I Thought You Were Dead (27 page)

“I may get a few things wrong, but I'll try. How much do you remember of the accident?” his mother asked him.

“The car accident? When I was three?” he said.

“Oh, you were too little. You don't remember this. I don't see why — ”

Harrold looked at her. His eyes seemed to plead.

“I remember it,” Paul said. “I don't remember the accident itself, but I remember staying at Grandma and Grandpa's house, and I remember seeing you guys in the hospital. I remember we were coming home from a party and the road was icy …”

His mother was shaking her head.

“The roads weren't icy?” Paul asked.

“I don't know where you got that part of it,” she said. “It was September.”

On the television, one of the Red Wings' Russians had scored a goal and was pumping his fist in the air.

“Okay,” he said. “I just remember we skidded. And hit a bridge. Right?”

His mother nodded.

“Thank God you were in a baby seat. We never had baby seats for Carl or Elizabeth.”

“They had their seat belts on, right?”

“Bits had hers on. Your brother didn't, and your father didn't. I had a seat belt on, but it didn't have a shoulder restraint.”

“So what happened?” Paul asked. “It was September? In my memory, we were coming home from a Christmas party with Dad's navy buddies, and we hit a patch of ice. That's not right?”

She shook her head again.

“It was Labor Day weekend. A warm summer night.” She looked at her husband again. Harrold stared straight ahead. “We were driving back from Madison, Wisconsin, where your father
had been to a reunion with the men who'd served with him in the Pacific. It was the first time they'd gotten together since the war. We all stayed at the Howard Johnson. You kids loved the pool. Anyway, we were driving home, and we'd gotten somewhere near Baraboo. Or was it Mauston? I think it was Baraboo, or near the Dells anyway. But your father had had too much to drink. He asked me to drive, but I'd had too much to drink too, and I was exhausted from chasing after three kids all day. Especially you. You were so fast.”

Paul looked at his mother, then his father.

“What?”

“We thought about getting a motel room — you know, it had to be the Dells because it was a holiday weekend and all the motel rooms were booked because of all the tourists, so your father thought we should just get home.”

“Back up a second,” Paul said. “You said you'd had too much to drink?”

“Your father was driving drunk,” Beverly said. She let out a big sigh, closing her eyes for a moment, then looked at her knitting.

“What?” Paul repeated. “You don't drink. You never drank.”

“No, we don't,” she said, looking up. “But we used to.”

“What?” he said again. “Let me get this straight. You're saying Dad was driving drunk?”

She nodded. He still couldn't believe it. He remembered how his parents wouldn't even take Communion wine and asked for grape juice instead. How they refused champagne at weddings. How there was never a bottle of anything in the house for guests, and of course how they chewed him out when they smelled beer on his breath after he'd come home from a high school keg party, and did everything they could to keep him from drinking. It all added up now, but he still couldn't picture them drunk.

“And what happened?”

“Well, your brother was singing very loudly and bouncing around in the backseat. He was standing on the backseat, singing ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer' at the top of his lungs, and your father was trying to get him to sit down. He turned around to get Carl to be quiet, and he reached his arm back”—she pantomimed the action, her arm hanging in the air — “and when he went back to watching the road, it was too late to turn away from the bridge. God had a hand in saving us that night, because if you'd seen the car …”

She looked at Harrold. He had his eyes closed, but he wasn't asleep.

“Carl went through the windshield. Elizabeth was okay except for the cut above her eye. Your father and I were both thrown from the car. Which I don't understand because I thought I had my seat belt on, but I must have unbuckled it. I wish I could tell you more, but I have no memories between just before the accident and when I woke up in the hospital. Anyway, that was what happened.”

“And Carl got thrown through the windshield?”

“That's what I was told. He broke his shoulder, and he had some glass pieces taken out of the top of his head, but he was fine. He bounced right back. He used to bring me juice and help the nurse — do you remember that, Harrold? No, he was fine. And like I said, you were fine and so was Elizabeth. It was really a miracle. We've thanked God so many times that nobody … it could have been so much worse.”

