Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
WHEN YOU WRITE a book, you enter into the subject matter. You get infected by it. Or at least, you had better hope you get infected by it, because a writer who isn’t hit by his subject matter doesn’t have any business writing to begin with.
For me, that moment when I was truly hit by what I had been writing about came when Tyler mentioned an email he’d received a few weeks before but which he hadn’t noticed because it had gone to his spam folder. “It’s from Jenny’s sister,” he said.
“Her sister?”
All through the writing of this book, I’d kept my focus entirely on Tyler and his experiences. Because Tyler was so authentic and because his story was so compelling, I’d felt it allowed me to overcome my trepidation about going any deeper into Jenny’s life. If I just stuck with what happened at the bridge, I told myself, I didn’t have to worry about compromising Jenny, about dishonoring the life, and the death, of someone I’d never even met by writing about it.
With a sentence, Tyler had just turned that plan upside down.
“What did the email say? Did you call her?”
“No,” Tyler said. “The email was nice: it just said how she’d read there was a book being done about the crash, and she was just curious.”
“Give me the number,” I said.
Tyler dug up the number, we hung up, and I dialed it. A pleasant voice answered, and, my heart beating a little hard, I told her who I was and what I’d been doing.
I ended up reading Jill, Jenny’s sister, the chapter about her death on the Spanish Fork Bridge. As I did so, I had exactly the feeling that Tyler had told me about in the story of what had happened to his officer friend behind the church: the feeling that I had strayed out of the ordinary rule book of life and into another kind of rule book. One written not by humans, but by an authority larger than that. After I’d finished reading, we hung up, and Jill emailed Tyler. As Tyler told me the next day, her message was short and to the point. “She told me,” Tyler said, “ ‘I’m so sorry you had to see my baby sister like that.’ ”
Through Jill, I got to know the young woman whose death I had been writing about with such care but whose life I had somehow not found the strength to face. And slowly, thanks to her friendliness to a writer who out of the blue had forced her to see the direct horror of her sister’s death, my misgivings, my feelings of guilt, eased up. Jill told me that ever since their mom had died tragically in a fire six years ago, Jenny had been obsessed with what had happened to her mom and with where she was now.
“She wouldn’t let it go,” Jill told me. “She thought about it all the time. It was like she just couldn’t get reconciled with her mom’s death. With the fact that something like that could happen in a world which, generally, she loved so much.”
“Do you think,” I asked Jill, “that Jenny might have intentionally taken a kind of hard right turn off the road of her life?”
“Well, you know,” she told me, “it’s weird. Because when I finally got the nerve to go and look at that intersection where it happened, I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how narrow the place was where she went through.”
“Tyler,” I said, “told me that he could practice all day and still not get his car to do what hers had. So . . . what does that mean? Do you think she did it on purpose?”
Jill told me she didn’t. She told me she didn’t understand it, she knew she never would understand it, but she knew that Jenny loved life, and her daughter, too much to ever have done that on purpose.
Jill sent me a lot of photos of Jenny, and as the stepfather of three girls I was haunted by how completely familiar the pictures looked. In most of them Jenny had her left arm raised toward the camera in the manner that indicates the photo is a selfie, and I recognized every expression, every attitude. There were the posed, pouty, sultry ones; the goofy ones; and the just plain regular ones, in which I could see who Jenny was more clearly than through all the others: a girl with a beautiful smile, a little too much eye makeup, and a big heart.
One of the things that intrigued me most was some writing on her arm. When I saw it in one photo, I thought maybe it was just temporary. But when it kept showing up, I realized it was a tattoo. But I couldn’t make out the words. What did they say?
I asked in an email, and Jill responded. “Oh gosh . . . the writing on my sister’s arm. I love it and she looooved that tattoo. It’s about our mom. When I was preparing the program for our mom’s funeral I made a little handout with her photo. I will send you a pic. It’s from a Sarah McLachlan song and it says, ‘You gave me everything you had, oh you gave me light . . . and I will remember you.’
“When I was at the mortician’s examining Jenny’s body to decide if it would be appropriate to have an open-casket viewing I stared at her tattoo for a long time, morbidly wishing I could somehow take her arm with me. When I spoke at Jenny’s funeral I talked about her tattoo . . . and closed with those words . . . barely not choking, of course.”
