The Accident Season

by Fowley-Doyle, Moïra

  The darkness shivers over my skin like little needles. I think about a warm hand in mine as I walked barefoot across a river that couldn’t possibly have been frozen. I think about riverbed eyes. Without really realizing that I’m thinking out loud, I say: “I know exactly what you mean.” I say it faintly, and my breath mists before me. I can see the words exit my body. I can see them right in front of me.

  Alice hasn’t noticed. “But I’m scared,” she’s saying. “Isn’t that crazy? I’m scared to admit things. To admit that I was wrong.” She puts her empty glass down and twists her hair forward over her shoulders and fans out the ends on her sling. “I’m scared of being happy.”

  That’s when I realize that Alice has never been happy, not for a very long time. The knowledge shakes me. She must have told me, shown me in a million ways for years, but I never really realized. I lean forward and take her good hand in mine. I whisper, “I’m sorry,” because there’s nothing else I can think of to say.

  Alice turns her hand so she’s the one holding me. “It’s okay, little sister,” she says. “It’s going to be okay.” But it doesn’t feel like it’ll ever be okay.

  I can’t hear my mother upstairs anymore. I wonder if Gracie’s phone call made her feel better or if that’s even possible. Not for the first time, I think about what it must be like to lose a sibling. I cling to Alice like I’m drowning, or like she is, and I don’t want to let go. The worst one yet. Bea’s words buzz in my brain.

  “It’s the thirtieth,” I whisper into Alice’s hair.

  Alice pulls away and looks at me. She nods. “I know. How is she?”

  “Bad.” I pick at some fluff on one of the couch’s cushions. “I’d forgotten,” I say quietly. “Is that really selfish and horrible?”

  Alice rubs my arm. “Not at all,” she says. “It’s normal. Life goes on.”

  Not for everyone, I think. “I miss Seth more than I miss Dad,” I tell Alice. If I were at school I’d type it up on Elsie’s typewriter and it’d be put up with the other secrets on the clotheslines through the halls, but I’m not at school, and telling secrets to a sister-friend is almost as good.

  Alice’s voice is a whisper. “Me too.” Secrets are even better when they’re shared. I look down at Alice’s bandaged legs. I want to tell her what Bea’s cards said, warn her to be careful, but I am too afraid.

  “The accident season leaves its marks,” I say instead. I think about my father, I think about Seth. I think about all the near misses, about the car driver slamming on the brakes today, about how fast she would have been going if she hadn’t seen Alice at the last minute. I think about Alice hitting her head on the banister rail as she fell down the stairs the other night. No one in the house. She might not have woken up from her concussion or been able to call the ambulance. Sometimes it seems like more than luck when we survive the accidents.

  “I didn’t fall down the stairs,” Alice says suddenly, as if she has read my mind. I look up at her face. “I wasn’t even here. In the house, I mean.” I remember getting my mother’s call that night, taking a bus to the hospital and walking a concussed Alice around and around.

  “But you hit your head—”

  “On Nick’s mantelpiece.”

  My heart drops down into my stomach. “Alice,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think of to say.

  “We were having a fight. He pushed me, I fell—he didn’t mean it, it was nobody’s fault. It was an accident,” she says, “but it wasn’t because of the accident season. It isn’t always about that.”

  I wince. It feels like my whole body is wincing. “I think it is.” Alice tries to cross her legs, but the padding on her knees won’t let her. Her tights are still stained with blood. She grimaces. “I can’t believe I didn’t see that car coming,” she says.

  “None of us did.” I shake my head. Then, remembering, I say, “You said something, before the car hit you. When I bumped into that street performer statue guy.”

  Alice shrugs and drags herself backward so she’s sitting more comfortably against the back of the couch. “The guy in the Tin Man costume? I just thought he looked like somebody,” she says. “That’s all.”

  I pull some fluff away from the cushions. “I thought I heard you say Christopher,” I say, remembering Sam’s expression, wondering if he heard what I heard.

