FROM the football field I could barely make out my parents—small, still silhouettes up in the bleachers, behind the blaring white lights of the game. It was halftime, and I was dancing with the five other baton twirlers and the whole cheerleading squad to “The Horse” as the high school marching band played it, raising my arms and lifting my knees, one at a time, as I hopped up and then spun around, catching a glimpse of the much-more-crowded, festive bleachers on the other side of the field each time I turned. Though our games were usually on Saturday afternoons, this one was an away game, at Shore Regional, and they held theirs on Friday nights, which added an air of excitement to the weekly ritual.
I don’t quite know why I became a baton twirler my freshman year—probably the same reason I’d soon become a spiky-haired glam-rock groupie, an alternative-rock dramaclub freak, and, eventually, a Deadhead: all desperate, fickle attempts to find where I belonged, to figure out who I was. I seemed to always be trying on and casting off personas during those years—way more than any of my peers seemed to be doing.
Twirling was cool, though—more tough-girl than being a cheerleader. Plus it required a bit of rhythm and grace, skills I had worked on in ballet all those years, and the outfits were sexy—black sleeveless bodysuits with high necks and three V-shaped rows of silky white fringe pouring down the front. We wore them with nude hose and fat white well-polished boots that we topped with homemade fluffy pom-poms of black and gold yarn. Our captain was Stacy, a skinny, apple-cheeked girl with braces and huge breasts and brown hair brushed back into fat wings who dated a beautiful blond football player named George. Alyssa, Kristin’s next-door neighbor, was on the team too, which drew us even closer together.
My parents supported my random venture, coming to as many games as they could, standing in the bleachers and taking photos of me from too far away, creating roll after roll of shots that had me and my teammates as little, scantily-clad figures, barely discernable from one another, peppering the massive field like a flock of gulls on a wide and empty beach.
“Did you see Dan when he ran off the field before?” Alyssa leaned toward me as the song ended, flashing me her metal-mouth grin. “Such a hunk!” Dan McGuinness was a walking cliché—captain of the football team, tall and blond and built, and dating the most popular cheerleader on the squad. We couldn’t help but fawn.
I raised my eyebrows and nodded in agreement before Stacy blew her whistle and picked up her baton, holding it in the crook of her right arm as she stuck her hands on her hips and began marching in place. We all followed suit, and the band—a gangly, motley crew of mostly older kids whose names I didn’t know—started bleating out the intro to “Sea of Love,” my favorite song in the repertoire. The brass section blared and we did our steps and our twirls, and I exaggerated every movement, feeling alive and free and in the spotlight. Out in the bleachers I saw a camera flash and thought that it was probably my father, taking more photos that wouldn’t really look like anything. Still, I smiled big for him, and made sure to point my toes each time I lifted my feet to march.
Things had started feeling both better and worse that year. Better because the accident was farther away than ever, and because Mom didn’t burst into unexpected tears as frequently. Also because I was finally out of the junior high school—where everyone knew who I was and what I had lost, and where Kristin’s spirit had never stopped inhabiting the halls—and into the big regional high school, where I could find new friends and begin to reinvent myself. Worse, though, because it wasn’t far away enough: Mom still cried and often seemed lost in sad thoughts, which annoyed me and made me constantly dread the moment that she might totally fall apart again. It felt so stupid to me, still grieving after two whole years—especially since I had made the conscious decision to put it all behind me back in June, right after my eighth-grade graduation.
Until then, though, I had dramatized every milestone. Like Adam’s eighth birthday, in the November after he died, which my mom had quietly acknowledged that morning. “It’s your brother’s birthday today, you know,” she said. Of course I had known it; I had awakened that morning thinking about it, and that night I sang to him quietly, while sitting in my room and clutching a flimsy postcard from Mr. Steak, which had come a week before, addressed to Adam, inviting him to come in for his free birthday meal. I had snagged it in my daily mail-grabbing ritual and squirreled it away for the macabre occasion.
Later came eighth-grade graduation for the class that Kristin would have been in. I don’t remember how I convinced my mom that I had to be there, but there I was, sitting near the back of the room. The ceremony was held at the Post Theater on our town’s army base, Fort Monmouth, because it was classier than the stuffy cafeteria filled with folding chairs would have been. My eyes welled up when the class sang the theme from Ice Castles, and my cheeks flushed when the principal, Mr. Danielson, announced that there would be a new award instituted that year, presented to two outstanding, well-rounded students: the Kristin Sickel Memorial Award. I don’t remember who won it (though I did, predictably, the following year), just that its existence floored me. But besides that the ceremony was anticlimactic and depressing, proving once and for all that Kristin was gone, and that all of her classmates were growing up and moving on without her.
A year later, at my own eighth-grade graduation, I gave the farewell address before the two hundred kids in my graduating class.
