General
Fiction / Literary
Date
Published: October 29, 2015
Holly Dorren can't breathe. Think. Feel. Her cousin is dead.
Nothing will bring him back. And nothing will ever make her whole again.
In
the days following Larry's funeral, Holly begins to reflect on the childhood
they shared. She looks for answers in both the past and the present, convinced
that understanding his fascination with death might somehow allow her to cope
with his absence. She doesn't want to disappear, but already she's fading away
from the life she's led.
Holly
knew her cousin better than anyone, she was his best friend, and yet there is
still a great deal she cannot accept in their relationship. In him. In herself.
She doesn't know how to move on without him, but refusing to accept his death
carries it's own devastating price.
EXCERPT
We were in a car accident as children. I was eight at the
time and could never remember the details afterwards. My cousin Larry
remembered everything, even though he was two years younger than me. It might
sound strange that a six-year-old would remember more than an eight-year-old,
but it wouldn’t seem odd at all if you knew Larry.
Even as the years passed and my memory of the event faded
more and more, Larry’s recollection of it only grew stronger. His parents never
liked that much. Neither did mine. I was the only one who ever listened with
the sort of unease and appreciation that he craved. We’d sit huddled on the
sofa in my living room while my mother was out and my father was upstairs. I’d
hug a pillow against my chest and he’d sit on his knees, hunched forward with
his hands slicing through the air as he described it all in active detail.
Larry never called it an accident. Not once. He referred
to it instead as an imperfect moment or that time in the truck. Keep in mind
this was coming from a boy of six, and then eight, and then fifteen, but Larry
was incredibly articulate from the very beginning. Every phrase was deliberate
with him—each letter carefully chosen. With such a gift for language and grace
as a speaker, my cousin should have been a better storyteller, but he wasn’t.
His descriptions were clear, but for some reason Larry couldn’t milk it. He
always started at the same spot—when we were in his father’s gray pickup truck,
where Larry was seated in the middle between his father and me.
Riding in that truck was really something to a couple of
kids because it was the only time we didn’t have to sit in the backseat. We
felt like proper adults up there in the front with the steering wheel and the
dashboard. The cloth interior smelled like motor oil and old takeout. Larry
loved that. He found it comforting. Nostalgic. His mother was a health nut, but
his father possessed a particular fondness for anything that could be gotten
from a drive-thru window. Abandoned hamburger wrappers and soda straws sat in
huddled piles at our feet and we just kicked our heels together and smiled with
gleaming, crooked teeth.
It had been snowing all morning, Larry often explained,
with tiny white flakes falling onto the windshield and dissolving the same as
they do when they fall onto your tongue. It was still fairly early in the day,
though the clouds made it seem much later. Larry’s father had promised to take
us out for lunch if we helped him in emptying out the garage. It was simple
enough. He’d hand us something and have us run it upstairs to Larry’s mother in
the study to see if she wanted to keep it or if the item could be thrown away.
Larry and I made it a game, racing one another to see who could reach his
mother first. Mostly we just tied, but I think I might have managed to win a
time or two.
Most of the boxes from the garage were filled with old
baby clothes and broken toys that were old enough to possibly be worth
something at auction if only they had been properly maintained. Larry’s mother
enjoyed finding value in the obsolete. They had a garage sale monthly for about
five years. It drove Larry’s younger sisters mad because all their toys were constantly
being sold before the girls were ready to part with them. They’d toss their red
little heads up in the air and call it unfair. Larry called it capitalism.
By noon we had finished with the garage and were out in
the truck on our way to lunch to well-known and beloved Barkley Diner. The
place had these dark brown seats, which looked like leather but weren’t, and
the lights were yellow-tinted which made everything look like it was lip up by
a warm, crackling fire. They served the standard fare. Burgers. Fries. Eggs.
Pie. It could have been swapped out with any other diner in the country and no
one would have noticed. And yet it was our very own place. The historic Barkley
Diner.
The drive only took ten minutes from Larry’s house, but
to get there we had to drive along Redwood Road, which consisted of one wide
lane that stretched through the woods and down beyond the park. The road was
about six miles in length though we only had to travel about two of those
before turning onto Wharton Avenue, which emptied into the intersection by the
traffic light that sat opposite the diner. The trees, whose bare branches
lurched overhead as we gazed out the window, were coated with a light brush of
fresh snow. Everything seemed frozen and icy. It was the middle of October but
it looked more like December. That day entered the record books as the earliest
snowfall Garner County ever received. I used to like to tell my friends that in
school. It made me feel knowledgeable—powerful even. It’s strange how children
grasp so tightly to what they cannot make sense of, finding importance in all
the wrong places.
Both Larry and his father remembered the radio as being
on that afternoon but only Larry knew the song that was playing prior to and
following the accident. Stairway to Heaven. Larry was particularly proud of
that little detail. After a point he even became smug about it. Stairway to
Heaven. Imagine that. He claimed it started about two or three minutes before
the crash and continued amidst the static on the radio until an ambulance
arrived. No one bothered to turn the engine off. It just kept on playing all
the way through.
