DIED 2007
AFTER WE WATCHED THE towers fall, and the phones started working again, and the lists appeared in the paper, and the weeks went by, I realized that I had lost no one I knew: not family, not friend, not friend of friend; not like my sister in North Jersey whose neighborhood was shot through. I was teaching then at an art school in Baltimore and drove down that afternoon to be with the students. One girl’s parents worked at the World Trade Center; we were frantic for her all day, but they were spared.
Then many more people died, died in Afghanistan, then Iraq. I didn’t know any of them, either. I did not feel lucky, though of course in a way I was.
While my son and I were on our trip visiting colleges, whatever luck this was seemed to run out. We were eating bowls of soup near the Tulane campus when Vince’s cell phone rang. A good friend of his had been killed in Iraq. It was a boy I’d liked ever since we moved to Pennsylvania, who at thirteen had kindly attended Vince’s ninth birthday party. I saw him not that long ago, Vince said, I gave him hell for enlisting.
Our soup froze, the day cracked, we made calls. People did not know yet, were shocked. Then one friend said, No. I was with him this weekend. He’s not in Iraq, and he is not dead.
It turned out that another boy from our high school, a boy with the same last name, had been killed, and someone heard it wrong; this is the rest. Though Vince’s older brother had graduated with the young man who did die when his jeep rolled over a homemade bomb in Baqubah, I never met him. When we got home, I read his short obituary: how he ran as fast as a gazelle, how he had so much energy he used to vault the water fountains in the halls of the school.
One boy is alive, another is taken. What kind of luck is that?