That day, but moments after the accident, before I could fully understand what had happened, I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard an unfamiliar voice telling me to leave the scene. “Come away, come away,” this person urged, gripping my arm and tugging me forward. It turned out she was the lady on the porch to whom I’d waved the minute before.
For a good part of that afternoon I sat in her living room on her scratchy gold couch staring at either the old braided rug covering the floor, a faded watercolor of a pot of daisies on her wall, a photograph hung on the wall of her surrounded by her large and smiling family, or at the woman herself, a person who upon closer inspection looked less like my mother than I’d previously thought, older by some degree, and who, from her post at the doorway between her living room and front porch, kept a near-constant vigil over the events outside. In the midst of the commotion the woman never introduced herself, but I subsequently learned that she was Ida Rankoff, and in the summers to come I would bring Mrs. Rankoff several tokens of thanks for her help that day: once an actual pot of daisies and another time a blueberry cobbler that Vivie and I made after buying the blueberries at Treat’s. During these visits Mrs. Rankoff and I always sat on her porch, and though I’d be talking to her, nodding my head and smiling her way, simultaneously I’d be searching the accident scene, scanning the roadway’s black tar as if Davy had melted right into it and was still there, intact, just waiting for one of us to look hard enough to finally find him.
That day the only words I said to Ida Rankoff were the occasional “What’s happening now?” And though it was clear from the sounds of the outside world that much was going on—an ambulance had arrived, as had the police, as had, in time, my father—Mrs. Rankoff always answered, her voice a near whisper, “There’s no need for you to see this, sweetie. Just hold still.”
Davy was taken to the nearest hospital, in Milford, and his condition that night, following surgery to stop internal bleeding, was poor but stable. He’d been crushed by one of Sal’s tires and was broken all over—ribs, shoulders, pelvis, his left arm—but the internal bleeding was the worst of it. He was lucky to be alive at all, my parents were told. For the remainder of the afternoon and evening my parents hadn’t left his side, nor had Howard or Bec. Leo and Vivie stayed at the cottage with Nina and me. The hours there were long and quiet, and I spent most of them cradling Samson Bagel in my lap. Finally, Vivie told Nina and me that we might as well try to sleep, and we pulled out the sofa bed, crawled under a sheet, and lay there, wide awake. Nina didn’t laugh at me when I asked her if we could keep Samson Bagel there in the bed between us.
When the group from the hospital finally arrived home at midnight—since Davy was stable they’d been directed to get some sleep and return in the morning—they plodded through the back entrance and kitchen and then dropped themselves into their respective dining room chairs. In the next instant Nina and I were up and joined them, and a moment later Vivie and Leo did as well.
We had no idea what to do except sit in silence.
Davy was hanging in there, Mort said at last. We should pray, we should hope, he added.
And so we did, or at least I thought that’s what we were trying to do, each of us in our way, during the next long minutes of silence. But the silence felt complicated, troubled. When my mother finally broke it, her head raised, her eyes fixed on Nina, it was obvious that she’d been neither praying nor hoping. “He wasn’t sailing to the Irish girl like you said. He was sailing to West Haven, as usual. As usual, you damn liar. As usual.”
With that Vivie threw her arm around Nina and leaned forward, her body protecting Nina from the bullets of her sister’s words.
“She’s a child, Ada, please. A child,” Vivie implored.
“A child?” Ada asked, her eyes popping, her words menacing. “I’ll tell you who’s a child. Davy’s a child.” And with that she made a fist and shook it threateningly Nina’s way.
“But you’ve seen it yourself, Ada, the way Howard torments my girl. How could she not want to get back at him? How could she not, Ada?” Vivie’s voice had modulated from a pleading tone to one of indignation. She tightened the belt of her bathrobe.
“Nothing justifies a lie,” my mother declared.
Vivie responded by pushing her chair, which was catty-corner to Ada’s, away from her, the few inches she could, and there it was again, that old space, reemerged, between them. “That’s pretty funny, Ada. Coming from you,” Vivie said.
“That’s enough,” Mort snapped, cutting off the sisters and causing both women to turn, surprised, from each other to him. Then he asked, “What happened to her?” He was looking at Nina, at the bruise and bandage on her forehead.
When no one spoke, he asked again.
“An accident,” my mother said, her voice anxious. “Last night.”
“She’s fine,” Vivie added, still holding Nina close.
