Half a Life: A Memoir (7 page)

During a break, I headed alone down the courthouse hallway to get a Coke. Teenage housewives and their husband-tyrants; a napper hogging the whole bench outside a courtroom; pre-divorce couples irreconciling their differences publicly; facial bruises; some lawyer yelling drill-sergeantly loud commands at his client; a professional witness checking something in a briefcase, preparing
to testify for show and profit; teary faces, tattooed faces; a weeping thug and his parents against a wall; crying millionaires; one defendant poking her court-appointed attorney on the lapel. A whole different division of a city had been ousted and massed here. At least that’s how I remember it: the complete anthology of anxieties. And I was here, too, however I looked to these people, holding my plastic Coca-Cola bottle—a kind of affiliation with the bright and normal world—a few inches ahead of my body, like a lantern. All these people: all of our lives were in doubt.

Back in the Special Hearings room, the deposition quickly ran its course. A few more vague yes-or-no questions. Then: all righty, thank you, goodbye. Nothing would be decided this morning.

On his way to the door, Dad stopped in front of Celine’s father. (They’d met only at Celine’s funeral.) I was afraid for a moment that Dad intended to punch him.

“He’s a prince, this guy,” Dad told our insurance company’s lawyer, and smiled warmly.

This was not sarcasm. Dad grinned and patted Mr. Zilke’s shoulder. This was nervousness, forced joviality. Emotion pressed a dark horizontal wrinkle across Mr. Zilke’s scalp. But with forced appreciation, Mr. Zilke said hi and thank you. It was all very strange. Mr. Zilke’s eyes were dry. He was taller than I’d remembered. The Zilkes’ lawyer turned to me with his fat, meaningless face. Everyone left.

Driving home, I asked Dad: “So, listen, why’d you do that? I mean, a
prince
?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Dad couldn’t tamp down, or maybe didn’t even know about, his smile. “I guess I didn’t have any idea what to say. It was like, I almost forgot he was suing us for a second. I remembered how nice he’d been at the funeral.”

Being friendly to Mr. Zilke felt, somehow, very natural. Back at college, I needed to act that way, too. My thoughts about Celine now were about honoring her memory, however privately. Every time I thought of Celine’s parents blaming me for the death they’d promised to absolve me of, I felt tender toward them.

But when I speculated that maybe they
didn’t
blame me, but instead were just trying to wreck my life for money—or that maybe they were simply and totally ruined, which made them not even quite know what they were doing—at those times I’d orbit around my sadness and guilt, and agonize. Mr. Zilke had brought me iced tea in a room where—for the first time, among adults—I knew I was hated.

I did not blame them for suing me. I pictured the Zilkes standing over Celine in some awful white hospital room just before their daughter died. The father with the terrible pinch of loss in his mouth, trying to will Celine to wake up, to somehow go back and say
Be careful
and
Look both ways
. The mother gently squeezing the bumps of Celine’s feet under hospital covers. Or wanting to get up from the bedside chair and stretch but being afraid to move. I saw her parents conferring together over the bleakest decisions, signing forms, crying, working not to look upset—because
wasn’t there maybe an off chance that Celine could perceive their sadness, or their fear? Mr. Zilke palming smooth the rumples in his dying daughter’s bedding. How could anyone blame these people for anything?

Amy Hempel has a story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” I read it a few years after college, and then read it again from the beginning immediately after I’d finished. Early and in passing, the narrator tells a very sick friend about a chimp whom someone had taught sign language. The story doesn’t analyze sadness so much as prod it and poke at it. Near the end, the sick friend dies and the story goes out like this, once the narrator is left alone:

I think [back to] the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

3

“Bear your griefs yourself …”

—
As You Like It

For years, the court case just dragged its slow length along. Nothing lawsuit-related would be going on, then I’d get word of a coming deposition—which then for some reason would be postponed, indefinitely. It seemed random, like when a dark sky decides not to rain. But even as our case would disappear around a corner, I could sense it wending its way—spreading its shadow, big and cold, inside the parts of me where Celine still was.

My old friend Jim attended Boston University, not far from Tufts. I could talk accident stuff to Jim, because he already knew. It was a bit of social math; I couldn’t lose anything by it, because the crash already shaped how he saw me.

All the same, I talked to him about it exactly once.

Sophomore year and Christmastime. I was nineteen. Jim and I waited together at Logan airport for a flight home. I admitted, or tried to admit, that the painful fact of Celine’s parents being out there, someplace, just seething, hating me, blaming me for their daughter’s death, made me just … made me just …

How could I put words to the thick, gloomy
thing
that covered my mind—this nullity that even all these years
later, when I call up that airport confession, makes it all play a little extra darkly in my brain’s theater? This was the same pain, the same whole-soul despair, that got me thinking—mainly theoretically, in an informal way—about committing suicide.

I felt in contact with the Zilkes’ hate, a long-distance communication between us, like a dispatch sent over telephone wire: a future, a jinx, message received. This silent communication with the Zilkes felt like the truest words anyone had said to me since the accident. The only unmuffled thing—what I’d waited to hear the whole time.
You did this. You alone are responsible
.

I didn’t cry when talking about this to Jim. I just felt very, very sad. Tears came quickly and readily at movies—even the dumbest movies—and at commercials. (Even the most obvious: family gatherings, a new mayonnaise sampled at an outdoor table, or an affordable phone service—and I found myself reaching for the Kleenex. A man and woman taking each other’s arms after leaving an especially understanding slow-motion bank, walking down a moody, populated street with smiles on their faces, and I was a puddle.) But I never cried about things in my own life. They seemed too small. And I never cried about Celine.

