By the end of the long weekend they all were exhausted.
They were fifty-eight minutes early for their connecting flight home. Orlando to Chicago. Now Chicago to Pittsburgh. The waiting area was practically empty. Will’s sisters both laid their heads down on their mother’s lap.
Will pulled a watch out of his pocket. It wasn’t one of those new cool watches that told the temperature and what time it was all over the world. It was just a plain Timex on an old, really worn yellow-and-blue-striped fabric band, but it had been his dad’s watch. The only thing Will had specifically asked for.
When Will was little, his dad used to let him wind it up, pulling out the tiny stem and turning the metal knob, careful never to overwind. Mindful, as well, never to let it stop completely. Will held the watch in his hand and looked down at the white face, the black roman numerals, and the skinny second hand ticking forward in a steady, jerking beat.
It was 10:03 exactly.
9/10
September 10, 2001
6:45 a.m. EDT
Shanksville, Pennsylvania
Will’s sisters were already in their usual spots at the kitchen table, arguing over the positioning of a cereal box for the best viewing, when he made his way down for breakfast.
“Coffee?” His mother handed him a mug.
“Thanks,” Will said. He turned to Rooney and Callie. “What’s so important about the Fruity Pebbles?”
“There’s a game on the back,” Rooney whined.
“Yeah, and it’s my turn.” Callie shifted the box in her direction.
Rooney yanked it back.
“Okay, that’s enough.” Will stepped over and lifted the box off the table. “Now no one gets to play.”
The girls didn’t seem to mind. They both quieted and returned to slurping down their bowls of pastel-colored leftover milk.
“Thanks, Will.” His mother wanted to say more, Will could tell, but she knew better than to heap compliments on him that felt like obligations. He was the quiet type, just as his dad had been. Too much conversation had made them both—now just Will—uncomfortable.
Maybe his mother wanted to tell Will how great he had been ever since you-know-when. Maybe she was going to thank him for picking up the slack, helping out with the house and the girls. He had even tried to help her with the mountain of paperwork and red tape that had been dumped on them in order to get survivor benefits from the trucking company.
Will had certainly stepped up, everyone said so. He heard it all the time. He was the best son any mother could ever hope to have in a situation like this—a young father dying, so randomly, so violently, leaving behind a wife and three children.
But that was the thing. He’d left them. Because the truth was that Will’s father should never have died. It didn’t have to happen. All his father had had to do was call in the accident on his CB. And if he’d really wanted to do something, if he’d really had to do something, he could have sat in his truck and waited for help to arrive.
How many times had he himself warned Will?
Nothing good happens on the road after midnight.
There are too many bad drivers out there.
Will’s dad was not one of them. In his eighteen years of long-distance hauling he had never gotten a serious infraction. Never even gotten a speeding ticket. Maybe that made this all the more ironic; it certainly seemed more unfair. It was unfair and it was wrong.
Will’s father would often be on the road for days, sometimes weeks. And so when he came home, it always felt like a vacation for all of them, even if Will and the girls had school and their mom still went to work. It changed the atmosphere in the house to something festive. It was a holiday just to have him home.
It didn’t hurt that their dad always brought presents from wherever he had been. California. Nevada. New Jersey. South Carolina. Little things; maybe something from a truck stop or a diner or a Holiday Inn. A pack of cards for one of the girls. A kachina doll for the other. A Matchbox car for Will. A plastic ring that came inside a plastic egg for their mom, and she would wear it all day. Sometimes just a folded map, or a paper menu from a restaurant with an interesting history. Or a pack of gum.
But he always had something for each one of them, every time.
Until he didn’t come home at all.
The state troopers showed up at their door before any of them had a chance to wonder where he was, or why he hadn’t called in before he reached his next checkpoint. No one was missing him. None of them knew enough to wonder why the police were knocking.
“Mrs. Rittenhouse?” The short one took off his hat.
Looking back, Will thought that should have been a warning sign. The tall one had his eyes down until he had to speak. “Mrs. Frank Rittenhouse?” he asked.
And after that it was pretty much a blur, bits and pieces of information, and images no one would want taking up residence in one’s brain.
Apparently, Will’s dad had been on his way home after being on the road for two and a half weeks, making the trip home from Denver, when he saw a car not quite pulled over on the side of the interstate and the driver, a man clearly in distress, slumped over the steering wheel. Smoke was coming from under the hood. Most likely, he had hit a deer.
Never pull over on the side of the interstate.
It’s dangerous.
Always try to find a rest stop, an exit, or a bypass road.
“Your husband was trying to help,” the tall one said, but of course it was all speculation. That’s what those state troopers did, put together accident scenes based on the physical evidence. Fur and blood in the grille of the first car. Tire tracks, amount and location of damage to both cars.
In this case they figured Will’s dad had seen a fellow motorist in trouble, stopped his rig a few feet ahead of the disabled car, walked over, and been about to open the driver’s door to see what was wrong when another car came racing down the highway.
“Your dad was a hero,” the state trooper went on, but Will could tell he didn’t mean it.
