Chapter 19 Freak Accident
Freak Accident
I would be home in Tallmadge for nearly a week before my mother would leave me alone in the house.
The first afternoon she did, rather like a sleepwalker, I went to the closet where my golf clubs once again were stored.
The police had not returned my golf bag (nor had they returned the target to the club, of course), but they had given me back my clubs, my golf gloves, and the tees and balls and the sweater that had been in its pockets.
I retrieved those gloves from the closet floor, the aroma—oh, who am I kidding, the stench—a Proustian madeleine of my years and years on the links.
I held in my hands the driver I had been using when I killed Kenny Foster, and stood on the living room carpet and stared down at an imaginary Titleist. My eyes rose up the shaft of the club to the gauze protecting the stitches on my forearms.
Once, as a little girl, I’d swung an iron in my bedroom and taken a divot out of the carpet. I wasn’t going to make that mistake on the living room rug, and put the club back in the closet.
It’s funny, the crimes I hoped most not to commit.
Ethan came all the way from Amherst for a visit, calling from a pay phone off the parkway in North Stamford, Connecticut, and telling me that he was no more than forty minutes away.
He was wondering if he could stop in sometime that afternoon or evening.
When I had asked what in the world he was doing in North Stamford, he replied that he was coming to see me.
He’d borrowed a junior’s car and decided to blow off the two classes he had that day.
I said I was happy to clear my calendar, an expression the lawyers around me seemed to use all the time, which was really no sacrifice at all since my calendar—if I had actually used one—would have shown nothing but blank spaces.
I handed the phone to my mother and asked her to give him directions from Exit 35 of the Merritt Parkway, and given that this was the man who had saved her daughter’s life, she was happy to oblige.
She wasn’t, I know also, wild about the idea he was over nine years older than me, but even she could do the math and see this was a demographic improvement over Theo Catton.
Also, he wasn’t married and he was even a student.
We sat in the living room, my mother with us the first half hour, a vague, almost unrecognizable smile on her face.
I was messy and flawed, but whenever I caught her gazing at either Ethan or me, the heartbreak I would have caused had I succeeded grew very clear.
My death would have killed her; not literally, but all but…
I thought of Sharon Foster, Kenny’s mom. I thought of his dad.
My mother brought him hot coffee and cans of Tab and ice-filled tumblers for herself and for me.
It dawned on me that although they had met when I had been at the hospital in Northampton, their visit had been brief, and my mother had been in a state akin to shock.
And so she was appraising him now, not only the man who was the reason I had lived, but her daughter’s suitor, something she had never had to do when I had been in high school: I hadn’t brought boyfriends home because I had Theo, and the most obvious involvement I’d had with a “date” in Tallmadge had ended with my taking a golf club to a car window.
Finally, she made an excuse to leave us alone and went outside to mulch trees.
(My mother hadn’t mulched trees, as far as I knew, in her entire life.
Either my father or the lawn service that mowed the grass and raked our leaves managed this chore.
The idea she was suggesting she had work to do was sweet, and I wondered if my attempted suicide had changed her in ways she didn’t yet understand.)
When my mother had left us, he asked, “You really set a door on fire?”
“Yeah. I did.”
He nodded. “Kind of badass.”
“You?”
“No.”
“Not even in Vietnam?” I joked.
“Nope. When we were pissed off at a lieutenant, we’d just frag him. You know, shoot him from behind while in the jungle.” My eyes must have revealed that while I hoped he was pulling my leg, I wasn’t absolutely certain. “I’m kidding,” he reassured me, and I smiled back.
“I can’t believe you came all this way,” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, we went to a bar, you learned I did drugs you didn’t approve of, I embarrassed myself by falling off a bar stool, and then we went back to Capen and you saw my housemates hated me.
Oh, and then I put one hell of a cherry on that sundae by trying to kill myself.
That was a truly terrible first date. After that, if I were you, I would have stayed as far away from me as humanly possible.
I might have transferred to another college in another state just to be sure I had plenty of distance.
Find a college in Juneau, Alaska, maybe. ”
“I’ve been on worse dates.”
“Not possible.”
