Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  I slept soundly.

  A police officer called the next morning to say that Celine had died in the hospital. It was unclear whether her parents, who had been on vacation, had been able to see her.

  My father answered the phone. The officer never asked for me.

  My surest memories of that day are the reflector running up the windshield and the sunshine in the cracks as Dad got me home. I can imagine the flash of impact, of course. Even if I’m unable to really call back much about it. But it’s not hard to guess at the terrible, scratched-out details.

  The truth is, anyone with a TV can fill this scene, taking snippets from the editing floor, plug-ins from the visual and sound-effects library we all carry. Pretty girl on bike, a shy little thud, hysterical windshield. And I’m somewhere in there too, trying to swerve, trying to disappear.

  The police, Celine’s biking companion, and the recollection of five cars’ worth of eyewitnesses all conspired to declare me blameless. No charges were filed. A police detective named Paul Vitucci later told the newspaper, “For an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into what you might call the traffic portion of the street, and she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he”—meaning me—“could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever.”

  I remember coming down to breakfast, and my parents showing me that article. I remember thinking two things. 1) I am fine. The sweet, marshy part felt—You made it. And the other part said 2) Well, that’s it, I’m in the paper for the world to read about, there is no hiding from this. And I was right. After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone did find out. One friend of mine who lived about an hour north was startled awake by his mother with the news.

  I’m sure my parents worried about me, but I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t think they tried to make contact with Celine’s family.

  Very soon I got to the article’s denouement: Vitucci, eyewitnesses, unprovisional absolution. Society was clearing me. But how could any reporter be so certain? If I hadn’t been with my friends, felt them next to me and in the backseat—if I hadn’t tried to point all of us toward something fun—maybe I would have focused on Celine, or driven slower. Or honked sooner. (Though I was positive that I had honked, when I’d first seen her inch away from the shoulder and into the right lane.) Any of ten different actions on my part might have led to an alternate ending. Maybe I hadn’t felt the right amount of alarm, just before the girl jumped across two lanes.

  On a map Long Island looks like a tailless crocodile with its mouth open. Its far shore yawns into a pair of peninsulas a hundred miles east of New York City, and the crocodile’s hind-end nestles right up against Manhattan. Not too far up the crocodile’s back sits Glen Head, my town: the patch of low, paved swampland where Celine and I went to school, at North Shore High.

  Manhattan casts a thin shadow onto Long Island. For most people, life in Glen Head verged on total disconnection from the city—ours could have been any suburb, anywhere—though when traffic was easy it took us just a half hour to reach tall and shaded Midtown.

  As you drive the Long Island Expressway toward North Shore High School, the city relaxes its grip on the land. Soon you’re in the middle of wide suburban ho-humness. Though western Long Island differs from a real country milieu in all kinds of major ways (traffic snags, no silos), it’s true that North Shore High—only a public school despite the upscale name, largely middle-class Italian and middle-class Irish—was small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business.

  Which meant many uncomfortable things. This wasn’t close to first among my worries and sadnesses, but it would be a lie to pretend it wasn’t somewhere in my thoughts: I’d violated the primary rule of junior and senior high—don’t get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. The thought of returning to school made me feel swollen and incandescent again. I was disgraced, I was blessed (alive and journalistically absolved). I would be cafeteria news, the object of a discreetly pointed finger or nod. I would be the heavy dark ingot from the adult world—the world of consequences—introduced into the nothing-counts ethos of adolescence.

  So here’s the next stage of guilt: when it’s about to become social. There were two parts of me that I wanted to keep above water: a respect for Celine, and a concern for her family. That seemed right and maybe even selfless. But the water that kept lapping over was this: how would people see me? How do I keep the accident from being the main thing about me forever?

  Immature, offensive thoughts—someone died.

  I stayed away from school for almost a week. (I’d already gotten into college, and so was pretty sure I was risking absolutely nothing by skipping all those classes.) The days after the movie-theater mistake and the announcement of Celine’s death I spent behind my bedroom door, talking to no one in particular. I was more parrot than person—a parrot in underpants and socks, repeating his one cry. “How seriously will I be messed up by this?”

  Which is itself, I don’t have to tell you, a pubescently egocentric thing to wonder. My concern about Celine, in those first days, was in large part really for that future version of myself—that he not become a shadowy and impaired figure. A week before I’d been eighteen and getting ready to push off for college, for love (I’d imagined) plus adventures with friends, then some cool and genial job. When my brain focused on losing all that, I became twitchy and frightened and horrible. At the same time, this anxiety triggered a new guilt: I should not be thinking about something so self-centered. I would concentrate on Celine’s parents, and next (after the shiver passing through who I was; after the cold squeeze in the throat) on nothing. The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts. I’d hear something distinctly: the hinge sound of a book I opened, or my own breath.