“Two children, two accidents,” Leo said, his voice so hushed he seemed to speak only to himself.
Mort drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Two accidents,” he finally repeated, his gaze so completely focused on Ada it seemed to cause the rest of us to disappear. But we were there, listening, as he said, “Ada. Howard has something going with an Irish girl, and you don’t call me? Last night Nina needs stitches over her eye, and you don’t call me?” He pointed past her, to the phone on the little table. Quickly, he shot a glance from it to her. After a long pause, he asked, “What am I, Ada?”
As he continued to drum his fingers, I stared at the center of my empty dinner plate, which, because I was too scared to blink, began to blur.
“Do I not deserve to know what’s happening in my own family?” Mort finally thundered. He pounded the table, and the wine cups at his end, including the silver kiddush cup, toppled over. Red wine, poured into the cup hours before, spilled onto the white tablecloth.
“Look at you, Ada,” he continued, ignoring the spreading stain. At that we all looked; his words seemed like a command. But what I saw was a moment of such deep anguish, such a private moment, I instantly regretted turning my mother’s way. She was tear-streaked, rocking back and forth in her chair, her crossed arms squeezing her middle and wrinkling her housedress, her hair utterly disheveled and falling over her face.
“You’re a mess,” Mort said, nodding. Then, gesturing at the dining table, which was perfectly set only minutes ago but was now in disarray, he declared, “This place is a mess.” He darted from his chair and rushed to the kitchen, where dinner preparations had been cut short and the chickens still sat uncooked in their pans on the kitchen table, the loaves of challah still sat in the bakery bags, used cooking utensils were strewn about the table and counters, and dishes were piled at the sink. “A mess!” he sniped, pointing into the kitchen.
As my father re-seated himself my mother rose. She stood for a moment as she’d done the day of our arrival: perfectly still, her eyes closed. But she was a shadow of that self. She held her body with such rigidity it looked contorted. And her grimacing mouth told only of pain.
Finally she opened her eyes.
“How dare you call my house a mess,” she told Mort, surprising all of us with her response. But she went on to surprise us further. Pointing to the spilled wine she said, “Morton Leibritsky, son of Zelik Leibritsky, father of Howard, Molly, and our darling Davy Leibritsky: that’s your mess.”
Furious, my father stood, while Ada, finished, dropped into her seat. Her tears began again.
Mort waited before glancing once more at Nina. “Look at this child. Look at that bruise. A mess,” he said.
“And there’s another child,” he added, his voice hushed, his eyes locked on Ada’s. “A worse mess,” he hissed her way.
While my father condemned my mother, and while the rest of us sat as if frozen, Bec stared dumbly in front of her, her eyes red, her gaze unfocused, her body not stiff, like ours, but slumped. Every so often she buried her head in her hands. “It’s my fault,” she muttered at long last. “I motioned for him to cross the street. But there was no truck then. I swear. No truck.”
At that Mort turned to her, glowered, opened his mouth as if to ask her a question, then closed it as if unable to find the words to speak. He dropped his head again, silenced by Bec’s confession. But by the way he’d looked at Bec the instant before, like she’d actually intended to harm Davy, he’d said plenty.
It’s hard to know how much time passed after that. Maybe another minute. Maybe an hour. It seemed we were deep into an endless span of night. My mother continued to rock back and forth in her chair. Quietly, she moaned. Bec continued to sit with her head buried in her hands. Vivie continued to console Nina, as did Leo. I continued to stare at the center of my plate. Howard, who’d seemed dazed this whole time, finally got up.
“You’re leaving?” Mort asked.
“Toilet,” Howard said as he walked away from us, toward the kitchen.
“Let’s not blame each other,” Leo offered some minutes later, breaking another tense silence. “Clearly it’s no one’s fault. We all love Davy, yes?”
I glanced up from my dinner plate. Yes, yes, yes, I wanted to cry.
But no one spoke; we were silent again, though this time the silence didn’t seem so fraught with hostility.
“Where were you?” Ada then asked Mort, changing the mood yet again. We were back to blaming. “You usually arrive by then. Why weren’t you here?”
At that my father turned to Leo, taking him in fully for the first time that night. “I wasn’t here because this man’s a goddamned invalid,” he snapped. “I was taking care of him.”