“As we each leave here tonight to enter high school, we will strive to become more independent—facing new challenges, taking advantage of all life has to offer, and thinking more about our futures, each contributing something to the world in our own way,” I said in my speech. I had been chosen to speak due to a combination of my straight As and, most likely, pity—just like when I had won the sand-castle contest with Tracy, and the talent show earlier that year, singing “Think of Laura,” a cheesy, light-rock Christopher Cross song popularized on General Hospital when Laura Spencer was presumed to be dead after being kidnapped by the evil Cassadines. I’d sung it with tears in my eyes, for Kristin, and every teacher in that school knew it. Nancy, who belted the perennial favorite “Maybe” from Annie, in near-perfect pitch, was jealous. But how could I not have won?
I stood at the podium wearing a high-necked, powder-blue Gunne Sax dress exactly like Nancy’s white one. We both wore ivory hose and pastel ballet flats. My hair was short and permed into a thicket of curls, and I wore brown mascara and pink lip gloss. After my speech I stood onstage with the choir and sang “We’ve Only Just Begun” and every time we returned to that chorus—“We’ve only just begun … to live”—tears leaked down my face because I thought about how Kristin had only just begun to live too. I sobbed in Nancy’s arms after we got our diplomas.
“I’m moving on without her now,” I told her, wiping black mascara juice off my cheeks, barely able to explain why I was such a wreck. “It’s like I’m leaving her behind.”
I was still wiping my eyes and trying to get a hold of myself when Mom and Dad and Grandma approached me in the crowd, but they thought I was just being overly dramatic about graduating. If they knew the real reason for my meltdown, they never let on. And neither did I.
It had been almost five months since that day, and there I was in high school, twirling out on the football field as if I hadn’t a care in the world. We all went to sit in the bleachers when the halftime show ended, twirlers huddling together a row or two behind the band members in the raw, early-November air. My parents were right behind us, and as soon as I finished clambering my way up the aluminum benches, feeling a stab of vertigo each time I dared to glance down between those flimsy strips, my mom handed me my latest favorite possession: my varsity jacket, black with gold trim, with a hood that unzipped down its middle to lay flat across my shoulders, revealing MRHS in big woolly block letters. My name was sewn in cursive on the left breast.
“Put this on before you get a chill!” my mother said to me, wrinkling her brow at my bare arms. Instead of rolling my eyes at her I took it, happily, and could not jam my chilly self inside the cool, quilted lining fast enough. “All that moving must have kept you warm, though,” she added. “You looked great out there. All you girls did! I wish I could move like that!” Everyone said thanks and Stacy went with Alyssa to get hot chocolates for us all. Then the lights blared and the band stood up to play and the football players came running back onto the field and I squinted until I saw Bobby, a JV player whom I’d kissed at a party recently. I was wondering whether we were dating or not, and what would constitute such a thing, when I caught an alarming tone and posture coming from my parents over my shoulder.
“Well then you can go without me!” I heard my mother hiss. She was hurling her wounded-accusatory-martyr voice—an angry sort of whisper/yell that sent shivers down my spine—toward my father.
“Oh would you come on already?” he pleaded. I stole a quick glance at them, saw my mom’s slumped, impenetrable posture and her wet, steely eyes and felt my stomach tighten.
I zipped my jacket and forced my knees up into it, blowing on them and pressing my lips to the thick nylons that encased them. Don’t cry, I thought to myself. Do. Not. Cry.
“Beth, come on,” my mom called behind me. “The game’s almost over. Let’s get going.”
“The game is not almost over!” I snarled, with a bit more anger than I would’ve liked. “I’m not leaving yet!” The other twirlers were on their feet, engrossed in the action on the field, stomping their boots to the beat of some blaring marching-band rally, probably not hearing a word we were saying. I felt so far away from everyone, so left out, amazed and so disappointed that after two years I could still feel that so much turmoil separated me from everyone else, who would have probably pegged me as happy. The more I had tried to avoid the truth, the more pronounced it had become, like a pebble in my shoe that felt bigger and harder the more I continued to walk on it. Stacy and Alyssa returned then, holding out rectangular cardboard trays stocked with Styrofoam cups of cocoa, and I took one, settling in, showing my mom with my posture that I wasn’t going anywhere.
We left as soon as I finished my cocoa, that much I know. What I don’t remember anymore is what set her off in the first place—what caused my mom to break down and cry in the car, and my dad to breathe out through his nostrils, exasperated. I know it was something about Adam—probably about her seeing something or someone that reminded her of him, which would’ve caused her to fall apart, which then would’ve caused my dad to tell her to stop dwelling on it all, leading to a fight about how it hadn’t been long enough to move on and what was wrong with him anyhow?
Whatever it was, it was the breaking of the dam, and the powerful gush it released left me drowning in the backseat, fingering the silky fringe of my uniform and holding sobs in my chest until I felt as if my heart would stop.
