Crash (8 page)

He had taken a Percocet shortly before we were discharged, but that had been almost three hours ago. He would be due for his next pain med right about the time we’d be pulling into the driveway.

With one hand on the wheel, I fished Neil’s prescriptions out of my purse. Then I dug out my cell phone and tossed it to Dan in the back seat, careful to keep my eyes on the road.

“Call the drug store at Port Plaza, Dan. Get the pharmacist on the line.”

Dan sprang into action, getting the phone number from information, then winding his way through the Walgreen’s phone tree, and finally handing me the phone.

“Hi, Mark. It’s Carolyn Bornstein.”

“Sorry, no. This is Tina. How can I help you?” a high-pitched Asian voice offered. Crap.

“Uh, this is Dr. Bornstein,” I began.

“Oh, yes, Doctor,” her voice picked up and I pictured her sitting up, pen in hand, ready to take dictation. Clearly, she didn’t recognize our name.

“Well, I’m on my way home with Neil,” I started. The line was silent. No recognition on the other end. “And I’ve got a Percocet prescription here.”

“Oh, Doctor, you can’t call in a narcotic,” Tina stated, flustered.

“I know. I know. I’m not calling it in really. You see it’s not my prescription. It’s from Boston. I just thought you could get it ready.” I was stumbling. I suddenly felt like a criminal, or at least a wayward doc trying to call in a favor. But really I just wanted Neil not to be in pain. I wanted him not to have to wait. I looked over at him. He was the color of sand.

The line momentarily cut out.

“Hey, Carolyn, Mark here. What’s up?”

Relieved, I explained the situation, but before I could even finish my request, Mark responded, “I’ll have it ready.”

As we pulled up in front of the house, Saul was chipping away at the sidewalk with an ice chopper and spreading rock salt on the stairs. Unlike the stubborn January snow, my heart melted for my husband, desperately trying to make his son’s way safe.

It was 12:15. Trista’s funeral was scheduled to begin in 15 minutes. As I saw it, we had three options. One would be to drive to the funeral home early, giving Neil a chance to settle in. Or we could bring Neil into the house, wait the hour until he was due for the Percocet, and get to the funeral late. The third option seemed the most obvious to me. Neil would skip the event altogether. I roused him.

“Neil? We’re home. The funeral is in fifteen minutes. What do you want to do?”

Neil grimaced, keeping his eyes closed.

“Get me into bed.”

I sighed with relief.

Dan carried Neil down the hill in front of our house, down the frozen steps, and in the front door. The house was ice cold. We hadn’t been home in a week. I pulled out the convertible couch and threw on some sheets and pillows while Dan held his brother patiently in his arms. We laid him carefully on the pullout, lifted his leg onto pillows, and piled blankets on top of him. His lips were blue. He shook violently.

I lit a fire in the wood stove then brought Neil a Percocet and a drink. It wasn’t quite four hours, but he was in pain. I called the Brigham, not knowing what to do. I spoke with the attending who had discharged us. He assured us that, this once, it would be okay. Someone called on the phone. I cut them off. I was scared. What had I done? I should have insisted on a longer stay, or at least that transfer. The agonizingly long stretches of time in the ICU hadn’t prepared me for this leap to action.

Saul came in from clearing the walk, threw on a jacket and tie. Trista’s funeral was in five minutes. The three of us looked at one another, then at Neil. He was asleep under a pile of blankets, thin and weak. He had missed Trista’s wake, and now it looked like he was going to miss her funeral too. He would rouse from this nightmare and she would be gone: dead and buried. Saul shrugged his shoulders, blew me a silent kiss, and closed the door quietly behind him.

17

Like Dogs

Details about the events that led to the drunk driver plowing into our kids came out gradually over the days and weeks following the crash. The drinking began at the home of a teenaged boy whose parents were at work. He invited a bunch of his friends, and the drunk driver arrived with a bottle of red wine. At some point the teenaged host took a fake ID and bought a thirty-pack of beer at a liquor store just over the New Hampshire border. They played a drinking game called beer pong. When the teen host received a call from his mother saying she would soon be home, the boys all piled out of the house.

They loaded the empties into the drunk driver’s SUV. It was apparent to everyone that he was way too intoxicated to get behind the wheel. One (or some) of the boys tried to take his keys away from him but were unsuccessful. He drove off into the night and ultimately into our children.

