Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  So I falteringly did what the grad student had asked. I grubbed up addresses, wrote letters, rooted out old phone numbers, butted into lives: the other bicyclist from that morning, a girl Celine had played field hockey with, a chem-lab partner—anyone I could trace down from her world.

  I learned that Celine had remade herself in the months before her death. She had become a born-again. And once I found my way to her field-hockey friend, I discovered something that for years changed how I felt about Celine’s death.

  Our phone chat was short and intense:

  “I’m really really sorry to call like this. Because, well—” Immediately I was thrashing around. Talking too fast, explaining too much. “Because I sort of, I’m taking this class and need to find out more about, you know, her. Because of the class and the class leaders thought one really helpful thing might be to—”

  “Wasn’t that diary thing weird?” the girl said.

  What diary thing?

  “Oh,” the girl said. She’d overstepped. “I guess I assumed you knew.”

  I could feel my heart, its sudden and loud lubdub, blood lurching through the aorta.

  “So you don’t know?” she said.

  Celine had written, right before the crash, something to the effect of: “Today I realized that I am going to die.” It had been her mother who told this field-hockey friend about it.

  “Thank you,” I said, and hung up. I may even have said it again, after laying the phone down. It was like a pressure along every part of my body had been snipped away: cut ropes flinging out crazily, weights tumbling from arms, shoulders, head. Today I realized that I am going to die. They were just eight words. I’d already grabbed them for dear life.

  Celine, I decided, had died on purpose. That’s why she’d turned right in front of my car. (From what I understood, her family hadn’t been much invested in religion, and that’s why that born-again stuff not only came as a surprise, but actually had struck me as dispositive, somehow.) For me, the suicide note—or, rather, the hypothetically suicidal journal entry—settled it.

  The first trial deposition came when I’d been away at college for a month. I caught a Greyhound home, and then Dad and I ambled over to the Nassau County courthouse, positive that this whole thing was a formality, that the Zilkes hadn’t really decided to come after me. That they still maintained—as everyone did—I wasn’t at fault.

  (I don’t know how the letter summoning me to the courthouse wasn’t a dead giveaway. I guess that’s how naïve I was.)

  At the courthouse, Dad and I met the lawyer my insurance company had detailed to us: curly hair, wireframe glasses. This was on Mineola’s Franklin Avenue, behind a grove of telephone poles. The lawyer and I shook hands, and above his soft grip his face was pale and serious. This was not the face of mere formality. As he hurried us down the lobby (lights and footsteps spanking off the marble floor), he told me I was being “litigated against.” Wait, the Zilkes are coming after me? In the flurry of information, I didn’t catch the guy’s name. Why would they sue me, after their promise? It wasn’t until the elevator doors shut that I felt control over my features and bodily functions return.

  My dad and I followed the lawyer into a room in the lower floors. And here the lawyer divulged the cruel, galactic sum the Zilkes could get from me if the trial went horribly wrong. (It was beyond what the insurance company even covered; it was more money, I was sure, than I would ever have.) The low-ceilinged place we entered was called a Special Hearings room. I had to recalibrate myself again: Mr. Zilke sat about ten feet from me.

  All at once I could see him bringing me that iced tea in his front room. And now he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  I’d imagined this deposition would take place in a judge’s cozy chambers—polished wooden desk; a sort of brass-based, green, LA Law-ish lamp. Instead we’d all sidled one-by-one into this chalky and hideously lit sub-basementy place. A long plastic table commandeered most of the room.

  “You okay?” my father asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. I raised my chin, spoke confidently, and meant it. “Yes.”

  And as fast as that, under the burnished presence of a judge, the event began. Right away the Zilkes’ lawyer trained his expertise on me. How far did her body fly?

  Before I opened my mouth, I realized the confidence had been a bluff, a kind of performance for my father and myself, too. It was the weighted bat you swing bravely in the on-deck circle, which can’t stop your knees from buckling when you step up to the plate.

  How much did your car skid on the grass of the median before it came to a stop? With a hunter’s eye, the Zilkes’ lawyer targeted small rifts in my self-assurance and certainty. Five cars around, why did she turn into yours?

  The lawyer flexed his eyebrows as he spoke—eyebrows that didn’t believe me, that were already garnishing wages, spending the balance of a salary I hadn’t earned yet.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Over and again, question after question. “Don’t know. Not sure.” I looked at my father for solace. This wasn’t anything we’d expected. All he could do was watch me. Mr. Zilke, of course (there was a great deal of intensity at the table), saw that I was looking to my father.

  “I don’t know,” I said, each time more softly than the last. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  Then the Zilkes’ lawyer inhaled through his nose and shut his eyes, slowly. A man visibly calming himself.

  He came back from his settle-down place and continued. His style was a kind of word fog in which I couldn’t make out any detail, only the growing sense of being lost and wrong: “What’s the exact amount of seconds, son, between when you saw her and you killed her with your car? Because, right now, it doesn’t seem like, with your answers—or lack of answers—there’s any, shall we say, it’s just that you strike me as someone who might be telling less than the fullest extent of the truth. Do you follow me?”