  “I was wrong,” Alice says, and she gets up off the couch. “Obviously.” She picks up our empty whiskey glasses one-handed to take them back to the kitchen. “It was one of those weird resemblances that disappears with a trick of the light.” She turns at the door to the hall and hitches a little sigh. “I’m going to go check on Mom.”

  The padding on every surface feels oppressive, like there isn’t enough room to breathe. It feels like there’s a lot not being said. I think my whole family is like that: We bite back the things we can’t say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.

  ***

  Sam comes home some time later. Alice and I are back in the living room together with the television on low in the background. The sound of it is muffled in the over-padded room. My mother is upstairs with the tea we brought her. We suspect she won’t sleep much tonight.

  The first thing Sam does when he comes in is ask what happened to Alice’s face and she tells him the same thing she told our mother: It was an accident. I avoid Sam’s eyes. He stares at Alice for a long time.

  “Okay,” he says, but it doesn’t sound like he believes her. “How’s Melanie?” he asks, sitting down on the coffee table beside us. “Today’s—”

  “The thirtieth, yeah,” says Alice. “She’s upstairs. She’s okay, I guess. As okay as she can be.” She gazes up at the ceiling like she can see through it to our mother’s room. She has a funny look on her face. “She’s keeping her secrets,” she says.

  I frown. Alice’s cheek is turning purple. Her lip has stopped bleeding, but it’s swollen and looks sore. I glance over at Sam and think that Alice is hardly one to talk about keeping secrets.

  Sam seems to think so too. His face gets cloudy. “Yeah, that’s how we do things,” he says. “Isn’t it?” His voice is sharp. He stands up and then sits down again. “I hate this!” he says loudly. I look up at the ceiling like Alice just did and hug my arms to my chest.

  Sam says, “In this house we never really know what’s wrong, only that something’s wrong. It’s fucked up.” His foot taps on the ground like he’s nervous, or angry. He points an accusing finger at Alice. “And what the hell happened to you after I left you at the hospital? Or are you keeping your secrets too?”

  “Sam,” I say like a warning.

  “No, he’s right,” Alice tells me, and she suddenly sounds just as angry as Sam. “You’re right,” she says to him. “You want us to share our secrets? Okay, I’ll tell you what I think—I’ll tell you a secret.” Her voice is dangerous, like the edge of a cliff. She says, “I think this accident season thing is bullshit.”

  I put up my hands to stop her, as if her words are physical things that can reach out and hurt us. “Alice, come on.”

  “It is.”

  I look anxiously toward the living room door. Sam didn’t close it when he came in, and I’m worried my mother will hear.

  “What about all the falls and bumps and bruises?” I say it in a whisper that comes out as a hiss. “What about the car that just hit you? Mom’s hand, her broken arm? The bookshelf that fell on me? Sam in PE?”

  “Coincidence,” says Alice. “For the most part. The rest? They’re not accidents. You think my phone just slipped out of my hand that night? I was angry.” She says it with passion. “I threw my lamp at the wall.”

  Sam opens his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “But it was still an accident that my shelf fell down,” I say. My hiss gets louder. “And what about all the cuts and stitches? What about the br
oken bones of every other year?” My voice is at normal volume now and it feels too loud to my ears. “What about the narrow escapes, Alice? Like the time Sam cracked his head on the kitchen tiles? Or when that glass broke and nearly severed the vein in your wrist? Or the time I almost drowned?”

  Alice’s eyes are like someone else’s. “You really think all those were accidents?”

  Later I’ll let myself look back on that sentence and figure out what’s wrong with it, like in a children’s picture puzzle, but for now I just raise my voice even louder and say, “What about the tragedies, Alice? What about Dad, and Granddad? What about Seth?”

  “Oh yeah?” Alice shouts. “What about Seth? What about how he died was an accident?”

  “Alice,” Sam says softly.

