by Ben Dolnick
I scrambled the half mile through the woods back up to the museum, my lungs burning, and called Hannah’s phone again from the phone in her office. It rang and rang, and I heard each ring as an event with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You’ve reached Hannah Rampe…“Hannah, if you’re getting this, I don’t care what you’re doing, I don’t care who you’re with, you need to call back, you need to call back right now, I’m completely freaked out, and—” I waited a minute and called again, in case she’d heard my message and had a change of heart. You’ve reached Hannah Rampe…
Back down in the woods, where my group was now walking up a rocky hill along a dry stony creek bed, the prospect of sunset (it was now five o’clock) had started giving an extra urgency to things. Sheriff Cole walkie-talkied everyone to say that we should regroup back at the museum if we hadn’t found anything by six. There were, through the treetops, a couple of pale stars out already, there was wind rattling the few leaves still hanging on. Hannah and I would usually have been in our room with the radio on, maybe splitting a beer, deciding whether to drive to Peck’s or just to cook with what we had.
There was now (there are terror cycles, just like there are sleep cycles) such a deadness in my limbs that I wasn’t sure I could keep moving. I felt minutes away from collapsing into the leaves. There was no possible way I was going to be able to survive it, if searching for her went on all night, then all day tomorrow—but there was also no possible way it was going to end any sooner than that. The places she could be were so many; the places we could look were so few. I imagined Sheriff Cole setting up a tent on the front yard with cots in it, like they have at disaster sites. We’d sleep in shifts. Maybe the Poughkeepsie police would loan us a helicopter. Hannah’s face would be on the news. I’d spend the rest of my life stapling flyers to telephone poles, wandering median strips.
No. The group that found her was farther down the river than Sheriff Cole had told anyone to search, past the swimming hole where we’d skinny-dipped. The call came through at 5:50, just dark enough that the woods and air were starting to turn blue and smudged. The group had gone outside the walkie-talkies’ range, so one of them, Butch’s son, had had to run back a bit, which explained some of how his voice sounded when it came through. “We found her. We found her. We’re about three hundred yards down the river.” He didn’t have to say whether she was okay; all of our faces fell together, as if a handful of strings had been snipped.
Without thinking about it, or even realizing that I was doing it, I ran back through the woods and across the fields and down the riverbank, hopping over brambles, climbing fallen trees, squelching through mud, nearly falling in. I was in incredible pain, all over my body, but my legs weren’t heavy anymore, I could have leapt over a car. I was making a steady rumbly groan. When I finally came to Butch’s son (his jeans and shirt were soaked, he’d been fully in the river, his neck was streaked with mud), I stopped, panting, trying to get out the words Where is she? and Sheriff Cole, who I hadn’t noticed running beside me, stepped in front of me, to block my view. “Take a seat right here,” he said, pushing me down onto a tree stump. He was shaking too, and panting. “You just wait right here. We’ll get her.” There were other people around me now, Donna and the scoutmaster and Jeanne from the farm stand, more people, all pressing on my shoulders, petting my head, squeezing my hands. Someone told me to close my eyes and I did. I heard, a little ways off, someone splashing out into the river, something like branches breaking, some kind of conversation, more splashing. That may have been when I started wailing, almost screaming, a sound I would never have recognized as coming from me; the hands were pressing harder against me now, and I thought, in the part of me that was still observing, like a guillotined head’s blinking eyes: This is the sound a person makes when he’s burning alive.
[Edmund Wright’s journal]
Oct. 3
…The events of the night have left me troubled to my toes. Shortly after supper I retreated to my office for a final grapple with the morning’s pages. I sat at my desk, just as I sit now, with my left elbow upon the table & my left temple upon my fist, just so. The moon hung in the window’s corner; Sarah & her dishes clattered companionably below. As I became consumed in the rhythms of my work, I grew conscious, dimly, of a strange sound somewhere in the room behind me. A cursory look persuaded me that I had been subject to one of perception’s manifold illusions, but in the ensuing quarter hour the sound, rather like breathing or distant chatter, persisted, & my bare animal sense, both more elusive & more reliable than hearing, insisted that there was indeed a presence in my study & that my very looking had been the cause of its earlier dissolution. Carefully, then, oh so carefully, I set down my pen & I made myself like a creature of prey in a meadow, still & abuzz with the readiness to perceive. Here the figure came, then, closer now, closer, seeming not so much to tread as to flow across the room; the flesh between my shoulder blades now fairly quivered. When the figure was, by my body’s reckoning, close enough to reach my neck, the sound of its breathing, the very imprint of its presence, identified itself to my inmost apparatus & I leapt: it was William. Helpless now to restrain myself, I spun around in my chair & in so doing I scattered being & sensation both. I had evidently let out a cry, for Sarah called my name from the foot of the stairs & I replied, in tones of willful muscularity, that it had been nothing, pardon me, that all was well. And so it seemed; my study showed nothing uncommon & after some minutes I returned to my papers, telling myself that I had received a dispatch not from my son but from some ordinarily unreachable depths of my psyche, made accessible by exhaustion. Yet the experience lingered, & lingers still, rebuking me, imploring me to trust my senses & not my reason; what a fool I would be if, out of fear & obstinate materialism, I failed to redeem in the currency of understanding the profoundest loss of my life. Thus does a man of science set down his tools & become once more one for whom the world contains wonders both terrible & incomprehensible. How fervently, waiting here once more in the dark, do I both dread & long for William’s return…
1
There’s a moment, after you wake up from a nightmare, when you realize: Wait, so I don’t have to worry about any of that. Those days right after Hannah died were the opposite of that, only over and over and over again. It’s true. It actually happened. This is now my life.