  One morning—Monday?—I left my room and went downstairs. A silent planet. Parents away at work, younger sister at school. I walked through the numbed rooms, stopping to read—because I was still allowed to take pleasure in magazines, right?—a Sports Illustrated. (Companies kept printing them, which meant time was still trudging ahead.) A photo of Danny Manning driving to the basket. How to face down a Nolan Ryan fastball. Can anyone fill John “The Wizard of Westwood” Wooden’s shoes? I’ve already read this stupid issue. And it was this second thought that cleared everything out. I was the kid I’d been three days ago. The morning passed with the sluggish, dusty feeling that comes to people when they’re loafing. But then, at the fridge, I was stopped by what struck me as a presentiment. Maybe I’d be okay right now if I could only get myself to remember—what? To remember or realize what? And I stood in the kitchen with a glass in my hand and tried to figure out what that what was.

  “We need to have you over at the accident site in a car,” said the Shrink. “What say you?”

  He was middle-aged, a gray and not very fit fifty—thrown together, it seemed, from sausage meat and behaviorism classes.

  “No, seriously,” he said, “that’s what you need today, is to drive that road again.”

  “Um,” I said. How could I just pop over to where I’d killed Celine? (This was, I think, four days after that nightmare morning. It also happened to be my first therapy session ever.) “Okay,” I said. I was blushing to the edge of tears. “Sure, I guess.”

  The Shrink—“Let’s do it!”—smacked the arms of his chair. And he sought, with quick vanity, the reflection in a big mirror opposite him. Just as fast he turned away. He appeared to have reached that situation of health where vanity meant you didn’t risk your face in the mirror.

  “Hey, come on now, Darin—you only guess? How about if I told you we’re going to go in my Porsche?”

  I swear this is what he said.

  West Shore Road follows the turns of the Long Island Sound like a tag-along sister. This Tuesday a.m. it had the dispiriting vibe of all empty beachfronts in the rain. Canadian geese bummed around the median where my own car, pre
tty much a few moments before, had slid to its stop. Where I’d stood and performed for those girls with their what-have-we-here faces.

  “Let me show you,” the Shrink was saying about his Porsche, “what this baby can do zero-to-sixty, in awesome time.” (This really was his method, but I’m not sure what it says about the profession—whether this is psychotherapy or just Long Island psychotherapy, where all problems can be extenuated by making good time on the L.I.E.)

  He stepped hard on the gas. The rain kept on as gentle drizzle, making an occasional plonk against the windshield. The Shrink ignored the street to focus his somewhat buggy eyes on me. He’d studied Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, and was trying to be the hearty Jewish man to rescue me. West Shore Road offers two lanes in each direction. Maybe my Ordinary People foreboding was just that I’d seen the movie, and so was on guard for any resonances. In any case, it felt less like my moment than a pop culture remake I wanted to avoid. The drops on his windshield—the Porsche really was aerodynamic—had reversed field; they were traveling up, shivering in little broken dashes. But the Shrink didn’t flick on his wipers. He futzed with the tape player, still eyeing me. His hair had Bozo-grade kinks at the temples. Let’s just say he failed to come off doctorially. His car, I couldn’t help noticing—I am Long Island born and bred—wasn’t the splashy 911 model that the frequent automotive name-dropping had led me to expect. Rather, it was a 944, what I knew to be the “Starter Porsche.” This model used Volkswagen parts. My hands were stuck in my jeans pockets, up to my thin sweaty wrists. Here I was, nipping along with a man who meant to save me in a souped-up Beetle. Cockeyed is maybe more accurate than buggy-eyed. But any man who tries to push into an emotional conversation—and to lead it to a very specific payoff—while entertaining the pleasures of driving really fast and dreamily on a wet road will of necessity seem bug-eyed. His stereo played “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” from the Footloose soundtrack. It was obvious the Shrink felt a large and human pride in his purring German go-getter. He pronounced the brand properly, with the vocal pirouette of a sha at the end.

  He decelerated—“Here?” he said. “Is this where?”—and even I noticed how smartly the eager little machine gunned down to lawful speeds.

  I followed the pointer of his finger. “Um,” I said. “Not sure.”

  If I’d tried to go beyond those short words, my voice would have guttered. I had already shared too much of what I felt and knew; I longed to feel and know more. “Maybe?” I said.

  The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun. I remember the fast-passing median and its luscious grass. I can still see the boring road. The Shrink slowed us even more. Some geese poked along the median, each in its own way. I went nauseous. The day had become grim, irreparable.

  “Okay, so?” he said, a wink of the profession in his voice. “How do you feel?”

  What could I possibly have offered as an answer?

  Then the sky bailed me out.

  “Hey, look at that,” said the Shrink. A long leg of sunlight kicked down through the fog.

  Miraculously, I could perform all the rites of conversation again.

  “I feel pretty good?” Somehow I didn’t let the tears fall. “Not bad?” My voice wasn’t even really a sniveling whisper.

