Another buddy, Eric, assured me that he and others had started in on the high-school equivalent of push-polling, of caucusing for votes. Come on, they’d say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds. Wasn’t it a little suspicious how she just turned into his car? You ever think of that? To her friends they’d say quietly: We have to be there for Darin, too. We have to support him, too.
For all that, my inviolability zone wasn’t airtight. An AP English teacher, rancorous and grim, squinted my way: I’m almost positive he shook his head and grumbled as we passed each other. But more often what happened was vague. Students in hallways passed looks back and forth, telling one another: Hey, go on tiptoes around a griever like this. Or they just shunned me—quickened their pace, hid their heads in open lockers. I got a sense of which look signified what. Grievers become connoisseurs of the averted eye. My stomach was wincing the entire week. Except now and then, on the second and third days, when a few non-friends dared talking to me. At those moments, there would be that echoed thump! everywhere in the chest.
On the off chance I would need to chat, I’d prepared a whole, verbatim pitch. (“The entire thing happened in like an eye blink.”) When I delivered it, I’d see myself as poignantly sad, even a bit aw-shucks, with sundown lighting and uncertain piano tinkles right out of Hollywood, a scene trembling on the brink of discovery.
Again, most people steered clear, but a few—“Hey Darin, that morning did you have any, well, accidents happen, whatever—I’m sure you weren’t, I mean, who gets drunk during the day, but I’m just asking, did you …”—a few kids did say things that demanded I address the accident. I’d chew off my monologue piece by piece, fussily clearing my throat, letting out a chunk at a time. It was the version I’d settled on, official and even true, but in a way that seemed to go against the spirit of truth: facts with edges sanded, corners rounded. (“Again, I didn’t really see her cut in front of me until pretty much, you know, impact.”)
The kids who did talk to me usually said: Most of us understand it wasn’t your fault, or some other soft response. And I even got awarded this: in front of my locker, the football team captain face-gestured my way. (With, I should admit, infinite disinterest.) He was the physical king of the class; his nod played up his good chin, the charisma of his nose … But so what seemed to be happening to me was a surprise. I don’t mean that North Shore High accepted my return with a gentle yawn. A fatal accident will remain a trusty motor of cafeteria scuttlebutt—I could intuit that as I humped around carrying my lunch tray. I felt like a paper cutout, poised there, being snipped into conversations at every table.
The school also had, of course, a few death fetishists. Kids who drew intricate pen-and-ink arabesques on their notebooks, who scratched BLACK SABBATH or ANTHRAX in their official fonts on the spine. These kids jostled over again and again, offering condolences but wanting accounts, details, details. I was a figure to them; to them, I may as well have been walking the halls with a black cowl and sickle. There was one girl in particular. She had mannish hair, cut in a greasy style. It was obvious, as she interrogated me—the wide eyes, the thrilled cheeks—that by talking about this, she felt close to something decayed and vibrant.
But still, what now seemed a qualified acceptance of me at NSHS came as a relief—compared to my own serfs-with-pitchforks visions. My reception exceeded what I’d hoped for. All the same, a new unease came shyly into my heart, as if on tiptoe. I didn’t know what it was. And then I did.
By fifth period I could pretty well catalog the variety of reactions. Some misread my tense, android gloom as some Mahatma Gandhian state of moral insight or knowledge. (As if, via something like virtue osmosis, those who brush up to death just arrive at the sense of what matters and what does not.) Other kids (friends of Celine’s and some basic misanthropes) flat-out blamed me for killing her, though this group mostly bit their tongues about it. But most people’s reactions lacked all intensity. If you were neither a close friend nor some kind of rival, it was easier to give “the tragic event” a minute of incomprehension and then go about your adolescence. “This,” I thought, “is it?”—someone has died. But the student body, stepping into summer sunlight, had grabbed its beach towel. It was nice out—that bright gush of weeks right before graduation—and your future rarely feels so present as it does in this June of your prime. The accident, to pretty much the whole school, was just one black feather in the larger scheme of things.
I didn’t understand that everyone’s tepid emotions were reasonable. The panicky little drum that kept me going required that this event, this death, be epochal. Of course, it was that: this was an incomprehensibly sad occurrence for our school, our town. But I didn’t yet know that there are some truths—that even young people die occasionally; that there’s only so much gnashing of teeth and weeping over another person’s tragedy—there are some truths that only come to us softened by beautiful stratagems of self-deception. Nobody wants to be reminded. Nobody wants to hear the sad song again.
Melanie Urquhart, at the end of that first day, approached my locker. I braced myself: here it comes.
As she closed in—backpack straps, yellowish hair, eyes at my face—I realized I wanted to hear it. This is what I craved, the fullest force. The worst thing. I needed it to be spoken, and by someone outside of myself, so I could determine whether it was true. Melanie was short but took long, fast steps. Here was judgment, at last. One quirk that makes life hard—for the mobile packets of truth and lies we all are—is that we’re all imprinted with a kind of bullshit meter. It’s nonpartisan. It gauges what others say, and what we say, too. It’s most active socially; it goes to sleep when we’re just thinking. I felt a magnetic pull to Melanie now. I got excited, even brimming.
