Cracking the Bell

by Geoff Herbach

  Ray and Hannah have not been drinking, like some of their friends were out by the lake. They’re not about that. They are quiet, and totally in love. They swam together in the lake. They hiked down into a valley and up across a high ridge that gave them a view of the entire park. They kissed up there for the first time.

  And now, in the car, they listen to Sufjan Stevens, the Michigan album, because it’s Hannah’s favorite, because the sweet, rolling songs remind Hannah of home, of rolling Wisconsin country. The open windows let hot farm air pour in, wet earth, growing corn. It is perfect. Her hand rides the currents.

  Ray’s Corolla crests a hill near Rewey, about fifteen miles northeast of Bluffton. The song “Alanson, Crooked River” comes on. It’s not even a real song, just a dozen tiny bells ringing together, like the sound fairies would make playing in the tall grasses along the road. “I love this,” Hannah says.

  They cross into an intersection. The pickup truck driven by Steven Hartley comes from the right, runs a stop sign. Hannah doesn’t even have time to scream. In a flash of steel and light, Steven Hartley’s truck blows the Corolla to hell.

  Steven Hartley of Arthur, Wisconsin, dies in a blink. He’s so confused as the Ford’s engine cuts through him.

  He has a blood alcohol level of .19, which is more than twice the legal limit. He is in the middle of a divorce. He has a two-year-old daughter named Melanie. Everyone is confused. The dude never drank. Never.

  Until he went to Boulder Junction Tap. Then he did drink.

  He kills Hannah while fairy bells play.

  I read my thing to Joey while he drove us home from Hazel Green.

  He had to pull over.

  He stared out the window for five minutes without saying a word.

  Finally, he looked at me, and said, “Yeah, bro. I bet that’s exactly how it happened. You nailed it. The goddamn fairy bells, right?”

  CHAPTER 3

  SEPTEMBER 29: MORNING AFTER THE FOOTBALL GAME

  I awoke thinking about my written version of Hannah’s crash. Or trying to. I kept sort of passing out. I wanted to remember it. I rolled to get out of bed. I couldn’t. I reached for my green notebook, which was stuck under my bed. But the room spun and the woman, the witch, stirred, shrieked. I couldn’t get my fingers around my notebook’s edges. I rolled back onto my pillow, swallowed hard. I had a terrible taste in my mouth. My head pounded.

  What is going on? What is going on?

  I shut my eyes tight. I am injured.

  Shrieking, like the sound of a girl losing her life?

  Hannah is dead.

  The bell had cracked.

  CHAPTER 4

  SEPTEMBER 29: INTO THE KITCHEN

  I stumbled into the kitchen, looking for coffee, hoping caffeine would help steady me, quiet the noise of my broken bell. I touched the walls in the hall; I touched the doorframe of the bathroom. I could feel things, but nothing felt real, substantial, like my soul had been knocked out of the universe and what was left was all plastic.

  Mom sat at the table in the corner. She looked up from her iPad. She seemed normal.

  September 28—the worst day of the year in my family—had passed. The day before she had canceled all her client meetings. She’s a small-town lawyer and needs to be able to think straight. The day before she had stood in the yard staring out into space. The day before, September 28, would’ve been Hannah’s twenty-first birthday. The day before, September 28, was the fifth anniversary of my grandpa John’s death.

  Mom couldn’t function on September 28.

  Generally, I couldn’t either. Usually, I took the day off school, so I, too, could stare into space, except I couldn’t the day before, because I’d had a football game to play.

  Mom squinted her eyes at me. It was September 29, and she was back inside herself, reading newspapers on her iPad, sitting at the little kitchen table.

  This was a normal Saturday-morning scene, but things weren’t normal. Generally, on Saturday mornings during football season, Mom, like so many Wisconsinites, a lifelong football fan, was chatty. We’d drink coffee together and run through the events of the previous evening’s game.

  But she squinted at me and said nothing.

  “Hey,” I said. My voice sounded fake. It echoed and whistled through gray corners.

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “What?” I asked. Echoes and whistles.