When we pulled into the driveway I felt almost as nauseated as I did that first day home from the hospital, when I noticed a new sadness in the gray-brown shingles and saffron shutters. Only tonight it was worse, because I was noticing it all over again, years later, when I had tried so hard to convince myself that the sadness had receded. But at that moment, in the weak ochre glow of the front porch light, I realized it had only grown more massive, more all-encompassing. My mother’s cries grew angry and jagged, and she hopped out of the car and slammed the door behind her, getting inside the front door before my father or I could even set foot out of the car.
“Come on, Bethie,” my dad said to me, all low and quiet like he was issuing a warning about doomsday. I wrapped a sweaty hand around my thin, icy baton, and stepped out of the car onto the tarred driveway, the weight of my boots suddenly feeling too much for me to lift, so I dragged my feet along as my father pulled open the heavy garage door and held his hand under it while I walked in. It was a running complaint among us that the garage was a horrible mess, but I secretly liked the disarray, found comfort in seeing the lawnmower shoved up against my sand-flecked bellyboard, an ancient wooden croquet set stacked against the rusting blue Zim Zam game and a waist-high stack of newspapers waiting to be brought to the recycling plant. I breathed in the familiar scent of cold must and faint gasoline, hoping it would fortify me for whatever lay inside.
I stepped tentatively into the laundry room—another less-than-organized space, painted in a garish mint green and home to not only the washer and dryer but closets jammed with coats and hats and boots for every conceivable climate. I noticed my mom had dropped her purse, a tightly packed brick of stiff leather, onto the floor. (“What do you have in there?” I always asked her, astonished by its heft anytime I’d picked it up to hand it to her, causing her to cluck her tongue and roll her eyes and declare, “My life!” which told me nothing.) The house was country quiet and dark, save for the faint emerald glow from the VCR’s digital clock in the living room, until my dad flicked on the overhead light in the kitchen. My mom appeared out of the dark recesses of the bedroom hallway, clutching her car keys.
“I’m leaving,” she said, barely looking at either of us. Her face was splotchy and her eyes were hard, and she wore jeans and her white Reeboks and a zipped-up sweatshirt. She looked like she was serious.
“Oh would you come on, Deb?” my dad asked, this time with a hint of fear in his voice.
“No, you come on!” she said. “I’ll see you later.” And then she turned away from us and walked toward the front door.
“Where are you going!?” I shouted after her with a ferocity so intense my throat burned. The desperation in my voice startled me, and made my mother stop, but only for a second.
“I’m going out,” she said flatly. And then she said, “Don’t worry about me, Beth. I’ll be fine.” But the way she said it—like someone who was saying one thing but clearly meaning another—made me worry even more. And it made me furious, too. I stood in the front door, alternately fuming and fretting, and watched as she walked with purpose across the edge of the front yard, got into her car and slammed the door, and then backed swiftly down the driveway, peeling out—the tires made an actual screeching sound—like a pissed-off character in a movie.
I turned away from the door and saw my dad standing there, a wounded look on his face. “Don’t worry, Bethie,” he said, using the same low voice he had used out in the driveway. “She’s just upset.”
My throat was so constricted I could barely eke out a sound, but I managed to tell him, “Well she doesn’t have to leave!” before rushing to my bedroom to dissolve into a mess of sobs.
She’d felt missing to me in so many ways before that night, but never so aggressively gone. Usually we just ignored her pain, our pain, the empty chair at the dinner table, the absurdity of calling Adam’s room “The office.” Usually the truth of our situation didn’t explode in our faces this way, because none of us ever let it. I pressed my nose against the window in my room, half expecting to see my mom’s car already returning to its spot in our driveway, next to my dad’s brown Pinto and the dormant rhododendron bush. But it was silent and dark out there; not even my neighbors across the street, whose geeky son was a year older than me and friends with some guys in the marching band, had returned home from the football game yet.
I cried hot tears as I sat on the edge of my bed and yanked off my boots, dropping each with a thud onto my newly exposed wood floor. My mom had helped me tear up the hot-pink carpet earlier that year, after I’d learned somewhere about the concept of bare-wood floors covered with throw rugs, and how it was a much more chic, grown-up look. We bought a large rag rug in shades of peach and sage and put it down alongside my twin bed, and though it was colder at night than the shag had been, I thought it looked much better.
I stood in front of my full-length mirror and watched myself as I cried. I had watched myself sob in this place so many times, but not so much lately, and I was taken with the way my forehead flooded with redness as I drew my breath in and out. My twirling uniform looked suddenly tacky in my bedroom’s light, but I left it on, too exhausted to even wriggle out of it. I sat down on the floor then, alternating between weeping so strongly I was lost in it to short periods of complete calm because I felt a certain kind of peace, just knowing that my frenetic mother was out of the house.
