by Jackie Hance
Emma had already started going to an orthodontist and wore a palate extender as a first step to the braces she would eventually get. We had a drama every night as I took the tiny key and turned it in the appliance, per the orthodontist’s instructions.
“I’m gagging! You’re choking me,” she’d complain some nights, when she leaned back for me to make the adjustment.
“I know it’s uncomfortable,” I would say, struggling to do it right. “But you look so pretty now when you smile, and you want to have a beautiful smile when all the grown-up teeth come in, too.”
“I still don’t like it,” she grumbled. But because she was such a good girl, she always took good care of the apparatus, even when she woke up the next morning with her mouth aching. She brushed carefully and worried about hygiene. The orthodontist had warned us to stay away from certain foods that could get stuck in the wires, so at the movies, she walked by the popcorn and only allowed herself Tic Tacs as a treat.
“What kid goes to the movies and only buys Tic Tacs?” I’d ask, teasing her. “You’d be okay with a chocolate bar. Can I get you a Kit Kat instead of Tic Tacs?”
“No, this is fine,” she’d say, always cautious. Alyson and Katie made up for their abstemious sister by loading up at the concession stand and walking happily to their seats with popcorn in one hand, candy bars and a soda in the other.
Now I felt yet another pang of despair. I couldn’t bear to think that I had asked Emma to put up with a moment’s discomfort for the grown-up smile she would never get to show.
But maybe something else had gone wrong tooth-wise that I didn’t even know about. Once I started obsessing about the subject, Jeannine agreed to drive me to the dentist’s office so I could examine the girls’ records.
“You’re not going to find anything,” she warned me, trying to find the right balance between being supportive and sensible.
“I might,” I said, not ready for rationality.
But, sure enough, the dentist’s records showed that the girls had good teeth, no abscesses, hardly even a cavity.
“I’m sorry,” Jeannine said. “I know you wanted a different answer. But I guess it’s physics, just like everybody has been saying.”
Physics. Even if Albert Einstein gave me a personal lecture on energy and force fields, I still wouldn’t accept the answer.
I knew my pursuit of the autopsy reports and the medical and dental records lacked logic, but I had a desperate drive to find a sensible story that could explain the absolute senselessness of what had happened. I wanted a practical reason that I could repeat to myself at night as I lay in bed forlorn and sobbing. Fighting with Warren and at wit’s end about how I could go on, I needed a narrative that put all the facts in place.
Having grown up in the Catholic Church, I was used to homilies and simple stories where all the facts lined up: good and evil, an orderly world, God’s reason for everything. But my story now was all disorder and chaos. Good and innocent children were dead, and unless I could understand why, it felt like the world had gone completely off its axis. My nagging Catholic guilt kept insisting that God must be punishing me, which just added to my anguish. I had no idea what I had done to deserve such outsize wrath and vengeance.
In my search for answers, I suppose I also subconsciously hoped to absolve Diane of blame. Maybe that sounds backward. The media had already condemned her, and I could have joined right in, dumping all the culpability for the tragedy on her vodka-swilling. But I just couldn’t reconcile the kind Diane I knew with the evil Diane depicted by the tabloids. And I suppose self-protective mechanisms kicked in again, because if I’d allowed myself to believe that she had done this on purpose, I would simply have gone crazy.
Dominic Barbara’s investigator Ruskin started talking about exhuming Diane’s body to search for more clues. I understood the impetus, but I also knew it could backfire. Who knew what they would actually find in the quest to clear Diane’s name.
One day I called Jay Schuler, Danny’s sister-in-law, who shared my fascination with plumbing the depths of the tragedy over and over. For hours, we would ponder the possibilities.
Theory #1: Diane had a tooth abscess.
Diane hated dentists. One of the surveillance tapes at the convenience store showed her walking in, talking briefly to the clerk, then walking out when she couldn’t find what she wanted. Police speculated that she had been looking for pain medication.
Neither Jay nor I quite knew how to link the theory of the throbbing tooth to the final result. Jay thought Diane might have begun drinking to ease the pain, but I couldn’t see her chugging vodka in front of the children.
The facts pointed in one direction, but my heart pointed in another. I knew all about the toxicology report and the bottle of vodka found on the scene. But I kept thinking of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein: If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.
When it came right down to it, I didn’t believe Diane had been drunk. On the phone before the accident, she had slurred her words, but that could have meant a stroke or a seizure. And when I had spoken to her forty minutes earlier, she had been fine. The police report might have concluded that she had gone from fine to deadly drunk in forty minutes, but I couldn’t fathom it.
In one of our endless conversations, Jay reminded me of a case she’d heard of in which a fireman died in the line of duty; when tests showed a high blood alcohol level, experts testified that at scorchingly hot temperatures, blood sugar can morph to mimic high alcohol levels.
Theory #2: Someone in McDonald’s drugged her.
After Diane insisted on getting what the children wanted (lunch at breakfast-time), she made a fuss and spoke to the manager. Was it possible she annoyed someone—either behind the counter or in front—enough to take revenge? Some version of the date-rape drug would have knocked her out in the car. Maybe it sounded unlikely, but was anything in this whole event probable or predictable?