So the words on Jenny’s arm were about loss, and about the love that overcomes loss. They were about the refusal to give up hope, the refusal, when a loved one dies, to accept that he or she is completely gone. The dogged, determined faith that those we love are not, in fact, ever truly gone. That they are simply in a place where we can no longer see them as we did when they were alive, but where, in certain rare but all-important moments, we can feel them inside us. Jenny, a young woman I had never met, had exactly the attitude toward death that I’d always had. She refused to take it at face value. She believed—she knew—there was something more.
But the email was not finished. “Okay,” Jill continued, “the weirdest thing just happened. I got up from this email to take a picture of that funeral handout for you. I was tuning out my girls, who were banging on the piano. Neither of them play . . . they just mess around on it. My daughter was singing and I was ignoring her at first until I realized the words were sounding familiar. I went over and looked at the sheet music she was reading from and it was ‘I Will Remember You.’ I didn’t even know I had piano music for it. Maybe it doesn’t sound that weird, but my kids don’t know that song or its significance or who Sarah McLachlan is. She dug through old piano books and just happened to turn the page to that song. So weird.”
Our helmets can fall away in all kinds of ways. They can fall away in moments of wonder, and they can fall away in moments of terror, or moments of sudden existential culpability. After our helmets fall away, we are in exactly the same world we were a moment before, yet at the same time we are standing in a completely new one. It’s the same old horrible world of pain and injustice. Yet it’s more than that as well. Much more.
I wrote Jill back my thoughts about that coincidence. I wrote it fast, because I didn’t have to think about it at all. “You know, this is the great thing about the world, the thing that really interests me. It is messed up, and horrible beyond all imagining. But, at the same time, and there’s no denying this if you really study it, it’s just a straight fact—it’s SIGNIFICANT. I imagine you know the term synchronicity, right? Carl Jung’s word for the fact that the world is way, way more tied up with itself than we normally realize. Everything’s significant. Everything means something. And yet at the same time, everything is just horribly messed up and full of pain, and it sucks, and on an overcast Sunday afternoon it often seems like the people who say life is meaningless are right. But . . . they’re not. And you can’t live, you can’t make it through life, if you don’t come to realize this in a way that you don’t just think, but feel in your bones.”
Reading the email over before clicking “send,” I was taken aback at how totally straightforward and accurate a statement it was. This really was the single fact that I’d spent most of my life thinking about. And here, at the end of this book, was that exact truth being handed to me by the sister of a girl I’d never known, whose life I had no business writing about, but who had somehow, some way, broadened my view of things and increased my own hope. The helmet I wear on my own head had been loosened just a little more.
As we neared the end of the writing process, I decided to go back to the beginning—to get a few more details about the incident at the bridge and its immediate aftermath. We were coming to the end of things, and when you get to the end of something, it’s often good to go back to the beginning—to the place you started from—and look at it again to see if it’s changed since you first saw it.
Throughout the course of our creating this book, his experience at the bridge—of hearing that voice inside the car—worked on Tyler, worked on him just as the bad experiences had, but in a different way. To his surprise, the memory of what happened that day didn’t fade, but stayed at the center of his consciousness at all times, even when other things were going on. It was like a seed planted somewhere within him, and it was a seed that had taken root and was growing. Maybe, it occurred to Tyler, the answer to the riddle of the world was like one of those clues in Forensic Files: some detail so small, so seemingly inconsequential that no one had paid any attention to it for the longest time. It was a detail which, when someone finally stopped and did notice it and picked it up and turned it over in the light and examined it, made the whole capsized world turn right side up again.
If the devil, as they say, is in the details, then it seemed like God is to be found there, too. Forensic Files, and the other shows like it, had driven home to Tyler, when he was younger, that though the clue is always there, it doesn’t just get handed to you. You have to figure out where it is and what it means. That single fiber from the back of some van that was stuck to the jeans of the murdered girl—a fiber that only a specific number of carpets were made of, that were installed in only a specific number of vans, only a specific number of which had been sold in the particular decade in the particular state where the murder had occurred . . . Tyler loved stuff like this. He loved it not for its darkness, but for the way it showed how the world wasn’t a totally unfair and terrible place after all, but a place where justice could prevail, where the bad guys could be caught—usually just at that moment when you were absolutely sure they’d escape.