  He searched my eyes, and for a moment, I got to search his. I made out, to my surprise, what looked like regret. Something shaky in the face, there in the spry brows—a remorse about the power and edge that experience has over anxiety and weakness. (This was my thinking then.) “Take your time, son,” he said.

  In any court setting, where people have nothing to do but lean forward and listen, silences feel drawn-out. They convey an impression of somebody using the shade of a few extra moments to put together a hasty lie. I wasn’t going to lie, though; I just didn’t want to give the only answer I had. But now their lawyer’s eyebrows hiked up as he waited for me to answer. My lawyer’s did, too. I probably had no choice but to hand over my one skimpy truth. Even Dad’s eyebrows were starting to pyramid. It seemed so artificial, somehow, that I couldn’t simply step out from behind this table and head off into the telephone-pole orchard out there on Franklin Avenue.

  “I don’t know how many, exactly,” I said. My face and the room seemed to be the same smarting temperature. Someone’s chair leg scraped against the floor. And the Zilkes’ lawyer, resetting himself, sat waiting for more.

  “One second?” I said—a guessing game. “Half of one?” I was lucky I didn’t just fall thwap onto the floor.

  “So which, then?” the lawyer said. “One second or half? We’re all here to listen to what you have to say.”

  Mr. Zilke, meanwhile, was bashful with his gaze until it failed him; he turned from the questioning and kept his eyes on his watch, on his cuffs. (Mrs. Zilke, like my own mother, wasn’t there.)

  More questions for me. Were you drunk? The Zilkes’ lawyer had the structural design of a Saint Bernard, sags and weight and flaccidity. Can you prove you weren’t drunk?

  (He’d later ask a policeman who’d been at the accident similar questions. Q: “How can you be sure young Mr. Strauss wasn’t drunk?” A: “I’ve been a police officer for years. He wasn’t drunk. I could tell.” Q: “Were you derelict in your duty in not giving him a breathalyzer?” Etc.)

  “Mr.
Vancini, approach, please,” the judge said, interrupting. Robed in the prestige of the state, he was the one relaxed figure in the room. The judge leaned forward to whisper something. Without ever having been in a court (or a Special Hearings room), I realized I knew the ins and outs of this place—lawyers approaching the bench; my having made the official promise to tell the truth; direct and cross and redirect examinations—just as everyone in the country did: from TV. Which is to say in my bones.

  (Weeks later, when I got to see the court reporter’s transcript, I read what the judge had actually murmured to the Zilkes’ lawyer. “Mr. Vancini,” he had said, “we all know how fond of money you are. If you don’t stop badgering this young man, I will take some money from you, via a fine.”)

  During a break, I headed alone down the courthouse hallway to get a Coke. Teenage housewives and their husband-tyrants; a napper hogging the whole bench outside a courtroom; pre-divorce couples irreconciling their differences publicly; facial bruises; some lawyer yelling drill-sergeantly loud commands at his client; a professional witness checking something in a briefcase, preparing to testify for show and profit; teary faces, tattooed faces; a weeping thug and his parents against a wall; crying millionaires; one defendant poking her court-appointed attorney on the lapel. A whole different division of a city had been ousted and massed here. At least that’s how I remember it: the complete anthology of anxieties. And I was here, too, however I looked to these people, holding my plastic Coca-Cola bottle—a kind of affiliation with the bright and normal world—a few inches ahead of my body, like a lantern. All these people: all of our lives were in doubt.

  Back in the Special Hearings room, the deposition quickly ran its course. A few more vague yes-or-no questions. Then: all righty, thank you, goodbye. Nothing would be decided this morning.

  On his way to the door, Dad stopped in front of Celine’s father. (They’d met only at Celine’s funeral.) I was afraid for a moment that Dad intended to punch him.

  “He’s a prince, this guy,” Dad told our insurance company’s lawyer, and smiled warmly.

  This was not sarcasm. Dad grinned and patted Mr. Zilke’s shoulder. This was nervousness, forced joviality. Emotion pressed a dark horizontal wrinkle across Mr. Zilke’s scalp. But with forced appreciation, Mr. Zilke said hi and thank you. It was all very strange. Mr. Zilke’s eyes were dry. He was taller than I’d remembered. The Zilkes’ lawyer turned to me with his fat, meaningless face. Everyone left.

  Driving home, I asked Dad: “So, listen, why’d you do that? I mean, a prince?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Dad couldn’t tamp down, or maybe didn’t even know about, his smile. “I guess I didn’t have any idea what to say. It was like, I almost forgot he was suing us for a second. I remembered how nice he’d been at the funeral.”

  Being friendly to Mr. Zilke felt, somehow, very natural. Back at college, I needed to act that way, too. My thoughts about Celine now were about honoring her memory, however privately. Every time I thought of Celine’s parents blaming me for the death they’d promised to absolve me of, I felt tender toward them.

  But when I speculated that maybe they didn’t blame me, but instead were just trying to wreck my life for money—or that maybe they were simply and totally ruined, which made them not even quite know what they were doing—at those times I’d orbit around my sadness and guilt, and agonize. Mr. Zilke had brought me iced tea in a room where—for the first time, among adults—I knew I was hated.

