Loud Awake and Lost

That first day Bethanne returned to my elementary school, I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off her. She looked just the same, and yet her sister was dead because of her. What would it mean, I’d thought, to be that girl—guilty and left over?

Now I knew.

“Maybe you can meet Dr. Pipini tomorrow. He’d clear his day for you.”

“Sure, whatever.” I curled up into a tighter bundle, pulled up the afghan, and watched twilight drag off the sunset. Accepted the cup of tea Mom was compelled to prepare, but then I let it go cold.

Mom settled in and took out some knitting. Softly clicking needles filled the silence until I broke it.

“Mom.” I spoke through closed eyes. “Do the Travolos want to see me?”

The needles picked up speed. “I have the family’s email.”

I could feel the cold, heat, cold in my skin. Thin jets of panic rose up through the floorboards of my consciousness. “Just an email? What does that mean? Do they blame me?”

“Ember, there’s no lawsuit here, there’s no finger-pointing and litigating.”

It wasn’t really the answer to my question. I tried another way in. “Does the family want to be in contact with me? Do you think I should email? Is that what they want from me? Have you met any of them?”

“Oh, Ember, I don’t have all the answers for you. I wish I did.” Tic-tic-tic. “What I can tell you is that they’re private people. Same as us, in their own way.” In their own way. What did that mean? Poor? Religious? Foreign? “You just tell me when you want their information, and then you and your father and I can talk about how to approach it. Let’s go carefully, Ember. I don’t want you to feel alone in this.”

As if my parents’ company, as I hauled them out with me to any meeting with the Travolos, would purge my guilt. Of course, it was how Mom and Dad always handled my problems—by absorbing them. Not this time. There was only one person behind the wheel that night.

Anthony Travolo. I rolled it around in my brain. Forcing myself to reaccept it. He was a stranger, or so they all said. Some kid who’d needed a lift out of the city.

“What else do you know about Anthony Travolo? Personally, I mean.”

Tic-tic-tic-tic. The clicking of the needles was steady, exact. Mom brought her math to her knitting. “Very little. From Bensonhurst. No criminal record. They showed me a photograph. I’d never seen him before in my life. You might have met him at a party. You’d fallen in with some different people, after you and Holden broke up.”

And now what did that mean? My mother’s voice was not a window to her soul; it was all bricked up in neutral.

The grandfather clock in the hall was antique and never kept the right time. Now it chimed six courteous bells, although it was only half past five. I’d spent hundreds of peaceful, happy versions of this afternoon. My mother knitting, me doing homework or reading or dozing, the muted sounds of passing cars making a soft quilt of noise.

Would I ever know a truly peaceful sleep again?

“Dr. P tried; he really did.” Mom broke the silence abruptly. “But the death was so hard on you. Unbearable—you couldn’t even speak about it. So Dr. P decided to take his cues from you. Which meant, ultimately, not speaking of it at all. It just seemed to be the best way to solve it temporarily. So much of you was broken, and needed mending. Inside and out.”

“Solve it?” I snorted. “Anthony’s death isn’t a calculus problem. It’s not like we solved anything. In fact, I’d call it pretty regressive—as Dr. P would say—to have blocked the whole thing out.” My voice was just way too horribly, childishly snappish. I wanted to control it, I wanted to sound stable, but it was as if I couldn’t hold on to my center.

And I’d got Mom uptight, too. I could tell by the way she set down and gripped her knitting on her lap. “You’re right. It’s not solved. But you can’t go back and undo it, either. Young people die in car accidents. The fatalities are staggering. It’s horrible, it’s unspeakably tragic, but it happens, and not just to you, Embie. There are hundreds of thousands of brand-new drivers on the road every year.”

“So it was my fault!” I sprang up. “You think Anthony died because I didn’t know what I was doing! If I’d been thirty years old, a seasoned driver, then none—”

“No, no—stop it, Ember!” Mom dropped her needles to clap her hands to her ears. “That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t thinking—I was speaking statistically. I wasn’t referring specifically to you. Not at all.”

But of course she was. The silence stretched accusingly, a distance between us.

“And I really don’t want to watch you lying on that couch,” Mom continued in a bare, thin voice, “with senior year and everything you worked so hard to get just passing you by, while you obsess on the past.”

“Whatever. On this couch, right in your sight, is where you like me best,” I mumbled. Hating myself, hating that I knew how to hurt her so easily.

“Maybe I’m protective. Fine. That’s just a mom’s job. But I don’t want you trapped here, beating yourself up endlessly about this. And nobody can tell me it wasn’t a mistake that you went back to school so early.” Mom spoke with force. “I warned Dr. Pipini. I warned him more than once. You need the comfort of your home.”

Did I? Because home didn’t feel very comforting right now.

I walked back into the kitchen, where I picked up the newspaper clipping that Mom had laid out for me to see when I got home from school. Rereading it, scouring it for anything I might have missed, anything that hadn’t appeared in my Google search—which had brought up the same clip, along with a brief notation of Anthony Travolo’s funeral services, which had been held out on Long Island.

The accident had occurred in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. February 14th at approximately 9:30 p.m. Anthony Travolo of Bensonhurst, aged nineteen. My name was withheld. Both of us had been taken to Weill Cornell with grave injuries.

“He never regained consciousness.” Mom spoke wearily from the kitchen door, where she’d been watching me. “So he went peacefully. He wasn’t from our neighborhood or school district.”

“Nobody knew him?”

“You’d have to ask around. But he didn’t have any overlap with your close Lafayette friends. No drugs, no alcohol. No indication of foul play.”