I'll See You Again

by Jackie Hance

  Later, she stopped again at a gas station and went into the convenience store. She left the kids in the car, and the surveillance tape at the store showed her walking through the aisles. She left without buying anything.

  And that’s all we knew. We would keep coming back to those scraps of information over the next months, twisting them into different shapes, trying to make them tell a story. But the evidence didn’t add up to anything that ever made sense, so we kept going around in circles with no escape.

  Five

  Extreme stress does odd things to the mind.

  I have no factual explanation for the temporary amnesia that kicked in right after the accident. Every time I woke up, I had forgotten what happened. More specifically, I didn’t know that the accident had occurred or that my children weren’t coming home.

  One morning I got out of bed, stumbled out of my room, and found Jeannine sleeping in the hallway.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, bewildered.

  “I slept here,” she said.

  “Where are the girls?” I asked, looking around at their empty rooms.

  “Jackie . . .”

  “Oh, that’s right. The girls are on a camping trip.” I felt slightly dazed. The girls would be home soon, right? Sure they would. This morning, maybe this afternoon. But why was Jeannine here? And if she needed to sleep over, why had she stayed on the floor outside my room?

  In movies, amnesia is the basis for charming entertainment—like a perky Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates waking up in Hawaii each morning, unable to remember that Adam Sandler has been wooing her. My amnesia wasn’t quite so endearing and nobody would sail off happily into the sunset at the end. Whenever I fell asleep, my brain reset, knocking me back to the Sunday morning of the accident. Whether I jerked awake from a midday nap or got up from a fitful night’s sleep, I would wander around, asking for my daughters. Sometimes I drifted into the street, as if looking for them. I’d go to the kitchen and start making lunch for them or find treats to put in their backpacks. My unconscious apparently wanted to keep repeating the day until I got it right. But, unlike a character in a movie, I could never get it right. I couldn’t alter the ending.

  Did I know what had happened and just refused to believe it? Even in retrospect, I can’t begin to explain the tricks my mind played. I wanted so deeply and desperately to change that day that my brain wouldn’t hold on to the truth. My subconscious self simply refused to accept the reality.

  My friends, including Jeannine, tried to drag me back to reality. They kept newspapers in the house from the day of the accident, which they showed me repeatedly. Since two people would usually sleep over each night—curled up on the couch or outside my bedroom door—my friends had written instructions, explaining what to do when I looked at them blankly and couldn’t remember anything. They all came to understand that the story of what happened to Emma, Alyson, and Katie would get written on the blackboard of my mind, then erased just as fast.

  • • •

  One morning, about two weeks after the accident, my friend Tara was in the house when I woke up. Then eight months pregnant but still sleeping over to be there for me, she had braced herself for the ritual of nudging me into the present. As kindly as possible, she told me why the girls weren’t there, and as usual, I remained slightly hazy. She patiently read me the newspaper account. I listened. She read it again. But I wasn’t the only one listening. As she described the tragedy for the second time, Warren’s frustration suddenly boiled over. Struggling with his own torment and grief, he found my denial, however subconscious, too much to bear.

  “Enough!” he yelled. “I don’t want to listen to this anymore!”

  “Why are you yelling?” I asked him, bewildered.

  “Jackie, snap out of it! The girls aren’t here!” he shouted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jackie, there was an accident. You know that.”

  “What accident?” I gazed at him, my expression blank and uncomprehending.

  “The girls are not here. The girls are dead!” Warren shouted.

  “Why would you say something like that?” I asked, my voice trembling.

  “Because it’s true.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “It’s the truth, Jackie. Look at the paper. Read it again. They’re dead.” He threw the frayed newspaper on the table and slammed out of the room.

  I’d like to say that his fury snapped me out of the amnesia. But it didn’t. Trying to speak rationally to a person who has become thoroughly removed from reality does no good. For weeks, we continued the same dance.

  Warren continued to suffer from my unhinged state, and so did my friends. “Imagine how horrible it is to tell your friend that her children have passed,” my dear friend Jeannine said months later, after I’d begun to comprehend what I’d put them through. “Now imagine how horrible it is to have to tell her that a hundred times.”

  I still feel guilty that I added to others’ anguish, but the memory loss wasn’t willful. Denial may be a survival mechanism that kicks in when events are more than we can bear, an evolutionary tic that guarantees we go on despite overwhelming circumstances. Doctors had also prescribed heavy drugs for me to help with depression, anxiety, and sleeplessness, and the combination of Xanax, Ambien, clonazepam, and a few others might have caused a chemical disconnect.

  Warren didn’t typically have to face my confusion in the morning because I regularly woke up before dawn, while he was still sleeping, to go running. For years, I had been part of a running group of five or six moms who met most mornings before the sun rose to exercise. We’d start texting each other at about 4:30 a.m.—who’s in, who’s out. “Was up all night with crying baby, so too tired to run,” an apologetic text might read. Or “Count me in! Got some sleep.” Those early-morning beeps on my phone made me smile and gave me a sense of belonging.