“I’m sorry, I—” she barely managed, “—support you.” She told it straight to my sneaks.
It was insincere. Melanie had been peer-pressured into coming. “You’re okay, Darin, which is important, too.” She was talking with steep reluctance. Or maybe she meant everything she said. I don’t know. It couldn’t have been easy for her—or for any of my still-stunned classmates.
What I wanted to tell her was: “I’m sorry I haven’t cried. I may not look it, but I’m overcome by this, a total mess, a wreck on two feet.” I didn’t say that—not that, or much of anything I can recall.
And so, as with the policeman in the newspaper, as with the Shrink, as with my decision to not even find out which hospital Celine had been in, I avoided the moment once again. The moment when I would be compelled to know what I felt about this.
When would the funeral be? The weekend—meaning not tomorrow, or the day after, but on the far side of the week? I mean, weren’t they always on the weekend?
My father and I went to the funeral alone. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t join us. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted her to. But as a family, we’d fallen into a set of dance steps: when calamity happened, Mom would stand off to the side, looking into her soda until someone would ask if she wanted to join in or not.1
When it comes to the funeral itself, my memory squints and mumbles.
At the church door I took a shaky gulp and wrapped my palms around the handles and my heart was a live bird nailed to my chest. Selfishness was thrumming at me: Don’t open this door, just take off! Maybe it only seems like the right thing to do, showing up today, but probably mine is the last face her parents and friends and whoever wants to see, yes that’s true maybe it only appears that the more mature thing is to open this door right now, but in fact the braver thing is maybe to not face it. I mean, I am the guy who drove the car and I’m showing up to her funeral? Are you serious about this? Because no one and I mean no one would expect you to have to, even if it is the manlier thing to do, or whatever, because you’re not even a man yet really, etc.
My father stood at the door and showed no expression of any kind: it was up to me. I opened the door.
I bowed and averted through the crowd, I swallowed and hesit
ated. This was—and remains—the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I was relieved to feel tears on my face. Among the selves jostling inside me was an actor who could manipulate people, while the frightened kid in there sweated out his confusion. Real tears, some part of me knew, were right. I wasn’t fully aware of most of this: I felt so much but understood so little, could express so little. I greeted the wetness on my face with relief.
An old man clamped his eyes on me as if he wanted to cut my heart out. Imagine outliving not only your children, but your grandchildren. The man was frail, with the body—slim hips, short, a big belly—of a schoolgirl eight months into a mistake. He stood to the left of my path and didn’t move; my father and I had to glide around him. His head revolved carefully, never releasing me from the grip of his gaze. I turned and looked—my father had, too—and the man kept staring.
(I now think tears don’t mean anything so much as overload. You don’t know what you feel. So tears spill out.)
I was bewildered and guilt-ridden and I hadn’t even faced Celine’s parents yet.
And then I did. Some mortician or other heartache functionary shunted me into a back-chamber where they were—it was like a green room for this particular death’s celebrities. I tried, for some reason, not to cry here, as if that was what was expected of me. I was trying to act as a kind but hard-judging person would want me to act.
I had the child’s faith that going through every official rite—psychiatry, returning to class—would restore me to an appropriate place in everyone’s eyes. Darin was brave enough to go to the funeral. He didn’t duck, nor did he shirk. He did The Right Thing. I hadn’t realized that the hard-judging person was myself.
Celine’s father, a big man, came to me with a surprisingly light step. He didn’t know what to do with his face. It was soft and jowly, and he wore glasses that gave him a Tom Bosley, Happy Days aspect. This made me to think he’d be gentle and understanding.
In the long moment before he found words, and as he took my hand, Mr. Zilke settled on an expression, a hard-won glint of: I will be friendlier than you have any right to expect me to be.
“You’re Darin.”
My voice and my face behaved as if this were a regular meeting between cordial strangers. I was nervous about sounding nervous, and nervous about sounding anything but nervous. (Even now I feel my face go red as I remember this: having complicated her parents’ grief with the question of how to treat me was perhaps the worst thing I could have done. A possibly brave act for me, but awful for them.)
Celine’s mother joined us. (The thing is, I still don’t know what would have been the right and respectful thing to do, other than having shown up.) I think her mother attempted a smile, but not a single muscle obeyed; she stood there exempt from all expression. Then her cheeks flared a difficult color. She was preparing to do something.
First, a clenching of her body, a steeling herself for something personally odious. She let out a noise: part sob and sigh, part venom. She hugged me quickly, and just as quickly shrank away.
“I know it was not your fault, Darin. They all tell me it was not your fault.” She swallowed, and took me in with exhausted eyes. “But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now.” Her voice went dim. “Because you are living it for two people.” Her face was a picture of the misery that had worn out the voice. “Can you promise me? Promise.”