But those programs also showed Tyler that we had some work of our own to do down here. No one ever told the investigators just exactly where the damning evidence of the fibers on the body of the murdered girl were going to be found, or even that any such fibers were there to be found in the first place. But the point was, those investigators had faith that somewhere out there, there was a piece of damning evidence, and that if they looked hard enough and were smart enough, it would show up. And once they found it, that tiny little detail would lead them straight to the bad guy, probably thousands of miles away at that point, his crime forgotten, in some new job, never dreaming he might have made some ridiculous, inconsequential little slipup that would lead to him getting a tap on the shoulder—the tap that told him his ticket was up.
That’s what Tyler had learned more than anything else from those CSI-type shows. The world didn’t make sense on the surface all the time. But scratch that surface, and at depth it made plenty. It had to, after all. There was too much goodness in the world, in people, in animals, in all of creation, for the bad to win out, no matter how much it seemed to be doing so sometimes. Sure, there could be days when the whole world looked upside down. But if you worked hard enough, you could find the clue that turned it right side up again. Things did make sense. Justice was real. It had to be. Tyler had always aspired to become one of those people who found those little clues—who hunted down and sought out the justice in life, who proved that there was such a thing after all. And in some strange way, Jenny’s death and Lily’s survival were just such a clue, just such an inspiration to keep going, to keep thinking, to keep open to the possibility that things were stranger, and bigger, and better than they appeared to be.
In the days after what he now was truly convinced was an angel-mediated event at Spanish Fork Bridge, Tyler found himself once again lying awake at night, puzzling about things. Lying awake as he had directly after the Boren shootings, but puzzling now in a different way, in a different key.
“Okay,” Tyler told me. “I said: There is a God. I don’t understand him, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t know what happened at that bridge, and I don’t know how Lily survived, and I don’t know who spoke those words from the car. I’m comfortable calling whoever spoke it an angel, because angels are messengers. And if ever I’ve been given a message, I was that day, while trying to right that car. What is an angel? I know you’re supposed to tell folks what they are in this book, but you know, that really is part of what they are: you can’t tell people what they are, because they’re too big, too strange, and too powerful to put a name tag on. But they’re real, and if you ask me, that’s all the definition you need. So I guess what I know—all I really know—is that it happened, it was real, as real as you can get, and that it means something. And the bottom line of what it means is that the world’s a big place, and most likely there’s a God who’s running it, and I gotta trust that he knows what he’s doing. When I think about it that way, it just makes me stronger in every cell in my body. I can feel it. And in my experience, when you think about something and it makes you feel strong and good inside, it’s usually right.”
Tyler also found that each time he told the story of what happened, he was telling it to himself as well. It wasn’t as if he had to convince himself the story had happened as it did. He knew it had. He’d heard the voice. But telling it again and again drove it into his head—made it so he couldn’t just forget about it, couldn’t just pass it off as something crazy and move on. No one knew better than Tyler that with police work, there were certain events, certain images that you couldn’t erase from your memory no matter how hard you tried. But the stories you wanted to remember, the ones that were positive and inspiring and made you stronger and better at your job—those stories you had to fight to remember, to keep from having them just slip away. And in spite of the sorrow involved, he wanted this particular story to stay.
Tyler had never been involved in an incident of this media magnitude before, however. As news outfit after news outfit made him go over the details of the day again and again, he found himself getting a little uncomfortable with this new overnight celebrity. After all, he didn’t want the story to be about him. But at the same time, he couldn’t help noticing how grateful people were to hear the story. It was like they were hungry for it. Not the sad part. Not the terrible fact that a young mother was dead, but the other part, the inexplicable part. Baby Lily’s incredible survival. The voice. And the idea, that seemed to come up every time a newscaster told the story, that baby Lily had not been alone down in that horrible black solitude.
Another word popped up a lot with the newscasters. The word sounded a little high and mighty to Tyler’s ears, but it wasn’t exactly out of place: miracle.
The last thing Tyler wanted to do was play any kind of negative role in the legacy of Jennifer Lynn Groesbeck—a woman he’d never met, and whose face, the one time he had seen it, would haunt him for the rest of his life. But maybe by being the spokesman for the miraculous event that had occurred in that car that day, he wasn’t doing a disservice to her memory at all, but honoring it. Though Jenny’s death was a tragedy, baby Lily’s survival was, it seemed, indeed something pretty miraculous, as was the angelic presence that had made her rescue happen.
