So Near

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “My dad expects me to join the business,” he told me. “But I want to be more than what he expects, you know? I want to try to be something better. Something else. I just don’t know what it is yet.” He talked a lot about his dad that night. It was as though he’d stored up all these important things he’d been waiting to tell someone. I was taken aback by his seriousness. He had a reputation as a party boy, a real heartbreaker. I’d steeled myself against that sort of thing, waiting all night for him to pounce. I wasn’t at all prepared to be seduced by his earnestness, his obvious need to have me think well of him. That Cal Horigan was a real person after all—as flawed and uncertain as the rest of us—made him seem all the more perfect to me.

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time, Jenny,” he told me at the end of the evening without so much as a peck on the cheek.

  I should have known I’d been too lucky. That it had all been far too easy. I should have realized that I’d been blessed, that God had actually been looking after me all these years. I should never have allowed myself to think of Cal as a given; he’d been a gift. I’m sorry. I’ll change. I was ready to promise God anything as we reached the outskirts of Harringdale, where run-down two-family clapboard houses sit wedged between gas stations and used-car dealerships. Just don’t take Cal away from me.

  Why didn’t I think to include Betsy in my prayers? Was it because Tessa had told me that it was Cal who had been in an accident? Because she hadn’t mentioned my daughter? No, I believe it’s because the very idea of losing Betsy is so unthinkable. She still feels like a part of me. Even when she’s out of my sight, off with Cal or at the little playgroup in town, I can sense the warmth of her body at my side. I can predict her moods. I know when she wakes up in the middle of the night. I’m able to guess what she wants before she even knows what it is. How could I lose her? It would be like losing myself. Impossible to even contemplate. But then God, as my father says, can do the impossible. If you believe in him. If you submit to his will. And, in the end, I can’t deny it. He listened to my prayers. He didn’t lay a finger on my husband.

  “No,” I said when I saw Cal coming down the hall toward me with that look on his face. “Please, no—”

  “Jenny, listen—,” he started to say. Then he stopped. I could tell he didn’t want to say the words out loud. Nobody did. It felt like a bad movie. Maybe it was the glaringly bright overhead lighting. Or the awkward way everyone was standing there: Tessa with her hand over her mouth, Kurt hugging his chest as tears ran unchecked down his cheeks, Cal so pale and stunned looking, his shirt blotched and wrinkled. I smelled beer—and vomit. And something else: fear, I guess. Everyone was waiting for me to react. None of it was real to me, but I understood enough to register the fact that the worst had finally happened. I felt like I was watching myself, all of us, on some kind of a hidden monitor. Except I was looking down on the whole thing, thinking: please, let’s just back up. Start again. Rewind the tape. All these thoughts ran through my head in a single instant.

  “I’m sorry,” my husband told me. “God, I’m so, so sorry.”

  I felt like I was following someone else’s script when I fell into Cal’s arms. It didn’t feel possible. It was just a terrible sentence, as yet unspoken. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Cal cry before. His face was all scrunched up. Like a baby’s, I thought. No, don’t think that. Don’t go there. I buried myself in Cal’s embrace. We wept together, Cal already with resignation, me just at the very thought. At the very beginning of the very thought.

  Then something else took over inside of me. I had to see her. Kurt tried to tell me that it wasn’t a good idea, but I wouldn’t listen. I think I had some crazy notion, the first of many, that I could somehow fix things. I was her mother. She needed me. How many times had I told her that I would make it all better?

  “I have to see her,” I told Kurt again.

  “Okay,” he said, though he was shaking his head. “Give me a minute.”

  I stopped crying in fits and starts. It was going to be okay. I was going to see her. Cal looked blank, though his grip was tight, almost painful. When I glanced up at him, his gaze was unfocused, staring down the hallway after Kurt. Tessa was the only one weeping now: loudly, openly, wiping her nose on her sleeve like a kid.