I can’t really say, now, whether I actually believed that Hannah’s death had been an accident, or if this was just the workings of my psychological immune system trying to protect me from taking on too many agonizing thoughts at once. Anyway, I was too staggered, in the immediate aftermath, to do much coherent thinking. I was at my full capacity just trying to navigate a single block.
I came back to the city a day or so after she died, but I have no memory of how, or exactly when. I don’t remember anything about being at the medical examiner’s office, except that there was scented Kleenex in the waiting area and that I didn’t look at the photo. I do remember going to the Rampes’ apartment, though. This was a day or two before the funeral; the arrangements had all been made horrifyingly quickly. The Rampes’ doorman, Dominic, who must have been letting up desperate-looking people in an uninterrupted stream for days, just nodded at me. The elevator looked unchanged, which was somehow both surprising and awful. The feeling at the Rampes’, as soon as the door opened, was like a sick ward. There were unopened bundles of mail on the floor, used tissues and empty plates on every surface. Bruce was in gray sweatpants, unshaven, red-eyed, his own homeless doppelgänger. Terri was in a worn blue bathrobe, frantically edgy, not wearing any makeup. It was stuffy inside the apartment, but her whole body was shaking.
“She’s gone!” she said, hugging me. “She’s gone! My daughter is dead! Dead!” I had the feeling, somehow, that Terri was testing out the word, like striking an old-fashioned alarm bell, at first tentatively, then louder and louder, not quite believing that the horrible, epic occasion—the life-changing emergency—had arrived.
The re
ason the Rampes had summoned me—I don’t know if they’d told me this or if I just understood it—was so I could officially debrief them on the day of Hannah’s death. They’d heard the story from the medics, and from the medical examiner, and even, in a weeping incoherent phone call from Hibernia, from me, but they wanted more. Misery loves detail.
We sat in their living room, in the same chairs where we always sat, their dog, Mickey, asleep at Terri’s feet. I remember feeling flayed inside, like every vein in my body had been scraped with a blade. I also remember having the surreally clear thought: So it’s actually true—none of this can protect you. By which I meant, the doors that close smoothly, the walnut bookshelves, the speaker system designed by a patient of Bruce’s who’d also done the sound for Wicked. There are no fortresses.
I did my best to walk them through the day she died, starting with the moment when I woke up in bed alone. I remember the looks on their faces—attentive, shattered—much better than I remember anything I said. Terri kept clawing at the arms of her chair, grimacing. When I’d gotten through most of it we sat there and wept together, freely and loudly, like a three-part chorus. Bruce’s mother, Hannah’s grandmother, who I hadn’t known was in the apartment, and who lived alone in an Arizona condo, came tottering in from the kitchen looking hunched and sunbaked, cleared away some dishes, and didn’t even look at me.
My decision not to mention anything about how Hannah had been doing before she’d disappeared—the Risperdal, the sleeplessness—didn’t feel like lying. It felt—to the extent that anything I did in those days felt like more than the reflexes of a wounded animal—like prudence, like loyalty. I wasn’t telling them about her meltdown in the same way that I wasn’t telling them about our sex life; there are layers of detail that belong only to the people in a relationship.
And I knew what these details would have suggested to them. I didn’t want them to even entertain the possibility that Hannah had killed herself—which, again, I didn’t think she had. I didn’t mean to be protecting them from the truth; I meant to be protecting them from a horrible misimpression.
“Who was the one who actually carried her away from the river?” Bruce asked.
“The police. The sheriff must have gone and got a stretcher from somewhere.”
They both nodded, then Bruce clutched at his stomach and closed his eyes.
Whenever I thought we couldn’t possibly cry anymore—we must have sat there for twenty minutes, all of our mugs of tea going cold—a wail would go up from Terri, and we’d start all over again.
“You loved her,” Terri said at one point, between sobs.
“I did.”
“And she loved you.”
“She did.”
“We loved her so much!”
If you listen to sobbing long enough, and if you’re tired enough, the sound breaks off from its meaning and becomes something else. One minute it sounds like an animal trying to throw up; then like someone shivering on an ice floe. At its most intense, it sounds—and this is somehow especially horrible—just like someone laughing hysterically.
. . .
I’d hoped to avoid going too much into my family, but I think I’d better tell you at least a bit about my parents. They came up to New York for the funeral—they installed me in a hotel on Lexington and sat by me while I shook and force-fed me spaghetti. For those few days, anyway, they were close to the center of my life again; for the first time since I was twelve, my family—the version I’d Magic Markered in kindergarten, lamented to the guidance counselor in middle school—was whole.
