by Ron Powers
June 12, 1998, was a Friday night in full Vermont spring, the end of Dean’s junior year of high school. The temperature had languished in the seventies through the middle of the day and the air smelled of wet cut grass. Kevin and his band had a gig that night in the gymnasium of a grade school a few miles south of Middlebury. By 6:30 I had the van packed with the equipment, which was usually stored in our basement—drum set, amps, mics, and cords. Kevin, Honoree, and I left the house and rounded up the other band members and drove them to the school. I helped them haul their stuff into the gym and set up. We stayed until things ended, at around 9 p.m.
Dean had other plans for the evening. He wanted to visit a girl—I will call her Amy—who lived about thirteen miles southwest of Middlebury, in rolling farm country. Honoree lent Dean her car, a 1997 Volvo. She asked him to promise her that he wouldn’t drink and would drive carefully, and reminded him of his usual 11 p.m. curfew. Dean had owned his driver’s license for seven months, since his sixteenth birthday the previous November. He had not yet mastered all the skills and disciplines of driving. He tended to drive fast, a sadly commonplace tendency among sixteen-year-olds. A week earlier, we had restored his driving privileges after someone had told us that he had seen Dean speeding.
Amy was fifteen. At her house, out of earshot of her father, Amy’s older half brother told them about a party nearby, a gathering of softball teammates a few years older than Dean, and offered to lead them to it. Later in the evening, a young man of legal drinking age would help purchase beer for the two of them.
We distributed Kevin’s fellow musicians and returned to our house not long before 10 p.m. Honoree and I stayed up for a while and talked, and then we went to bed.
The ringing telephone awakened us some time after midnight. This was the sound and the time of night that all parents dread. Honoree answered the call, and she soon told me that Dean had been in an accident. He and Amy were at the hospital in Middlebury. She hadn’t learned the extent of any injuries.
We agreed that Honoree would go to the hospital and I would remain at home with Kevin. While she was en route, Amy was transported to a larger facility in Burlington, thirty-five miles to the north. She’d suffered serious head injuries when Dean took a curve at too much speed on a two-lane blacktop road strewn with wet leaves.
In the span of a few seconds around 11:15 that night, I would lose control of my mom’s Volvo beige 350 GLT, and forever remove myself and Amy from the lives we once had. But like Otter creek the night drifted by like any other night in any other town or city and the wreckage was cleaned, Amy was brought to the hospital in Burlington.
Dean had been hurrying to bring Amy home from the party. She was already past her curfew. Earlier she’d called home, hoping to get an extension. Her father had refused it. This refusal placed pressure upon Dean—or so Dean saw it—to trim as many minutes from Amy’s tardiness as he could.
In the car with them were two other high school classmates who had jumped into the backseat, uninvited, at the last minute. Dean lost control of the car on a curve in the dark rural macadam. The rear wheels fishtailed to the right, and the car’s right side slammed hard into a tree. Amy, sitting next to Dean, absorbed most of the impact. Her head crashed against the window. The force knocked her unconscious and into a coma that would last for several weeks. Dean was unhurt, and one of the young men in the backseat suffered a broken leg.
An ambulance and a Vermont State Police car arrived on the scene. The ambulance rushed the girl to the hospital at Middlebury. Soon she was transferred to the larger hospital in Burlington for surgery. The state policeman administered a Breathalyzer test to Dean. The test showed that Dean’s blood did contain traces of alcohol, but that the content was well under the minimum for an intoxication charge. The policeman charged him with a misdemeanor for negligence in operating a motor vehicle, but he did not charge him with driving under the influence. This is a critical fact to bear in mind given the years of conflict that lay ahead for my son.
Honoree picked up Dean and drove on to Burlington. At the hospital there, she told me that she didn’t yet know the extent of Amy’s injuries, and she would call me when she had more information. The information was slow in coming. I sat beside the telephone for three hours, dreading the worst, hardly moving, not daring to leave the room, not able to distract myself with reading, crosswords, the computer—anything—until Honoree returned home at 4 a.m. Dean had insisted on staying behind at the hospital, along with the injured girl’s parents and stepbrother. He stayed at the hospital the next day, too, when Honoree and I drove up together. He wanted to be in the room with Amy, but was forbidden by her parents, so he came home with us.