She picked up her skein of yarn to see how much she had left. Paul considered. Carl would have been seven years old and relatively cognizant. He always said he didn't remember anything about the accident. Paul wondered if that was true and, if it was, if Carl had blocked the memory, prevented it from rising to the level of consciousness until it had nowhere to go but to live in the basement of his unconscious, where it gained power over
time and came to dominate the way Carl felt and thought about things. Paul had called him a born tight-ass, but now he realized he may not have been born that way.

“At any rate, we never had another drink from that point on,” his mother said.

“I can imagine,” Paul said.

“I know you always thought we were prudes. We changed a lot of things after that. I know, Paul, that you never cared for church, but for us, God spoke to us and told us he was going to give us a second chance, but if he did, it was on the condition that we become better Christians. He gave us a second chance.”

“I had no idea,” Paul said.

Harrold was looking at his wife again.

“Pastor Wilson helped us a great deal at first,” his mother said. “And we talked to a man at the VA, a psychologist, and then your father attended meetings for years. I had to stay home with you kids.”

“AA meetings?”

She nodded.

“When?”

“Every Monday night.”

“I thought he was bowling,” Paul said. “We thought he was bowling. We bought him a bowling ball.”

She smiled. “That bowling ball was one of the best presents you ever gave him.”

Paul recalled a time when the whole family went bowling and how his father wasn't very good and barely broke one hundred, and he remembered thinking, “Wow, he sure sucks for somebody who bowls once a week.” Now it made sense.

“I'm sorry if it's taking me a while to get this,” he said. “I can imagine a bunch of navy buddies sitting around getting loaded and telling war stories, but I always figured Dad would have been the guy sipping iced tea.”

His mother had been somber before, but now she was grave.

“I don't think you understand what ‘telling war stories' means,” Beverly said. “It's not like telling jokes around a campfire. By then, two of your father's friends had taken their own lives. That's why they called the reunion. They'd seen some horrible things during the war. A psychiatrist suggested it would be a good idea if everybody got together and talked about it. The wives were locked out.”

“Do you know what happened?” he asked. “What horrible things?”

She shook her head. She didn't know the answer.

“I thought the right thing to do was not to ask,” she said. “Maybe he'll tell you someday, when he's better. Let me get you some more cocoa.”

She took his cup and left the room. While she was in the kitchen, Paul looked at his father, whose eyes were cast down.

“Dad?” Paul said. “I had no idea.”

His father watched the hockey game.

“Would you mind if I told Carl and Bits what Mom told me?”

“NO.”

“No, you won't mind?”

“YES.”

“Okay then, I will. I was going to go over to Carl's house tomorrow morning before my flight. You know, if you want to turn the sound back on, I don't care. I know it isn't easy for you to — ”

“CN YOU,” his father typed.

“Yeah?”

“FRGIV ME?”

“Absolutely.”

He saw his father raise the pointer finger on his right hand and hold it up. It looked like a baby bird in a nest. Paul took his
father's hand and squeezed, surprised at how hard his father squeezed back. Three squeezes. Three squeezes back. Paul put his arms around his father's neck and hugged him, not for the first time, but for the first time since he was six, when he'd come to understand that men didn't do such things.

P
aul drove out to see his brother the next day. Minnesota in late November was both bleak and expectant, bleak because the trees were bare and the grass was brown, but pregnant with the possibility of winter. Growing up, Paul had watched for the first snowfall, yearned for it. The temperature was in the thirties. He drove around Lake Harriet, then Lake Calhoun. In a month, they'd be frozen over, and a few weeks after that, people would be skating on them.

Over the phone, he'd told his sister everything he'd learned the night before. They'd talked for nearly an hour. She was surprised at first but then saw how much sense it made, a piece of a puzzle she hadn't known was missing.