  Kurt’s known at the hospital because of his EMS work, and he was able to talk someone into clearing the chapel for us. It’s a small, windowless room, with a stained-glass panel, backlit, built into the far wall. Jewel-like light spilled out over the little nondenominational altar and scattered its bright shards across the darkened floor. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. Later I learned that it was Kurt who helped arrange Betsy on the gurney in front of the altar, the sheet tucked carefully around her body. But as soon as the door closed behind us, I went right over and started to pull her into my arms.

  “No, Jenny, don’t—,” Cal said, though I didn’t think to ask why not. And it didn’t matter: nothing was going to stop me.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, hugging Betsy to me. I don’t think it took more than a few seconds for me to realize that she wasn’t really there. That I was cradling something inanimate. Beyond needing or wanting my help. I’ve never felt that I could get enough of Betsy. When she was first born, just a few floors up in this very hospital, I stared at her for hours on end. But each time I looked at her—it was like seeing her for the first time. And in the months since, though I’d spent endless hours watching her at play, or asleep, I still felt that I could never see the whole of her the way I can Jamie, say, or any other child. It’s like looking at my own reflection in a mirror. So familiar, yet also unknowable. Now, though, when I looked down, I was able to take her in at last. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so absolutely still.

  Cal finally took her from me and laid her back down on the gurney, tucking the sheet around her again, blocking my view of her until he had her just the way he wanted. When he stepped back, I noticed she had some dirt on her forehead. I licked my thumb and tried to smudge it away.

  “Don’t,” Cal said, stopping me. Suddenly my eyes were opened. It wasn’t dirt. It was a bruise. How could I have missed that before? Was I losing my mind? It was the first in what would become an endless series of loops: denial, disbelief, confusion, and then a door closing on a windowless room from which there is no escape.

  They gave me something to sleep the first night, but I woke up moaning from a nightmare. No, I woke up to the nightmare. Later that morning Chief Tyler stopped by the house. Cal was still asleep upstairs; he’d come up hours after me the night before, an hour or so after the last of his family had left. The Horigan family needs to be together to face disaster. I was beginning to discover that I needed to be alone.

  “Cal’s not up yet,” I told the chief.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Could I come in for just a minute? Sorry, I tried calling, but something’s wrong with the phone.”

  “I unplugged it,” I said, leading him back to the kitchen. “I couldn’t talk to another person.” There was only one voice I wanted to hear. I kept listening for her singsong babble of nonsense words. Earlier that morning I was convinced I heard her calling Mama! Mama! from somewhere downstairs.

  “I’m really sorry to intrude,” he said, taking the mug of coffee I poured for him and putting it down on the countertop. “I’m sure you have a lot on your mind right now. But I thought you’d want to know about this.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, pushing the sugar bowl toward him. The milk carton was already out on the counter along with a coffee cake that Cal’s mom had brought over the night before and homemade cinnamon buns that Nell Gruber had dropped off first thing this morning. The casseroles would be coming later, I knew, and the disposable aluminum trays of lasagna. I wondered what atavistic ritual makes us want to overfeed the living right after there’s been a death. I had to ask Chief Tyler to repeat what he’d just said.

  “The car seat. We think there might have been a ma
lfunction. There’s a possibility, anyway. Something went wrong when the Jeep rolled over. So she was thrown—Well, the thing is this: it shouldn’t have happened. We looked up the manufacturer on the Internet. Apparently, there’ve been complaints about another one of their products—something about faulty safety latches, I think.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  “We thought you should know right away,” the chief went on. “In case you wanted to contact a lawyer. I’m not a big expert on this or anything, but you might very well have a negligence or wrongful death suit here.”

  Wrongful death.