  “I heard you last night,” she replied.

  “What did you hear? The witches?” I surprised myself by saying that. But I could hear the witches.

  “Witches?”

  “Not real witches.”

  “I heard you vomiting, Isaiah.”

  I paused. Tried to remember. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t remember? That is even more disgusting.”

  The witch noise grew. A shady image emerged. Falling on the thick carpet in my bedroom, crawling into the bathroom, pulling myself up and over the cold side of the bowl. “Oh yeah. I guess. Vomited,” I said.

  “Three times,” Mom hissed.

  “I was sick, I guess.”

  “You were wasted.”

  “Wasted? No,” I said. The girl’s cry got louder. “I don’t drink.”

  “I asked you if you had been drinking and you said yes.”

  “Last night?”

  “When else, goddamn it?”

  “We talked?”

  “More like I screamed, and you crawled away from me.”

  “No. I didn’t drink. That didn’t happen.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes watered. “Isaiah. I don’t care if you win a goddamn football game. You cannot do that and live in this house. You will not behave like that in my . . .”

  “I would not drink,” I said. “What time did I get home?”

  Mom cocked her head. “Early. Someone must’ve had a bottle in the locker room.”

  “No one would do that. Do you know my teammates, Mom?”

  “I thought I did,” she said.

  “Something else happened. I . . . I didn’t drink, Mom. I wouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Something happened? During the game?”

  I nodded. The witches screamed.

  “Grandma Gin said you were down on the field for a bit?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I can’t . . .”

  Mom pushed back her chair. Anger left. Concern spread across her face. “What’s wrong with you, Isaiah?”

  “I would never drink, Mom,” I said.

  “Isaiah?”

  Wind ripped through the corners. Witches cried. “I have to lie down.”

  Mom stood.

  I slid to the floor, leaned against a cupboard door. “I really don’t feel good.”

  CHAPTER 5

  BEFORE FOOTBALL

  Joey remembers me from the days of my criminal life pretty well. He said I seemed like a normal kid, but I wasn’t. Joey hated Reid Schmidt and Ben Carpenter, my only friends back then. “Those dudes were shit. Reid shoved me into a corner over at Kwik Trip back when I was still in school. Bastard held me there and burped in my face. What a damn pig.”

  I wrote this for Joey in my green notebook. It’s about my first life.

  When Isaiah was a kid, he was the anti-Hannah. Hannah was a neat freak. She was sparky and funny. He was not funny. He was grubby and he broke stuff and he got in fistfights at the swimming pool and he didn’t like school, so he did terribly, and so some of the same middle school teachers who had loved Tammy Bertram (his mom) when she was a perfect seventh grader laid into her about her terrible, gross kid. Mom sent him to his room when she got home from parent-teacher conferences because she couldn’t bear to look at him. Hannah was so easy to brag about, so clearly her mother’s child. But the dirty little caveman, Isaiah? What a pain in the ass.

  That’s what Mom called him before Hannah died, the caveman. It was sort of a pet name. Until it wasn’t.

  Isaiah did something at Hannah’s visitation. It was a closed
casket visitation because Hannah was crushed to pieces and badly burnt and so the “restorative” work that needed to be done to make her presentable was too much for the mortician in town.

  But the casket was out there on some kind of podium, right at chest level for Isaiah. There were no flowers on it. Nothing. Just the door. Not good.

  Before all the people—the high school kids, and teachers, and his mom’s law clients and his dad’s colleagues, the staff and professors from the college—showed up to stand in line, to come forward and grimly shake Grandma Gin’s hand and Mom’s hand and Dad’s hand, to tell the family how much they would miss Hannah, Isaiah fixated on the casket, on the fact that his dead sister, who he loved so much because she was hilarious and her eyes sparkled with glee when she chased him around the house, was inside it, and he couldn’t control himself. He could never control himself. He wanted to say sorry, to say goodbye to her. He stood up from the folding chair and went to it and lifted the casket door and looked in.

  He began to shake. He began to cry. What was that thing inside?