  So I tried to give this a chance. I tried—after the Porsche edged onto the shoulder, stopping next to a sweep of West Shore Road. The Footloose soundtrack had forged ahead: first to “Almost Paradise (Love Theme from Footloose),” now Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.” After a moment of tiptoeing around the mood, the Shrink twisted the volume all the way down. We sat together in soft ticking silence. I tried to chuck my guilt into the landscape’s calm. I tried. And it was weird to be back here. Only days later, and it was already just a spot. A spot with geese and a spear of light.

  Your muscles can tense with hope. I looked around for somewhere I could entrust with all this emotion: the khaki stripe of sand a little way off; the clean bend of street that (in a guess) I’d picked as the exact place where the accident had happened; all the vast and true stuff that seems to be nearly revealed, but isn’t, when you take the time to admire nature—that is in fact never revealed.

  But a sickly paste of anxiety covered everything. I feared that by giving my feeling over to someone else’s idea of what I should be feeling, I’d lose it. Years later, at college, I would read a Hemingway story about a young man home from a war, and the words would be so right I’d see that Porsche and that median strip and my stomach would turn heavy:

  Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it …

  His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of …

  Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.

  Over the Shrink’s Porsche clouds were tapping together, and the sky turned dismal again. The occasional car passed to slide its lights over the road. I had a fresh, healthy thought: It was too soon for me to gain anything meaningful from being here.

  The Shrink turned a key, and his car snorted awake. “This,” he said, “was a help, right—this drive?”

  I lied and I nodded: It sure had been.

  His pink face (which for all I know wasn’t nearly as vulgar as I still need to see it) eased into the smile he’d wanted to wear all along. And the Porsche skimmed back onto what you might call the traffic portion of the street.

  “I knew it, Darin. It’s just a place. The accident’s just something that happened. This happened to both of you.”

  Still, the Shrink needed to get back at me for having doubted him. He did this, however, with the gentlest touch. “Listen, you probably don’t understand this yet, but therapy,” he said, “is a process, okay?” He turned up the music again. “You have to listen to your therapist.”

  It would be ten years before I’d try therapy again.

  That Tuesday or Wednesday, there had been a school-wide memorial assembly: Celine’s teachers, friends, and coaches giving tributes to her, the “girl who has been so cruelly taken from us.” I hadn’t had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all.

  Friends told me that, before the end of the assembly, a teacher stood from the crowd. This was a guy I barely knew and didn’t very much like. He walked straight to the microphone. It was a surprise; the teacher hadn’t been designated to speak.

  “Along with the sadness,” he said, taking the mic from the principal, “I know there’s a lot of anger here.” This teacher wasn’t a hippie, but he was given to wearing pullover baja shirts in his social studies class and I’d laughed behind his back many times. “Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community, too.” (Our school had about five hundred and twenty students total.) “The reports tell us he wasn’t at fault, and I am sure we can agree he’s a good person.”

  It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guy I didn’t really know, who was decent enough to perform a simple kindness, the kindness of remembering the young man whose well-being it would have been easy, at that moment, to forget. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of my high-school days.

  As I waited to decipher the forming pattern of accusations and consequences, I returned to class. It was early June, about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral.

  I was met at North Shore High’s front door with a stormy look from Melanie Urquhart, one of Celine’s friends. I had prepared for this, or something like it. What high-schooler wouldn’t glare hard at the boy who killed her f
riend?

  I had the hunch, as I contrited my way from class to cafeteria and back, that my day would be filled by these black glances. I was wrong. With frightened eyes, I looked everywhere, at everyone. And in the homerooms and corridors, there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviolability. Except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything’s normal, quoting lines from Fletch and slapping my book bag or calling me a dick.

  All the same, the inescapability of what had happened—what was happening now as I showed my face in the clogged thoroughfare between classes—threw who I really was into shadow, even to myself. It felt somehow like living at the last limits of objective reality. I seemed less real than the plain, plump truth did. Because I’d driven a certain road, someone who had been alive was dead. I had killed someone. And yet, that wasn’t the end of it. Because now the daily me was back: the residue of that accident returned to school. The shambling or smiling or lurking person who’d run down the girl. I remember the first time after the accident my name was called in class, the feel of pause and hush in the room, like deer scenting something strange. Everyone’s ears and tails flicked. Speaking aloud here meant, all at once, that I was a student again. I’d have to work to be as present, as definable, as real as the accident was.

  Before lunch, Jim—the guy who’d been such a jocular monster at the movie house—apologized and tried to explain himself. This was like that surprise tribute my social studies teacher had given at the assembly, a case of spot kindness. Jim was telling me that when we’d seen each other, he’d heard only that there’d been some kind of accident. And if he’d known that a person had actually been seriously hurt, let alone died, he of course wouldn’t have ever dared or even dreamed of, etc. Who cared what he said; his hands were on my shoulder. He asked three or four times how I was, and his grip on my arm felt good. When he saw I couldn’t answer, he’d interrupt my pauses. His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren’t right even as he couldn’t stop presenting them.