10

Then

I was eight years old when I realized that death had a sound. I’d find later that it had many voices, but the first one I recognized was when my neighbor’s champion basset hound, Farley, was hit by a car. It wasn’t the screeching of the tires—though sometimes that sound is the preamble to death. It was the sound the dog made. An unearthly, stomach-twisting mixture of pain and surprise and incomprehension. Beneath it all ran the ragged sound of something else—that thing that all dead things are missing—leaving that dog’s body. At the moment of impact, Farley looked me in the eye where I sat on the front lawn, and I could swear it wasn’t a dog at all looking at me. It was whatever left that dog. It was there. Then it wasn’t. And the driver never stopped.

Death had a sound, and I heard it somewhere intertwined with that crunching metal the moment Peter and I kissed.

I slipped into the still-warm arms of Peter’s jacket and took off after him toward the road. He ran so fast that in a moment I couldn’t see him ahead of me as I stumbled through the cemetery in my flip-flops. When I came to the road, a wisp of smoke glowed red off to the left. I ran along the ditch toward the drive that led over it, then stopped. Just visible over the edge of the ditch on the other side of the asphalt, a tire was spinning slowly in the lurid red glow of a taillight. An engine rattled. A radio blared. In the moonlight, Peter scrambled back up the side of the ditch.

“Robin!” he screamed, not realizing how close I was. “Robin!”

I skittered across, terrified.

“Call 911!” His eyes were wild. “We need an ambulance.”

I ran as fast as I could back to the trailer. The Professor squawked and flapped as I burst through the door. Hands shaking, I dialed 911 on the kitchen phone and sputtered out the awful words between labored breaths. The dispatcher was asking for details I didn’t have, trying to be heard over The Professor’s screeching, telling me to stay on the line. But I left the phone swaying at the end of its coiled cord and ran back out to Peter.

I crossed over to the scene of the accident and leaned over the ditch.

Then I wished I hadn’t.

The passenger-side window had shattered across the motionless body of a girl. Blood stained her beautiful formal dress, covered her face, and dripped from one loose blonde curl. Her left hand lay limp at her side, a blood-streaked white bone in her forearm clearly protruding through her skin and catching the moonlight that had felt so romantic moments before. I could just make out the figure of a young man in the driver’s seat next to her in the dark.

“The ambulance is on its way.” I barely managed to push the words past the tightness in my throat.

Peter looked up at me, his eyes like sinkholes. “It’s Sarah and Brad.”

In a town as small as Sussex and a school as small as Kennedy, of course even I would know the people in this car. But that moment of knowing, really knowing, nearly knocked me backward. I couldn’t ask if she was alive. I didn’t want to know. All the same I was sure she must be dead. All the blood. You couldn’t lose all that blood and survive.

Peter reached over Sarah’s unmoving body and turned off the radio. In the sudden silence I could hear his feet splashing in the sludge at the bottom of the ditch. A vile fusion of stagnant water, gasoline, and beer mingling with the sweet scent of coolant and corn stubble drifted into my nose. I stood on the side of the road, useless, while Peter buried his face in his bloody hands and let out a deep, animal growl that quickly became a yell. It sounded far too much like that basset hound. He kicked the car hard with his soggy patent leather wingtips, cursed, then climbed out of the ditch and crumpled at my feet on the gravel shoulder.

What should I do? What did people do? These things were supposed to be handled by adults. When Farley had been run over, I ran inside to my mother. I thought she’d rush outside right away—to help the dog, to get the license plate, to question witnesses. But she didn’t. She hugged me fiercely, put both soft hands on my tear-streaked cheeks, and said, “Are you okay?”

But no one said that to me now. I shoved the tears back inside. Stupid crybaby. Sarah and Brad were probably dead and all I could think about was myself?

Peter and I sat there in an eerie pocket of quiet despair for a long time. I avoided looking at his face, now striped with tears and Sarah’s blood. Was I supposed to cup his cheeks? Ask him if he was okay? Of course he wasn’t.

I saw lights in the distance, flashing like the glittering confetti shot from pressure canons at the start of each football game as the team broke through the paper and trotted onto the field. But instead of cheers, they were accompanied by the wail of sirens.