  Why didn’t they have the box locked shut? Why was the box even out there at the visitation? Why didn’t anybody pay attention to the thirteen-year-old kid who constantly did stupid things? Who was skin and bone and vibrating energy all the damn time? Who would miss Hannah more than everyone else combined? Who had impulse control problems in the first place?

  He screamed.

  Grandma Gin grabbed for Isaiah. The casket door slammed. He fought Grandma off. Dad grabbed for him. Isaiah fought him, too. He couldn’t say why he fought. He couldn’t say anything. He was blind with fear and rage.

  And then Mom lost her mind. She started screaming, shrieking. “Get him out of here! Get that piece of shit out of here!”

  Isaiah ran. He found his way to Pine Street and then down to the grocery store, a half mile away. He hid behind piles of flattened cardboard boxes by a dumpster filled with rotting vegetables. He crouched down, dropped his head between his knees. He sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

  A grocery store worker found him when it was dark. The cops came to pick him up. No one spoke to him at home. He didn’t go to the funeral the next day.

  A year later, Isaiah had grown physically, and things were off the rails. The cops picked him up many times. He smoked pot at school in the eighth-grade hall bathrooms. He got wasted repeatedly with two young dickheads, Reid Schmidt and Ben Carpenter. He was arrested for shoplifting at Walmart (box of Combos pretzel snacks—not that big a deal, one would think). Later, after he drank a half bottle of vodka by himself and vandalized his own house, he was sent to live in a group home in Muscoda, Wisconsin, for two months (where he learned to smoke menthol cigarettes and to fight with kids much bigger and older and then also to breathe through his nose, to calm himself, to talk in group therapy, to write about his feelings). But when he got back from Muscoda, after promising to never drink again (he’d meant it), he followed that messed-up Grace again—because he couldn’t help it—to a massive party in a cornfield, which got busted, and he got hauled to jail again, and he received the ultimatum.

  “Go out for football or go to Muscoda for good,” Dad said.

  What would his life have been like if he had gone to Muscoda?

  Where would he be?

  “Maybe he’d be happier?” Joey asked.

  “No. I love football,” I said.

  “Life is more than football, bro,” Joey said.

  “No,” Isaiah said. “Not really. It really isn’t.”

  CHAPTER 6

  SEPTEMBER 29: THE HOSPITAL

  “Witch whistles? Is this the first time you’ve heard these witch whistles in your head?” the emergency room doctor asked me.

  I didn’t want to answer honestly. A little voice inside me said, Shut up. Do you know what you’re doing to yourself? but the actual voice in my throat said, “No. Not the first time.”

  Mom, who still wore her cheesed-out Mickey Mouse T-shirt and sweatpants that she used as pajamas, tipped her head to the side. “Are you saying you’ve hit your head like that more than once, Isaiah?”

  “No . . . no. Not like that,” I mumbled. “Not like last night.”

  Mom had a leather-covered notebook with her, taking notes. She scribbled in it like crazy.

  “What are you writing?” I asked.

  Dad, who left us two years ago, but had driven over from his crappy little apartment, looked at his phone, read headlines in the New York Times, which is probably what he would’ve been doing at his own place, said, “She’s taking notes so she can use this conversation against you some time in the future. The regime keeps meticulous records.”

  “Oh, come on. Not now, Dan,” Mom said.

  “How often have you heard the witch whistling?” the doctor asked.

  “Not very often.”

  “Give me a number. How many times?”

  “Two, three times if you count last night. I’ve heard ringing in my ears other times, maybe six times, total,” I said.

  Dad looked up from his phone. “Are you serious, Isaiah?” Dad said. “That’s not good.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Mom didn’t take notes.

  We’d already established that the concussion was more than minor—my pupils were normal, but I admitted that I might have been knocked out and that I couldn’t remember coming home. We’d established that I’d have to take a minimum of a week off without doing anything sports-related to rest and recover, and that I’d need to visit the clinic on the following Friday to be reassessed.

  All that was okay with me, I thought. It helped that the next week represented a soft spot in our schedule. River Valley, our next opponent, hadn’t won a game all season. Twiggs, Riley, and the rest would be okay without me.