A hero?
It was a stupid thing his father had done. Getting out of his truck, standing on the side of the interstate that way. He had warned his own family against doing that hundreds of times. If they were out in their station wagon and he saw someone changing a tire by the side of the road, he would roll down his window.
“Don’t do that, mister. It’s dangerous. Call a tow.”
The state troopers went on to describe, briefly, how the oncoming car hit the disabled vehicle and sent it into the side of the rocky embankment with Will’s dad pinned between them. Listening, Will and his mom remained silent. The girls were upstairs. It had been over quickly, the troopers were certain.
He was a hero. They repeated that.
And then Will’s mother asked the strangest question. “What happened to the man in the car?”
“The one that hit them, ma’am?”
“No,” she said. “The man my husband was trying to help?”
Both troopers seemed to breathe in simultaneously, like they had a long day ahead of them, a long unpleasant day. They could have more houses to visit, more news to deliver. Or maybe this was their only assignment for the whole day, and it was already too much.
Finally the short one spoke. “He died, ma’am. They both died.”
So it was all for nothing.
* * *
“You didn’t eat anything,” Will’s mom was saying.
It would upset her more if he didn’t eat. She’d feel like a bad mother. She needed to feel useful. It had been a full year since they lost their dad, about the time people start to get past their grief, but no one, it seemed, had bothered to tell that to Will’s family.
“I’ll take an English muffin if you’ll make one. I gotta go back up and get my sneakers,” Will said.
His mother burst into action, fussing like a frantic chicken. She was almost more at ease when she was rushing about nervously. When Will came back downstairs, she was
standing with his breakfast wrapped in foil.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
So he hadn’t fooled anyone pretending to be hungry. His mother kissed him on the cheek and then pushed him toward the front door. There was an invisible wall between the world out there, where his father’s death wasn’t ever-present, and the world in here, where it always was. Will felt it blocking him, tugging at him every time he had to leave the house.
Then, out the window, Will could see the flash of school-bus yellow through the trees, and his heart jumped a tiny beat faster. His feet unstuck. He stepped outside.
Claire would be on the bus.
September 10, 2001
10:14 a.m. PDT
Los Angeles, California
Aimee had been too young to see the movie Clueless when it first came out in theaters, but she had seen it several times since then, and she owned the video tape. It was one of her favorites, but it had never entered her mind that one day she’d be living in Los Angeles and going to a school that looked just like the one Cher Horowitz went to.
But it did. It looked just like that school. Right down to the sunshine and the sea of blond hair.
“Why do we have lunch at ten o’clock in the morning?” a voice next to Aimee was complaining.
Aimee turned to see who was talking. It was a girl about her age, which made sense, since this was the seventh-grade lunch period. But Aimee wasn’t hungry, and she hadn’t felt like negotiating the line, or trying to figure out how to buy lunch and where to sit or with whom. And apparently no one else wanted to eat either, since it looked like most everyone else was here in front of the middle school, spread out over the lawn and steps, instead of in the cafeteria.
The answer came. “Because some grade has to get early lunch period.”
“It’s not that I want to eat their horrible lunch anyway, but this is ridiculous. Don’t you have any sunscreen in your bag?”
The voices were coming from two girls who were sitting on the same stone wall Aimee had found. It was under the shade of a large tree with droopy branches covered in beautiful purple flowers that gave off the most amazing scent, like real perfume. They definitely didn’t have trees like this at Aimee’s school in Chicago.
Or girls like that.
They looked like miniature grown-ups, in perfect clothing, with perfect haircuts, perfect skin.
Aimee looked down at the jeans, flouncy white blouse, and brand-new sneakers that had seemed just fine just this morning but suddenly looked ridiculous. She looked like a baby. Oh jeez, what had she been thinking?
If her mother had been home, they would have laid out her outfit the night before. They might even have gone shopping for something special. But as it was, most of her stuff was still packed in boxes, and her mother’s trip to New York hadn’t been expected when they made plans to stay an extra week for the bat mitzvah.
Aimee had had to leave her school, her house, her room, and all her friends, including her best friend, Lauren, who had sobbed and cried, and had made Aimee a special memory book, which she’d held out in one hand, wiping her nose with the other.
“I’m not moving to outer space,” Aimee had said, but she could feel a flood of tears behind her own eyes, and now, looking out at her new school, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t landed on the moon.
“Who are you?” It was one of the girls sitting on the wall beside Aimee. The one who wanted the sunscreen.
“Me?” Aimee pointed to herself.
“No, the girl behind you.”
And Aimee turned around before she realized the girl was making fun of her.
Aimee had told her mother, “I don’t want to go to a new school. I’ll never make friends.”
“No, just kidding,” the girl added quickly. “Yes, you. You’re new, aren’t you? We heard we were getting a new girl in our class. I’m Vanessa. This is Bridget.”
The other girl leaned forward, smiled, and did a little wave thing.
Maybe her mother was right.
Give it a chance.
“I’m Aimee,” Aimee said.
Vanessa scooched closer along the wall and Bridget followed, like they were attached by an invisible rope.
