by Jackie Hance
“They were happy memories,” he said. “I don’t want to lose those.”
He looked out the window and I suddenly saw again the summer evenings when we had family barbecues, Warren standing by the grill while Emma carefully came out holding a tray of hamburgers and hot dogs for him to cook, and Alyson and Katie watched him flip them onto the fire. After we ate, the girls would run around the backyard and I could still see Warren carrying Katie into the house when she got tired, snuggled in his arms, a look of contentment on both their faces.
His resistance to moving irritated me, but I didn’t argue further because in truth, I still got some peace from being in the girls’ rooms. Many days, I would lie down on each of their beds, one after another, and cry. But now I couldn’t just worry about me, I had to think about this baby. Was it fair to bring her into a home where every corner was already imbued with memories of lost sisters? And why wouldn’t my husband ever see another point of view?
• • •
Before the accident, Isabelle and I had talked about expanding our small houses for our growing families. We both considered moving elsewhere, but our neighbor-friendship was so special that renovations seemed like a better idea. The close connections between our children gave everyone so much joy that any house problems seemed irrelevant.
“I’d give up my house in a minute to have a neighbor like Isabelle,” said my friend Kathy, who lived in a huge, exquisite house that made everyone’s eyes pop.
“It’s a deal!” I joked. “You get Isabelle and I’ll take your house.” But even as we laughed, I understood what she meant. Friendship trumped room size any day.
Isabelle is like the sister I never had and always wanted—funny and sweet and up for anything. Our husbands referred to us as Lucy and Ethel. We used to come up with crazy schemes together and in the days when our children played together regularly, Isabelle and I did, too. She was easygoing and laid-back and made everyone laugh.
As moms, Isabelle and I were usually running around with the kids, shopping or carpooling or making plans. But one spring when Katie was about four, Warren happened to pop home several days at the exact time that Isabelle was over. And each time he came in, he managed to catch Isabelle and me in a rare moment of relaxing.
“Where are the kids?” he asked one day when he raced in to pick up some papers and found us drinking coffee in the kitchen.
“In the yard playing,” I said.
“No they’re not,” said Warren, looking out the window.
“Then they’re in my yard playing,” said Isabelle, stepping into the doorway and waving.
Warren just shook his head and muttered about the easy lives we had.
“How does he always come home in the five minutes we’re not doing anything?” Isabelle asked, mystified. “It’s like he has some magic radar.”
The next time it happened, I jumped up from the table. “Pick up a sponge! Pick up a broom!” I called out to her. “Make it look like we’re doing something!”
When Warren came in, Isabelle had her coffee in one hand and was idly holding a broom in the other. Warren looked at her strangely but this time didn’t comment.
We weren’t off the hook yet. A few days later when the kids were playing, Isabelle came up to my bedroom to see a big pile of clothes I’d just bought.
“Try them on, I want to see!” she urged.
So I stripped down and pulled on a new outfit. After getting Isabelle’s approval, I took it off and reached for another one just as we heard Warren’s car pulling up.
“Oh no, not again,” I said, standing in my underwear and feeling very exposed.
“I can’t believe it!” Isabelle said. “The radar again. He’s going to make fun of us for goofing off.”
“I don’t want him to catch me trying on clothes,” I said, scooping up my purchases and throwing them into the closet. “What should we do?”
“Get into bed!” Isabelle said. “Under the covers, quick.”
Giggling, we both jumped into the bed—Isabelle fully clothed and me not so much—and pulled the quilt over us.
We heard Warren’s footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, he stood in the doorway and looked at us, baffled.
“What are you two doing?” he asked.
“Watching TV,” I said brightly.
“In bed?” he asked. “In the middle of the day?”
“We just felt like it.”
He stepped into the room—and, of course, the TV wasn’t on.
“We turned it off when we heard you coming up,” Isabelle volunteered.
Warren looked at us oddly. He grabbed what he’d come in for and fled.
Isabelle and I tried to wait until he had gone back outside to burst into hysterical laughter, but we didn’t succeed very well.
Now that I was pregnant again, Isabelle and I still laughed together all the time, and she regularly came over to visit. But beyond that, the gate between our houses stayed mostly closed. With their best friends gone, her children stayed in their own yard, traumatized by loss and not wanting to experience the pain of coming over. A therapist Isabelle consulted suggested that it might be helpful for Kailey and Ryan if they didn’t have to stare into the empty bedrooms across the way anymore. But Isabelle wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’m not moving away from you,” Isabelle insisted loyally. “Don’t even think about it.”
She hired an architect who drew up plans to double the size of her house. Eight thousand dollars later, we studied the plans together.
“This is silly,” I told her. “You’ll have this giant mansion on a block that doesn’t have anything like it. You’ll never get your money back when you sell.”
“Then I won’t sell,” she said. “I’ll live here forever. I’m not leaving you, Jackie. I wouldn’t do that.”
Her loyalty moved me, but how could I ask her to make that kind of sacrifice? I’d already learned how a life plan can fall apart. “Maybe you should think about moving,” I said. “It’s okay. I don’t know how I’ll feel once the baby is born. What if you build this big house and then I want to move?”