The words caused Nina and Vivie to jump up, defiantly. “He’s a better man than you,” I heard Nina whisper. I thought I was the only one. But Vivie repeated Nina’s words verbatim. “Yes, he’s a better man than you,” she told Mort, her voice quavering. She and Nina then looked at each other, surprised.
All the while Leo stared into his lap, sadly.
As Vivie sat back down, careful still to place herself at some distance from Ada, she said, “Nobody’s an invalid. Let’s not get carried away.”
“A little late for that,” Mort answered, clearly insulted. After a moment he said, “Where’s Howard? Why’s he not back yet?” He looked around and then asked about Howard a second time. By the third time his wrath was full-blown, his voice the loudest that night. “Goddamnit. Where the hell’s Howard?” he cried again and again.
In fact Howard had not gone to the bathroom but had left the cottage, snuck out the back door, and gone down to the beach. He spent a long night there, exhausting himself by hammering his fists into the sand, by racing a jagged to-and-fro in the dark, and by calling out to Davy, over and over.
Bec, too, went down to the beach, eventually. Her journey was at dawn. Making her way to the shore’s edge, she passed Howard, asleep by then on the sand. She was still in her New Haven clothes: pleated skirt, paisley print blouse, new hose. Once at the water, she felt its coolness on her ankles and shins. After a time she dropped down, first to her knees, and then she sat, letting the water rush into her lap, up to her waist, splashing as high as her chest. At some point she ripped her blouse at its collar then ripped her pleated skirt, many times, at its hem. When she returned to the cottage to finally try to sleep, I sat up, momentarily, to see her pass by me on her way to the sunporch. I almost didn’t know her, this woman in wet shreds.
Upstairs in the cottage my father spent the night alone, in the boys’ room, on Davy’s bed.
Nina slept upstairs too that night, on blankets laid on the floor beside her parents.
And that left me alone on the sofa bed for the first time that summer.
“What’s happening now?” I so often uttered as I tossed and turned that night. At one point I actually dreamed myself asking the question. I was in Mrs. Rankoff’s living room, still staring at her braided rug, her faded still life of daisies, and that happy photograph of her family on the wall. She was on guard at the door, as before, but in the dream she was bigger, filling the room as she did my mind, like a kind of omnipresence, a kind of god. “There’s no need for you to see this, sweetie,” she said in the dream. Then she commanded, “Now just hold still.”
To obey her I hauled in a deep breath and held it. I began to see stars. I began to feel like I was exploding. I understood, even in my dream state, that this deprivation was not what Mrs. Rankoff meant. But still I refused to breathe. To do so would have been to move one tiny speck past the moment of Davy’s accident. To do so would have been to leave him behind. That was the dream’s logic, and it was bigger, even more commanding, than the reenvisioned Mrs. Rankoff.
And so I didn’t breathe, didn’t move, and continued in my dream to see stars, then after a time to see myself weeping as I floated along with millions of stars in an otherwise dark and endless expanse.
Though Davy would live for the next week, he died on the eighth day after the accident. Between that first Saturday and the next my parents stood vigil at the hospital, with Howard driving them to the center of Milford, dropping them off, then returning late each evening to drive them back to us at Woodmont so they could get a little sleep. There were days when Howard would drive back again, to see Davy himself or to take one or another of us in for a visit. During a crisis like that it was good to have a thing to do, one useful thing, and that’s what the driving that week gave him.
Vivie also had one useful thing: she prepared our food, except when Mrs. Isaacson’s granddaughter Judy came by to take over that task. To everyone’s surprise, Judy, by then five months pregnant, was as unstoppable that week as she’d been lethargic all summer. But our crisis became Judy’s cause. She cooked for us, cleaned for us, shopped for us. In our kitchen, she and Vivie even argued once, gently, over who would sit for a much-needed rest, the pregnant one with the sore feet or the one who didn’t know minute by minute if her nephew would live or die. That’s how Judy with her newfound purpose put it, and Vivie, hand to her heart, sat.
Bec, who in ordinary times had many useful things to do, all connected to her sewing and designing, stopped her work, and most of the week she stayed by herself, sitting for hours in the wicker chair in her sunporch and smoking more than usual, or going off in bare feet for long, solitary walks along the water’s edge. At supper Vivie nearly had to force her to eat. “Come on, Bec,” Vivie urged over and over. “We can’t afford another disaster in the form of you starving.”
Nina and Leo were inseparable, sitting side by side on the front porch, his arm over her shoulders, her face often pressed into his chest as she cried yet again. They didn’t read. They simply sat there, looking seaward.