  That was good. All my body wanted was to lie in a dark, quiet room.

  But the energy changed when I mentioned witch whistles.

  “Have you ever lost consciousness before last night?” the doctor asked.

  “No?” I said, but it sounded like a question, not a definitive answer.

  “How do you usually feel?” the doctor asked. “When you hear the ringing?”

  “Just the ringing? Good. I feel good, usually.”

  “Good?” Mom asked.

  “Well, that sounds good, doesn’t it?” Dad asked.

  “Not necessarily,” the doctor said.

  “Explain ‘good,’” Mom said.

  “Better. My sinuses drain, and I can breathe really well and I’m awake and I feel faster, feel ready to go again.”

  “Sounds like a meth addiction,” Dad said.

  “Stop, Dan,” Mom said.

  The doctor squinted at me. “You are the one doing the hitting, but you’re the one getting injured?”

  I wanted to leave, to sleep.

  “That’s what’s happening,” Mom said. She scribbled a note.

  “Can you avoid that kind of contact when you play?” the doctor asked.

  “I just need to keep my eyes up. I’m getting better at that technique.”

  “Huh?” the doctor said. “You’re mumbling, Isaiah.”

  “Eyes what?” Mom asked.

  “Up. Up,” I said.

  “What, Isaiah?” Dad asked.

  The doctor shook his head. “If Isaiah were my child, I wouldn’t let him play anymore.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Because of the long-term neurological impacts?” Dad asked.

  “Not just that,” the doctor said.

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Please explain,” Mom said.

  Before speaking, the doctor sighed. “Well, it’s rare,” he said.

  “What is?” Dad asked.

  “But suffering two major concussions within a short period of time can result in second impact syndrome. . . .”

  Mom scribbled furiously.

  “That’s just obvious,” I mumbled. “And three major concussion within a short period of time can result in thi
rd impact syndrome. Fourth fourth. Fifth fifth.”

  The doctor talked over me. “. . . and just look at him, and with Isaiah’s propensity to take contact . . .”

  “Sixth sixth,” I said.

  “Be quiet, Isaiah,” Mom said. “What is second impact syndrome?”

  “We’re not sure, exactly,” the doctor said.

  “Seventh seventh,” I said.

  “Be quiet. What is wrong with you?” Mom said.

  “But catastrophic head injuries in football are associated with a recent, prior head trauma in nearly three-quarters of the cases. He is in bad shape now, but the second impact is the dangerous one.”

  Mom scribbled.

  “What results from a catastrophic head injury?” Dad asked. “Impaired thinking?”

  “Eighth eighth,” I said.

  “Goddamn it,” Mom said. “Stop.”

  Everyone looked at me, concerned. I should maybe have been concerned, too, as this “out-of-turn talking” was out of character.

  The moment passed.

  “Catastrophic head injury results in death.” The doctor looked at me. “Or worse.”

  There was a moment of total silence.

  “What’s worse than death?” I asked.

  “What, Isaiah?” Dad asked. “Why are you mumbling?”

  “What is worse than death?” I shouted, the volume rattling around in my broken head.

  “A vegetative state, I think,” the doctor said. “A coma.”

  “Oh God,” Mom said.

  “That’s why I’d be very careful if he were my child,” the doctor said.

  CHAPTER 7

  SEPTEMBER 30: MORNING

  The next morning, I lay in bed and listened to silence in my head. So quiet. I’d slept for seventeen hours straight. It was a relief to hear silence. No girl crying, no witch whistles, no bell ringing, no nothing. But I didn’t feel right, still. I felt numb and exhausted.

  In my second life, my football life, Sundays are days I give to other people. It starts with Grandma Gin. I drive her to the ten o’clock church service. Then, if there’s a noon Packers game, we stay at her house. Mom comes over. We eat brats or lasagna or something. I help Grandma do chores in the yard or in the house. Later in the day, I go to Dad’s apartment. Twiggs often joins me there for food and Sunday-night football, and we do some homework, too.