2

I first fell for her walk.

Watching her hike ahead of me, up a mountain trail in southwest Virginia, all chinos and a tank top . . . I fell for her stride, her confidence, her irreverence, her runner’s build, her New York-y style. I thought: this is someone who knows who she is, where she wants to go, how she wants to get there, but is game for why-not diversions.

Mary had come to visit her sister, a colleague at the newspaper where I worked. Mary and I flirted as we hiked, and I invited her to my apartment for dinner, then burned chicken on a grill. We kissed that night while walking through Mini Graceland, the decorated yard of an obsessive Elvis fan’s homage. I visited her in New York, where she produced TV commercials. When I moved to Florida she came for a long weekend and we drank beers and got stoned at a drive-in beside an orange processing plant, car windows open, the air sweetly orangey, watching Jean-Claude Van Damme kick some ass—and I fell hard. Months later, I awoke to find the Gulf of Mexico knee high in my house, then chest high, as an unnamed winter storm swamped the coast that Saturday morning. I smashed out a kitchen window, watched my Subaru bob and float, and the first person I called was Mary. Within weeks, I’d loaded the handful of my nonflooded possessions into an insurance-paid pickup and moved to New York, much sooner than she had likely expected.

Also much sooner than she had anticipated, I told her I loved her—at a Holiday Inn beside a New Jersey Turnpike exit. This was after a friend’s wedding, and I was inspired by the image of her bending over a pool table to make a shot. Her response to my “I love you” was “thank you.”

She didn’t flinch when I bought a lovable but impractical twenty-five-year-old BMW 2002, a speedy thing we named “Buddy” that I drove like a weapon. She flinched a little when I asked her to move in together, and then to pay for my overdue student loan one month. And then the next. She was fit and funny, mischievous and curious; a smart-ass with a gymnast’s physique. We skied, ran, hiked, and biked; we loved to drink and play. Both lapsed Catholics and rule benders, we’d sneak beers into a theater and stick around for a free double feature.

Six months after my move to New York, we spent a weekend on eastern Long Island, and while walking through the Montauk sand dunes, regrettably without a ring, I proposed. A decade later, we had moved from New York to New Jersey (where Sean was born) to Maryland (where Leo was born). While our friends settled into their first homes, building equity and sinking roots, we bought and sold two fixer-uppers, then landed in North Carolina, nursing another old house back from disrepair.

We’d both signed on for a mobile, malleable life, a life of “why nots,” a life on our terms. If I recall, the decision to leave New York and buy our first house, while on tour with a new Jersey realtor, had consisted of a raised eyebrow, Well?, and a shrug, Sure! We were proudly nimble. “We’re like cats,” Mary once said. “We always land on our feet.”

Our life together, ten years so far, had already been a zigzaggy series of bold and borderline impulsive decisions that, to friends and family, must’ve seemed random or reckless.

And we were just warming up.

Our latest move—in 2002, from suburban Baltimore to hippy, arty, vegan, boozy Asheville, nestled in the folds of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains—came partly in response to 9/11. Like many families, we found ourselves in a reboot after the terrorist attacks, asking: Where should we be right now? Where will our children be safe?

Mary had been working for a film company in D.C. at the time, and was driving toward her office when the first plane hit the first tower. I’d been scheduled to give a talk to a group of navy veterans (prompted by the book I’d begun researching, a biography of the astronaut Alan Shepard) at a luncheon near the Pentagon. I called Mary, catching her halfway to D.C., and she circled back, and together we watched the tragedy unfold on CNN, crying and praying that none of our New York friends were among the victims.

During those sober September days, Sean insisted on wearing what he called his “worker guy” outfit—dress shirt, bow tie, blazer—around the house, in the backyard, and to school. Leo became obsessed with the Grinch. He’d watch the Jim Carrey movie repeatedly and at bedtime made us read the Seuss book a half dozen times before he’d go to sleep. At dinner one night, Sean asked if he could say a prayer . . . Mary and I exchanged looks—we hadn’t done much praying as a family.

Sean theatrically lowered his head and led us: “God is gracious. Thanks for our food. Oh-man.”

Oh, man.

Mary and I had our own erratic reactions to 9/11. Six weeks later, we decided not to cancel a long-planned trip to Ireland. (I’d recently become a naturalized Irish citizen.) Tucked inside cozy Dublin pubs I thought: Let’s live here! Back in Baltimore, we talked of returning to New York, to the place where we’d married at a cathedral high above the Hudson River. But then we pivoted and started looking in the other direction, to the south, far from the terrorist targets of the Northeast.