Sometimes I sat with them. Other times I wandered into the kitchen to watch as Vivie or Judy prepared the next meal.
Occasionally one of them would ask me to set the table and I’d rush forward, a little too eager to finally have something clear and useful to do.
Mark Fishbaum, who had also been at the accident scene, came by each day that week, always with a fresh bouquet of flowers. “For your family,” he told me each time he arrived, knocking on our cottage door, and I’d nod and take the bouquet from him. “See you tomorrow,” he’d then say. He didn’t even ask for Howard, who he seemed to know wouldn’t have the heart yet to say hello. I didn’t say anything to him the entire week either, but each afternoon from Wednesday on I found myself peeking out a side window to see if Mark was on his way again.
That was another thing to do.
The first Wednesday following the accident, early in the evening, Howard drove us all in together to see Davy. This was the first time we’d be there en masse. Our parents were already there. Howard knew that later that evening he’d have to take us home in two trips.
“I don’t mind,” Howard said. “Really, I don’t.”
Upon our arrival Ada was sitting by Davy’s bed, holding his hand, rubbing it between hers. Mort was behind Ada, pacing the length of the room.
Davy had tubes stuck into him, and his head, partially wound with white bandages, looked larger than it should have, out of proportion with his small, thin body. His left arm was in a cast, and most of his torso was wound with white bandaging as well. He looked like a mummy, a wrapped-up little mummy with a blanket thrown over his legs and tubes coming out of his nose and wrist.
He was asleep. Ada told us he’d been that way the whole day, which wasn’t surprising. He’d been out nearly nonstop since the accident, and in the few moments when he’d awakened he’d not said a word.
“He needs his rest,” she said, reaching over his body to rub his hand. “He’s hungry, he needs nourishment, but he needs his rest most of all.”
Then she admonished us to whisper because to talk would risk waking Davy and risk the hospital staff finding out, against their rules, that so many of us were there. Our whispers were ridiculous in their banality. “Hi, Davy,” most of us offered, for lack of anything better to say. Bec said more. “Get better. You get better now,” she urged, leaning over his face, kissing his nose, which was one of the only unwrapped pieces of him.
My father stopped pacing and made a point of standing by Bec, looking at her coldly while she spoke to Davy. When Bec finished, she stood off to the side, a step or so away from the rest of us. Though days had passed since the accident and we were no longer hurling blame at each other, Mort was still looking at everyone with a stunned expression, as if only then seeing us for who we were: Ada, Bec, Howard, Nina, Leo, everyone, as he saw it, who’d had a direct role in the unfolding of the events leading to the accident. He was no longer yelling at everyone, just glaring now and again. He was even angry with Vivie, just for being Nina’s mother. And, it seemed, with me too, for my role, innocent as it was, as witness to the whole thing. Then there were other times when he seemed more irate at himself than anyone else for his absence when his family was in need.
“He knows to get better,” Mort said in response to Bec’s words, his tone agitated but controlled.
“Shoosh,” Ada scolded. “Mort, whisper.”
We’d fallen into another one of our collective wordless trances, all of us mute as we stared and stared at the sleeping Davy, when footsteps outside the door grew louder and the faint smell of something smoky and familiar—cigars—wafted into the room. I turned and there was Sal, standing meekly in the doorway. He was dressed not in his usual Good Humor whites but in a dark suit and tie, and at first I didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t smoking a cigar, but his clothes reeked nonetheless. In one hand he held his fedora while in the other he carried a large bouquet of late-summer flowers, mums and daisies.
“I hope you don’t mind I’ve come,” Sal said, taking the smallest step toward us. Everyone had turned his way by then. When no one answered, Sal didn’t proceed farther.
Just seeing Sal caused a relief I couldn’t explain. I rushed over to him and wrapped my arms around him, and when I felt his arms around me I began to wail as if it were last Friday again and the accident and ordeal to ensue had just begun. I’d been wanting to do that—bury my head in someone’s chest—for the longest time, though I hadn’t known it until that moment.
“Molly, darling,” Sal said quietly as he patted my head and back. “Ah, darling…It’s a terrible thing. I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”
When I recovered some and lifted my head I stayed where I was, beside Sal in the doorway. The rest of the family silently faced us. Nina’s eyes were almost as tearful as mine, and Leo had his arm wrapped tightly around her. She seemed to want to join me and Sal but something kept her from moving. Then Howard took a step Sal’s way, but only a step. Still, Sal moved his hat to the same hand that was holding the bouquet and reached out to Howard, but Howard didn’t come closer.