  “Look,” she says, “I know you don’t want to believe it. I know you never have, but that wasn’t an accident. He didn’t hit his head on that rock by accident.”

  And maybe her words are physical, maybe they do grab us and take us away from the wrapped-up doll’s house to the evening after one of my mother’s gallery openings in Westport four years ago. They bring us right there—I can see by his pale face that Sam’s there with me: We’re not in the living room anymore, we’re down past the pier, by the rocks, we’re daring each other to jump into the water fully clothed, but my mother won’t let us. Not during the accident season, she says.

  “He didn’t know that there were rocks there,” Sam says in a strange voice. “None of us did.”

  “Yeah,” says Alice. “None of us”—she gestures around at the three of us—“pushed him in. That part, that wasn’t an accident.” She shakes her head and talks over us when we try to speak. “Seth was pushed into the water, he hit his head. That’s not an accident. And I know you don’t like to think about it because Christopher’s your father, but—”

  “It was an accident,” Sam says again. His face is too pale and his cheeks are flushed. They stand out; they remind me that there’s blood beating under there, a network of veins.

  I put my hands on his. “It was a game,” I say to Alice. “Christopher just did it as a joke. We’ve done the same thing in summer. I can’t count how many times I’ve pushed Sam into the river.” Sam’s hands reach around and squeeze mine.

  Alice’s face is unreadable. “If that’s what you tell yourself,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s what Mom tells herself. I don’t think that’s what keeps her awake at night.”

  Sam’s face is furious, but his eyes are filled with tears. Alice gets up and storms out of the living room, and when she has gone, the whole house feels more breakable than ever, and unsafe even under all its layers.

  ***

  When we go to bed, I lie awake for a long time. My head swims from the whiskey I drank with Alice and from everything she has said. I feel that strange stinging sensation against my cheek again. It lingers like pins and needles. The wind whistles by my window, and suddenly I want to be outside. I open my bedroom door to go downstairs and Sam is standing there, right in front of me, his eyes hooded and his hair messed like he’s been tossing and turning in bed. One of his hands is raised like he was about to knock.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  I feel silly and tipsy in my pink fleecy pajamas. Sam inclines his head toward the stairs. “I heard you moving around in your room,” he says, “and I just wondered if you wanted to go for a quick smoke before bed.” He is wearing a rumpled hoodie over his pajamas and his feet are bare. “I couldn’t sleep,” he adds.

  “Me either,” I say. I realize that my chest is tight. Maybe a smoke would help.

  I follow Sam downstairs and out through the kitchen door. The rain is torrential against the windows, but we shelter between the back door and the shed and the wind doesn’t even ruffle our hair. It slants through the garden and needles through the trees. The world looks like it’s melting. I light a cigarette with shaking hands and pass the lighter to Sam. I don’t know what to say.

  “Do you remember that street performer in Galway the day we found the magic shop?” I say after a long smoky silence. I reach up and touch the shed roof. It’s rusted and slick with rain.

  “A street performer?” Sam hugs his arms to his chest, his cigarette perilously close to his clothes. The wind finds its way in through our pajamas.

  “The metal man. The human statue guy.”

  “You mean the guy in the Halloween costume earlier?”

  “I don’t know if it was a Halloween costume. I bumped into him last week in Galway too.” I take my hand down from the shed roof too quickly and the side of a corrugated-iron sheet cuts me, slices into my palm like a lifeline. Blood beads through the seam. I close my fist so Sam won’t notice. I’m not ready to go inside just yet. “I just thought that’s why you seemed to recognize him.”

  “I never saw him before,” says Sam.

  I back away from the shed and lean against the cold wall of the house. “Alice thought he was someone else,” I say. “That’s why she stopped. That’s why the car hit her.”

  Sam shrugs. “I guess he looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.”

  I don’t know why, but I keep going. “You didn’t think he looked like Christopher?”

