers.  We had to get our AA slips signed each week and hand them in to Marge.

            “Let’s walk to the meeting at St. George’s,” Dave said one Friday night. “That way we don’t have to spend money on the Metro.”

            “But I really like the one in Falls Church. The way everyone claps a lot, and they have all those cakes and cookies afterward.”

            Dave and I had exchanged books, his Lush Life for my volume of the translated poems of Wislawa Szymborska. “On four slim legs borrowed from the truth…” he’d quoted to let me know he’d read it. Next we exchanged work, his story about a waiter at a four-star restaurant who has to wait on four-star assholes, a waiter who’s also writing a novel about a waiter. Why did I imagine fiction was lies? Not that I didn’t enjoy his satirical voice, his narrator’s self-deprecating humor. The man could write.

            I gave him a new poem about throwing my baggie of weed into the toilet, the way the tiny brown and green bits swirled around in the bowl like leaves in a storm. The way I grieved once the porcelain mouth swallowed them.   

            After the meeting when we were walking to Ballston Mall for ice cream, Dave said, “Are you trying to be valedictorian of our A.S.A.P. class?” He nodded at The Big Book under my arm, which I’d bought at the meeting.

            “I remember my dad reading this,” I said. Although it had taken Dad a long time, eventually he’d gotten sober and stayed that way.  

            After exchanging deep ice cream flavored kisses on a bench in a small park off Wilson Boulevard, Dave walked me home. While we had exchanged books and work, there’d been no exchange of bodily fluids between us. We were a little shy with each other as if romance was new to us. And since we were doing it sober for the first time, it was new. In a way we’d become virgins again.

            Later, sitting in bed, I opened The Big Book and began to read. I didn’t stop until a line of pale light appeared beneath my curtains and birds began to awaken the world.  I had read all night.

            It was the summer I actually looked forward to A.S.A.P. Our group of drunk drivers bonded. Often Dave and I went to a café called Cosi with everyone after class, where we sat around a big round table in the back and laughed about the A.S.A.P. films we had watched. Reefer Madness was our all time favorite. Some had seen it before and repeated lines from it as if it were The Rocky Horror Show.  

            It was the summer of long sultry days and gorgeous thunderstorms that splintered the night sky. One rainy night at Cosi I looked around our table of faces--my own as well in the mirror on the far wall--and told myself that while we didn’t look like criminals, we were. Driving is a privilege not a right, and we had abused that privilege. And some of us would do it again. May I not be one of these.

            They were talking about the crazy AA meetings they’d attended. “So this guy introduces himself as Coyote and claims he’s a grateful recovering drunk,” Curtis, a computer programmer, told the group adding a wolf howl.

            “They’ve all drank the Kool-aid big time,” Ace, who no longer wore his nose ring, said. The rest piled on. Many objected to the way the groups held hands and prayed at the end of the meeting.

            “I’m afraid they’re some sort of crazy cult,” Edith, the elderly lady sitting beside me, said.

            “Afraid they were going to burn incense and anoint your head with chicken blood?” Curtis teased, which made Edith shake with laughter.

            As she laughed I could smell alcohol on her breath, alcohol she must have drunk before the meeting. A few weeks ago Marge gave us all a breathalyzer, which several failed.    

            Dave had been watching me. “Sasha’s dad went to AA,” he said to the group. I hadn’t told him much more than that.

            Everyone looked at me, some with expressions of concern, fearing they had hurt my feelings. These were good people who had done something wrong and gotten caught, not so different from everyone else.

            “He did,” I told them, knowing I could never convince those who truly had a problem with alcohol. They had to find out for themselves. So instead I entertained them with the time Dad hit the newspaper truck. “I grew up on the Carolina coast in a small town called Braxton, where you could pay your way out of drunk driving tickets as long as you didn’t make news in the process. Which Dad did. The morning after his accident, The Daily News put the story and photo of Dad, his Mustang, and their damaged truck on the front page.”

            On our walk home, Dave asked, “How old were you when your dad got his drunk driving ticket?”

            “Which one?” I asked.

            We were stopped at a light, waiting for it to change. He drew me into the arch of his shoulder and held me close. It was the safest I had felt in a long time.

            “Don’t look so sad,” I told him as we crossed. “Braxton is adjacent to a Marine Corps base, so the town is filled with Marines as well as retired military. My dad wasn’t the town drunk. He wasn’t even in the top 20.”

            Still I had sworn I wouldn’t be like Dad when it came to booze and yet I found myself on this similar road. When I was a kid I believed I could be anything I wanted to be, but now I was discovering that there were things about myself I couldn’t seem to control.

            I came to dread the end of A.S.A.P. Just thinking about not seeing those people again made me sad. With them I didn’t have to hide my secret.