The next half hour I felt like I was watching something on TV. People in uniforms came and went on swift feet, barking orders and updates. I clung to the blanket an EMT had draped around my shoulders in lieu of my mother’s absent arms. Sarah and Brad were extracted from the car and put on stretchers. Sarah was immediately put into the back of an ambulance and driven into the black night. Peter ran off without a word to follow them to the hospital in his car. The stretcher that held Brad did not move. There is no need to rush a corpse to a doctor.

When my father was arrested, it was quick and quiet. No lights, no sirens, no warning. Just men in navy jackets with yellow lettering and black handguns. Voices were raised, but not to shouting. No one cried out, no one swore. It was almost like everyone in the house had expected it—except me. I copied the sober expression I saw on my mother’s face and stayed that way, silent and solemn through everything, even her arrest a few months later, until the day my grandmother met me in a tiny regional airport terminal and I was permitted to resume my childhood. Or what was left of it.

When I finally went back to the trailer, Grandma was seated at the kitchen table with an open book, a cigarette, and a cup of coffee. The phone had been hung up, The Professor calmed by a black sheet over his cage. Grandma put the mug down on the page to keep her spot. A few pages on the other side slowly fanned up.

“Crazy night,” she said, raising the half-smoked cigarette to her leathered lips. “You know those kids?”

I nodded.

She flicked the cigarette on the edge of an ashtray that, judging by the logo in the center, had been stolen from a hotel. “You okay?”

Finally. Someone asked the question. But it wasn’t the same. This woman was not my mother.

“I’m fine.”

She coughed violently, so violently and for so long I thought I might have to call 911 twice in one night. Then she recovered and pointed at the book. “I’m not sure you should be reading this. I hear it’s banned in some places.” She lifted the coffee cup and closed the cover, keeping her finger in her spot, so I could see the title.

“That’s mine,” I said. “What are you doing with it?”

She opened the book again and put her mug bookmark down. “What do you think I’m doing with it? I’m reading it. Is that a problem?”

“It’s a problem that you took it from my room without even asking! And it’s a problem that you’re putting this on it!”

I made a grab for the coffee cup, seeing too late how full it was. In the jostling, a little sloshed over the side and slithered down the cup, forming a large brown C on the page. I snatched up the book and rushed for a paper towel, but it was too late. I let loose with one of my most exasperated sighs and stomped off to my bedroom, book in hand.

“Hey!” she shouted after me. “Whose tux is that? And why don’t you have any pants on?”

I slammed my door and pushed all my books under the bed in short, tidy stacks. Then I lined up my shoes and tucked each pair under the bed skirt to shield my horde from further pilfering. If she thought I shouldn’t be reading The Catcher in the Rye, she’d probably bring me to her priest for an exorcism if she read even a few pages of Lolita.

When I crawled back into bed, it was after 4:00 a.m. My body shook—from the cold night with no pants, the adrenaline, the exhaustion, from another disaster outside my control. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Sarah Kukla’s bloody face, her white bone, her ruined dress. Was she still alive? Was Peter hunched over in the waiting room staring at his bloodstained cuffs? Was he pacing the hospital hallways, his wet shoes squeaking with every step? What were Brad Ellis’s parents doing at that moment? Had they told his younger sister, a sophomore who had landed a large role in the fall play that was premiering in two weeks?

I wanted to call out for my dad, the soother of nighttime fears. But no amount of screaming could reach him where he was. So I just cried. All night. And most of the next morning while Grandma was at church. She didn’t make me go with her. “You can stay home just this once,” she said. But there was nothing she was going to do to make me go the next Sunday or the next. I had nothing nice to say to God, so it was best if I didn’t say anything at all.

On Monday morning we were all herded onto the gymnasium bleachers. For those who hadn’t already heard, the red-eyed teachers would have been a clue. Principal Pietka read from an index card, probably too emotional to wing it as he did at other assemblies. Brad Ellis was dead. He had not been wearing his seat belt, we were told in a stern tone that seemed to accuse the entire student body of having conspired to convince him not to put it on. Sarah Kukla was still in the hospital with her shattered arm, broken ribs, internal bleeding, a fractured knee cap, and other injuries. Yes, alcohol had been involved.