My mind fills in the details of the accident I did not witness. I hear the shrill shriek of screeching brakes and the sharp shattering of broken glass. In terrifying dreams my mind conjures up images of things I did not see and cannot know. I see our children, blinded by headlights that lurch unannounced from a pitch-black night. I hear the horrified screams of shocked witnesses, seeing it happen before their eyes, powerless to stop it.

But as time has gone by, I have learned the actual details from newspaper accounts and police reports. From first responders and passersby. From people who cannot get those nightmare images out of their heads. I want to suck those scenes right out of their brains and plant them inside mine then replay them again and again, making them my own.

From the crash reconstruction team, I have learned that there were no screeching brakes that night. There were no brakes at all. The drunk driver plowed into our children headlong, too drunk to notice them, too cowardly to stop.

There was no shattering windshield either. Just a crack in the glass. A single crack with hairs wedged into it, like a weed sprouting from a line in the sidewalk. This I learned from the police detective who came to my home. The one who asked me to pluck twenty-five hairs from my son’s head so that they could extract his DNA and match it to the hairs at the scene. The ones sprouting from the lone crack.

And Trista and Neil were never blinded by headlights. They were hit from behind. They never saw it coming. It
was
pitch black that night. On Ferry Road where they were hit, there indeed are long stretches of unlit territory. Long sections with no sidewalk and nowhere to walk but the road itself. But they were run down under a street light by a drunk driver driving on the wrong side of the road. It was there that investigators found her watch, her book bag, his hat. (“Hats are never found more than twenty feet from the point of impact.”) I learned all this from the police officers, waiting to testify before the grand jury, convened to indict the drunk driver.

And there were no horrified screams of shocked onlookers either. There were no witnesses to the crash at all. Only those who came later. There was Dick Sullivan, a retired firefighter who swerved to avoid being hit by a car out of control. Who radioed headquarters for backup. Who followed the driver, watched him flip his SUV, and then flee into the woods on foot. There was Wynn Damon, a local radio personality, whose driveway the drunkard was caught in, urinating on Wynn’s wife’s car. There was Steve Cutter, the fire chief, whose kids played soccer with Neil. Who heard the call from home. Who responded to Dick’s report of an erratic driver. Who found two crash victims instead.

“Run over like dogs.” That is how one officer described it to a newspaper reporter that night. An honest response from a weary rescuer, overwhelmed by what he saw. I can just see him shaking his head and sighing, “like dogs.”

That printed comment turned out to be controversial. A woman who worked as a cashier at the local supermarket wrote a letter to the editor admonishing the officer for his word choice. She felt he maligned the drunk driver and showed little respect for us, the parents of the victims.

But we sympathized with the sergeant. In fact, we felt he was being too kind with his words. Who would run down a pair of dogs, let alone kids, then leave them for dead? But that is exactly what happened to Trista and Neil.

And this is what galls us most. What we cannot fathom, even now. This is what Neil cannot wrap his injured brain around.

“How could he just leave us, Mom?”

Neil asks me this question again and again, over and over.

“Why didn’t he call 911?”

Trista’s father, Dave, asks himself an even more pointed question: “Would my daughter be alive if he had?”

And I will never have an answer for them. Everyone had cell phones by then. And there were plenty of doors to knock on. Why, indeed. But he just left them there. To die. To freeze to death. Or get run over again by cop cars hurrying to apprehend an erratic driver, unaware that the drunkard had already begun leaving victims in his wake.

So now my dreams have detail. I have quilted together a new reality. No screeching brakes. No shattering glass. No screaming witnesses. Just a cold, clear night. A halo of light from a towering street lamp. A soft dull thud. A watch. A book bag. A hat. Two young lovers, hand in hand, unaware that their future ends now.

18

Drunk Driving

As details of the crash came out, so did the discussions about underage drinking and drunk driving: in the local newspaper and the
Boston Globe,
on talk radio, in conversations among friends at parties and grocery stores. If I had thought about it, I would have expected those discussions. What I didn’t expect were the families who seemed okay with underage drinking. Who felt they were protecting their children by confiscating their keys and giving them a “safe place” to drink. Their comments filled the op-ed pages, even as the story of the crash and all its devastation was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

But the dangers of underage drinking go beyond drinking and driving. I know this not just as a parent or even as a pediatrician; I know this as a citizen of my own community, one who reads the paper and knows the stories: A little girl in a nearby town wandered away from a drinking party and drowned in a shallow stream. A boy at another local drinking party cut his hand on a window and bled to death, discovered the next morning on the back stoop. Confiscating car keys may prevent drunk driving, but it doesn’t prevent drunkenness, and bad things happen to drunken children, children of sleeping or inattentive parents. The misguided notion that if parents take away the car keys and let their children drink under their roof they will somehow keep them safe to me just ignores history.