  It was a phrase that would haunt me in the days ahead. Through the surreal hours of planning my daughter’s funeral with Cal, his family, and my father, who came over later that morning without asking and insisted we pray together. But the Lord is my shepherd was shouted down in my brain by wrongful death. I kept thinking back on those final moments when I was talking to Tessa while buckling Betsy into the safety seat. Stopping midway to tell Tessa that Cal didn’t know yet about Jude. Had I ever actually finished strapping her in? It was one of those things I do so often, one of those routines that becomes such a part of everyday life that the mind no longer really registers it. Like turning off the iron or locking the front door. Leaning into the back of the car and inserting the buckle into the clasp.

  Of course I did. Surely I did. I kept rubbing the tips of my fingers together as if trying to bring back from somewhere deep inside the feeling of that click. That little shudder of metal kissing metal.

  5

  Cal

  “I guess I just don’t understand her reasoning,” Edmund said. He, Kurt, Dad, and I were sitting around my parents’ living room. It was nearly midnight. Empty beer bottles cluttered the coffee table. Jenny’s father had conducted Betsy’s funeral service that afternoon at the Lutheran church in town; then we buried my daughter in the Horigan family plot in the Roman Catholic cemetery out on River Road. Neither Jenny nor I am particularly observant, but we still managed to get into a fight about the right way to handle things with Betsy. Jenny came up with this crazy idea that we should cremate our baby and have her buried on our property.

  “Up on the hill near where I want to put in the gazebo,” she explained to me. “That way we can visit her whenever we want. And she won’t have to be in some awful cemetery surrounded by headstones.” I was having such a hard time reading Jenny’s moods at this point. Neither one of us was sleeping very well, and I was running pretty much on fumes.

  “People bury their pets in the backyard, Jen. My dad told me that there’s a really nice sunny spot right behind my grandparents.”

  I thought we’d managed to talk it through and that Jenny was okay with the decision, but on the way back to my parents’ house after the interment she’d said, “So now the Horigans get to have her for eternity.”

  I knew how much she was hurting. I understood the hell she was going through. So was I. Still, it seemed to me that if there was any solace to be had, it was the fact that Jenny and I were in it together. But I was beginning to think she didn’t see it that way. She kept turning away from me just as I was turning toward her. After years of effortlessness, I couldn’t seem to get into the right rhythm or set the appropriate tone with her. Case in point was our differing opinions on what to do about the car-seat manufacturer. I was ready to go in there and sue the pants off the sons of bitches.

  “I can’t think about that now,” she told me the first time I brought it up to her; this was when we got back from my parents’ house the night after Betsy died. They’d hosted a kind of open house for everyone who wanted to come by and share their grief; the place had been mobbed. Kurt and Denny Lockhardt had taken me aside during the evening and filled me in on what Denny had found out about Gannon Baby Products, Inc., including the two lawsuits the company had already settled out of court. I’d been surprised to learn that Chief Tyler had apparently already told Jenny about all this earlier in the day, because she hadn’t said a thing about it to me. When I raised the subject again this morning, after Edmund had called to say he’d found a lawyer he wanted us to meet with, Jenny flew off the handle:

  “What’s the point? She’s gone, Cal! And no amount of money in the world is going to bring her back. I think there’s something wrong, something really kind of creepy about demanding payment for someone’s death. People who do that sort of thing? They’re like vultures as far as I’m concerned.”

  “It’s not about the money,” I replied, stung by her tone. “It’s about making sure these guys don’t get away with this kind of thing again. I mean, come on: Gannon was probably responsible for our daughter’s death! Doesn’t that make you furious? I can’t believe you don’t want to do something about this.”

  “Please, let’s not talk about it right now, okay?” Jenny replied. We were up in our bedroom and she was standing in front of her open clothes closet, trying to decide what to wear to the funeral service. She looked like she’d lost about ten pounds in the last couple of days. Her shoulders were slumped, her arms locked across her chest. Along with everything else, I knew she was having a tough time dealing with her father, who had called her idea of having Betsy’s favorite children’s songs played at the beginning of the service “not in keeping with the sanctity of the occasion.” I knew she was also dreading having to face her sister, Jude, who was supposed to be coming down from Boston in time for the funeral. The situation with Jude alone was enough to make anybody act crazy. I felt myself relenting. Unlike me, Jenny grew up without any real love or support. But somehow, through her own fierce will and determination, she managed to turn herself into this strong, brave, beautiful person. I went over and put my arms around her.