As we shuffled back to our classes it seemed that everyone around me was in some stage of crying, whether holding back tears or openly weeping or wiping moisture from their eyes. I thought I should cry too. I tried. But I couldn’t manage it. I was all out. I had never exchanged a word or a glance with Brad Ellis. The only interaction I’d had with Sarah Kukla was the one where she had to peel herself off of Peter in order to get a better angle from which to glare at me. I didn’t wish either of them harm. I just didn’t know them enough to cry.

Not that that stopped anyone else. At some point during every class period for the rest of the day, and less so the rest of the week, some girl would burst into tears and be escorted down to the office beneath the comforting arm of a teacher or friend. We were all encouraged to talk to a school counselor and to be open with our parents about how we felt.

I considered writing to my mother, telling her about the whole thing. But I didn’t want to talk to her. She should have been there. She should have already heard all about it and laid on my bed with me, stroking my hair, until I fell asleep. A letter would take days to get to Connecticut, and her response would take even more time to reach me. And a letter couldn’t hug me, couldn’t stroke my hair. So what good was it? All I wanted, all I needed, was another book from Peter.

Eventually we got the news that Sarah was conscious, then that she was improving daily, then that she was home. Peter started reading again, so I started reading again. Brad Ellis’s little sister powered through her part in the play, which was apparently better attended than in years past. I’m sure they all told themselves they were supporting her in this difficult time. As I leaned against a wall in the cafeteria during intermission, sipping at a plastic cup of watered-down punch, I heard people whisper about her tragedy, about her irresponsible brother, about her poor parents. Had people whispered about me back in Amherst after I left? Was someone whispering about me even now?

The first dusting of snow came. Thanksgiving passed. Grandma and The Professor and I watched the parade on TV. We never talked about that late-night fight or the book or the coffee stain or my lack of pants. Then one day in mid-December she handed me a letter that looked like The Professor had gotten ahold of it.

“Your mother wants me to bring you to visit her.”

I didn’t answer her, just turned the next page of The Handmaid’s Tale.

“We can go during your winter break, though I don’t really want to drive in the snow.”

“I’ll save you the trouble.”

“What do you mean?”

I looked up from my book. “I won’t go.”

Grandma sat down next to me on the couch and waited for me to look at her. I tried to ignore her, but once it was obvious I wouldn’t get rid of her that way, I put down the book and looked her in the face.

“Robin,” she said, “I know you’re upset with your mother, but this is not the way to handle it.”

“How would you know?” I snapped. “You got a lot of experience with this sort of thing? Did your mom go to jail for trying to help your murderer dad avoid prison? You don’t know anything about what I’m going through.”

“Not exactly, no.” She put a hand on mine. “But I have been the mother who was abandoned by her daughter.”

I pulled my hand away and folded my arms across my chest.

“When your mother left Sussex it was for good,” she said. “She didn’t want to be associated with anything from back home, which included me. She never wrote me, never called, never invited me to visit her, never came back home for Christmas. The only time I saw her after she graduated from high school was at her wedding, and the only reason I was invited was because your father insisted.”

“Why wouldn’t she want to see you? Why didn’t she ever talk about you?”

Grandma sighed. Then The Professor sighed.

“Our home was not always a happy one. Lindy’s father was a manic-depressive. They call it something else now. Bipolar, I guess. And he was an alcoholic. It was hard living with him. He’d go from inviting everyone he knew over for a cookout and giving me just an hour to prepare for it to yelling and screaming and slamming doors. Lindy used to hide from him under her bed. And I guess I didn’t know how to handle it all. When Bob was raging and yelling about the house being a mess, I blamed Lindy and Kevin more often than not, so I got mad at them too. I probably should have been defending them. But I always sided with Bob, because if I didn’t . . . it was just much worse for everyone. I don’t blame her for wanting to pretend we didn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t hurt. That’s the one good thing to come of this whole mess with Norman. We’re finally talking.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll start talking to her when I do something really stupid with my life. As for right now, maybe she should start pretending that I don’t exist.”

I got up from the couch, went to my room, and slammed the door. Out my window the snow was falling, falling, falling. I opened up my book again and picked up where I’d left off. It was easy—I just opened to where my finger was, found the last line I’d read, and read the next sentence. If only someone had just put their finger in my life where it got interrupted so I could find the last line I’d said—Good night, Mom! Good night, Dad!—and keep going from there. Instead, someone had ripped the book in half and burned the end of it, and I was left hanging off the page, holding on for dear life, trying to figure out what came next.