“Okay,” Mack said as we walked back slowly toward the circling lights. Night had fallen. The temperature was dropping. I felt shivery. Light-headed. Afraid.
“Tell Kurt I need him,” I said to Mack.
“Hold it a sec,” he replied, stopping a dozen yards from the group of men who were huddled next to the cruisers. Mack put his hand on my shoulder, restraining me.
“And you were there, too, Denny,” I heard Kurt say. “How many beers did you put away?”
“That’s not the point,” Chief Tyler said. “I’m sorry, but this is the scene of an accident. There’s been a fatality. It’s my job to follow certain procedures. You know that.”
“Well, to hell with you and your job!” Kurt said. “You are not putting my brother through that right now, okay?”
“Don’t make this hard.”
“I’m not. I’m making it easy,” Kurt told him. “You want to talk about procedures? Why do I think that deputy police chiefs—Denny, for one—should not be chugging back beers half an hour before they go on duty?”
“Now, listen here, Kurt—”
“No, you listen,” my brother said, cutting him off. “We were all drinking. We all had a few. We were playing ball and it was hot. It was totally fucking harmless, okay? You even try to give my brother a Breathalyzer when his little baby is lying over there in the woods and I will personally see that Denny gets thrown off the force, okay?”
“Jesus,” the chief said. “I don’t know—”
“Sure you do,” Kurt said, his tone changing. “We all know the right thing to do here.” I’d never heard my brother sound like this before—like my dad. Glad-handing. Hailfellow. Selling something. “We all know this is a tragedy. You start laying blame where it doesn’t belong, and the tragedy just gets a whole lot worse. None of us want that to happen, do we? This is your town, Chief. It’s our town. And I think we have the right to decide the best procedure at a time like this. I think everybody understands that, right?”
I don’t know what the response would have been if Kurt and I weren’t Jay Horigan’s boys. If Horigan Lumber and Hardware wasn’t one of the bigger businesses in the area. But it’s not just that. The Horigans go back a long way in Covington; my great-granddad Harold helped build the town hall and Grange. At this point, I’d say we’re related by blood or marriage to at least a third of all the local families. The wealthy weekenders may have more money, but the Horigan name is right up there in the social hierarchy of Covington. We’re hardworking, successful, civic-minded. Dad just about underwrites the annual volunteer fire department steak roast every year.
How was Chief Tyler—whom my father, a longtime selectman, helped hire away from the Northridge force a dozen years ago—supposed to stand up to someone like Kurt? Someone who, putting everything else aside, the chief surely thinks of as one of the good guys. We all do. And Kurt is the best. The straightest arrow. Yet here he was demanding that the rules be bent. No, be broken. And he’d asked, it seemed to me, reflexively, without thinking twice. How quickly the lines blur. I felt sick again. Dizzy. I turned away from Mack, doubled over, and started heaving. The conversation halted as everyone turned around and looked at me.
“We need to get him up to the ER in Harringdale,” Kurt said. “He’s got a concussion for sure. Don’t you think Mack and me should run him right up in the cruiser?”
“Yeah, okay,” the chief said, sighing. “You don’t want to take any chances with a head injury. But you better get a move on. The state police are on their way.”
“I can’t leave her there,” I said when Kurt tried to pull me toward the Chevy Tahoe.
“I’m sorry,” Kurt told me, leaning in close. “But I need to get you away from here—now.”
“I’m not leaving her,” I told him again, turning back to the woods. I could see the little white blanket gleaming through the trees. Kurt grabbed my arm, hard, and wheeled me around. I’m bigger and stronger than he is. We both know I could take him if we ever got into a real fight.
“You want to totally fuck up your life?” Kurt whispered. “Is that what you want, Cal? Because that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t get the hell out of here right now.”
“No, Kurt, I just—”
“Listen to me,” my brother said, cutting me off abruptly. “There’s nothing more you can do for her. I know the guys are going to try everything, but I think they know the score. They’ll bring her up to the hospital when they’re done here. Whatever happens: I promise you’ll get to see her again, okay?”