Honoree thought to hire a lawyer, and we did. At some point the state’s attorney elevated the charges against Dean from a misdemeanor to a felony count: grossly negligent operation of a vehicle resulting in serious bodily injury. We never learned the reason for this. Dean had not joined several others in getting drunk at the party. He admitted to possessing alcohol and to passing a beer to a minor.
Dean insisted on making a daily trip up to Burlington for a few days after that. At length, the nursing staff allowed him inside Amy’s room, and he sat beside the bed of the motionless girl for hours. One day he asked his mother to stop at a jewelry store so that he could buy a present for his friend, who was still in a coma.
Minutes of waiting slipped into hours slipped into days slipped into months. With every day those first two weeks or so after the accident, I felt the anticipation of a change in Amy’s condition. She would wake up hopefully this afternoon if not this morning and it might take a few weeks for her to learn to walk again, but either way in a little while I can tell her how sorry I am, and I would be right there to support her and talk to her a million times about the whole thing.
At the jewelry store, Dean purchased a necklace and brought it to the hospital in a small gift box. He left the box on a tray near her bedside.
But I would not be allowed to see her for a long time after that.
This was because not long after he arrived with the necklace, Amy’s parents barred him permanently from her hospital room.
After three weeks of torturous anxiety for everyone, Amy began to emerge from her coma.
My friends would come back to me and say that they saw her and that she recognized them and smiled and waved to them. My heart sank every time I silently realized that she would never smile and wave to me again. I was confined to my house. Not because of the legal system, yet, not because of my parents so much, but rather because of the impact the accident made on me and the guilt that I carry to this day. I was scared of what others thought of me, who was mad at me, who my real friends still were, and what would eventually happen to Amy. I smoked cigarettes on my porch and began to silently learn a lot about the world and myself.
In those early weeks, even after she had regained consciousness, no one could predict how thorough the young girl’s recovery would be, or even whether she would recover further. For Honoree and me, our racing thoughts ricocheted back and forth between her physical and mental prospects and Dean’s psychological state, which had him pacing the house, head down.
I called Amy’s household weekly to find out how she was progressing. Her father’s tone was never welcoming, and on the day his voice fairly vibrated with iron, I stopped calling. Several months later I wrote a letter to Amy’s parents, in which I restated our regret for what had happened and expressed our hope for a meeting, reconciliation. It went unanswered.
We eventually learned some details of Amy’s ordeal.1 While in her coma, and for days and weeks after emerging from it, she breathed with the aid of a ventilator, a mechanical form of artificial respiration. She was fed through a feeding tube and spent months in a wheelchair. Assisted daily by her parents, she underwent five months of painful rehabilitative therapy to recover her movements.
Amy’s parents purchased Honoree’s wrecked Volvo from a salvage company. We never learn
ed the full extent of their intentions, but one of them, expressed in a request, was to place the car on the Middlebury town green and oblige Dean to stand beside it and be photographed and videotaped by the regional media.
Nor did we ever learn, for sure, the reason for the flawed reports on the crash that quickly appeared in Vermont newspapers and on the state’s sole network-affiliated commercial TV station (CBS), WCAX. The papers and the TV station uniformly identified Dean as the “drunk driver” in an accident that seriously injured a fifteen-year-old girl. Clearly, none of the news outlets had bothered to check the primary source, the on-scene patrolman’s record of the Breathalyzer test. Either they had defaulted to a standard supposition without checking the facts or someone had supplied them with the false information.
Dean would be described as a “drunk driver” in the press for years, as litigation proceeded through the courts. The misrepresentation infuriated us as it became settled truth in the state. We wanted to demand corrections from the newspapers and TV stations. But our lawyer cautioned against it. He worried that any sort of protest from us—as “flatlanders” living in a tony college town—might arouse resentment in the region, along with accusations of trying to influence the media. We let it go. This was a bad mistake, in retrospect. As the news outlets kept finding ways to renew the story, frequently by examining and reexamining the topic of adolescent drivers and “booze,” Dean became Vermont’s Public Enemy No. 1.