  I did not blame them for suing me. I pictured the Zilkes standing over Celine in some awful white hospital room just before their daughter died. The father with the terrible pinch of loss in his mouth, trying to will Celine to wake up, to somehow go back and say Be careful and Look both ways. The mother gently squeezing the bumps of Celine’s feet under hospital covers. Or wanting to get up from the bedside chair and stretch but being afraid to move. I saw her parents conferring together over the bleakest decisions, signing forms, crying, working not to look upset—because wasn’t there maybe an off chance that Celine could perceive their sadness, or their fear? Mr. Zilke palming smooth the rumples in his dying daughter’s bedding. How could anyone blame these people for anything?

  Amy Hempel has a story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” I read it a few years after college, and then read it again from the beginning immediately after I’d finished. Early and in passing, the narrator tells a very sick friend about a chimp whom someone had taught sign language. The story doesn’t analyze sadness so much as prod it and poke at it. Near the end, the sick friend dies and the story goes out like this, once the narrator is left alone:

  I think [back to] the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

  In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

  Baby, drink milk.

  Baby, play ball.

  And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

  3

  “Bear your griefs yourself …”

  —As You Like It

  For years, the court case just dragged its slow length along. Nothing lawsuit-related would be going on, then I’d get word of a coming deposition—which then for some reason would be postponed, indefinitely. It seemed random, like when a dark sky decides not to rain. But even as our case would disappear around a corner, I could sense it wending its way—spreading its shadow, big and cold, inside the parts of me where Celine still was.

  My old friend Jim attended Boston University, not far from Tufts. I could talk accident stuff to Jim, because he already knew. It was a bit of social math; I couldn’t lose anything by it, because the crash already shaped how he saw me.

  All the same, I talked to him about it exactly once.

  Sophomore year and Christmastime. I was nineteen. Jim and I waited together at Logan airport for a flight home. I admitted, or tried to admit, that the painful fact of Celine’s parents being out there, someplace, just seething, hating me, blaming me for their daughter’s death, made me just … made me just …

  How could I put words to the thick, gloomy thing that covered my mind—this nullity that even all these years later, when I call up that airport confession, makes it all play a little extra darkly in my brain’s theater? This was the same pain, the same whole-soul despair, that got me thinking—mainly theoretically, in an informal way—about committing suicide.

  I felt in contact with the Zilkes’ hate, a long-distance communication between us, like a dispatch sent over telephone wire: a future, a jinx, message received. This silent communication with the Zilkes felt like the truest words anyone had said to me since the accident. The only unmuffled thing—what I’d waited to hear the whole time. You did this. You alone are responsible.

  I didn’t cry when talking about this to Jim. I just felt very, very sad. Tears came quickly and readily at movies—even the dumbest movies—and at commercials. (Even the most obvious: family gatherings, a new mayonnaise sampled at an outdoor table, or an affordable phone service—and I found myself reaching for the Kleenex. A man and woman taking each other’s arms after leaving an especially understanding slow-motion bank, walking down a moody, populated street with smiles on their faces, and I was a puddle.) But I never cried about things in my own life. They seemed too small. And I never cried about Celine.

  Jim listened carefully as I chattered on about the Zilkes. Holiday passengers circulated around, their belongings on stands and wheels: the flustered, the ardent, the frowning, the greeters and the greeted, the intersections of lives and plans at an airport.

  “What dicks they are,” Jim said.

  My thought was—no! “I think her parents just don’t have any idea what to do,” I said. How would he act in their place?

  Jim shook h
is head no. He put his hand on my biceps; I could feel the fingers through the wool. College was teaching all of us not to be so shy about touching, that contact was what adults did more of than children.

  “Darin, dude, everyone knows how you feel. Don’t beat yourself up. Her parents are already willing to beat you up for you,” he said. “Those dicks.”

  I gave a small, gutless laugh and changed the subject. I very badly wanted to stand up for the Zilkes but didn’t even try.

  And then I was twenty and not talking about it at all, not even to people like Jim. That year I remember as one peeled of emotion. I didn’t identify with the Zilkes’ anger anymore. I really wasn’t feeling at all, just finishing classes, closing books and subjects forever.

  I belonged to no support groups, but still I somehow fell into the serenity now traps of rationalization and cop-out. It was easy to do. I had, of course, that journal entry. I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody’s pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else.

  At twenty-one I was studying in London, where avoidance was even easier. An ocean between me and the person who had done this.

  Turning up a collar to Leicester Square fog, swigging one-pound lagers in fireplace pubs—these were just a very few of the uncountable experiences that Celine would never have. Every time I realized this (which was often) it came as a numbness that seemed to match the London weather: as though Celine was merely some girl I’d vaguely known in high school with very bad luck. I remember walking alone down British streets that directed everyone to Look Right, Look Left. This simple pavement advisory struck me, for pretty obvious reasons, as buzzing with whole realms of meaning.

  The lawsuit still loomed over me. But I had Celine’s journal entry. I relied on assumptions I made about it. The assumptions seemed burnished and solid, and I wouldn’t have gotten through life without them.