Being hit, he said, was like sitting in one of those
spinning teacups at an amusement park. The other car tried to yield as it came
to a fork in the road but there was ice on the pavement and so the little sedan
went barreling into the left side of our truck. We spun three or four times
before hitting a tree. Larry compared the impact to a violent punch in the
chest. It made him dizzy and, gasping, he looked up to see that his father’s
nose was cracked and the man’s mouth had set on muttering every curse that
could be called upon. Then, Larry said, he turned to me. I didn’t stir when he
touched my arm. Blood had begun to seep through my hair, painting the window
bright red. The impact left a thin scar up near my temple, just under the
hairline, from where my skull split the glass. Larry explained that his father
looked me over, but was afraid to move my arms or head. My uncle then
instructed his son to run over and check on the other driver. He didn’t though.
He didn’t want to leave me—he couldn’t leave me. He didn’t even want to get out
of the car. So Larry’s father told him to watch me and he opened the door and
ran over and called to the man in the sedan. Larry just continued to sit there.
Staring. He claimed he couldn’t stop staring at me as that song continued to
play and his head continued to spin. It was like the teacup never stopped
turning, he said. It just never stopped.
When the paramedics arrived they took me away. Larry
wanted to sit in the ambulance with me but they drove us separately, claiming
my injuries to be more severe. Whether Larry’s disappointment in not being
allowed to go with me came from a concern for my safety or his fascination with
the blood, I’ll never know. It was probably a little of both. Afterwards he
swore it was because he was worried about me. He was always a rotten liar, and
since I believed him it was most likely true. Or maybe I just wanted to believe
him. Too much has happened since to ever really know.
Larry sprained his arm in the accident, but other than
that there was little harm done to him. He was always disappointed about that
and at first his parents took that disappointment to be displaced guilt; they
thought he felt ashamed to have gotten away with barely a scratch. But really
he was just disappointed that he hadn’t experienced more. Felt more. The
accident wasn’t nearly enough to settle him.
The only solid thing I could ever recall about that
afternoon was how bright the lights were when they rolled me into the hospital.
I looked up at those round, white lights along the ceiling and thought I was
dreaming. Or dying. The lights looked hot and it stung so viscously to stare at
them that I had to close my eyes. There was nothing after that. The memory just
tapered off and the next thing I could recall was being back at home.
The doctors did their work and were proud of my recovery,
given that my injuries were more severe than they at first suspected. I
received a concussion from hitting my head and one of my lungs collapsed in the
ambulance. The latter actually served me well in later years. I was able to
avoid my parent’s insistence that I join the soccer team that spring, and in
high school it got me out of having to run the mile required to pass gym. The
cold weather sometimes made my chest ache and I couldn’t breathe well after
running, but those doctors considered me lucky. I could have died. Larry used
to say that all doctors tell the parents of surviving patients that their
children were lucky. He thought it was nonsense. There was nothing lucky about
it. For years I thought I understood what he meant. Only later did I realize
that I was wrong.
Larry clung to the
particulars of that afternoon. They mattered so much to him, and so in time
they began to mean a great deal to me as well. His memories became mine. His
story did, too, and for a while it looked like that was all the accident would
be: a good story. Those involved recovered, even the other driver who suffered
nothing beyond a split lip. No one pressed charges. No one died. The flesh
healed quickly. At the time it looked as if nothing much had changed. Only
later did we come to realize the extent of the damage it had done.
My parent’s never let Larry’s father off the hook, even
though it wasn’t his fault. The fact that guilt nearly drowned him became
inconsequential. No one seemed to notice that it was only after the accident
that he started drinking again. It didn’t matter, not to my parents. At the
time I was an only child and my mother maintained that nothing ever scorched
her soul like that phone call informing her that her lovely little girl had
been brought to the hospital. It was the last time she ever took the trouble to
care about me as a mother. In that respect, the accident also did me good. I
knew from that afternoon that she loved me and I remembered it when she left my
forty-five year old father for a twenty-six year old physical therapist in
Florida. I remembered it when she stopped visiting. I remembered it when she
stopped calling. For the rest of my childhood I had the comfort of knowing that
for one day as I lay on the very verge of death, my mother truly loved me. That
love was so strong that it scorched her soul. Some people might have needed
more than that, but I considered it to be plenty. It was more than my father
had. It’s more than my brother, who was only three when she left, was ever
likely to receive.
Larry always regretted the accident more than I did,
which many thought was strange for a lot of different reasons that did not
really apply. They thought he wished it hadn’t happened, but really it was what
didn’t happen that disappointed him. Larry saw something in the accident—the
potential for something—that he couldn’t get over. He became fascinated by
it—addicted to it. The dizziness never left him and so he never stopped
spinning. Instilled in him was the need to know. He was stuffed full of the
cruel and compelling need to understand every aspect of it. Every vile little
detail. Every curious moment. It was unfortunate really. All those years of
waiting and wondering and he never shared a single answer with me, even though
I was quite possibly the only one who actually wanted to understand. And he
tried. He always tried to make it clear what it was he wanted to find and why
it meant more to him than all the rest, but as articulate as he was, he
couldn’t put it into words. It became impossible to convince any of us. Not
that it really mattered when all was said and done. There was nothing worth
finding in it because Larry ended up dead. It happened on a Thursday. Suicide.
No one was surprised.
AUTHOR BIO
Emily
Ruth Verona is the author of the novel Steady Is The Fall. She received her
Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and Cinema Studies from the State
University of New York at Purchase. She is the recipient of the 2014 Pinch
Literary Award in Fiction and a 2014 Jane Austen Short Story Award. Previous
publication credits include work featured in Read. Learn. Write., The Lost
Country, The Toast, and Popmatters. She lives in New Jersey with a very small
dog.
CONTACT LINKS:
Twitter:
@emilyrverona
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