“Oh, you kids,” Sal said, dropping his hand and looking at each of us. “So terribly sad…”
“Of course they’re sad,” my mother said, still trying to keep her voice to a whisper. “And why do you think they’re sad? Why is that, Sal?”
Instinctively, I froze. Though I let go of Sal, I remained at his side.
Sal was about to speak again, but before he could Vivie spoke on his behalf. “Ada, come on, we’re past that now,” she urged, her voice no louder than my mother’s.
“Careful now,” Howard said, speaking particularly gently, as he did whenever he wanted to win our mother over. “You don’t need to get wound up.”
“Wound up?” Ada said, her voice, against her own advice, rising in volume. “How can I not get wound up when the man who hit my son is here?”
Bec said, “Ada, we all know it’s not his fault. We’ve been through this so many times already.”
Ada was nevertheless adamant. “Get him out of here,” she said, her voice even louder than before. “Get him away from my son.”
But Sal had already stepped backward, just out of the room, when Davy rolled a bit to one side and then, blinking first, opened his eyes.
Our mother had wakened him.
He blinked several times more before focusing his gaze on the doorway, directly in his line of vision.
He lifted a finger as if waving Sal’s way. He even mouthed something, though no sound came forth. Then his eyelids dropped closed again.
“See you later, Davy boy,” Sal whispered. The flowers in his hand shook from his trembling.
He backed fully out of the room, turned, and raced down the hospital hallway. I followed him, calling to him. When he stopped, I caught up and he held me again. It was an accident, I assured him, crying as I told him so. Even if we didn’t act like it, I said, we all knew that.
He hung his head; he nodded.
Two days later Sal had a fruit basket delivered to the hospital. Then, the following Tuesday, he ordered flowers to be delivered to our home in Middletown, a late-afternoon drop-off following Davy’s funeral. He didn’t risk any cards, any identification of himself, but we knew who’d sent the flowers. My mother wanted them thrown in the wastebasket, but Vivie took them. “Something to console Nina,” she said. The third delivery was of money, fifty dollars, as much as Sal could spare that month. Ada wanted to throw that out too, but Mort took the bills from her before she could tear them up. By the next month, when Sal sent another fifty dollars, Ada had calmed down just enough to hand over the envelope to Mort without comment. And so it began: fifty-dollar payments every month, always the first Monday, for the next decade, and always, once received, forwarded promptly to Reuben Leibritsky in Israel, who needed it the most, Mort insisted, even in the years after Reuben’s small department store, opened in Haifa, finally began to thrive.
For weeks after the accident Sal’s Good Humor truck, which he refused to drive, remained parked in front of his house. During this time there were moments when he wondered about the children on his route, and sometimes he approached his truck, leaned his back against it, and rattled off their names—Edna Muldoon, Kevin Amato, Binnie Rosenstein, Amanda Pratt, Tommy Monroe—one after the other until his feet ached and he had to go inside to sit down.
One night nearly a month after the accident, after his own children were asleep in bed, he walked outside, climbed into the truck, and stared at the night sky. He hadn’t dared sit in the driver’s seat since the accident. But having finally returned, he leaned forward to grip the steering wheel as if acknowledging an old friend. Then he pulled at it, attempted to rip it out. When he couldn’t he sat back, exhausted. Through the windshield he observed the full moon, emitting a radiance that obliterated the light of most of the stars. The glowing moon looked like a distant spotlight aimed absolutely and singularly at him. He knew he couldn’t duck the light. He knew that his life, the one he’d lived for so long, had already become a thing of the past.
Eventually he got out of the truck, stepped onto the tar of his driveway, and, as if he were suddenly on the moon, he watched himself walk away.
He interviewed weeks later for the position of janitor at the hospital in Milford and told his boss-to-be that he knew a lot about cleaning up messes. He used to be a plumber, after all, he explained, but the family business had recently closed, his father had gotten old, and neither he nor his brothers had the heart to carry the business on into the future.
This was the truth—though not nearly the whole, nor central, truth.
When he was asked his name he spoke it in full for the first time in a long time. It didn’t even sound like his. “Salvatore Giuseppe Luccino,” he said.