We both heard the siren approaching from the north. I turned and saw the chief motioning to Cal: get moving. I let Cal lead me to the cruiser, open the back door, push me in.
“Go south,” Kurt told Mack, climbing in beside me. “That way we can take 206 across and 4 up. It’ll be faster.”
I sat with my head in my hands, sick and dizzy. When I closed my eyes I saw Betsy lying there, looking up, unseeing, at the starlit sky. Her mouth was slack, in what seemed to me in my confused state a look of wonder. I sat back up, shaking my head, trying to purge the memory. I turned to stare out the window as the fields and farms and woods blurred into a wall of darkness.
“I’m going to call Tessa on my cell,” Kurt told me. “I think I should just tell her that there’s been an accident. That she should drive Jenny up to the hospital and meet us there.”
A sickle moon dangled low in the sky. I felt myself drifting back to those first, hallucinatory moments right after the Jeep rolled.
“Cal? Did you hear me?” Kurt said. “I’m going to call Tessa, but I’m not going to tell her what happened. Okay? You’ll want to be the one who tells Jenny, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” I’ll want to be the one who tells Jenny. I tried to think about what that actually meant, but my mind skittered away from it. Instead, I listened intently as Kurt made his call. He attempted to keep his voice even and calm. But he was too calm. It was like he was already bracing for hysterics, and Tessa knows him too well not to pick up on it. I could just make out her end of the conversation:
“What do you mean? What kind of accident? We heard sirens on our way back from town. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen, just forget about supper. Tell everyone to go home. Drive Jenny up to the hospital in Harringdale. We’ll meet you there.”
“Oh God. What’s happened? Who is it? Oh no, don’t tell me—is it Cal?”
“Tessa—please.”
“Jenny’s in the kitchen. She can’t hear me. But you’ve got to tell me. I can’t stand it. I’ll be able to manage if you tell me. You know I will.”
“Okay, but I need you to do this. I need you to drive Jenny up to the hospital. Tell her you don’t know the details, you don’t know anything. But it’s really, really bad, Tess. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Just tell me.”
“It’s Betsy. She’s gone.”
The sound of Tessa crying on the other end of the cell phone was muted and distant, but it unleashed something inside me, something that roared right through me, that crashed through every fragile defense I’d tried to construct over the past frantic hour. Kurt knew. And now Tessa knew. I’d had the childish notion that for those who didn’t yet know, it hadn’t really happened. And that somehow I could contain it, keep the thing from spreading. But that was all swept away now, along with any last hope I’d been harboring that I would wake up from this nightmare. Wake up any moment. Drenched in sweat. But whole. Reprieved.
Kurt was right by my side the whole time I was in the ER. My memory of that hour or so is patchy, but I’ll never forget the moment when he told me that the coroner had made it official: Betsy was dead. When I didn’t respond right away, he asked me if I understood what he had said. I nodded, but I was lying. How was I supposed to understand? Kurt came with me to the X-ray unit when they took the head scans. But he slipped away after the doctor came by to let us know that I seemed to be checking out okay. No swelling or bleeding that th
ey could detect at that point. I should try to take it easy for a couple of days and be on the lookout for any headaches, dizziness, or nausea.
“Other than that, I’d say you’re going to be just fine,” the young doctor told me. I stared at him. He looked tired but relaxed. A resident, probably, stuck with weekend duty. A few hours ago, I would have appreciated his affable, easygoing manner. Obviously, no one had told him what had happened. It wasn’t his fault. But even knowing all that, I wanted to slam my fist into his face.
“Jenny’s here,” Kurt said, coming in as the doctor left and closing the door. “I talked to the head nurse. You two can have this room for as long as you want.”
“No!” I said. “No. Let me walk out with you.” It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what a total fucking coward I really am. Jenny and Tessa were waiting at the end of the hall, huddled together. When Jenny saw me, her face lit up, but as we got closer and she saw my expression she began to shake her head.