“I have a friend who works at Payson Hospital where they medevaced Lily up to,” Tyler told me. “He knows his stuff. He told me that there was absolutely no way that baby could have made it through that night alive, even with all the stuff that happened in her favor. Yeah, her clothes were dry. Yeah, her mom had dressed her right and strapped her in right. But for a body to be in an upside-down position like that for so many hours, for her to have survived the impact the car made when it hit . . . he gave me a list of detail after detail. They all amounted to one thing: no way. No way that baby should have been alive when we got to her. Then throw in the fact that because we didn’t see her there in the backseat, we put her underwater for two minutes—forty-five-degree water. Well, I guess you could put it like this. Fill up your bathtub with water. Dump in a couple of big bags of ice and stir it around. Then get in and sink your head under for two full minutes. Do that, and you get an idea of what that child survived, after the fourteen hours of hanging upside down in a crashed car on a fifty-degree night.”
So . . . miracle? Tyler had never given too much thought to what the word really meant, but he figured it boiled down to this: something that can’t possibly happen happens anyway. The more he thought about all the details of the story, the more he could see why everyone was so interested, so gratified, to hear him tell it.
“Why Lily and not Jenny?” I asked Tyler during one of our last phone interviews—not because I thought Tyler knew. I knew he didn’t. I knew I didn’t either. But I wanted to hear what he’d say.
“Well, you know,” Tyler said, “the regular answer for that is, ‘It’s all part of God’s plan and we’ll know someday,’ or something like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the standard answer. But what do you think?”
“Well, I guess that’s what I think, too. But you know, there’s a difference between thinking something and feeling something. I don’t know whether I ever thought an answer like that was true before. I might have. But I never felt it. And I guess what that means is that if you haven’t felt something, you don’t know it.”
“That reminds me of something a poet called Kabir said once,” I said. “Do you know who Kabir is?”
“Nope,” Tyler said.
“Well, he was this fifteenth-century Hindu poet. He said, ‘Nothing that hasn’t been experienced is true.’ ”
Tyler thought for a moment.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “I do know. I know it because I feel it. In the end, the good feelings I got from the Boren case, from Jenny and Lily, outweighed the bad feelings I got. What happened at the river made me go back to what I’d experienced in the Boren bedroom, what I’d experienced a million times in all kinds of different ways.
“Evil is real. I know it, because I’ve felt it. No one can talk you out of something you’ve actually felt, no matter how hard they try. But good is real, too. And I’ve felt that as well. So why one thing and not another? Why does this person die and this person doesn’t? I don’t know and, at least while I’m alive, I’m never going to know. But I know there’s a God, and he has angels that help him deal with us down here, and this part of the story here isn’t all there is. There’s more to the story. I guess you could say that would be my answer.”
I told him it sounded like a pretty good one.
Ten days after the accident at the Spanish Fork Bridge, there was an official presentation at the Spanish Fork Fire Department to honor Lily and all the people in her life and, especially, those who had been there to rescue her. Officers, doctors, firemen, ambulance drivers, nurses, EMTs . . . everyone who took part in saving Lily. Most brought presents. “It was a real party,” Tyler said.
Jill had been at the party, but there had been so many people there that neither remembered actually meeting. But among the people Tyler met at the event that he did remember was Lily’s biological dad.
“I talked to him, hugged him, cried with him,” Tyler said. “He was real sincere, real genuine, real respectful. You could tell there was no way he didn’t just love that child. You know, everyone talks about how he’s a rough dude, how he had issues, how Jenny had issues. Me, I don’t really judge people who’ve had issues because I’ve had some myself, and so has just about everyone I know.”
I told Tyler I’d had some issues myself in the course of my life, that most of the people I knew also had issues of one sort or another. I also told him that this book was not going to be about people’s issues. It was going to be about something else.
Tyler also got to hold Lily in his arms for a minute and look into her eyes. When he did, he told me, he had one of those strange moments of overlap—like when he’d come home and seen his family asleep in his bed and suddenly seen the Boren family lying there instead, superimposed over them. Now, for a moment, looking down into Lily’s eyes, he had a flashback to the moment when he’d seen Jenny’s face—her cruelly, brutally, irreversibly destroyed face.
But this time, something different happened. Something a little like when, in the middle of the Boren horror, he had felt those kids at his legs. Looking into Lily’s eyes, the ruined face of her mom transformed, and it was like he was meeting Jenny Groesbeck—the real, living Jenny Groesbeck—after all.
And she was telling him something. She was telling him, through the innocent eyes of the child in his arms that he had played such a big part in rescuing, what the Boren children, or the angels representing them, had told him, too.
It’s okay.