We chose Asheville partly to be near the research for a book I’d started writing (about southern moonshiners and the roots of NASCAR). The other draw was Mary’s parents, who lived outside Asheville. In the 9/11 aftermath, raising our boys near Grandpa Bill and Grandma Pauline felt right, no matter how wacky our move would later seem.

The day we pulled away from our perfectly remodeled and manicured Baltimore home, the boys were downright giddy.

“Well!” gushed Sean. “Here we go, off on another one of those wild goose bumps.”

We fell quickly, madly for the town Rolling Stone once dubbed “Freakville, U.S.A.”

Asheville was scruffy and outdoorsy, proud of its weirdness, a culture that championed coffee and beer, music and books. I loved the freaky Friday night drum circle, the impromptu fiddle jams outside Malaprop’s Bookstore, the mottled mix of rednecks and trustafarians, writers and retirees. And I loved that it was ours: we had chosen it, not some employer or job. For the first year, it seemed like we’d gotten away with something: Did we really pull this off?

Unlike me, happily alone at libraries and coffee shops with my new book project, Mary was diligently social and quickly befriended other moms with young kids. The boys made playground buddies, and the dads became my friends.

One summer night, two of the dads came over, their three boys in tow, to help me rebuild our sagging garage. The kids climbed on the lumber stacked in the driveway, scrambled over bags of cement mix, dug into piles of sand and gravel. Mary was at work, and she and the other moms would arrive soon for a barbecue. Until then, the evening was messy and male. It smelled of sawn wood and power tools, then lighter fluid, charcoal, and beer, accompanied by the twangs of Dick Dale surf music. A swampy southern evening.

Leo and Sean, now five and six, were playing in the front yard with the other boys while Eric, John, and I finished our work and drank our beers and prepped the grill.

Then a red ball rolled down the driveway, and into the street.

The boys hovered at the edge, daring one another to get it.

Sean, the eldest, stepped into the road.

The driver, who lived in a nearby apartment complex, was traveling thirty miles an hour in her Corolla; thirty in a fifteen-mile-an-hour zone; thirty past the yellow sign that read SLOW CHILDREN PLAYING; thirty miles an hour . . . while texting. We heard the thud of impact, the screech of tires, and the driver’s screams. In that order. Thud. Screech. Scream. In an instant, Sean was airborne, cartwheeling an arc through the summer sky, the other boys watching in confused horror, their mouths just opening into howls.

Manning the grill, I had my back to the street and saw nothing. Eric, who looked over my shoulder in time to see Sean midflight, later told me his first emotion was anger: “Why the fuck is he flying? Boys don’t fly.” I can still picture Eric’s bugged-out eyes, just before he dropped his beer can and ran. I followed in a panic and found Sean crumpled in a terrible heap on our neighbor’s front lawn. His body was all wrong—left leg bent midthigh and twisted, foot up by his ear, eyes shut. Afraid to touch him, I clawed at the grass and dirt, animal screams howling out from someplace deep inside. For the worst minute of my life, I thought—no, I just knew—my boy was dead.

John ran up yelling, “Where’s the phone, the phone, I can’t find the phone!” Eric, all war-zone cool, reached across Sean’s body and grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted in my face, “You have to find it. Do it now. Go.” I wrenched myself from Sean and ran crazily toward the house.

And there was Leo, screaming with the other shrieking kids and holding up his arms, pleading for comfort, his face red and contorted. But I pushed past him and into the house, found the phone, dialed 911 while sprinting back toward Sean, fully expecting to find that he’d breathed his last while I was gone . . .

As I dropped beside him, Sean’s eyes fluttered and popped open. He was scared, foggy, but awake. An EMT was suddenly at my side, tugging me out of the way, taking control.

At the hospital, they stabilized Sean, and Mary finally arrived from work. (More war-zone cool: John’s wife, Dana, had delivered the news with aplomb: “Mary? Don’t worry, Sean’s okay. He broke his leg. But . . . can you come to the hospital?”) Once my in-laws and a couple friends showed up, and the adrenaline drained out of me, I locked myself in a bright-white bathroom, saw my stricken face in the mirror, and dropped to the floor, where I lay sobbing for five minutes. I’d never get those awful sounds out of my head: thud, screech, scream, fucking Dick Dale . . .

I had experienced every parent’s worst nightmare. Except it wasn’t the full nightmare. My boy had survived.