“No,” she said, shaking her head faster. “Please, no—”
“Jenny, listen—,” I began. A part of me still wanted to deny it. To allow her to keep hoping for just another moment longer.
A little more than two years ago, she’d given birth to our daughter, three floors up in this very hospital. We’d done Lamaze together to prepare for it. I was Jenny’s coach. We were both as nervous as hell, but determined to make it a natural delivery if possible. Jenny was into all that sort of thing and had convinced the maternity ward at Harringdale—not exactly the most forward-thinking place on earth—to let her bring in her own midwife and doula. If things got complicated, we assured them, we’d switch over to the traditional way of doing things. Their way. We put everything in writing; signed waivers. The whole nine yards.
But none of it was necessary. An hour after Jenny’s water broke, I had her registered on the maternity floor. By the time the midwife arrived, Jenny was seven inches dilated. I remember standing there, gripping her hand, waiting for the moment when I was supposed to start yelling for her to push. When all the agony we had heard so much about was going to begin. But the midwife just advised me to go down and stand at the foot of the bed.
“This baby’s taking the express train,” she told Jenny. Within minutes, Betsy came tumbling out: right hand first, uncurling and waving, I swear to God, to all of us assembled there to meet her. The midwife told us it was the fastest, easiest birth she’d ever seen. It had seemed like a miracle to me then, as if something had intervened—cut through all the pain—and handed us this gift.
Now this thing had intervened a second time—with the same speed and finality—and snatched our miracle back again. And the suffering I thought we’d managed to avoid hadn’t even really started yet.
“I’m sorry,” I told Jenny at last. “God, I’m so, so sorry.”
She fell into my arms and began to hit my chest with her fists. We both started crying, openmouthed, uncontrollably. We staggered—in a desperate kind of embrace—like two boxers in the final rounds of a fight. I kept waiting for her to ask me what had happened. How it had happened. How I could be standing there, without a scratch. How I could have let our baby die. But she just kept crying, her whole body convulsing with sobs, defenseless, battered again and again by each new incoming wave of grief. I held on to her for dear life, but it was as though some powerful undertow that I couldn’t feel or fight had taken hold of her—and had begun to pull her slowly and steadily down and away.
4
Jenny
I tend to go right to the worst-case scenario. It’s my default setting. I learned the hard way when I was growing up that it’s always safest to prepare for disaster. That way, you’re maybe a little bit braced for impact if those fears materialize—and so relieved if they don’t that you can actually make yourself believe that you’ve come out ahead. So when Tessa told me that Kurt had called to say Cal had gotten into an accident, I went immediately into lockdown mode.
“What happened? Where? Is Betsy okay?” I’d wondered briefly when we got back from shopping why Cal and Betsy weren’t there waiting for us. But then I figured that Cal had probably dropped by his folks’ place in town to invite them to join us for supper. He’s there every other day as it is—the Horigans can never seem to get enough of one another—and loves taking Betsy along with him. Now, though, when I searched Tessa’s expression for some kind of instant reading, I felt my panic start to escalate. Her skin looked splotchy, her eyes red rimmed, as though she’d been crying.
“Take it easy, Jen,” she told me. “He didn’t really tell me much. Just that we’re supposed to meet them at the ER in Harringdale. I’m sure everything’s fine.” She knows I’m an alarmist; we joke about it all the time. But her voice sounded thin and breathy, not her usual no-nonsense tone at all.
“You’ve been crying,” I accused her. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”
There were a dozen or so people milling around our downstairs at this point, more coming in the door as we spoke. Tessa had tracked me down in the kitchen, where Burt Mayer and his wife, Kaye, were helping set things up for an indoor buffet on the butcher-block counter that separates the kitchen from the great room. I was holding a party-sized jar of pickles and had been about to twist off the lid. Tessa took it away from me and handed it to Kaye.