Yes, of course, of course, Mrs. Zilke—and the accident churned my stomach. And here again came that reflector sliding up, like those raindrops on the Shrink’s Porsche: up and over my windshield. But somehow it still didn’t seem right to promise Mrs. Zilke this. How can you commit to something you don’t even understand? Was I to become the Zilkes’ son now, visiting on school breaks, calling in with news of grades and girls?
I tried to scrub my face of all emotion and message, to let Mrs. Zilke fill it with whatever meaning would bring her comfort.
“Can you promise me, Darin?” Her eyes got very hectic. “Promise. You’re living for two. Okay? Okay?”
I nodded quickly.
And she continued to gaze at me. Not too unkindly or even severely, just for a long while. I swallowed what had become a big pointy stone in my throat. Some clock somewhere kept beating its subdued cymbal. I looked away and then back. She was still looking at me. Why are you the one who is still alive? her eyes seemed to be saying.
I opened my mouth to tell her—what? Nothing. Finally, at once, she turned to leave: she wanted, forever, to have no part of this life she’d doubly freighted. My dad leveled his hand on my back, on my shoulder. A kind of drape of family, holding me, recasting me as his, and our family’s.
Next I’m standing before Celine’s open coffin. I don’t remember how I got here, who’s brought me. I only remember the tingly awareness of the two hundred whispers at my back, and how that got every hair on my body to stand up. Celine looked almost like herself. What I mean is, she now looked more like her high-school self than she had when I’d mistaken her for someone pale and dozing on the road.
I haven’t really described her appearance at all. Her face was soft and broad, pretty and unpretending. Pretty without being stagy about it.
Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what. I’m not sure I can get across just how much I want to be extra-generous to Celine here. Extra-generous and, you’ve probably noticed, extra-writerly. It’s a coward’s tactic. I’m trying to write all the difficulty away.
What if I tell you it was windy when I fled the memorial, so that all the trees moaned in protest. Is that puffed up enough, labored and lyrical enough, to seem like something extracted from a novel—and not just a real day of a real boy and a real dead girl?
I want very badly to tell you Celine was unusually beautiful. Celine was unusually beautiful. And to equate her with quiet, sleeping Juliet—or some such overdone b.s. Will the tuneful balancing of q and t sounds—the thing I’ve learned to do with my life after Celine—isolate me from the reality of what happened? (Which was merely this: here was a plainly attractive and nice girl I kind of knew who died after she pedaled into my car.)
The truth is—if I even have access to the truth—I remember Celine only with certain key words: athletic, broad face, good-natured, bicycle. These words call up no images. Real memory is a mix of blast and keepsake. For me, with this event, there is nothing—at least not in the part of the brain I live in. My mind looks away. I see only letters on a page, vowels and consonants, press and flop. There: I’m still trying to write and write and write away the reflector.…
So I can’t share the image of what lay inside the coffin. I don’t have enough mental steam to make it all the way there.
What I do remember is self-centered—my own turning from the casket. I’m hurrying past all the stares in this neat and unreal spectacle. The heels of my unfamiliar dress shoes clack on the church floor. My stomach has been clutched and empty all morning; it’s already been a long, hungry day. Soon enough I’m spluttering past the old grandfather, almost at the exit. And my dad keeps buzzing in my ear, “Keep your head up; just keep your head up …” The grandfather’s head is dropped so he won’t have to bear the sight of me.
I hadn’t realized I’d been slouching my own head. I felt buoyed by an almost infant-level admiration for my father, and I wondered if I would ever know the things grown-ups know. I lifted my head.
1. I should mention, if only in a footnote, how great my parents and sister were throughout this. Real difficulty, if it holds any benefits, holds this one: sometimes it lets you find out if your family has a genius for kindness, for devotion under pressure. In mentioning even this, however—merely giving my parents and sister their due—I feel again the we
ird twinning of my story with Celine’s, a feeling of how dare I mention my family at all. The Zilkes must have faced a howling sadness that makes what my parents were dealing with seem completely inconsequential, just smoke and cobwebs.
Looking back now, there’s something that bothers me about the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn’t Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual’s quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine’s death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.
The gym was an over-lit expanse of mascot banners, fluttery clothes, gaudy streamers, flashing cameras, graduation kitsch. NSHS was dressed for an end-of-year assembly. (This wasn’t graduation, per se; just the entire school, flippant and free, enjoying a practice run/celebration.) But as soon as the proceedings got on their feet, the principal decided to take a moment. She started launching into—and my stomach clutched; I knew what was coming—a sermon about Celine’s death.
Hundreds turned, a mass, bovine shift: this was the school’s first sanctioned, public mention of Celine in front of me. How would I react? Warm-faced, I focused hard on my thighs.
“I want to just take a little time here to talk about creating a Celine Zilke memorial scholarship.” The principal’s voice staggered, recovered. My lap looked pretty much the way it always did.
Half a Life Page 3