  Once the group gathered, we’d take off for six miles, chatting and sharing stories all the way. A kaffeeklatsch on steroids, we ran fast and gossiped endlessly. Even with a stop at the local deli afterward for actual coffee, I’d be home by 6:15 a.m., heart beating and endorphins soaring. It had long been my favorite way to start a day.

  I didn’t plan to start running so quickly after the accident, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Friends and family packed our house for days after the funeral, but I was disoriented and had stopped eating. Wandering through our living room on Sunday night, I noticed my friend Bernadette. In her mid-thirties but with the looks and energy of a teenage rock star, Bernadette was one of the linchpins of the running group. She had married early and had four children, the two younger ones in the same grades as Alyson and Katie.

  I knew the next day was Monday, but what did I do on Mondays now, in this post-accident world? What could connect me to the person I had been just a week ago?

  I tapped Bernadette on the shoulder. “I’m going running tomorrow, right?” I asked her, completely out of the blue.

  “Sure you are,” Bernadette said without hesitation. She smiled at me, as if she’d never thought I’d do anything else. “But Jackie, if you’re going to run, you have to eat.”

  I had no taste for food and couldn’t imagine how I would ever swallow anything. A tightness perpetually clutched at my throat. Nothing tempted me, and I’d lost several pounds in the week since the accident. For some people, that might be good news, but I’d been slim to start with and didn’t have a lot of reserves. Bernadette immediately made a new rule: If I wanted to go running, I had to gulp down three cans of Ensure. In coming weeks, that simple rule might have saved my life. It was the only thing that got me to ingest any calories at all.

  • • •

  My friends knew that I’d battled bulimia from the time I was a teenager. Trying to cure the condition, I’d met with specialists in eating disorders and tried various healthy eating regimens. I’d had individual counseling and gone to group therapy sessions. But combating the disorder w
as a difficult challenge, and finding a remedy proved elusive.

  “If you know it’s a problem, why don’t you just stop?” Warren asked me once, when we were dating. However bewildered he felt, he remained supportive and had come over to New Jersey to drive me to a doctor’s appointment.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not that easy.” Why don’t overweight people stop eating cookies? Why don’t diabetics stay away from candy? I’ve heard about people who pay thousands of dollars for a week at a weight-loss spa, then sneak out at night for a pepperoni pizza. Our short-term impulse controls and long-term goals don’t always match up.

  The bulimia stopped during my pregnancies but kept coming back. I never let the girls know about the problem and hid from them when I threw up after binges. Nobody has quite figured out what really causes bulimia, but it’s generally understood that feelings of inadequacy definitely play a part. So does a desire to please people and keep your life under tight control.

  After the accident, my subconscious must have finally accepted that however much I monitored what I ate, life would spiral in its own direction. I could never control what really mattered. In fact, trying to control anything now seemed pointless. The bulimia disappeared and never resurfaced.

  • • •

  Members of our running group usually drove to Bernadette’s house in the early morning to start the run from there. But now they changed the plan to make it easier for me. I set my alarm for 4:30 a.m., and whichever friend had stayed over at our house groggily got up, helped me find running clothes, and walked me outside to the street corner. The group gathered there around me—and we took off.

  Some mornings I kept pace with the group and joined the conversation. Other times I bolted ahead by myself, going so fast that nobody could keep up, as if I wanted to outrun my own pain, leave the past behind and go to a different, distant place.

  When the worst has happened, how do you go on? Sometimes all you can do is put one foot in front of the other—quite literally. Running was a bit of normalcy I could hang on to when everything else had become tangled and twisted. I had run before the accident and now I was running again. Tying on sneakers and going into the cool morning air was something I had always done without the girls at my side, so, unlike most of my activities, it wasn’t haunted by memories.

  Coming home from the run at 6:15 a.m. used to be ideal. After getting the day off to an exhilarating start, I had plenty of time to wake the girls, make them breakfast, and pack their lunches.

  Now I came home to unbearable silence.

  The quiet in the house hit me like a sledgehammer every single morning, after every single run. Instead of excited chatter bouncing off the walls with my three girls dashing around getting ready for the day, I faced only silence. The noiselessness had an almost palpable presence—a looming, gloomy headstone marking all the words that weren’t being uttered, the laughs not laughed, the footsteps not landing on the floor.

  In the silent house, I looked at the clock and felt myself sinking even lower. What did I have to do all day? The hours ahead stretched endlessly. After the girls were born, I had quit my office job and become a full-time mom. I had worried about losing a bit of my identity, but being a mother gave me a sense of purpose. Now, without my girls, I had no purpose, no reason for being.

  As I floundered, Warren tried to stay strong, talking to lawyers and handling all the tangled legal and financial problems. I had always wanted him to go to church with us and now he was attending mass twice a day. I had wanted him to exercise and now he was running and riding his bike a lot. He walked the dog. One day he bounded into the kitchen where I was sitting and I looked up and felt that flush of adoration, like when we were first together.

  How great to experience that again. But it didn’t last long. With the girls ripped from me, my heart had been torn out—and how could I care about anyone if I had no heart? I couldn’t say “I love you.” If Warren tried to hug me, I stood there limply until the embrace ended. I had turned to cold stone, which probably isn’t what any man wants in a wife.