  “Whatever you say,” I’d told her, pulling her close. “I just want to do the right thing.” Her breathing was quick and ragged, her body rigid.

  “I’ve got to find a way to get through this,” she’d said. She’d circled her arms around my chest and squeezed tight, then stepped away. Now, though, sitting there with my father and brothers, I was having a hard time recapturing the sympathy I’d felt for Jenny’s position earlier in the day. Edmund had been on my case about a lawsuit for the last half hour or so. And a lot of what he said was making sense to me. But I wanted to at least try to present her point of view.

  “Jenny feels that whatever we might get would be like blood money,” I explained. “That it would be tainted. And, besides, she says she can’t think about any of this right now. We’re doing everything we can to just keep things together.”

  “Sure, I get that,” Edmund replied. “But later? When the anger sets in? I think you’re going to change your mind, and I just hope it’s not too late. This product liability lawyer I’m talking to in Albany told me he heard that Gannon settled one of those suits for a million two.”

  Leave it to Edmund to know the exact amount of the settlement. Or to know somebody who would know. I have my problems with my oldest brother, but I concede that his grasp of the wider world of business and finance is far greater and more sophisticated than mine. He kept up with and then built upon all the contacts he made at Cornell, and at this point the friends in his network—at least those on his Facebook page—number in the hundreds. Yes, he can be a total asshole. He actually had the balls to tell Kurt and me that Horigan Lumber and Hardware financial reports were “proprietary information” these days. But if you need to find the go-to guy in any given situation, Edmund will start thumbing through his iPhone address book and have a name and number for you in a matter of seconds.

  “I filled the lawyer in on what happened,” Edmund continued. “He thinks you have a case. Why don’t you at least meet with him? Hear what he has to say. You can catch Jenny up on what you learn when you feel the time is right.”

  Do I trust Edmund? Not really. He always seems to be operating with some kind of hidden agenda, angling for something I don’t understand, looking over my shoulder to see if someone more important than me m
ight be in the room. But his outrage over the way Betsy died feels genuine to me. There were tears in his eyes when he hugged me at the cemetery. Because Edmund can be so cool and contained, that display of unguarded emotion really touched me. And I do trust his information. If he says Gannon settled for one two, they did. If he says the lawyer thinks we might have a case, we probably do.

  “Why don’t you sleep on it, Cal?” Dad suggested, sighing as he rose from his La-Z-Boy. He scooped up a bunch of the empty beer bottles by their necks and headed toward the kitchen with them. Then he stopped, turned back to us, and said: “But, you know, Jenny may have a point. No amount of money is going to make up for losing Betsy; I can tell you that right now. And I’ve never really understood this business of assigning blame. It’s just not all that productive in the long run.”

  “Okay, Dad,” I said, rising as well. “Let me think about it.” The Jeep had been totaled. Jenny had driven our second car, a Volvo wagon, back to the house hours ago. Kurt would be dropping me off on his way to his place, which is just a couple miles north of ours. The three of us helped the old man straighten up downstairs. My mother had long ago resigned herself to our late-night revelries—“it’s the cross I have to bear for having only sons”—but she’s a stickler about coming down to a neat kitchen in the morning.

  “Give me a call when you’re ready,” Edmund said as he double-clicked the key to his BMW. “But don’t wait too long.”

  Kurt and I didn’t say anything for a while after we headed up Route 32. Farmland still encroaches on the town from every direction, and within a mile or two the street lights of Covington were swallowed up by darkness. Winter salt and grime had eaten away at the white safety lines on the roadway, and Kurt was taking things slow. I could feel a certain tension between us, though it might have been just my imagination. I felt all wound up and utterly exhausted at the same time.