  Sam sort of smiles. It looks more like a grimace. “I guess,” he says. “Maybe. If he were ten years younger and made of metal. It was just a passing resemblance, but I’m sure Melanie knows that guy. She knows most of the street artists around here.” He takes a sharp drag of his cigarette. “I wouldn’t even know what Christopher looks like anymore.” He tosses his hair out of his eyes. “He could look completely different. I know I do. If he saw me now he’d never recognize me.”

  I think of Sam at thirteen, his hair shoulder-length and tangled, his body scrawny, his eyes cheeky and confident, his voice pitching like a ship at sea, and I smile. Then I look at Sam at seventeen. I stand out in the yellow light of the kitchen window in front of my ex-stepbrother and really look at him. I see the blue streak in his dark hair, the freckles on his cheekbones, his fingernails bitten to the quick. I see his broad shoulders and big, square hands. I see his smile that flickers like a silent-film ghost. I look into his riverbed eyes and they look straight back into mine and my heart gives a little lurch.

  “And you know what?” Sam says. “I’m glad. I don’t know what I’d do if I looked like him.”

  I’m taken aback by his tone. “But he’s your dad, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” says Sam. “And what good does that do me? He left.” He finishes his cigarette and buries his hands deep into the pockets of his hoodie. “He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t care. He never cared. I kept trying not to believe it for years, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so . . .” He shakes his head with one eyebrow quirked like it doesn’t even matter, like it’s no big deal. “So I hate him.” There’s something underneath the raised eyebrow and the feigned nonchalance, though—I can feel it. It simmers like a storm.

  Then he says it, softly but fast, like something he needs to get out but doesn’t want to say. “I think maybe Alice is onto something.”

  I’m sure the shock registers on my face. “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” he says. “So much. I’ve been going over and over everything: how he left, why he didn’t take anything with him, why he only calls once a year, why he never comes back, not even for a vacation. Don’t you think there’s something that doesn’t add up?” His eyes on mine are almost pleading. I don’t know if they’re pleading with me to agree or to prove him wrong.

  “I don’t know, Sam,” I say finally. “I think it just sounds like a shit person who doesn’t care about anyone else.”

  Sam’s eyes are dark in the cold night. River-after-sunset eyes. “I guess you’re right.” He seems relieved. I try not to think about what Alice said earlier. It was an accident, I think. It was the acc
ident season. That’s all there is to it. I’m not sure I believe myself.

  Sam leans back against the shed wall and lights another cigarette. I check the cut on my palm and see that it has stopped bleeding. I crack my knuckles loudly in the careful quiet our words have left behind. Beside me, Sam blows out three perfect smoke circles. I stretch after one of them before it wafts into nothingness and I stick my tongue through it like we all did last night out here in the garden before Sam and I went down to the river and it was frozen. It seems like a long time ago now.

  Breaking the smoke circle is like breaking a spell. Sam grins at me and it’s as if the last few hours have been forgotten. I giggle. The air is cold and dries my tongue. I taste smoke and rain and mushy autumn leaves. Sam takes another puff, and soon there are three more smoke circles floating around our heads. Like a little kid trying to pop all the soap bubbles, I tongue every one of the circles. Sam puffs out some more and curls up his tongue in that way that’s supposed to be genetic and pokes at the smoke circles with me. We laugh low so as not to wake anyone up. The house is silent and seems far away behind us.

  I go after one of the smoke circles that has drifted away. It is deformed and oblong, and when I lean forward to catch it with my tongue I overbalance and almost fall down the back step into the stormy garden, but Sam grabs my waist and pulls me back into the shelter of the shed and we both laugh some more.

  We are very close. I notice it suddenly. Sam’s arms are still around my waist. He smells nice. His hair is completely black in the darkness and I can hardly see his eyes.

  “When you kissed Bea,” I say to him slowly in the circle of his arms, “you said it was to prove the cards wrong.” Sam nods slightly. “Did it work?” I ask.

  Sam stares straight at me. “No,” he says.