First, a clenching of her body, a steeling herself for something personally odious. She let out a noise: part sob and sigh, part venom. She hugged me quickly, and just as quickly shrank away.
“I know it was not your fault, Darin. They all tell me it was not your fault.” She swallowed, and took me in with exhausted eyes. “But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well now.” Her voice went dim. “Because you are living it for two people.” Her face was a picture of the misery that had worn out the voice. “Can you promise me? Promise.”
Yes, of course, of course, Mrs. Zilke — and the accident churned my stomach. And here again came that reflector sliding up, like those raindrops on the Shrink’s Porsche: up and over my windshield. But somehow it still didn’t seem right to promise Mrs. Zilke this. How can you commit to something you don’t even understand? Was I to become the Zilkes’ son now, visiting on school breaks, calling in with news of grades and girls?
I tried to scrub my face of all emotion and message, to let Mrs. Zilke fill it with whatever meaning would bring her comfort.
“Can you promise me, Darin?” Her eyes got very hectic. “Promise. You’re living for two. Okay? Okay?”
I nodded quickly.
And she continued to gaze at me. Not too unkindly or even severely, just for a long while. I swallowed what had become a big pointy stone in my throat. Some clock somewhere kept beating its subdued cymbal. I looked away and then back. She was still looking at me. Why are you the one who is still alive? her eyes seemed to be saying.
I opened my mouth to tell her — what? Nothing. Finally, at once, she turned to leave: she wanted, forever, to have no part of this life she’d doubly freighted. My dad leveled his hand on my back, on my shoulder. A kind of drape of family, holding me, recasting me as his, and our family’s.
Next I’m standing before Celine’s open coffin. I don’t remember how I got here, who’s brought me. I only remember the tingly awareness of the two hundred whispers at my back, and how that got every hair on my body to stand up. Celine looked almost like herself. What I mean is, she now looked more like her high-school self than she had when I’d mistaken her for someone pale and dozing on the road.
I haven’t really described her appearance at all. Her face was soft and broad, pretty and unpretending. Pretty without being stagy about it.
Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what. I’m not sure I can get across just how much I want to be extra-generous to Celine here. Extra-generous and, you’ve probably noticed, extra-writerly. It’s a coward’s tactic. I’m trying to write all the difficulty away.
What if I tell you it was windy when I fled the memorial, so that all the trees moaned in protest. Is that puffed up enough, labored and lyrical enough, to seem like something extracted from a novel — and not just a real day of a real boy and a real dead girl?
I want very badly to tell you Celine was unusually beautiful. Celine was unusually beautiful. And to equate her with quiet, sleeping Juliet — or some such overdone b.s. Will the tuneful balancing of q and t sounds — the thing I’ve learned to do with my life after Celine — isolate me from the reality of what happened? (Which was merely this: here was a plainly attractive and nice girl I kind of knew who died after she pedaled into my car.)
The truth is — if I even have access to the truth — I remember Celine only with certain key words: athletic, broad face, good-natured, bicycle. These words call up no images. Real memory is a mix of blast and keepsake. For me, with this event, there is nothing — at least not in the part of the brain I live in. My mind looks away. I see only letters on a page, vowels and consonants, press and flop. There: I’m still trying to write and write and write away the reflector.…
So I can’t share the image of what lay inside the coffin. I don’t have enough mental steam to make it all the way there.
What I do remember is self-centered — my own turning from the casket. I’m hurrying past all the stares in this neat and unreal spectacle. The heels of my unfamiliar dress shoes clack on the church floor. My stomach has been clutched and empty all morning; it’s already been a long, hungry day. Soon enough I’m spluttering past the old grandfather, almost at the exit. And my dad keeps buzzing in my ear, “Keep your head up; just keep your head up …” The grandfather’s head is dropped so he won’t have to bear the sight of me.
I hadn’t realized I’d been slouching my own head. I felt buoyed by an almost infant-level admiration for my father, and I wondered if I would ever know the things grown-ups know. I lifted my head.
1. I should mention, if only in a footnote, how great my parents and sister were throughout this. Real difficulty, if it holds any benefits, holds this one: sometimes it lets you find out if your family has a genius for kindness, for devotion under pressure. In mentioning even this, however — merely giving my parents and sister their due — I feel again the weird twinning of my story with Celine’s, a feeling of how dare I mention my family at all. The Zilkes must have faced a howling sadness that makes what my parents were dealing with seem completely inconsequential, just smoke and cobwebs.
Looking back now, there’s something that bothers me about the newspaper article about her death: it has Celine as Knockout, as Queen Bee, as Prom Superstar. The kid the newspaper grieved for wasn’t Celine. She was none of those things. Their version of her was less distinctive than the real Celine was, less an individual, devoid of any real-life individual’s quirks and smudges. The paper seemed to believe Celine’s death could only be fully newsworthy, only fully sad, if she were outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly popular, outlandishly everything.
The gym was an over-lit expanse of mascot banners, fluttery clothes, gaudy streamers, flashing cameras, graduation kitsch. NSHS was dressed for an end-of-year assembly. (This wasn’t graduation, per se; just the entire school, flippant and free, enjoying a practice run/celebration.) But as soon as the proceedings got on their feet, the principal decided to take a moment. She started launching into — and my stomach clutched; I knew what was coming — a sermon about Celine’s death.
Hundreds turned, a mass, bovine shift: this was the school’s first sanctioned, public mention of Celine in front of me. How would I react? Warm-faced, I focused hard on my thighs.
“I want to just take a little time here to talk about creating a Celine Zilke memorial scholarship.” The principal’s voice staggered, recovered. My lap looked pretty much the way it always did.
“Planning’s begun on this scholarship for next year,” the principal said, “to I think be a really appropriate way in which to say goodbye.”
She touched her birdnesty hair and cleared her throat, and now even she was looking in my direction. I was the unpredictable quantity this morning: the bomb that might blow, the sparked fuse.
My inviolability zone was gone. What would happen now?
“As you all are aware,” the principal was saying, “the worst thing that can happen to a class happened to the Class of 1989 …”
Every time I circled away from some kid who sat gawking at me (pimply James Harmon, round Mark Reiniger), I’d catch another stare, and another.