“Where are you from? Why weren’t you here last week when school started? Did you just move here?” Vanessa asked in rapid-fire succession.
Aimee didn’t know which question to answer first. “I had a bat mitzvah to go to over the weekend, so we just thought it would be easier to fly here after that,” she said. She waited a beat, trying to think, and then added, “From Chicago. I’m from Chicago.”
“Oh, cool,” Vanessa went on. “Why did you move? Is your dad in the movie business? Everyone out here is in the movie business or something related to the movie business. My dad is a screenwriter. Is that why you moved?” She talked really fast.
“My dad is a script adviser,” Bridget said quietly.
“Yeah, he works for Spyglass,” Vanessa added. “So, what about your parents? Is that why you moved here? Isn’t it so cool?”
Aimee hadn’t thought it was cool at all.
She had begged her parents not to move, even going as far as leaving sticky notes all over the house, in secret places that they would find over the course of days or weeks. The laundry room, the coffee cupboard, her dad’s bike, her mom’s box of hair color. But nothing worked. This was a big opportunity for her mom, a promotion.
Her mom wasn’t an actress or a director or a costume designer. She worked in finance, for a company called Cantor Fitzgerald, and her dad was a math teacher, so he was interviewing at schools in the area. The idea was that this new job of her mom’s would change their lives for the better.
“It will make things easier,” she’d heard her mother say. “For all of us.”
“No,” Aimee told the girls. “We moved here for my mom, but she’s not in the movie business. She’s in banking.”
When she said that, Aimee could see their faces drop. Banking was boring. Vanessa was glancing off to the left. Bridget was already studying her nail polish. The thick scent of the tree blossoms was beginning to border on nauseating.
“But it’s a really big job,” Aimee rushed on. “It’s so important that my dad doesn’t even have to have a job.”
That didn’t come out right, but it was too late. Vanessa’s expression went from boredom to pity.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Your parents are getting divorced?”
“I’m so sorry,” Bridget piped up.
“No, I didn’t say that,” Aimee blurted out.
Vanessa was shaking her head. “You didn’t have to. That’s the other thing about California. People move here just to get divorced.”
And lunch period was over.
September 10, 2001
9:48 a.m. EDT
Brooklyn, New York
There was no way Sergio was going to school today. No way. Not after what had happened that morning when Paul decided to show up. Sergio needed some time to cool off, cool down. All the muscles in his body were tight, wound up, like twisted wires about to break. The image of Paul standing in the hallway kept flashing in Sergio’s head, and he needed it gone. Sitting in a classroom wasn’t going to cut it. Fresh air was the only answer. Fresh air to blow away the sight of his father—of Paul standing with his hands in his pockets, standing in the doorway. Waiting.
Sergio didn’t refer to Paul as his father. He was Paul Kinkaid, and somehow he’d gotten wind of Sergio’s math award and the trip to Chicago. He came by, early that morning, to congratulate his son. Couldn’t a father congratulate his own son?
How did he find out?
It sure couldn’t have come from Sergio’s grandmother.
To say Nana wasn’t fond of Sergio’s dad was an understatement. He didn’t ring the buzzer outside. He somehow managed to talk someone into letting him in, and he showed up at their apartment door. Knocking. Ringing. Calling out.
“Serge. It’s me, Sergio. It’s your dad. Sergio, open up.”
“What do you want, Paul?” Nana said when she opened the door, but not all the way. She blocked the space between outside and inside with her own body. Paul kept trying to look past her, for his son.
“So, Sergio, I hear you are some kind of math genius.”
The way Paul said it was like an insult.
Sergio didn’t answer. His grandmother did. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he is,” she said. “Is that all you wanted to know?”
She remained by the door. She didn’t invite Paul inside. She didn’t run to the kitchen and put up a pot of coffee, as she would for pretty much anyone else, including the UPS man, if he’d come by.
“No, I didn’t come because I want anything.”
Paul stood, his head nearly touching the doorframe. He was probably six feet three inches tall. It was the one thing Sergio hoped he would inherit from his father.
Paul turned to look at Sergio. He dug into his pant pocket. “I actually came to give him something.”
Sergio would kick himself later. He would kick himself every single time it happened.
When would he realize not to expect anything? Not to trust Paul and never to let his guard down? But he did, and for a moment, for that single split second, Sergio thought his father had really gotten him something.
A gift? A card? Money? Money was always nice. Something to commemorate his accomplishment. It was what parents did, right? Parents who couldn’t show up at the ceremony in Chicago might buy a gift, might slip their kid a little money. That was a reasonable thing to expect, right?
Sergio told his heart to be quiet, but instead his rebellious heart quickened with anticipation. Not for the money or the card or the gift, but the connection. His brain braced itself for certain disappointment, but his heart was ready to be evacuated of all previous sadness and make plenty of room for everything to be good, and real, and safe.
Like father and son.
Like, Okay, you haven’t been the best dad, but here you are now and you’re trying to make it up to me because I’m your flesh and blood and because I love you. And because you love me.
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