Parents who allow their children to drink in their homes open themselves up to enormous risk. Many states, including Massachusetts, have social host laws that hold parents responsible for the actions of partygoers who drink alcohol in their homes, even if they were not present when the drinking took place and didn’t provide the alcohol. A couple of years after the accident, a friend of mine hosted a party for her son’s graduation from high school, and she served alcohol. Saul and I were incredulous. Not just because they had so much to lose but also because we had already lost so much. But there was no talking to her; her mind was made up. She just seemed to ignore all the bad possible outcomes.

But to me it’s more than just the lawsuits. Assuming children can’t have a good time without alcohol sets the bar of expectation pretty low for our young people.

Neil came to the same conclusion reading the array of editorials and responses.

“It’s like they think we have to be drunk to have fun.”

But Neil and his friends could have fun without alcohol. Neil was a theater kid in high school. Theater kids know how to party. They had bonfires at their drama teacher’s house. They held coffeehouses between the performances and the judging at the Massachusetts Drama Guild Competition, a contest among over 120 high schools in the Commonwealth in which each theater team had to set up a stage, perform their play, and then strike the set—all in less than fifty minutes. All these events were alcohol-free.

They weren’t angels. The police were called one night when Alex Wallace led a particularly rousing rendition of “She Bangs” while dancing on top of one of the tables at the local Wendy’s to the thunderous applause of his fellow theater kids. Whom did they call from police custody? Their theater teacher, Suzanne Bryan, who came to get them with a stern look for the kids and a solemn plea to the police officer.

“Some of them are troubled kids, officer. Just let me take them home without calling their parents.”

The officer acquiesced to Suzanne’s requests.

“Are you gonna call our parents?” the kids nervously asked their teacher after they were safely in her custody.

Suzanne maintained her stern expression but shook her head no.

“You’re not?”

“Uh-uh.”

She paused, for dramatic effect no doubt, before pumping her fist in the air and shouting “because you’re theater kids!”

The crowd erupted in cheers. No confiscation of car keys needed. No fake ID. No record. Just plain fun.

In my everyday life as a pediatrician, I often have the opportunity to talk to kids about underage drinking and drunk driving. While I’m generally reluctant to share events from my personal life with my patients, I do sometimes when I feel I’m not getting through to my kids—when my usual spiel on drugs and alcohol are making my young patients’ eyes glaze over. Sometimes their parents are in the room with us, and I’ll often catch a glimpse of Mom out of the corner of my eye, nodding gratefully. I’m a new adult ally in the war on drugs. Sometimes it’s just the kid and me in the room together, locked in a kind of health-care
SmackDown:
them with their in-your-face-what-do-
you
-know swagger, me with my more quiet “Let me tell you how it is” stance. That’s when I’ll sometimes play the crash card.

After all, what’s more effective? Telling them that 11,773 people died in 2008 in drunk driving accidents or recounting being asked to pluck twenty-five hairs from Neil’s head so the crash scene investigator could match them to the ones sprouting from the drunk driver’s cracked windshield? What if one of my teens tells me she doesn’t drive drunk, just buzzed? Do I reach her with a discussion of blood alcohol levels and the minimum legal drinking age? Or do I tell her a story about watching my seventeen-year-old son say the mourner’s prayer for his dead girlfriend in our synagogue?

It’s not that I’ve become a doctor without borders. I believe in the usual boundaries between physicians and their patients. I don’t parade the gory details of my life out for every family in my practice. In fact, I don’t talk about the crash much at all. But when I do I’m simply trying to get my point across. A pediatrician I know keeps his daughter’s crumpled bicycle helmet displayed prominently on his desk as a reminder of her survival. He pulls it out to show his patients whenever one of them claims not to believe in its use. I don’t have a crumpled bike helmet. All I have are words. Are they effective? Who knows? I’m not going for shock value. I’m just trying to connect with my patients and make a difference in their world. Using my own family’s narrative as street cred. Linking choices to consequences. Hoping that my words get through.