“I’m going to have to run Jenny up to Harringdale,” she told the Mayers. “Cal’s been in some kind of an accident. No big deal, but I think we’ll have to cancel supper here. Could you let everybody know? And could you guys maybe hang out and keep an eye on Jamie for me until we get back? He’s right over there watching cartoons with the other kids.”
“You don’t want to take him with us?” I asked her. It was still fairly warm out; we had the screen doors open to the patio, but I felt my fingers start to go numb. Tessa would never normally leave Jamie with the Mayers, whom she doesn’t know all that well. It was beginning to occur to me that this wasn’t a fire drill after all; there was a real possibility that my life was burning down.
“No, that’s okay. He loves being with the big kids,” she said, taking my elbow. “He’ll be fine. Come on, let’s go.”
Tessa and I didn’t say much on the drive up. That right there was a pretty clear indication that something was seriously wrong; we’ve been talking basically nonstop for the entire five years that we’ve known each other. Especially at a time like this, I thought, when words could so easily offer distraction and comfort. But she seemed oddly intent on the road ahead. She leaned forward, her hands gripping the wheel, her body tense. After the uneasy silence had stretched on for several miles, it dawned on me that Tessa knew what had happened. Kurt had told her—and then made her promise to keep it from me until we got to the hospital. It was that terrible.
I wasn’t going to ask her what she knew. In fact, I suddenly became frightened that she might change her mind—and decide to tell me. Because if I didn’t know then I could almost convince myself it hadn’t really happened yet. And if it hadn’t happened, there might be something I could do to still prevent it or at least divert it. So I started to bargain with God. Unfortunately, despite my being a minister’s daughter, God and I don’t communicate all that much anymore. Actually, I think it’s probably because I’m a minister’s daughter that my relationship with the Almighty has always been fraught. From my earliest childhood, I had a tendency to confuse my earthly father with the heavenly one. They both seemed so distant and judgmental, so easily exasperated by the neediness and questions of a nine-year-old girl. If God is all-seeing, why can’t he tell us where Mom has gone? Since the lilies labor not nor spin, why do I have to do so much work around the house and take care of Jude? The answers seemed gruff and dismissive to me, obscuring rather than revealing the larger truth I was hoping to uncover:
“God’s not some kind of crystal ball, Jennifer. He works in mysterious ways we cannot begin to fathom or try to bring down to our own pedestrian level.”
So what was the point of
him? I wondered. I listened for as long as I could to my father’s dry and didactic sermons every Sunday. I sat obediently next to Jude in the front row of the Lutheran church in town as more and more of the pews behind us began to sit empty over the years. I tried my best to be good and obey the word of both my fathers. And for the most part I succeeded, that is, up until my earthly father caught me kissing Cal Horigan one night and forbade me to see him again. At that point, I started breaking commandments right and left: bearing false witness, committing adultery (which meant anything racier than holding hands in Reverend Honegger’s lexicon), dishonoring my father, and, though not exactly forgetting the Sabbath day, no longer doing much to keep it holy.
It all started, though, because I broke the first and most severe commandment: I put another God before his face. Or, more precisely, I made for myself an idol from the earth below. He was tall and big-boned with a macho swagger and a smile that could make ice melt. He was two years ahead of me and one of the high school’s superheroes: star athlete, student council president, an easygoing guy’s guy whom every girl I knew worshipped. I adored him, too; it seemed silly not to, though I assumed that it would always remain the kind of vague, impossible crush I entertained for Justin Timberlake and Leo DiCaprio, as well.
So when he reached down and plucked me out of the obscurity of the lowly sophomore class to be his date for the senior prom, it seemed to me that a miracle had occurred. There I was, riding next to Cal Horigan in his pickup truck, a wrist corsage he’d given me just about levitating my arm. It made the conjuring of manna from heaven or loaves and fishes from thin air suddenly seem like mere magic tricks. But the true revelation of our first night together—the thing that altered the course of my life and the constitution of my heart forever—was that underneath that cocksure walk and disarming smile was a boy struggling hard to find his way as a man.
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