But Warren wasn’t planning to move, and he felt adamantly that Isabelle and Mark should stay. He and Isabelle talked about how our baby-to-be would make everything just like it used to be. The two yards would be filled with happy children again.
“You two are unrealistic,” I told Warren. “What Kailey, Ryan, and the girls had isn’t going to happen again. It’s never going to be like it was.”
“Why not?” he asked. He wanted to recapture the past, but it wouldn’t happen. The kids wouldn’t be anywhere near the same age.
“Ryan will be eleven when the baby is born. Maybe he’ll babysit, but he won’t be her best friend. And the baby’s not walking through the gate to Isabelle’s house anytime soon.”
For once I was the rational one in the crowd, able to see clearly what they didn’t want to admit.
“Warren doesn’t want me to move,” Isabelle said one morning when she came over to talk about her expansion plans.
“Then Warren’s being selfish,” I said. “Anyway, have you looked at the house for sale on Adams Street? It looks pretty online. It’s the right size for you. And it’s only a mile away.”
Isabelle shook her head. “I don’t want to look.”
“You should,” I insisted.
Some days later, Warren called me from work and he was crying. Even before I heard his voice on the phone, I heard a loud, gulping sob.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“I told Isabelle she could move,” he said. “She liked the house you told her about. I think she’s going to make a bid.”
I called Isabelle and she was crying, too. “How will I get breakfast if I move?” she asked, only half joking.
Leave it to Isabelle to find the sweet spot of our friendship. Her husband, Mark, and I were early risers, and on weekend mornings, one of us would go out to pick up bagels for everyone. We both have excessiv
e energy, while Isabelle and Warren like to sleep in. We always joked that if Mark and I were married, we’d have a big clean house and be doing projects all the time.
“The bigger question is what Warren is going to do for junk food if you move,” I teased back. Given that our own cabinets were either barren or stocked with healthy food, Warren often called Isabelle asking if she had any Ring Dings or Doritos to spare.
The day the moving van pulled up to Isabelle and Mark’s house, I felt lower than I expected. Her move to Adams Street signaled a fresh start, and though my pregnancy should have signaled the same, I didn’t feel it yet. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my children. I wanted my children playing with Isabelle’s children between our backyards.
That night, I showed up at Isabelle’s new house with dinner.
“You came!” she said happily, flinging open the door.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s just takeout,” I said, putting dinner down on top of an unpacked box.
She giggled and brought me inside. Despite the boxes, I could see how happy she was in her new house. We both would have liked the gate between our backyards to swing forever, and for our houses to ring with the happy voices of Kailey, Ryan, Emma, Alyson, and Katie all playing together. But that was gone and something else had replaced it. I understood for maybe the first time that change didn’t have to destroy me.
“I’m happy for Isabelle,” I told Warren when I got home. “I guess this is what people mean when they tell us we have to move on.”
“We’ll never move on, Jackie,” he said. “What happened will stay with us forever. But we do have to try to move. Just keep moving, a step at a time. That’s the best we can do.”
He was right. Getting on to the next phase of my life would happen slowly. I looked at my belly, which protruded slightly under my shirt. One small step at a time.
Twenty-two
Once when Alyson was very young, we were talking in her room, and I asked her if she wanted to be famous.
“Nooo, Mommy, I don’t want to be famous,” she had said, shaking her head.
“You don’t?” I asked, surprised. “Why don’t you want to be famous? I’d looove to be famous.” I stood up and struck a movie star pose.
Aly giggled. “I’m happy just the way I am,” she said. Outgoing and comfortable in life, she didn’t need to imagine a spotlight shining. “But you should be famous, Mommy. You are famous!”
Sometimes those words came back to haunt me.
Because of the accident, I knew what it was like to have photographers snap my picture when I least expected it, or to have store clerks’ eyes widen when they saw the name on my credit card. Interest in what the tabloids had dubbed the “Taconic Tragedy” seemed to linger, though Warren and I did nothing to encourage it. We didn’t speak to the reporters who continued to knock on our door, and while I became email friends with at least one well-known network TV reporter, I let her know from the beginning that I didn’t plan to do an on-air interview. What would be the point? Except for the written statement we gave early on, we tried to stay out of sight, maintaining a public dignity.
My brother-in-law Danny had no such instincts.
Maybe Danny’s desire to clear Diane’s name overrode everything else—including his better judgment. From the beginning, Warren and I distrusted Dominic Barbara, the sleazy lawyer who used Danny to whip up a media storm right after the accident. In February, the courts found Barbara guilty of various misdeeds and suspended him from practicing law for eighteen months. He promptly retired. But plenty of other people were still turning Danny’s head. In late winter, we heard that HBO planned to run a documentary on the crash, produced by a filmmaker named Liz Garbus. Danny signed a deal with her.
“Why is he doing this?” I asked Jay, Danny’s sister-in-law and his media sidekick. Since Danny didn’t speak to Warren and me anymore, I got all my information through her.
“I guess we’re all still looking for answers,” Jay said.