Jay spun some stories that seemed too far out even to consider. She told me about a drug bust at that McDonald’s involving some employees just a few months earlier, and a police officer, somehow related to the events on the Taconic, who had died under strange circumstances. She talked about the possibility of conspiracies and cover-ups.
No matter how far-fetched or realistic our theories were, we still had nothing but conjecture, and the bottom line remained: no simple explanation fit.
Maybe what kept the tragedy so alive in the media was its mystery.
“I know you need to find answers,” I told Jay. “But if you’re ever one hundred percent confident that Diane was just drunk, please don’t tell me.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I can’t think like that,” I said. “I need to be in a good spot with Warren, and hating Diane won’t help. I have to believe that she was the person I knew.”
I needed even the merest sliver of hope that something else had happened that day, otherwise I’d hate Diane and I’d hate Warren and then I would not be able to go on. Still, no matter what the explanation, the fact remained that Diane had been behind the wheel in the accident that killed my girls.
Seven
Warren went back to work in September, about two months after the accident. He owns a real-estate appraisal company, and since the mortgage crisis hit, he hadn’t been quite as busy as before. But he had a job, a place to go. In general, he wanted to get through each day with as little emotion as possible, and work allowed him a mental checklist to get through. When he got home, he’d have dinner, watch sports on TV, and go to sleep—another day without the girls completed. By staying regimented, he didn’t have to think.
I could do nothing but think. Endless questions spun through my mind, tormenting me. Had the girls suffered? Did they know what was happening as the car sped along the Taconic Parkway? What were their final thoughts? Were they scared?
I played and replayed each horrible moment in my mind. I needed to talk. I wanted someone to help me tak
e the pain away. But how could Warren do that for me when he was struggling with his own anguish? Our approaches to the overwhelming grief were miles apart. I looked to him for strength, but all I saw was heartache. We were both broken, but in different ways.
Love should be a balm in times of grief, but instead, being together just caused us more hurt. Every time I looked at Warren, I thought: It was your sister who did this. Your sister destroyed our lives. I couldn’t blame him for her actions, but there was nobody left to hate. Warren was in front of me every morning and night, and the anger burned. When I saw the misery in Warren’s eyes, I knew he couldn’t silence the chorus of guilt ringing in his own head. My anger and his guilt—the tensions between us grew in every way. We began fighting so ferociously that our friends felt uncomfortable about leaving us alone together. Anger, grief, guilt, and resentment are a toxic combination.
Warren started working long hours again, feeling better when he could keep himself distracted and his mind occupied. But his office is near our house, and one afternoon, I found him napping on the couch.
“Why are you here?” I asked when he finally woke up.
“I was tired.”
“You’re tired because you stay up at night,” I sniped.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Take sleeping pills at night so you can work during the day.”
“Leave me alone. I’ll nap when I want to.”
A ridiculous fight? Of course—they all were. On some level, the argument about his nap revealed my escalating fears about money. I didn’t have a job and was worried that Warren wouldn’t be able to work as hard as he had before. The deeper problem was that I had always turned to my husband for strength and now he had none to give. The early burst of courage and fortitude he’d shown had seeped away. He wanted to help, but he couldn’t take care of me anymore, since it was all he could do to take care of himself. As a man, he liked to fix problems. But this was beyond fixing.
One reason grieving couples break up is that simply seeing each other is a constant reminder of heartbreak. Warren would get up in the morning and hear me crying or see me upset and the rest of his day would be ruined. Sometimes I pretended to be asleep until after he left for work so that he didn’t have to face my despair. People told us we should work on our marriage and communicate better, but that just made us laugh. Work on the marriage? We barely had the emotional energy to work our way through a bowl of oatmeal.
What’s worse, being happy—even for a few minutes—seemed like a betrayal of the girls. Happiness became as dangerous an emotion to avoid as any other.
A few Sundays before the accident, Warren and I had gone with the girls to a baseball game at Citi Field. An ardent Mets fan, Warren had season tickets at the old Shea Stadium, and once a season, he’d treat each girl to a father-daughter date of baseball, hot dogs, and happy time together. Then Shea was torn down, and when the fancy new stadium went up, so did ticket prices.
That Sunday afternoon, Warren wanted to do something memorable with the whole family for the Fourth of July weekend. And for him, that meant the Mets. He asked our friends Mark and Isabelle if they wanted to join us, and when they agreed, he rushed to get tickets. It was last-minute, and he sprung for wildly expensive seats.
“Who cares, let’s do it,” he said.
“If it costs so much, shouldn’t we do something the girls really like?” I asked.
Too late. He had the tickets in hand.
“They’ll like this,” he promised.
We ate lunch at the fancy Acela Club at the stadium and cheered all afternoon from our up-close seats. The children jumped up and down and waved to their favorite players. It was the kind of happy-go-lucky experience that leaves you wrung out from sheer pleasure by the end. Warren’s enthusiasm percolated through all of us.
“An expensive day, but the best day,” Warren said as we fell into bed that night.
