42. Sinclair
Sinclair
My darling Elyse,
The pie was delicious. Thank you for your grace. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to receive it, and it makes the following even harder to write.
I can’t fathom telling you this, but I can’t fathom omitting this particular sin when I’ve faced up to my others. If this is the point where I lose you for good, then so be it.
Here goes.
When I was fifteen, I was riding my mountain bike home from a tennis tournament at our country club in Locust Valley. It was almost dark, and I remember I was pretty psyched. I’d just won my game.
Anyway, the roads between the club and Glen Cove don’t have any street lighting, and they’re pretty dark with all the tree cover.
It’s not an excuse, just context. I went careening around a bend on a downward slope—I didn’t even ring my bell—and, next thing I knew, I was clipping another cyclist with my handlebar.
I was going so fast that I didn’t come off at all.
I just wobbled and rode it out. But then I heard a woman’s cry of terror and a crashing sound and then the most awful thud.
I remember I got up out of my saddle and looked around, and I could just make out this human-shaped lump, right in the street, with a bike on top of it.
And she was screaming in pain now, shouting, “Hey, hey! Come back! Help!”
This is the hardest part to write.
I saw her. I heard her. I knew she was in pain and in danger, lying there on that dark road, and still I turned around and cycled away.
I remember shouting back at her that I was going to get help, which I did, but the truth of it is that I was too fucking terrified to face up to having injured someone, probably badly.
I just wanted to get the hell away from her.
I got home a few minutes later and screamed for my parents.
My dad called an ambulance and got the woman picked up. They immediately called our fixer, who sorted out medical cover for her. It turns out she was a server at the country club who’d just finished her shift, and she wasn’t insured.
My folks told me very little except that she had a nasty wrist fracture and two broken ribs.
It could have been worse, they said.
I was brave to get help, they said.
They bought me a new, stronger light for my bike.
And that was that.
Last week, I contacted our guy and asked him to pull her files for me. I now know that her name was Maria Marchetti of Capobianco Street, Glen Cove, she was twenty-three years old, and she was fourteen weeks pregnant when I knocked her off her bike and left her there.
The baby survived. My parents agreed to cover her ob-gyn expenses in return for an ironclad NDA which, as far as I could tell, was excessive.
She didn’t even know who crashed into her.
And I went about my business as an entitled teenager with tennis matches to win and girls to woo, unencumbered by anything as awful as consequences.
God forbid any guilt should weigh on my mind by the time my parents packed me back off to school for my sophomore year.
Except that I’ve thought about that woman, and the crime I committed against her, every day of my life since then.
I think about her every time I see a cyclist. I thought about her every time you mentioned your sister.
And when I met your sister? Well, let’s just say that was the worst kind of mirror staring me in the face.
If the work I told you about in the last letter has helped me to be truly sorry for how I treated you, then coming face to face with what cowards like me do to people like your sister was what I would call a moment of reckoning, to understate it grossly.
I don’t want to go full “road to Damascus,” but it was another example of life serving up the unfiltered truth that I have been ignoring for far too long.
In far too many ways, I’m still that boy, letting my mom clean up my messes and having the gall to despise her for it.
Elizabeth’s take, for what it’s worth, is that I should separate the crimes.
I have to live with the way I handled my panic that night on the road, while the cover-ups sit squarely with my folks.
She said they infantilized me (another Elizabeth-ism) by sanitizing the consequences of my actions, especially the risk to Maria’s unborn child.
And, obviously, she was all over this as an origin lesson that has stayed with me ever since: I brought my parents a literal and moral crisis and they managed it into nonexistence. Seems that’s been my MO ever since.
I’ve been thinking about all this incessantly since my session with her this morning.
There’s a kind of sick relief in knowing you finally have to own something.
It seems to me that the shirking can be more exhausting.
And she also had compassion for the way I acted back on that road.
She said I should extend some grace to that shit-scared little guy who failed that woman so spectacularly.
I’m not sure if I’m capable of giving him that just yet, but I am capable of breaking the pattern, once and for all.
Which brings me to this. Even if you never forgive me, even if I never see you again—and that’s probable, given that you now know I’m no better than the motherfucker who hit your sister—there’s only one course of action, and that’s to right my wrongs.
I’m going to visit Maria Marchetti tomorrow.
Like the Vanessa thing, I’m not telling you to get brownie points.
I’m telling you so that I can differentiate between giving you hard facts—my way of putting my life into your hands—and making it your dirty work to clean up my messes.
You get to shout it from the rooftops about my darkest secrets.
But I’m the one who needs to make amends.
I love you.
Yours always,
Sinclair.
One other thing Elizabeth mentioned yesterday is that guilt can be a destructive emotion or a constructive one. If you ruminate on it for two decades, as I’ve done, it will eat you alive. But it can also spur you to act.
I’m working on the assumption that Maria Marchetti no longer lives at Capobianco Street, but, given that I’m trying to wean myself off Mickey and his nefarious skills, it’s the only lead I’ve got.
It’s only two or three miles from Fairwater, and soon I’m pulling up in front of a modest gray house with immaculate white-painted window frames.
I step out of the car and button my coat before bending to retrieve the ostensible reason for my visit: a thin manila envelope containing the deed of release for the NDA my parents made her sign.
I am on a fucking roll with these releases.
My head is swimming with emotions as I walk the handful of paces to the front door.
Shame and guilt and dread and relief and recklessness…
and an odd kind of fatalism. Because, even if the sight of A.J.
pulling up the night before last with that delicious fucking olive branch made me think I might, just might, have a chance with Elyse, last night’s letter was the death knell to any residual hope.
Sylvie Ward’s sister could never forgive this sin.
I’ve lost her, which means I have nothing left to lose.
I’m hoping, as I ring the doorbell, for a family member still to be here—parents, maybe?
Or for whoever took over this property to know the Marchetti family?
After all, this enclave, The Orchard, is still a close-knit community, even over a century after its creation to house the staff of huge Gold Coast estates like Fairwater.
But the woman who answers the door looks almost too good of a fit to be believed: early forties, probably, with the kind of tan skin and dark hair and eyes that could match her Italian name. She does a double take, and I know at once she recognizes me—the man, not the boy.
“Ms. Marchetti, by any chance?” I ask.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Maria Marchetti?”
“It’s Jones, but yes.” She’s frowning at me in puzzlement.
“My name is Sinclair Voss, ma’am.”
“I know who you are.” She cocks her head, too polite to ask the question, and then I see it, right inside the hallway.
A wood-framed photo of a good-looking, dark-haired boy wearing a blue gown and mortar board and a wide grin.
From his haircut, it looks recent. The son she was carrying when I hit her bike and knocked her onto the fucking road?
The son I could so easily have deprived her of.
It’s a leap to assume this kid was that pregnancy. But that doesn’t stop my brain, which immediately hits me with the most brutal of all realizations:
Thanks to my actions that night, my carelessness and cowardice, that photo might not be there at all.
That boy might not even exist.
It’s so physically painful that it slams the breath out of me before I order myself to pull it the hell together. I have no shame in business. No shyness, no matter how uncomfortable a conversation needs to be. Finally taking responsibility for my actions shouldn’t be any different.
“I realize this is out of the blue,” I say, forcing myself to focus, “but I was wondering if we could talk. Twenty-one years ago, you were hit by a teenage cyclist on your way home from a shift at the Lattingtown Club.”
Her eyes widen with surprise.
“I know this because I was the boy who hit you that night and didn’t stop to help. And I realize I’m two decades too late, but I’ve come to apologize, from the bottom of my heart, and make whatever amends I can.”