  Late in the summer, Melissa and Brad invited us to their vacation house on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, and Warren and I decided that a sandy beach and new scenery might do us good. The getaway had an effect I wouldn’t have expected.

  On the second day of the vacation, Warren took a shower after a day at the beach. I looked at him as he dried off with a towel—and felt a twinge of our old attraction. For the first time since the girls died, I imagined having sex with my husband. Just as quickly as I felt the pull, I was racked with guilt. Was it wrong to feel desire? Even though I wanted to be close to Warren, I couldn’t let myself want to, I couldn’t give in to it.

  A strong physical attraction had been a part of our marriage from the start. Warren had complained once, years ago, that I never initiated sex, and all I could do was laugh.

  “How could I? The minute I walk into the bedroom, you’re all over me,” I teased him.

  Since the accident, we often stayed far apart, going to sleep at different times or in separate places. Alone together in the bedroom we were more likely to fight—or cry—than to make love. But something about the beach house—the fresh air, the freedom from the oppressive silence in our own home—let us both remember what used to be. That night in bed, I was drawn to him, and he responded. As the beach breeze wafted through the window, Warren forgot that he was a man in torment and remembered only that he was a man.

  “Warren, we can’t do this,” I said, suddenly feeling uncertain and pulling away.

  “Yes, Jackie, we can. We have to,” he said.

  “But the girls—” I began to protest.

  “This isn’t about the girls. It’s about us.”

  Having sex that night, I let myself be distracted for a few minutes from the black horror I couldn’t otherwise escape. It was nice to feel my husband close, but I felt guilty about experiencing pleasure and wouldn’t let the connection unfreeze my heart. I remember that night on Long Beach Island so strongly because it didn’t happen again for a long, long time.

  Six

  In my unhinged state throughout August, I felt that I had two mysteries to solve. The first was why Diane drove onto that highway. The second was how Emma, Alyson, and Katie had died in the car. Maybe it was obvious to other people that a horrific car accident could snuff out three little girls. But it made no sense to me. I kept thinking of how normal and pretty they looked when I gazed at them before the funeral.

  “I want to see the autopsy reports,” I told Warren.

  “No you don’t,” he said.

  “I do. I swear I do. I have to know what happened to the girls.”

  “The autopsies won’t give you any answers.”

  Warren had the autopsy reports but kept them hidden from me. I knew exactly where they were—and one day while he was out, I finally got the courage to read them.

  I could feel my heart pounding as I slowly took the official documents out of the drawer. Would the medical examiner’s findings tell me some secret that I hadn’t yet known or imagined? Would I finally understand what my daughters felt during those final, horrible moments?

  I held the autopsy reports in trembling fingers, stunned at first by how short each seemed. Three skimpy pages, one for each girl. Barely one tiny paragraph on each page. How could the girls be dead with so little wrong with them?

  I read the few sentences over and over, but the words just blurred in front of me. I called my friend Maria, a hospice nurse, and she rushed over to help me understand the clinical lingo. Emma and Alyson had died at the scene, Katie at the hospital. The dry report blandly enumerated the findings of head trauma, broken clavicles, and internal injuries. Clearly this wasn’t the grandiose explanation I wanted.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, calling Jeannine later that afternoon. “The girls looked so perfect at the funeral home. Something else must have happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “I
don’t know. But how could they all die?”

  “The force of the trauma from the car accident caused internal injuries,” Jeannine said simply.

  An instant, an accident. How could that one moment end everything that mattered in my life, everything that defined me? Our lives are supposed to go on a straight path, and when they veer so dramatically, how can we grasp that what has been so vital and alive is no longer here? I still wanted to believe in an orderly universe, to find bigger forces at work that would give meaning to what right now felt so completely meaningless.

  I called our pediatrician, Dr. Ana Dellorusso, and asked to see the girls’ medical records.

  “Jackie, they were healthy children,” she said gently. “What are you trying to find?”

  “Maybe they all had a heart disease. Something genetic that they were born with,” I said, trying to sound rational.

  “Why would you think that?” she asked.

  “Because it doesn’t make sense that they all died. Maybe there was an underlying reason I don’t know about. I want to see their records.”

  She could have told me to stop being silly, but instead she let me take the thick files that had accumulated over the years as the girls came in for vaccinations and well-child visits, for the occasional cold or strep throat. I didn’t find anything suspicious because there was nothing to find. All three girls had been perfectly healthy. The car accident—nothing else—had killed them. “What happened in that car was just the laws of physics,” Dr. Dellorusso explained, trying to give me an answer.

  Physics. Others had said the same thing to me, talking about trajectories and impact and force. But how could something so cold and mathematical explain what had happened to three warm and vibrant girls?

  Not completely convinced, I turned my attention to the girls’ teeth, conjuring mysterious dental problems from thin air. Danny’s lawyer had raised the possibility that a gum abscess had somehow been involved in Diane’s actions. The theory might have been a reach, but since we had all resorted to grasping at straws, I wondered if something comparable could have weakened the girls. Is that why they had died?