My grandmother followed us back in. “I take it the car was wrecked?” In my peripheral vision, I saw my mother shake her head: Do not ask. Then I saw that Mrs. Falke was still there, sitting at the card table smoking, and she said, “Alice, you’ve had us on pins and needles. Now, what have you done to your arm?” and my mother said, “Go upstairs, Alice.”
I didn’t look at my grandmother or Mrs. Falke as I left the room. I’d stopped crying after the nurse had given me the Librium, but my throat was still raw, and my eyes felt scrubbed out, my cheeks puffy. Decades later, I had a friend named Jessica who was much younger than I, and I once told her about the night I hit Andrew Imhof’s car. I almost never discussed it with anyone, but Jessica and I were very close, and it was around the anniversary of the accident, always a difficult time. Jessica couldn’t believe that I had come home from the hospital and gone up to my bedroom, that my parents and grandmother had left me alone. It was such a different time, though, there was so much less talk of feelings, and of course we were so unprepared; it was not the type of tragedy for which there was a script.
I entered my room without turning on the lights, removed my shoes, and climbed under the covers with my skirt and blouse still on (the cardigan sweater I never saw again—I must have left it in the car). It was impossible: I had caused another person’s death? And the person whose death I’d caused was Andrew, Andrew Imhof was dead because of me? There were things I worried about, tests, and the tension with my grandmother, and sometimes, when it occurred to me, Khrushchev bombing the United States. But this? It was, in all ways, impossible.
And I thought, Andrew. His smile and eyelashes, his hazel eyes, his tanned calves, my head against his chest at last spring’s prom. He had always liked me, he had never hidden it—the Dena years, I thought, didn’t really count, and why had I pretended they had?—and I had felt his recognition of me. People recognized you or they didn’t, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father’s job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you’d said months or even years after you’d said it. Andrew had always been kind to me, he had always noticed me. Who else in my life was that true of beyond my immediate family?
So why, when Andrew had offered his attention and affection since childhood, since well before Dena had staked her claim to him, why had I waited, holding him off? And I had held him off, I knew it now, and I’d known it when I was doing it. I’d been passive and ambivalent, I’d imagined that we had plenty of time. Then I thought that if he’d become my boyfriend earlier, we’d have gone to the party together; I would not have been driving alone.
The confusing part, the sickening part, was the double calamity. If Andrew had been killed in a car accident in which I was not involved, it still would have felt to me like a devastating loss. Or if I had hit the car of a person I didn’t know and the person had died, that, too, would have been a devastation. But both—both at once were unbearable. He was gone from me and I had caused it. In my life now, every year or so in a newspaper or magazine, I come across reports of similarly coincidental misfortunes: two brothers die on the same road on the same evening in separate motorcycle accidents, or a husband and wife, each in their own car, have a head-on collision. “How bizarre” is the tone of such articles, how interesting and unlikely. What are the odds! To me, these stories don’t seem interesting, and they don’t seem unlikely.
I DID NOT attend his funeral, nor did my parents. I didn’t return to school for a week, and then I did return, and very few people said anything to me that was either kind or unkind. An article about Andrew’s death had run on the front page of The Riley Citizen, but I didn’t know this at the time—my parents hid it from me, and many years passed before I was prompted by outside forces to read it. At school, there was no public acknowledgment, even in my absence, though after I graduated the following spring I learned the yearbook had been dedicated to Andrew. But even this was restrained, just a page that said IN MEMORIAM with a photo, his name, and the dates of his life: ANDREW CHRISTOPHER IMHOF, 1946–1963. Mrs. Schaub, my tenth-grade English teacher, slipped me a card and a copy of a Shakespeare sonnet, the one that starts “That time of year thou mayest in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” and I was not exactly sure what I was supposed to take from it. I could manage only to skim her note, and I saw the phrase “very difficult time for you” in Mrs. Schaub’s loopy blue cursive, the same handwriting in which she’d praised my papers on Beowulf and Canterbury Tales. That was what I still wanted, to be treated as a regular student, to be regular—not this fraught goodwill, or the surreptitiously curious glances of my classmates, or the outright animosity, though that was rare. On my second day back at school, I passed Karl Ciesla, a former football teammate of Andrew’s, in the hall, and he murmured, “There’s a reason girls shouldn’t be allowed to get a license.”