The condensed version of my parents’ marriage is: they got married because they’d each been disappointed by someone else—my dad the daughter of his childhood piano teacher, my mom a young civil rights activist from Wesleyan—and then they spent the next twenty years learning that this was not a good reason to marry someone. They had me halfway through this process of discovery; my existence was the only enduring result of a decades-old folly, and probably the only thing that made them wait as long as they did to extricate themselves from it.
My dad, Robert Beron, was, like nine-tenths of the parents I knew in D.C., a lawyer. But he wasn’t a box-seats-to-the-Redskins, deal-making, partners’-retreat type of lawyer—he made practicing law look as glamorous as selling vacuum cleaners. When he had me he was already in his forties. He was—is—a big disappointed leonine man, still with a full head of gray hair at seventy, dental work from another era. He was, I remember realizing at some point in elementary school, too old to really play sports with me. I’d see my friends’ dads—boyish men racing around Father-Son games in sweaty T-shirts and running shoes—and feel a secret stab of shame for my dad, sitting on the sideline in his worn gray suit and broken shoes, doing paperwork in a too-low lawn chair. I always had the sense, sartorially, that he would have preferred to live in the era when men wore hats. And I think he would have had better luck in building a family in that era too—a wife who craved his praise, a son who aspired to drive a stick shift.
Instead he had my mom, Eileen, who was only a few years younger than he was but who could, culturally, have been his daughter. She was—is, is—an actual hippie, with long gray hair and clothes that involved large buttons and colorful scarves and skirts that looked like they’d spent months crushed in a drawer. She spent her entire career doing a job she didn’t care about—she wrote policies in the National Labor Office of Blue Cross Blue Shield—and wishing she had the courage to go and illustrate children’s books. This I think was the bewilderment at the heart of their marriage: why my mom couldn’t be satisfied by the life she had, but couldn’t be stirred to build the life she might have wanted. In my most durable childhood memories she’s sitting in her chair in the den—a patched beige easy chair that was practically a living animal—with her library books stacked up around her like ramparts, her feet drawn up under a complicated assemblage of clothes and blankets. She didn’t think she was cut out for motherhood—she used to tell me this semi-regularly—but rather than try to do better, she would always just apologize, and encourage me to go into therapy.
I don’t know what finally led to the divorce—one Thanksgiving my dad announced the decision as hurriedly as an embarrassed grace—but I remember that the house felt empty, and that I suddenly had much less trouble convincing my mom to buy me microphones and amps. I was in seventh grade. I had shaggy hair and a chain that ran between my wallet and my jeans. I painted my bedroom black; my mom redid all the house’s bathrooms; my dad moved to a formica box of an apartment on L Street and never had milk in the fridge.
Both of my parents tried dating other people—my dad was even briefly engaged to a devoutly Presbyterian woman named Sally, who’d once worked for him—but by the time I left for college they’d both settled into not particularly agreeable solitudes. My dad developed an interest in World War II history and a chronic cough. My mom read Scandinavian mysteries and drove sandwiches around D.C. to housebound elders. I learned to divide my visits home as neatly as a diplomat. I learned to answer each one’s questions about the other with vague misdirections. All this seemed perfectly natural. It was, eventually, the families without a divorce who seemed like outliers to me; I thought of them as freakish somehow, self-deluded.
But even in me, apparently, some Parent Trap strain of sentimental wishing had managed to survive all the way into adulthood. Because when my parents came to New York for Hannah’s funeral, there was a moment—not a long one, but a moment—in which I just wanted them to scoop me up and cradle me, for the three of us to collapse into a king-sized bed and sob, a single warm mass. I actually had the thought: If only we’d stayed together, then none of this would have happened.
“Oh, Nick,” my dad said, pressing me into his overcoat.
“You poor, poor thing,” said my mom.
For most of their visit, though, I was too bewildered and miserable even to register their presence; I would just weep in bed or on the floor while one or the other of
them called around to doctors to see if anyone would prescribe me Valium. Something they don’t tell you about grief is how much it hurts, physically; I felt like someone had gone over me with a meat tenderizer. I remember at one point sitting up to read the first article that appeared about Hannah’s death—not an obituary, just a three-line stub from the Poughkeepsie Journal—and then having to go lie down on the bathroom floor while my mom rubbed circles on my back. I remember eating three bites of scrambled eggs at the restaurant off the lobby and then having to be helped into the glass-and-gold elevator, my parents on either side of me as if I were an athlete with a broken leg.
Both of my parents had known Hannah, of course, but at a distance—they hadn’t known her well enough to really grieve for her themselves. For Hannah’s twenty-ninth birthday my mom had sent her a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns with a “40% Off” sticker and a barely legible note (“I hope you haven’t read this”). Whenever my dad and I talked on the phone—a monthly obligation—he would end the conversation by saying, “Tell Hannah hello.” But they’d never really known what she was like; they hadn’t known our life. They’d been spectators to the business of our wedding planning (“You aren’t going to have us walking you down the aisle, are you?” my mom had asked), and they’d shown no inclination whatsoever to visit us upstate (though my dad had asked how near we were to Cooperstown). What comfort they could give me was mostly generic or accidental.