But where could she have gone? And why? I imagined her racing along Route 35, past The Spot: the traffic light at the intersection where Route 35 crosses Deal Road, where the low cement highway divider will forever remain cracked and crumbled from where our station wagon slammed into it. Whenever we passed it, which was often, I would be in awe over the craggy, dirty crevice that our car made in the cement, and that it never got repaired, and also at how unremarkable an intersection it was—jughandle, gas station, Foodtown strip mall. I pictured my mom racing past this, eyes already slits, sobbing all over again when she sees it and then maniacally running red lights until she comes to the edge of a cliff and drives right off of it without slowing, into a rocky, watery abyss. Of course there was no such landscape anywhere in the entire state of New Jersey. Still, I visualized this scenario over and over again, working myself into a frenzied panic until, though it was out of character, I turned to my dad.
When I opened my bedroom door I was struck by the silence in the house. Usually by then my father would have turned on the television and settled into the couch in front of the late-night news, keeping one eye on the screen and one on the Asbury Park Press, the unfinished sections from the morning spread messily across his lap. Instead it was so quiet I thought he had fallen asleep as I crept along the short, carpeted hallway toward the living room, glancing at the wall of photos on my way. For as long as I could remember, Adam and I had figured in equally on that wall, one half for each of us, the centerpiece on each side being one of those big framed collages—a black mat cut out with preset spots for about a dozen photos—filled in with images of us both through the years. But at the end of that first summer my parents took down all of Adam’s individual pictures and removed the photos from his collage, inexplicably filling the ovals and rectangles back in with old photos of themselves: a sepia-toned shot of my smiling dad at two, wearing brown overalls and sitting on the sidewalk in front of his father’s North Jersey soda shop; a black-and-white head shot of my mom, doe-eyed and long-haired, in high school; a too-far-away photo of my parents on their first trip to Europe, earnestly posing together in front of Buckingham Palace. Only one image of Adam remained. It was in a family photo—me at five, Adam at one, standing with our parents at the edge of the water on Key Biscayne—that they had, for some reason, decided to leave in the collage. We had been visiting my dad’s parents on our yearly pilgrimage to Miami and decided to have a day away from them, just the four of us. I remember being thrilled at how empty the beach was, and amazed by the warm shallow stillness of the water, which glowed pale cerulean like something out of a Caribbean fantasy. I gazed into that photo, noting the brightness of Adam’s red hair and the light in my mother’s eyes, and the way my father had kneeled down next to me, wrapping a strong arm around my small waist. Then I moved along so I could find him.
“Dad?” My voice pierced the gloomy quiet of the house.
He was reading the paper after all, and looked up from it with weariness. “Hi, Bethie,” he said glumly.
“What if Mom doesn’t come back?” I hadn’t expected to blurt out such a thing, planning instead on saying something nasty and blaming. But this is what came out of me, along with a torrent of tears, which horrified me.
“She’s going to come back,” he said, smiling the tiniest bit as if to prove to me that anything else would be ridiculous. But as he spoke he put his paper aside and got up out of his chair and put his arms around me, pulling me into him as he started to cry—really cry, with noise and deep breaths and wet tears that I felt in my hair and where my bare shoulders poked out of my twirler uniform. “We just miss him so much!” he sobbed. “We try to go on and be strong, but it’s hard sometimes! And your mom, I think, just needed to get away.” I continued to hold onto him and to cry, thinking, I am actually crying with my father and not running away. How truly, alarmingly desperate. His crying was so deep, so guttural, almost as intense as his painful moans had been that night in the car. I cringed from the intimacy of the moment, and only let myself languish there for a few moments before pulling away.
“OK, well I’m going to change,” I told him, swiping at my eyes and suddenly yearning to end our scene.
“OK,” he said. He stood there unmoving, bereft, letting me know with his arms, and the way they hung, still suspended in the air, that I’d torn myself away from him too soon. I briefly considered flinging myself back into his warm chest but didn’t do it, and instead returned to my room.
I heard my mom come in about an hour later, when her voice, commingled with my dad’s, woke me slowly from a deep and syrupy sleep. I had changed into sweats and dozed off on top of my made bed, with my light on and my R.E.M. tape playing softly, and I hadn’t even stirred when the cassette clicked off. My clock radio’s face said 11:58. She’d been gone for less than two hours; it had felt like a week. Part of me was so jealous that she got to tear off like that, and I suddenly yearned for my driver’s license.
Another part of me began to awaken for the very first time: my rebellious side, my run-for-your-life side. My mom’s half-assed yet terrifyingly real flee had stirred something in me, and made me realize that, while getting older may not make the grief hurt any less, it gave one access to the tools that could help facilitate escape a little better—car keys, new friends, even alcohol. I switched off my light and got under the covers, and made a mental note to throw myself into all of it, headlong.