Looking back to that day after the accident, I suspected that I’d never feel such lighthearted elation again. And I’d probably never go back to a Mets game, because the associations would be too painful.
But in September, we returned to Citi Field. One of our friends, Paul Asencio, worked as an executive for the Mets, and he and his wife, Heather, had become intertwined in our lives since the accident. We sought comfort in them, as we did with so many others, and they responded. Paul and Heather must have looked at their own three energetic daughters and felt extraordinary empathy for us. With great warmth and generosity, Paul invited us and all our friends to be his guests at the game.
On a lovely fall evening, we arrived at the stadium and were ushered into a prime suite. No ballpark franks for us tonight—there was a bartender serving drinks and gourmet food piled high. As our friends milled around laughing and talking, Paul arranged for third baseman David Wright, Alyson’s favorite player, to come by and say hello to us.
David Wright! It was like being face-to-face with George Clooney. The All-Star slugger posed for pictures and chatted for a few minutes. Warren was over the moon. And then it got even better. Paul took us down onto the field.
For a big baseball fan like Warren—and even for me—it was like stepping onto hallowed ground. Warren’s dad came with us, and we all had silly smiles plastered across our faces.
Oh my gosh, I thought, my head spinning from the lights, the excitement, and the famous players tossing balls a few feet from us. I’m having too much fun!
I looked at Warren, and we both grinned. For the first time since the accident, we were having a good time. We wanted the night to go on and on. When the ball game ended, we hung out with our friends awhile, letting the high spirits linger. Several of our friends offered to come home with us, but we said we were fine. Not just fine, happy for once! We could go home by ourselves, no problem.
Still slightly euphoric from the excitement of the ballpark, we arrived back in Floral Park after midnight. When we had the girls at home, we always rushed back from an evening out so we could pay the babysitter and drive her home. And maybe we had that image in our heads as we went inside. But of course there was no babysitter to greet us.
Nobody. Nothing. Emptiness.
Just that sledgehammer of silence.
The pain smacked against me and I ran to the girls’ room, crying and wailing and unable to talk. Going from being so happy and light at the ballpark to such misery at home was almost unbearable. Was it worth going out if we had so much pain when we returned?
Warren tried to stay positive.
“At least we had one good evening,” he said, following me upstairs. “Aren’t you glad we went?”
“No!” I screamed, sitting on Alyson’s empty bed and rocking back and forth in agony. “This is much worse than if we had just stayed home alone.”
We began to fight—vicious, horrible accusations thrown back and forth. The pain morphed to anger that we couldn’t contain, and we screamed and raged at each other.
Isabelle and Mark came over to alleviate the tension and wisely stayed on, seeing how our spirits, which had soared so high, inevitably dropped so low. Yes, the emotional swing was almost unbearable, and so was the penetrating guilt. How did we dare allow ourselves to laugh and be happy and enjoy a ball game when our children would never have fun again?
• • •
After that outing, I once again resisted leaving the house. Big excursions didn’t end well and small ones produced their own kind of torment. Even going out for simple errands was fraught. The girls had so often been at my side for jaunts around town that every store I walked into evoked ghostly images. Looking in a window one day, I saw a shoe display and suddenly Emma stood next to me, pointing out the clogs she wanted as we laughed together about how cute they’d look on her. She wanted them right then, but instead I promised to buy them next week.
What was I waiting for?
As I stared at the clogs, my heart began pounding and I felt my throat closing up and the air squeezing out of my ch
est.
Should I buy them for her?
Unable to tell reality from fantasy, I started gasping and clutching at my chest. A woman called out to me to see if I needed help, but I ran away, arms flailing, and escaped down the street.
Yes, I need help, I thought. I need my daughters. I want to die and be with them.
I knew the symptoms of a panic attack—the pounding heart and the closed throat—because I’d had them before. Hyperventilating makes you feel like you’ll have a heart attack or die. For most people, that’s frightening and they breathe into a paper bag to get the oxygen flow under control. But I had no paper bag and I wanted to die, anyway.
Take me right now and I’ll see the girls!
I already felt like a freak, and panic attacks like this one just aggravated my sense of not belonging in normal society. Better to stay home and avoid the embarrassment.
Also better not to bother eating meals than to risk going into a grocery store, where every aisle was a minefield of memories that could blow up in my face. The girls and I had always shopped, cooked, and baked together; the joy of that had been so central to our lives that I couldn’t bear getting anywhere near the kitchen now. Right after the accident, I packed up my Cuisinart and KitchenAid and mixing bowls and gave them all away. I’d cook only for the dog. Friends still brought over dinner for us—opening the door to the baskets and casseroles that were left was a nightly treat—but our cupboards were bare. One night at about eleven o’clock, I heard Warren call Isabelle, our next-door neighbor, and ask if he could come over and get a snack.
“There’s nothing to eat here,” he moaned. “I’ll take any junk food you have.”
The next day, I thought about going to the small, local grocery so he’d have fruit or cookies. Then I flashed back to the Sunday afternoon just a few months earlier when I’d asked Warren to stay with the girls so I could make a quick trip to the market. He’d agreed, but as I headed out the door, I heard Emma’s little voice.
