So few of our days contain actions that are irrevocable. Our lives are designed not to allow for anything irrevocable. The school part of our lives continues to be the school part for eighteen years, the work parts stay the work parts, and if we’re lucky nothing disarranges them; the small inconsistencies get buried under talk, explanations, rescheduling. If everything couldn’t continue as planned, no real plans could be made. But the breakfasts and TV afternoons and band practices of teenaged life had been disrupted by something irrevocable, and I was new to it. And how did I handle this? What I want to write is that I lay there until morning, with tear-stained eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one’s capacity to register?
I slept soundly.
A police officer called the next morning to say that Celine had died in the hospital. It was unclear whether her parents, who had been on vacation, had been able to see her.
My father answered the phone. The officer never asked for me.
My surest memories of that day are the reflector running up the windshield and the sunshine in the cracks as Dad got me home. I can imagine the flash of impact, of course. Even if I’m unable to really call back much about it. But it’s not hard to guess at the terrible, scratched-out details.
The truth is, anyone with a TV can fill this scene, taking snippets from the editing floor, plug-ins from the visual and sound-effects library we all carry. Pretty girl on bike, a shy little thud, hysterical windshield. And I’m somewhere in there too, trying to swerve, trying to disappear.
The police, Celine’s biking companion, and the recollection of five cars’ worth of eyewitnesses all conspired to declare me blameless. No charges were filed. A police detective named Paul Vitucci later told the newspaper, “For an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into what you might call the traffic portion of the street, and she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he”—meaning me—“could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever.”
I remember coming down to breakfast, and my parents showing me that article. I remember thinking two things. 1) I am fine. The sweet, marshy part felt—You made it. And the other part said 2) Well, that’s it, I’m in the paper for the world to read about, there is no hiding from this. And I was right. After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone did find out. One friend of mine who lived about an hour north was startled awake by his mother with the news.
I’m sure my parents worried about me, but I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t think they tried to make contact with Celine’s family.
Very soon I got to the article’s denouement: Vitucci, eyewitnesses, unprovisional absolution. Society was clearing me. But how could any reporter be so certain? If I hadn’t been with my friends, felt them next to me and in the backseat — if I hadn’t tried to point all of us toward something fun — maybe I would have focused on Celine, or driven slower. Or honked sooner. (Though I was positive that I had honked, when I’d first seen her inch away from the shoulder and into the right lane.) Any of ten different actions on my part might have led to an alternate ending. Maybe I hadn’t felt the right amount of alarm, just before the girl jumped across two lanes.
On a map Long Island looks like a tailless crocodile with its mouth open. Its far shore yawns into a pair of peninsulas a hundred miles east of New York City, and the crocodile’s hind-end nestles right up against Manhattan. Not too far up the crocodile’s back sits Glen Head, my town: the patch of low, paved swampland where Celine and I went to school, at North Shore High.
Manhattan casts a thin shadow onto Long Island. For most people, life in Glen Head verged on total disconnection from the city — ours could have been any suburb, anywhere — though when traffic was easy it took us just a half hour to reach tall and shaded Midtown.
As you drive the Long Island Expressway toward North Shore High School, the city relaxes its grip on the land. Soon you’re in the middle of wide suburban ho-humness. Though western Long Island differs from a real country milieu in all kinds of major ways (traffic snags, no silos), it’s true that North Shore High — only a public school despite the upscale name, largely middle-class Italian and middle-class Irish — was small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business.
Which meant many uncomfortable things. This wasn’t close to first among my worries and sadnesses, but it would be a lie to pretend it wasn’t somewhere in my thoughts: I’d violated the primary rule of junior and senior high—don’t get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. The thought of returning to school made me feel swollen and incandescent again. I was disgraced, I was blessed (alive and journalistically absolved). I would be cafeteria news, the object of a discreetly pointed finger or nod. I would be the heavy dark ingot from the adult world — the world of consequences — introduced into the nothing-counts ethos of adolescence.
So here’s the next stage of guilt: when it’s about to become social. There were two parts of me that I wanted to keep above water: a respect for Celine, and a concern for her family. That seemed right and maybe even selfless. But the water that kept lapping over was this: how would people see me? How do I keep the accident from being the main thing about me forever?
Immature, offensive thoughts — someone died.
I stayed away from school for almost a week. (I’d already gotten into college, and so was pretty sure I was risking absolutely nothing by skipping all those classes.) The days after the movie-theater mistake and the announcement of Celine’s death I spent behind my bedroom door, talking to no one in particular. I was more parrot than person — a parrot in underpants and socks, repeating his one cry. “How seriously will I be messed up by this?”
Which is itself, I don’t have to tell you, a pubescently egocentric thing to wonder. My concern about Celine, in those first days, was in large part really for that future version of myself — that he not become a shadowy and impaired figure. A week before I’d been eighteen and getting ready to push off for college, for love (I’d imagined) plus adventures with friends, then some cool and genial job. When my brain focused on losing all that, I became twitchy and frightened and horrible. At the same time, this anxiety triggered a new guilt: I should not be thinking about something so self-centered. I would concentrate on Celine’s parents, and next (after the shiver passing through who I was; after the cold squeeze in the throat) on nothing. The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts. I’d hear something distinctly: the hinge sound of a book I opened, or my own breath.
One morning — Monday? — I left my room and went downstairs. A silent planet. Parents away at work, younger sister at school. I walked through the numbed rooms, stopping to read — because I was still allowed to take pleasure in magazines, right? — a Sports Illustrated. (Companies kept printing them, which meant time was still trudging ahead.) A photo of Danny Manning driving to the basket. How to face down a Nolan Ryan fastball. Can anyone fill John “The Wizard of Westwood” Wooden’s shoes? I’ve already read this stupid issue. And it was this second thought that cleared everything out. I was the kid I’d been three days ago. The morning passed with the sluggish, dusty feeling that comes to people when they’re loafing. But then, at the fridge, I was stopped by what struck me as a presentiment. Maybe I’d be okay right now if I could only get myself to remember — what? To remember or realize what? And I stood in the kitchen with a glass in my hand and tried to figure out what that what was.