But generally, there was an aura around me, and I knew it: a stunned, ashamed haze that made me both piteous and unapproachable. I think this was why almost no one besides Karl expressed their anger, though surely some people were angry with me. Also, I had years of being a good girl to trade on, a credit history of pleasantness. Once during the week I’d stayed home, I’d been at the kitchen table, trying to eat a tuna sandwich my mother had fixed for lunch, and I had stiffened in my seat, panicked by a horrifying thought: What if people suspected I’d done it on purpose? That I had wanted, in some crazy fashion, to keep him for myself, or that he’d spurned me and I was seeking revenge? But no one seemed to think this, or at least no one accused me—there had been, after all, no obvious link between Andrew and me other than that we were classmates.
Really, almost no one said anything, no one suggested I see a counselor, not even my grandmother, who was a reader of Freud and Jung. The Sunday morning after the accident, my mother had knocked on my door and said, “Daddy thinks it’s all right for you to miss church, but we’ll pray for Andrew, just you and me.” I let her lead the prayer (the scab on my left elbow hurt when I bent my arms), but the lack of comfort I drew from it was my first indication that I’d begun to lose my faith. The next evening, Monday, my father came into my room and said, “I went to see Mr. Imhof, and there aren’t going to be any charges pressed, not by them or the county. Mr. Imhof is an honorable man, and we’re very lucky.” I was sitting at my desk, and soberly, he patted my shoulder. But I was less grateful for this news than startled to learn charges against me had been a possibility; so dumbfounded was I by everything else that I hadn’t considered it.
This was just about all either of my parents ever said on the topic of the accident. A consensus seemed to have been reached among everyone in Riley, including my own family members, that the best thing was simply not to mention it at all.
ONE PERSON WAS direct with me. At the end of that first day back at school, when I went to drop off books in my locker before going home, Dena was waiting. Unsure what I was in store for, I stopped a few feet short of her.
“I’m so sorry I made you drive to the party alone,” she said, and she burst into tears.
“Dena—” We stepped into each other’s arms, we clung to each other, and her tears fell on my neck and shirt.
“I know he liked you better,” she blubbered, “he always liked you better, and if you’d ridden with Nancy and me, it never would have happened.”
I took a step back so I could see her; her face was red and smeary. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Already, in the privacy of my mind, I had considered her culpability and ruled against it. No matter what events had led up to that moment in the car, I was the one who’d run the stop sign.
“I just can’t picture him, you know”—she paused then whispered —“dead.”
Instantly, an image came to me of that strange angle of his head, his face obscured. Why hadn’t I gone to him, why hadn’t I climbed through the passenger win
dow and across the seat and wrapped my arms around him when he’d been so alone there, amid the broken glass and ruined metal? There are many ways I tortured myself in the subsequent months and years, and one of them was wondering if he’d still been alive then, and if he had, whether human touch, my touch, could have saved him. But I do not think this way any longer. If I’d climbed in the car and he’d still died, I’d have been convinced that that, too, had been a mistake.
To Dena, I said, “Are people mad at me?”
“Robert thinks your family should move away, but he’s an idiot. I told him he should move away.”
Robert thought my family should move away? He had graduated the previous spring and was working at White River Dairy.
“What else have people said?” I asked.
Dena sniffled. “You don’t have a tissue, do you?”
I did; I pulled it from my bag and passed it to her.
After she’d blown her nose, she said, “When I found out, I thought the police were going to arrest me. I was so scared, I made Marjorie sleep in my bed.”