At a hearing a few weeks after the accident, the court imposed a house arrest ruling on Dean pending the hearing that would follow several weeks later. Now his isolation was obligatory. Most of his friends deserted him. Only one, a football teammate, continued to drop by. The effects of the order reached deeply into our household. Until it went into effect, Honoree and I could legitimately assure Dean that we were his allies, his advocates and protectors. Now we were his jailers.
I did a lot of thinking that summer. When I was at work, the only other place I spent the majority of my time at, I could take my mind off of it, but back home it consumed me. Time is what I thought about most. The seconds in which my life changed, the days before the accident, how I had gotten from point A to point B without choosing to get there. This was a new experience, and why couldn’t I go back, it was so easy to avoid if only I hadn’t called her, if only I had been sick that day, if only the Volvo had a flat tire, if only, if only, if only…
Dean’s daily reprieve from house arrest, and the only interruption in his obsessive despair, was his early-morning job helping to make bagels and serving customers at the Middlebury Bagel & Deli shop. The owner, Jim Rubright, an industrious and good-hearted family man, had hired my son some months earlier. Dean wanted to hold on to that job after the accident, and the judge allowed it, and Jim Rubright welcomed him back, a gesture of humanity and respect that our family never forgot. So every morning Dean continued to rise before dawn, put on his white apron and join Jim, his wife, and grown children making breakfast for the town. Of course things were different now. Greeting customers had always been part of the job’s fun for Dean. These were mostly people he knew: friends and parents of friends from swim team, football, church, school.
But now the routine exchange of eye contact, the taking of a customer’s order, was freighted with the unspoken. Many of the patrons, Dean was certain, now looked back at him with silent contempt. Here was the notorious “drunk driver” in the flesh. Dean dreaded this exposure. Yet he performed his job without complaint and with what I can only describe as gallantry. (Gallantry was and remains a part of Dean’s nature. Late one night, years later, as he and I crossed Kearny Street near San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in a knot of pedestrians, Dean trained his attention on a man in front of us who’d abruptly separated from the crowd, walked up to a young woman, and begun yelling into her ear. Without hesitating, Dean bellowed: “LEAVE HER ALONE!” Everyone around us suddenly looked as though they were trying to will themselves somewhere else. The man left the woman alone.)
And so returning to his job was a mixed blessing. Yet the work hours broke up the tedium of his house arrest, and, more importantly, the job pieced back together some of his shredded self-esteem. When his workday was done, he would come home and resume his thoughts. Inevitably those thoughts settled on the girl in the hospital in Burlington.
But it couldn’t have been avoided, and that is fate, which I have spent days wondering about. What I didn’t know back then though, was just how much of Amy’s life and my life could be ruined by the gigantic blaze that grew from a spark I created that night in a matter of seconds. I have a good feeling of how hard this was on Amy and [her] family, I can only try to imagine how hard it would be to live Amy’s life, all she knows is that things got really tough after the black haze that sits in the corridors of her memory from that time. So I can’t tell anyone what she went through, except it was worse than me, and what I can tell about myself was hard for me.
I cut myself off from a lot of my old friends that summer, I didn’t hang out with them at night, I didn’t go out on the town and do fun things, and at the bakery I didn’t want to wait on customers, I just wanted to work in back so I didn’t risk seeing anyone I knew, or who knew of me. I was worried about anyone seeing me have a good time anywhere, ever. I wasn’t supposed to. Not until I had paid for what I had done and Amy was all right again and I apologized to her. I strongly felt that, and never let anyone tell me, “shit happens” or something along those lines, because of how that cut me off the hook of responsibility, and basically said, “Well, you know, your right. How was I to know that would happen, its not really my fault, it could happen to anyone.” No. I was determined to stand and face the music, and own up to my doings. I am not a stupid person, and I can see right through a person who shrinks away from responsibility, and so through that image I had of what responsibility was, I made a sharp turn in the path of life I traveled.