Jim listened carefully as I chattered on about the Zilkes. Holiday passengers circulated around, their belongings on stands and wheels: the flustered, the ardent, the frowning, the greeters and the greeted, the intersections of lives and plans at an airport.

“What dicks they are,” Jim said.

My thought was—
no!
“I think her parents just don’t have any idea what to do,” I said. How would
he
act in their place?

Jim shook his head no. He put his hand on my biceps; I could feel the fingers through the wool. College was teaching all of us not to be so shy about touching, that contact was what adults did more of than children.

“Darin, dude, everyone knows how you feel. Don’t beat yourself up. Her parents are already willing to beat you up for you,” he said. “Those dicks.”

I gave a small, gutless laugh and changed the subject. I very badly wanted to stand up for the Zilkes but didn’t even try.

And then I was twenty and not talking about it at all, not even to people like Jim. That year I remember as one peeled of emotion. I didn’t identify with the Zilkes’ anger anymore. I really wasn’t feeling at all, just finishing classes, closing books and subjects forever.

I belonged to no support groups, but still I somehow fell into the
serenity now
traps of rationalization and cop-out. It was easy to do. I had, of course, that journal entry. I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody’s pretty
much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.

At twenty-one I was studying in London, where avoidance was even easier. An ocean between me and the person who had done this.

Turning up a collar to Leicester Square fog, swigging one-pound lagers in fireplace pubs—these were just a very few of the uncountable experiences that Celine would never have. Every time I realized this (which was often) it came as a numbness that seemed to match the London weather: as though Celine was merely some girl I’d vaguely known in high school with very bad luck. I remember walking alone down British streets that directed everyone to Look Right, Look Left. This simple pavement advisory struck me, for pretty obvious reasons, as buzzing with whole realms of meaning.

The lawsuit still loomed over me. But I had Celine’s journal entry. I relied on assumptions I made about it. The assumptions seemed burnished and solid, and I wouldn’t have gotten through life without them.

And now I was at the end of my early twenties, spending a year in Colorado, moving to Manhattan. A different city than Boston or London, and certainly there was a much higher voltage to New York than you feel on Long Island—even just walking around the giant metal forest in whose shadow we all lived. The strangest thing about coming to Manhattan after a life in the suburbs: it’s never really dark outside. Not ever. At any hour, there are lights in the street,
cars on the road, a window bright with a person moving sleepily inside—changing a TV station, sitting down to a computer with a coffee. No matter what you’re doing in New York you’re not the only one, and the absurdity is that this movement and buzz makes you feel especially anonymous. People living too close to and too far from one another at the same time. As it was with me. Because I still told nobody, who really knew me here? How would I find out who else was like me?

My accident was the deepest part of my life, and the second-deepest was hiding it. This meant certain extra steps. Never introducing high-school friends to new friends. Never taking anyone home to Long Island. (I didn’t want my parents to learn what I still felt about the crash—and I didn’t know
what
it was that I felt, whether it was shame or guilt or anger. Plus, asking my family not to mention it would have started a conversation that would have left them puzzled and sad. I’m not sure if this will make sense to most readers. I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion, in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.)

By now, the camouflage had become my skin. My friends wouldn’t want to know. Who would want to know? I certainly didn’t want to know. All I wanted was to hold my assumptions to the light, and to watch them sparkle in their facets, as all sham gemstones do.

Through all this, there was the courthouse threat of financial devastation—a thief taking up ominous position outside every job, every apartment, rubbing his hands together. Everything could at any moment be taken away because of the Zilkes, snatched from under me, desks pulled from my fingers. Her parents had found a very real way, I realized, to keep Celine with me forever.

During the gulp and wait of litigation, my distress sprouted a few surprising offshoots. I found the idea of people mistakenly thinking ill of me impossible to take. (This misunderstanding-phobia went even for your standard sitcom mix-up: if Diane incorrectly thought Sam did something wrong, I couldn’t bear it and often left the room.)

The accident had also turned me squishily obliging. I always cozied up to people—so that if they ever learned the story, they’d say: “He seems so decent and kind. How awful that such a thing would happen to him!”

I never really got to know my insurance attorney; I watched him grow older at wide intervals, like a frame-advance special effect. The case seemed to have stalled. He was now in his late thirties, when time begins to do heavier work on you. I was living in that jittery meantime where an accused can almost mistake bureaucracy for reprieve, where it’s possible to hope officials have simply misplaced the proper forms, let their attention wander, have clean forgotten. I kept this hope going. And then one evening it shattered against the blunt force of a lawyer’s phone call.

But before I get into that, I should explain in greater specificity how the trial had actually started.

In May or June 1988, right after the crash, my insurer—more or less satisfied that no jury was likely to find me negligent—had followed an industry-wide policy of offering “the deceased’s family” what insurers (charmingly) call “go-away money.” In fatality accidents, this is the minimum a company will release: a careful figure above what it believes a plaintiff might be likely to gain in court, but below the hassle threshold of an actual trial. The go-away idea operates on a just-in-case basis. “Like a hedge against a jury verdict,” the lawyer told me: no matter how airtight
the defense’s proof, no jury’s ruling can ever be predicted with utter confidence.

My insurance company put the Zilkes’ go-away figure at $20,000. That way they (and I) would avoid the “crapshoot” of a trial.