Recalling that kiss was as far as I got.
Matthew and Christie, their lips pressed together at the top of the school steps, would be the last thing I wrote for several years, because everything in 2008 was about to start speeding up. A Friday afternoon at my desk in The Shack, a phone call from Detective Mike McCluskey—how could I have known that everything would be over before the weekend was out?
Which means that Matthew and Christie’s gaudy display now seems immensely trivial to me, insignificant almost compared to everything that took place later on, both in 1982 and 2008.
Although, when it happened that kiss was everything, all four walls of my existence. Christie had displayed impeccably malicious timing, she couldn’t have chosen a worse moment at which to smash my glass slipper to pieces. For days, weeks, I felt as if I were still rooted to that spot watching them kiss, the world spinning on without me, a sense of heartbreak giving birth to jealousy, and then jealousy spawning my rage.
I think Christie had fallen for some version of Matthew almost as much as I had fallen for my fantasy version. Why do I think that? Because she left me alone. For as long as they were together, Christie Laing kept her barbs to herself. (Don’t worry, she would return to spectacular form not long after I lost my eye.)
And how much did this put me off Matthew? Not one inch. From the black seed of my rage there grew an even deeper sense of yearning for him, the world conspiring to keep us apart until the school year was over. I had turned thirteen years old, I was flowering inside, and if my adolescent desire hadn’t built to such a fever pitch by the time summer vacation started, maybe I would have been able to see everything that happened later much more clearly.
* * *
I’VE JUST REMEMBERED SOMETHING PATCH once said to me in the early days when we were dating. He said you could line up a hundred cooks and give them all the same ingredients, that those hundred cooks could prepare each one of those ingredients in the same proportions and by the same method, but not one of the finished meals would taste the same.
I think that’s how I feel about this story. How am I supposed to know what made the difference anymore?
For example, should I have noticed what was happening to my husband before that Friday afternoon? Maybe I was suffering from self-hypnosis, just as my mother had somehow hypnotized herself into turning a blind eye to everything concerning my brothers. Or did I think that because we had money, because Patrick didn’t absolutely have to find another job, that everything would simply work itself out in the end?
How foolish of me to have seen so clearly, even from a young age, how money had distorted my immediate family, but to have failed to notice it affecting my own life.
Oh, the money—gray gold—yes, I suppose if we’re listing all the ingredients, I really should tell you about that.
* * *
TOWARD THE END OF 1992, little more than a year after completing my journalism degree at Northwestern, I was living in New Jersey, working at the Star-Ledger in Newark where I wrote mostly about the least serious of reportable local crimes—domestic burglary, spates of car thefts, minor assaults.
On December 12 that year, my mother, father, and brothers set off together on a family vacation to Clearwater, Florida—even in their thirties Bobby and Pauly were living at home and vacationing with our parents. They had chartered a small aircraft, my mother being not fond of flying commercial, and somewhere off the coast of Delaware they encountered a thunderstorm of such violence that the wings were torn clean off the plane’s fuselage, the remaining trunk then dropping from the sky, straight down into the Delaware Bay, leaving no survivors.
I heard the news of the air crash when I was called back to the office urgently from a story, the coach at a local high school having been accused of supplying his students with alcohol, the juiciest story I’d been assigned up to that point.
Until that day, I had always believed my first editor, Max Reagan, to be a man with no discernible heart, very much of the old school, grizzled by years of hard news, and fond of shouting his very public and scathing rebukes. (Among other things, we called him Old Yeller.) Max was the kind of boss who kept Scotch in his bottom drawer, because somewhere in the newsroom there was always a fire in need of extra fuel.
I suppose that before I was nervously ushered into his office, Max’s newshound nose had sniffed the story out of the police officers, who had come to find me at work, and he’d offered to be the one to sit me down and tell me of the accident and no survivors, his furious yell replaced that day by an avuncular growl, the police officers looking on and filling in details when asked, strong and official, the room solemnly darkened by their uniforms.
That day the editor of the Star-Ledger and I finished a bottle of whiskey in less time than it takes a good journalist to track down the free drinks at a party. Later on he told me that it was the worst news story he’d ever had to break.
So, early in 1993, the sole surviving beneficiary of my parents’ will, I sold the stables, the cave, the house, everything. I also sold Jensen Royal Cement, which turned out to be worth unfathomably more than I could have imagined.
I wanted to use the money well, and for a long time I thought that I did, looking upon my inheritance as nothing more than security, something that could steer my life in the direction I wanted to go. The money allowed me to stay in a poorly paid job that I loved, meaning that I never had to move away from the streets, up to the higher-salaried echelons of editing or management. No, I could remain where I felt safest, felt best, on the beat, surrounded by the police in their uniforms, in their blousy fitting suits, while I told the stories of the victims—the victims who want to be listened to, who want to be heard almost as much as they want justice. That’s all I ever wanted to put down on the page, the tales of crimes solved, cases closed, and criminals punished.
Or that’s what I thought the money might allow—and I hope there’s some degree to which this has been the case—but perhaps another effect of the money was that I became partially blinded to what was happening in the world around me.
Despite 1993’s windfall, I remained at the Newark Star-Ledger for another three years (Max Reagan becoming something of a father figure to me in that time), and after the funeral I wouldn’t return to Roseborn for the next fifteen years.
When Max told me the news of the accident, me sitting in his editor’s chair, I can clearly remember my very first thoughts.
No, that can’t be true, not my dad. Please not my dad. Please, anyone but my dad.
Guilt is a terrible thing. I mourned my father first and hardest, I still do, and when I remember my family, I cry for him most of all, seeing his face the clearest when I close my eye. But what am I supposed to do? I can’t rewire my thoughts, unthink them or ignore them. And the thoughts refuse to go away, words that whisper themselves to me over and over, feelings of guilt like a bad neighbor I will have to live next to for the rest of my life.
The only thing that dims those thoughts is my work. Work work work has become my mantra, the only drug that has any effect.
Of course I didn’t want to neglect my husband, my wonderful Patch, but when he was in pain, more pain than I could see, the burden was too much for me to share. I had to keep on going, keep on working, my job not so different from Bobby’s vodka or Pauly’s pot.
Obviously I miss my brothers too. And I wish I’d gotten the chance to know my mother, to properly understand her. Perhaps one day Mom would have gotten to know me as well. It is one thing to miss a father and brothers you loved, and another thing to miss a mother you never quite had.
But in the hierarchy of my guilt, all of this now forms only the midsection of the pyramid. A Friday afternoon at my desk in The Shack, a phone call from Detective Mike McCluskey—it was time to start building that pyramid higher.