“I never even told anyone about our fight,” I said. “Dena, really, that isn’t why it happened.”
She bit her lip, clearly trying to suppress more tears. “I just shouldn’t have gotten in the way of him being your boyfriend,” she said. “But I didn’t think I could stop it, and that’s the only reason I tried.”
I NO LONGER attended church with my parents and grandmother. I had stayed in bed that Sunday following the accident, and then the next Sunday as well, and after that, it seemed they never expected me to return at all. In fact, and it was a painful notion to consider, my absence might have made churchgoing easier for them; the other parishioners wouldn’t stare, or if they did, they’d do so less intently. On the last Sunday in September, I waited until my parents and grandmother had left, then pulled the envelope I’d already sealed from my desk drawer and walked out the front door. I had not driven since the accident, and I had never driven this car—it was a newer model and a different color of the Chevy Bel Air. The day my father had brought it home, which had been the week after the accident, I’d heard my mother say, her voice anxious, “Black, Phillip?” and he sounded very tired when he replied, “Dorothy, it was what they had.”
It was a cool gray fall morning, and I drove out of town under twenty miles an hour, my heart jolting against my chest and my hands shaking. I could never have another accident, I realized; I would always have to be extremely careful. The streets were quiet and empty because everyone was at church—including, I presumed, Andrew’s parents, who were Catholic. The emptiness was calming. By the time I picked up De Soto Way, I felt confident enough to press my foot more heavily against the accelerator. I wasn’t at the speed limit—though I hadn’t been speeding before the accident, I’d never speed for the rest of my life—but I was close enough to the limit that a car behind me would not have honked. Luckily, there wasn’t a car behind me, and I was alone in a way I hadn’t been since the accident, alone in a way I no longer could be at home. Even when I was by myself in my room, with the door shut, there was someone on the other side of the door—my mother or father or grandmother, individually or in combination—and that person or those people knew. They might be sympathetic, but they still knew that I was in there and that I had done something hideous, however inadvertently. In other parts of the house, they walked and breathed and sighed and shifted, and their presence was always a question, even if they weren’t speaking, even if they were consciously refraining from asking me anything: Are you going to come out of your room? Are you crying right now, or not crying? When will enough time have passed that this misfortune won’t hide in every corner and wait beneath every conversation, including the conversations that seem at first to be about something else? Obviously, they weren’t really asking these questions, which meant I didn’t need to answer. And I was willing to fake it, willing already to pretend I was fine, that life was close to normal. I didn’t want them to carry my burden but preferred for it to be condensed and only mine, a knapsack of distress. Out on the road, though, beside the bur oak trees and silver maples, the hickories and elms, I felt a gratitude for my own insignificance. I was nothing but a nameless, foolish girl. The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn’t care what I had done.
I knew I’d need to stay neutrally focused as I approached Farm Road 177, and I repeated to myself, Turn right, turn right, turn right, the world reduced to two words, and then I did turn, and the site of the accident was behind me. I had driven past it without weeping or hyperventilating, without even slowing down. From there, I had to concentrate on finding the Imhofs’ driveway—I’d been out at their house once, for Andrew’s birthday party in second or third grade—and after a mile, I saw it, a black mailbox with a red metal flag, recently harvested cornfields flanking the narrow driveway.
The house was white with green shutters; it seemed a house where you’d have an unremarkably happy childhood. A swing hung unmoving on the front porch, and a red barn sat a few dozen yards back, chickens waddling in front of its open double doors. No cars were visible, only a decrepit red pickup truck of the sort farm families kept for driving around their own land but didn’t use on the roads. Holding the envelope, I walked up three steps to the porch. I set the envelope between the screen door and the wooden door and hoped neither Mr. nor Mrs. Imhof would step on it as they entered the house. I will never be able to express to you how sorry I am, I had written on the card. I know that I have caused you great pain. If there was anything in the world I could do to change what happened, I would. I had written five drafts of the note; one had included the line I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for my actions, but I’d cut that part because I feared it emphasized that I had a life still to live. This pendant is something of mine Andrew once told me he liked, so I thought it might comfort you to have it, I had written in conclusion, and this was the reason I was delivering the note rather than mailing it; I’d removed the silver heart from its chain before inserting it in the envelope.