Paul's brother was in the basement rec room, lacing on a pair of running shoes and dressed in fleece running attire. Despite having taken the scenic route, Paul had arrived half an hour early. Erica had taken Howie to soccer practice and Katie to skating lessons. Carl said he'd hoped to get in a run before Paul got there.

“Go ahead,” Paul said. “I can wait.”

“You wanna come with?” Carl said. “Bits told me you've been running. I can set you up.”

Paul agreed. Carl found him a pair of Yale sweatpants and a matching hooded zip-up sweatshirt in blue and white and an extra pair of socks and shoes, his and Paul's feet being the same
size. They stretched in the driveway. Paul wasn't so much into stretching but knew it was something he was supposed to do. The sky was a mat of slate, but there was no wind.

“I hate running into the wind,” Paul told Carl. “It feels like the whole universe is against me.”

“What makes you so sure it's not?” Carl said, smiling. “Let me know if I'm going too fast. Three and a half okay?”

Paul nodded.

Carl set a good pace, maybe a bit faster than Paul ordinarily went. He felt strong, but then he always felt strong for the first quarter mile. They turned left at the end of the drive and headed up the bike path along Mirror Lake.

“So what was it you had to tell me?” Carl asked. Paul had warned him on the phone that he had some news. “You talked to Arnie?”

“I did,” Paul said. “There's some paperwork, but that's about it.”

“That's what you had to tell me?”

“There's more,” Paul said.

He told Carl the story their mother had told him the night before, leaving nothing out. Carl listened, slowing the pace a bit as he concentrated without comment.

“Pretty interesting,” Carl said at last.

“That's an understatement,” Paul agreed. “Do you remember anything about the accident?”

Carl didn't answer at first.

“I remember thinking I'd done something wrong,” he said.

“Do you remember ever seeing Mom and Dad drunk?” Paul asked.

Carl thought.

“I remember them being goofy. If they were drunk, I didn't know it.”

“Did Dad ever talk about the war? He never did with me.”

Carl thought again, his pace steady and even.

“I remember him having bad dreams,” he said. “Hearing him. And being frightened. He never went bowling?”

“Apparently not,” Paul said.

“Mom told you all this?”

“Dad wanted her to,” Paul said.

The water on the lake was choppy and broken, the wind picking up now. They ran past a small cove where a dozen mallards had taken transient slippage before heading south, their green heads shining despite the gloom.

“You sleep last night?” Paul asked.

“Nine hours,” Carl said. “Triazolam. Point one two five milligrams. It takes about an hour to fully wake up, but it seems to do the trick.”

They left the bike path and cut across a footbridge leading to Interlachen Country Club, the famous golf course where Bobby Jones won the United States Open on his way to completing the grand slam in 1930. Despite its being late in the season, a lone foursome of diehards made its way over a hill in the distance, golf carts like beasts slowly grazing.

“I remember,” Carl said.

“Remember what?” Paul said.

“Mom and Dad. Drinking. That must have been it. You were crying in your crib and I couldn't wake Dad up.”

“Where was Mom?”

“I don't know,” Carl said. “He must have been passed out when he was supposed to be babysitting. You were crying and I didn't know what to do. I never thought about it until now.” They ran. “Maybe I'll bring it up with my therapist.”

“You're seeing one?”

“Friday,” Carl said. “A woman Erica knows. She thinks I'm OCD. I'm kind of nervous.”

“Don't be,” Paul said. “The whole idea is to listen for as long as you can before you realize they're just as big an idiot as anybody else. Then you're cured.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Karen and I saw a marriage counselor,” Paul said as they ascended a hill, staying in the rough next to the twelfth fairway. “Talk about a fucking racket. If they were real doctors, they'd be sued for malpractice for losing so many patients. I quit drinking, by the way.”

“Bits told me,” Carl said. “High time.”

“Quite the opposite, actually,” Paul said.