Nowhere in this essay does Dean deny his accountability in the accident. Nowhere does he cast an aspersion at Amy, or try to lessen his culpability in any way. Nowhere does he try to refute the slander that he was driving drunk. His empathy for his friend, and her parents, permeates the lines: in his insistence, for example, that Amy’s ordeal was worse than his own.
Even though the police had not found him to be intoxicated after the car accident, the sad fact is that our son had become an underage drinker. Whether his use had made him a habitual “underage drunk” we never found out. The signs, or the lack of them, gave us hope. We had never seen him intoxicated after a night out, and at the party on the night of his accident he had clearly shown restraint—although even one beer was against our rules and against the law. Our lack of information on these matters may sound like indifference or parental incompetence, but if some means exists of monitoring a young teenager outside the home at night in the company of his or her friends, a means that doesn’t require shadowing the child or relying on his or her friends to act as snitches—either of which seems freighted with ethical and practical obstacles—then we have not heard of it. The alternative, as I have said—keeping a child under lock and key through the end of adolescence (however that might be determined)—didn’t seem like such a hot idea either.
We understood the lethal hazards that awaited any child crossing the threshold into adolescence and out the front door. We understood that we had little choice but to sit and wait until the child got home, if he got home, and that the following night, that child’s departure and his parents’ vigil would all begin again.
We knew of several strategies adopted by parents in our town and in the country. Home drinking was one: An underage child could drink, and even hold drinking parties, in the household, on the lesser-evil theory that the son or daughter at least would not be out on the road then or later. Whose responsibility it was to get the buzzed partygoers home safely was presumably worked out among the families.
Clueless though we were about alternative solutions, home drinking had never struck Hono
ree and me as a realistic option, although we could sympathize with the parents who allowed it. It was the unstated messages of this strategy that bothered us—that forbidden behavior was okay as long as you weren’t caught, and that liquor had no bad effects on the developing brain.
Our own zero-tolerance strategy was hardly foolproof. We talked to Dean and Kevin about the dangers of drinking and bore in on our simple but absolute rule: Not a sip. Anywhere. At any time. Not until they had reached the legal age.
Parents across time and space, of course, have marveled at how devoutly their children, otherwise programmed to rebel, obey such moral sermons and unenforceable rules. Policy established, we trusted. And sat at home, clenched and distracted, praying that one more night would pass without delivering catastrophe.
Dean himself shattered our recourse to fantasy. Weeks before the accident, he had told us, with an adolescent male’s typical defiance—but with the honesty intrinsic to him—that he and his friends had used alcohol. And would continue to use it.
What to do with that? Lock him in the basement? We protested his decision, and pleaded with him to be aware of limits. We even enrolled him in a weekly counseling session with a local psychologist. He joined several of his friends whose parents already had signed them up. Dean attended, but he gave no sign that his habits had changed.
Through all of this, there was Kevin. Our younger son graduated from middle school less than a week after the accident, and he turned fourteen that July of 1998. He remained a silent, absorbed witness to all that was happening. We watched him for signs of his own distress, but he concealed whatever feelings he might have been harboring. His trademark ebullience did seem to be lacking.
I believe that this was the summer the brothers began to forge their true friendship, a mutual understanding that elevated them to a level beyond that of childhood siblings. The process was subtly closed off to Honoree and me, and it probably proceeded without too many words between them. But there are other forms of communication. This was the summer that Dean mastered the guitar with Kevin’s help and began to play duets with Kevin. He had learned the basics over the past couple of years from sessions with Kevin’s teacher and then the guitar workshops. Now, increasingly, instead of sitting and smoking, he would disappear upstairs into his room when Kevin was gone and play for hours on end. Often he howled as he played, howled out his pain and his rage, making music that was angry but to me sounded coherent. Within a few years he and Kevin would be appearing together in coffeehouses around Vermont and later in Colorado.