I was not quite back to the car when I heard a sound behind me, the lift and release of a door opening, and I whirled around mostly in terror and also, just a little, in hope; under my surprise and alarm was the irrational idea that it might be Andrew himself. Even when I was facing the house again, the difficulty of seeing the features of the figure behind the screen prolonged this glimmering impossibility. And then I realized it was Pete Imhof. Of course it wasn’t Andrew.
He didn’t open the screen door right away, but stood there for several beats, watching me, I suppose. I was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing a shirt. At last, pointing, I called out, “I left a note.” And then, absurdly, with my palm against my chest, “It’s Alice Lindgren.”
He pushed the screen door open, and because it seemed like I ought to, I walked toward him, reclimbing the steps, standing before him on the porch. He was indeed shirtless—he was wearing light brown corduroys, no socks, and no shoes—and though I tried to avert my eyes, I noticed the dark hair covering his chest. It was heavier around his nipples, which were broad and ruddy, and it thickened in a line down his sternum to his navel, and then down farther, where he had a pinch of flesh hanging over the waist of his pants. His arms were also lined with dark hair, except at the tops, where he was visibly muscular. My father, who was the only man I’d seen shirtless on a regular basis, including the previous summer at the motel pool in St. Ignace, was muscular, too—at five-nine, he had a compact muscularity—but his chest was white and almost hairless.
“My parents aren’t here,” Pete said. “They’re at church.” His face was stubbly and puffy. I had thought often of Mr. and Mrs. Imhof during the last few weeks, but the truth was that I had hardly considered Pete. I hadn’t even been sure that he still lived in Riley, though I realized in this moment that the car I’d plowed into had most likely been his.
“I thought�
�” I hesitated. “It seemed like it would be better if I came when they weren’t around. I’m sorry if I woke you up.” And then, predictably, there was the silent echo of the bigger apology I owed him: I’m sorry I killed your brother.
“You didn’t wake me up,” Pete said.
I looked down (there even was dark hair on his bare toes) and then up again at his eyes, hazel, like Andrew’s. “I’m sorry,” I said, and we held each other’s gaze, and then I said, “for what I did,” and to keep from crying, I looked down and pressed together my thumbs and forefingers. I couldn’t cry in front of an Imhof.
“Everyone knows that,” Pete said.
I looked up.
“Everyone knows you’re sorry.” His voice was neither harsh nor compassionate; it was matter-of-fact. And though I don’t think he doubted my sincerity, I felt a wish to convince him of it that seemed in itself insincere. “You don’t have to write my parents a letter,” he said. “They already know. My mother feels bad for you.”
“Should I take it with me?”
He shrugged. We both were silent for almost a minute. Finally, he said, “Are you waiting for me to invite you in?” I was about to say no when he added, “You can do what you want,” and he turned and walked back into the house. I followed him. Not by a lot but by a little bit, it seemed less awkward than just leaving.
No lights were on inside, and as we passed a dim living room, I observed a stone fireplace, a settee covered in navy blue velvet, and an old-looking upright piano. A wooden staircase with a shiny banister rose from the first-floor hall, but we took a second staircase, cramped and carpeted, that we entered from the kitchen. At the top of the steps were two doors, one closed and one open, and in the room with the open door was the first lit lamp I’d seen in the entire house. It was a small room with a large bureau, a little desk, a single bed (this was unmade, the white sheets and brown spread rumpled at its foot, a paperback book open and facedown against the mattress), and a nightstand on which rested the lamp and an ashtray.
American Wife Page 8