And maybe Danny wanted money. The Washington Post reported rumors that “Daniel Schuler was paid $100,000 to participate in the film.” (The film’s publicist said it was much less—and it probably was.) When Warren and I got a call from the filmmakers, we immediately declined any offer to be interviewed. No discussion. We doubted the documentary would make HBO proud. Filmmaker Garbus seemed to be continuing on the path Barbara had set of finding a medical explanation for the accident, something that would shed light on why nondrinker Diane had been drinking. I didn’t object to her skepticism, and I shared the view that something must have happened that none of us really understood. But the idea of making a public spectacle of it was too much.
“What do you think the movie is going to say?” I asked Warren one night. “Is there any way we can stop it?”
We couldn’t stop it, of course. A free and open press is great—until you become its victims. Thinking about the documentary made my stomach churn. Why bring the story up again? In our 24/7 news culture, shouldn’t something else be front and center by now?
Warren received a letter from the producers, asking for permission to exhume Diane’s body. Since we owned the cemetery plot, he would have to agree before anything could happen. It seemed sordid and horrifying, but Warren and I decided that if Danny needed answers, we didn’t want to stand in his way.
Much as I wanted to stay out of the spotlight, I also wanted people to remember our daughters. It drove me crazy when reporters talking about the accident said that the victims had included Diane, her daughter, Erin, and “her three nieces in the backseat.”
I am the mother of those three beautiful girls! I wanted to scream. Emma, Alyson, and Katie are not just anonymous “nieces.”
Meantime, talk of lawsuits continued to swirl. We had lost three children, and now we could lose everything we owned, too. According to the convoluted laws of insurance and legal responsibility, Warren could be sued because Diane was driving his car. Really? You sue a car, not the person driving it? Apparently we could have a round robin of suing: I could sue Diane’s estate on behalf of the girls. Danny could sue Warren on behalf of Bryan, because it was his car. And so on. The press jumped in, having a field day with stories of family-turning-against-family, which infuriated me all over again. Maybe we weren’t in Norman Rockwell bliss at the moment, but all anyone wanted was to get whatever was due from the insurance companies. Though it was a complicated way to divide a very small insurance pot, the lawyers insisted it was necessary.
Warren simply wanted it over. He told the Bastardis, the family of the men killed in the SUV that hit the Windstar, that we would give up any money that we might deserve from the insurance if we could just settle quickly. Through their lawyer, they said no. I certainly understood that people in mourning after a tragic accident can get caught in a tortured cycle of anger and recrimination. But this might have been the ultimate example of blaming the victims.
My nerves were already frayed by the pregnancy, and now we were dealing with lawyers and lawsuits and the ridiculous possibility of our being sued for big sums of money. Knowing that the whole horrible story would be a TV show that people watched for casual entertainment drove me completely wild.
Just when everything was as grim as could be, it got grimmer. HBO announced that the title of its documentary would be There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. Emma’s last words to me.
“Oh my God, how could they do that to us?” I wailed. “That’s horrible! It’s cruel! Do they even have the right to use that title?”
How could a person with any normal human sympathy exploit Emma’s last words as a TV catchphrase? Maybe producers and network executives were as heartless as the Hollywood stereotype. I called HBO, begging them to change the title. For almost two years now, I had replayed the words from my last conversation with Emma over and over in my head. I heard her every inflection, thought about what she must have been thinking and might have been feeling. Ours had been a private conversation, a private exchange
between mother and child. Now it would be nothing more than a catchy title to get ratings.
In late April, our foundation had received a $30,000 check from HBO with a lovely note:
“Please accept this donation on behalf of HBO Documentary Films. We’re so sorry for your loss. Emma, Alyson and Katie live on through the good work you’re doing with the Hance Family Foundation.”
I had jumped up and down shrieking in delight. All the good we could do with that money! The network hadn’t asked for anything in return. Warren was more distrustful.
“Don’t cash it yet,” he had said. “Let’s see what’s in the movie first.”
“Oh, you’re killing me!” I said, joking, as I clutched the check. “The movie’s already made. Let’s cash it and do something positive with it.”
But Warren had convinced me to wait, and now I was glad. “You were right. No way can we accept this,” I told Warren as soon as we learned the movie’s title. We wrote a note to HBO explaining that the foundation was sending the check back. We suggested that if they really cared about doing good, they should make a contribution in the girls’ names to one of the other charities that the foundation supported.
As far as I know, they never did.
• • •
I had tried to be understanding about Danny’s eagerness to cooperate with HBO. If he wanted answers or absolution (or both), that was fine. But now he’d crossed the line. He could sell his own soul, but what right did he have to take advantage of my daughters?
“I bet he didn’t have approval of the title,” Jeannine said, trying to calm me down and offer some perspective. “He probably didn’t have much control at all.”
“Then he shouldn’t have signed the contract!” I said. “Doesn’t he think of anything?”
When I complained about the title, the people at HBO were sympathetic in the same way that customer service reps from your credit card company tend to be when you’ve been overcharged—they murmured how sorry they were, said they’d look into it, and then didn’t do anything at all. They probably figured that if the title got me this riled, it would stimulate ratings, too.