I had survived, too, I suppose. But something changed in me that day. Some innocent piece got gouged out and replaced by a lump of dread that pulses in my chest to this day.

I’d hardly been restrained as a kid, nor as a teen or young adult. I was a cautious daredevil—skateboarder, skier, water-skier, motorcycle rider, partier—and, frequently, a happy-go-lucky “don’t worry about it” dumb ass. Not quite the heedless risk taker my younger brother had been, but still, no scaredy-cat. When Sean and Leo were born—less than two years apart, just like my brother and me—I didn’t fret over their safety. I wanted to raise them to explore, to take chances, to live. But after Sean’s accident, I fixated on their fragility. Obsessed with the speed of Sean’s assaulter, I’d drive down our street trying to imagine slamming into a child. At night, I’d kneel beside the spot where Sean had landed, and I’d try to pray the old prayers I had learned in Catholic school, forgetting the words, hoping that my loony neighbor didn’t come out and find me crying on her lawn.

I kept asking myself, What have I done? With Sean in traction, in a druggy fuddle? With Mary bleary-eyed beside his hospital bed? With a cocky young doctor wearing a blue blazer over his scrubs telling us Sean would need a cast from ankle to chest, that he might have lifelong back problems? I suddenly regretted the move south, the new house—it all seemed idiotic. We almost lost one of our boys! What kind of negligent father lets his kid chase a ball into the street? As a reporter, I’d written that child-hit-by-car story more than once, and I’d think: Where were the parents? Well . . . where was I? Drinking beer, listening to surf music—music that would forever remind me of my life’s worst day.

Though I’d spent only a few hours at a hospital for my own injuries—severed fingertip after waterskiing, broken hand from a badly fought fight—I’d visited my wildman brother a few times: motorcycle accidents, a skimobile accident, his infamous forty-foot fall off a ski lift. The worst hospital visits had been for my mom (head injury after I graduated college) and my sister (a stroke a year after Mary and I got married). Sitting beside Sean’s bed, I desperately wished I could talk with my mom or sister, hold their hands, hug them.

Or at least laugh with them about what a terrible patient Sean was, sometimes hilariously so.

“Is this some kind of joke?” he’d yell, when his leg, locked in its traction device, ached and itched. Like a cranky old man, he’d shout to the nurses, “Somebody get in here and fix this.” To the cocky ER doc in the blazer, he’d complain, “You don’t know what it’s like!” Had he told the doctor to shove a stethoscope up his ass, I would not have blinked.

Though the ER doctor warned that Sean might need to spend months in a half-body cast, a doctor friend helped us find a well-respected orthopedic surgeon, with the reassuringly biblical name of Moses, who told us there was no need for the body cast. “That’s how we used to do things,” he said with authority. Instead, he wanted to operate immediately. The procedure, inserting two foot-long pins called “femoral IM nails” into Sean’s shattered thighbone, took two hours, and Moses came out drenched in sweat.

When I finally asked Sean to describe what he remembered about the accident, he told me he’d looked both ways, walked into the street, picked up the ball, then saw the car coming and assumed it would stop. When it didn’t, he tried to jump. The EMTs told me the momentum from his half jump likely saved his life. After bouncing off the hood, Sean flew at an angle, into the neighbor’s yard instead of straight onto the pavement, where a head injury might’ve killed him.

Sean remembered flying. And he remembered dying, just briefly. He described a white light, following it, then stopping and turning back. But first, there was an old man . . . “He had white hair. He was nice,” Sean said. “I wasn’t afraid.”

Leo, meanwhile, would be haunted by what he saw. Years later, I’d find the brave three-page school essay he wrote about that day, a portion of which . . .

“He’s dead. My one and only brother is dead. . . . They put him on a stretcher and took him away. And I stood on the porch. Alone.”

In the hazy days that followed, Mary and I found ourselves mulling yet another big change, a reactionary pivot. As usual, we were in sync in our impetuousness.

The day Sean was released from the hospital, we all went for a drive. Winding along a pretty country road, Sean’s wheelchair in the back, we passed a FOR SALE sign: LIVE IN THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS. 2.5 BEAUTIFUL ACRES WITH VIEWS. Mary and I exchanged looks—Well?—found the house, knocked on the door, got a tour from the owner. Wheeling Sean around the property, past gardens and fruit trees, watching Leo scamper across a green-carpet lawn, I thought: this is it. This is where we’ll keep our children safe.

We sold the tainted downtown house and relocated our boys yet again—the fourth time in six years—setting in motion a whole new trajectory.