            Penny, Cash, and I were out on the front lawn that hot hazy Thursday morning of the last day, a day predicted to be code red which meant pollution in D.C. was the worst and the air dangerous to breathe. On code red or orange days we usually went to the movies or burrowed inside the massive Hermann-Novak house playing board games. Penny’s despised camp had ended and both she and Cash would be starting school soon. I had arranged my classes so I could continue to care for them.

            “Slip, slide, slide,” Cash called and threw his belly down on the long strip of yellow plastic. I had turned the hose on, so the plastic was wet. On it, he slid down the slope of the lawn, squealing with joy.

            I’d bought the Slip and Slide for them the day before and set it up early this morning so they could play on it before the air got too nasty.

            Penny was about to take her turn when Dr. H. called to me, “Please move your car, Sasha. I’ve got to get to work.”

            Why had I parked it in the driveway behind hers?

            I waited until she left the doorway to get in my Civic, where I picked up the tube and blew while turning the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t start. The engine didn’t even turn over. I tried again and again, sweat beading my forehead, terror in my heart. I was about to get caught.

            Penny wandered over to the car. “Don’t cry, Sasha.”

            Suddenly I realized Cash was gone.  

            I jumped out just as he appeared in front of the Civic, dragging the giant post digger.

            “Cash,” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

            Red-faced and grinning, he managed to lift the digger high over his head like a superhero and throw it on my hood.

            A loud thump sounded as the metal dented.

            Inspired by her brother, Penny grabbed the plastic t-ball bat and began pounding the hood, beating a rhythm like a steel drum. “Bad Andrew,” she yelled.

            Barefooted Dr. H. came running out to us. “Stop!” she told her children.

            She made them put down their weapons and go into the house. Turning to me, she said, “I’m so sorry, Sasha. I don’t know what’s gotten into them.”

            But I was the one who was sorry.

            “See this,” I said and opened the Civic’s door. I showed her the tube. “I got a drunk driving ticket in April and have to blow into this to start the car.”

            “But why did the kids…?”

            I told her the story I had made up.

            Her face drained of color, as her cell phone began to ring. For once she ignored it.

            “They were protecting me from Andrew,” I told her, knowing this was the end. I would lose these two I had come to love on the same day A.S.A.P. ended. I felt the pull of tears. “They’re great kids.”

            She lifted her index finger, signaling for me to wait. Then she pressed a button on the phone and put her back to me. My heart began to pound. She must be calling the police. I tried to catch what she was saying, but her voice was too low.

            Closing the phone, she turned back. “I sensed something going on with you, Sasha.” Her voice was the soft, reassuring one she used with her patients.

            She took my arm and led me to the house.    

            Outside the kitchen door, I made her stop. “Dr. Hermann, I want you to know I haven’t had any alcohol or anything else mood-altering since that night in April. Around the kids I would never…”

            “I know that.” She patted my shoulder. “You’re so good with them that I feel less guilty about working the hours I do. And call me Adele, please.” In the kitchen, she said, “Who should we call to get the Volvo rigged with this tube?”

            Her response stunned me. For a moment I couldn’t speak. “My probation officer,” I said. 

            “So call him and have the stuff installed in the Volvo today and see about getting your Honda fixed.” She smiled. “Both are my treat.”

            It was the summer I resolved to stop making snap judgments about people.

            A.S.A.P. was fun that night. As we received our certificates, Curtis played a CD of the graduation march. Edith brought homemade bittersweet chocolate chip cookies. Even Marge appeared touched and told us we were a good group, and she hoped never to see any of us again professionally.

            Afterward we were all out on the sidewalk when it was decided that we would go to a restaurant in Ballston Mall, a place that was more bar than restaurant.

            “I’m tired,” I told them, which was true. “I’m going home.”

            “Please come, Sasha,” Dave whispered. “We’ll be good and not have any alcohol.”

            “One isn’t going to hurt you,” Edith called to me.

            But she was wrong. I had gone back in my drinking history and knew that sometimes I could drink a few and stop, but other times it was like getting on a train that went faster and faster so there was no getting off.

            “Good-night,” I told them and turned to the lot and my Honda with its dented hood, which still ran fine as long as I blew sober breath into its tube. That morning in the driveway I had been so nervous, I flooded it.   

            “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dave said.   

            And maybe he would call, but it was hard watching him walk away. I felt so alone as I blew in the tube and pulled out.

            But instead of home, my Honda took me to St. George’s.

            I parked, went down the steps to the basement, and stood outside the meeting, listening to the sounds of people inside. I heard a female voice speaking softly then a burst of laughter.

            I felt that red light pulsing again, this time in my head. Taking a deep breath, I extended my hand. It was the summer I opened the door.