“I was supposed to go to dinner and a movie with a woman a year ago. We never got to the movie, because she wouldn’t stop talking about how horrible it was we—by we, she meant America—had been in Vietnam, and how I was probably the only guy she knew who’d been there who hadn’t killed grandmothers and babies. Then she actually asked me if I had.”
“Did she know a lot of veterans?”
“I have no idea. And, one time, when I was painting houses, a client had a sister, and I was fixed up with her. She lived in a commune, which was fine. Remember, I’m from Vermont. I mean, I’m no fan of hippie ratatouille—”
“What is hippie ratatouille?”
“You know how some dealers stretch their dime bags of weed with oregano? Hippie ratatouille is the reverse: you stretch your oregano with, I don’t know, a dime bag of weed.”
“Wow. Putting pot in the pot.”
“There you go. Anyway, the woman was showing me the commune. The goats and the group’s plans to bring cheese someday to the farmer’s market.
The chickens. The wild blackberries. After no more than forty-five minutes, she asked if I’d—and these were the words she used—father a baby for her.
You know, impregnate her. And then, if I wanted, join the commune.
Or not. Go away, if that was my desire, and leave her and the kid alone.
Wanted my sperm because she liked my eyes and bone structure, but didn’t believe in a traditional family with two parents. Thought it was archaic.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Maybe. But to want me to be the father of her child after forty-five minutes? Not great judgment. Kind of crazy.” Then, suddenly, he smiled at me and said, “See? I do have a type.”
For a while, Ethan and I tiptoed scrupulously away from the reality that one and possibly two trials loomed before me.
He wasn’t going to bring it up to the girl who’d slashed her wrists.
And so I did. I told him that I didn’t see me pleading to a lesser criminal charge, given that Harry Fallows had been the idiot who’d removed the target, not me, and then he’d had the audacity to try to frame me.
Moreover, I didn’t want to expose my parents or me to even greater compensatory or punitive sums in the civil suit.
“And that will be this winter? The criminal trial?” he asked.
I nodded. “Maybe February or March. My dad was willing to put down money for the spring semester at Smith, but they weren’t wild about having me back.
At least not yet. The dean of students suggested we wait until next spring and see how I was doing.
I guess that makes sense. The trial would have pulled me away for a couple of weeks anyway.
And maybe I don’t want to go back there.
I’d always be the wet fish pulled from a bathtub and covered in blood. ”
“Where else would you go?”
“Guam? The Galápagos? Anyplace no one has heard of me? Also, that assumes I’m not in jail.”
“You won’t be in jail.”
“That’s what everyone says. I try to believe that. Anyway, wherever I start college again—because I would be starting over—it will be next fall. So, I’ll be a really old freshman. Kind of like you,” I added, ribbing him.
“I am a bit of a freak,” he agreed.
“Yeah, but I am, too.”
He leaned forward in the heavy upholstered chair in which he was sitting.
“You’re not, Mira. You were part of a freak accident.
Think about those two words: freak accident.
It was a one in, I don’t know, ten or twenty million chance.
I can see why you’d feel bad: I feel bad about plenty of things in my past, and not just the ones in Vietnam.
But stop punishing yourself. Feel bad for Kenny.
Feel bad for the kid’s family. Feel bad for Theo Catton’s family.
But, please, do us both a favor and stop beating yourself up. ”
“That is so much easier said than done.”
“Of course it is. But there are advantages to being old. Older. You’re already a year and a season older than when the accident happened.
Run with that. When you return to college next fall, don’t just think about how much older you’ll be than the other freshmen.
Think about how much more life experience you’ll have on them. Lean into that.”
“Is that what you do?”
“More or less. It’s kind of a life lesson I got from my own dad.
He went to Clemson on the GI Bill. He was twenty-four or twenty-five, I guess.
Used to joke about the idiot eighteen-year-olds in their fraternity beanies.
He’d been a paratrooper in World War II—D-Day, Market Garden, the works—and thought all those freshman high jinks and rituals were pretty juvenile.
But it wasn’t to those kids. Fraternities were the center of their universe. ”
“You’re not rushing a frat, are you?”
“God, no. Like my dad, I got my fill of male camaraderie in the army. I am too old for hazing.”
“Yeah. I think I am, too.”
He smiled. “It’s like you said in the hospital. All that golf. Made you a grown-up. But you know what?”
I waited.
“I think you were born with adult tastes.”