The Best American Essays 2015 (11 page)

At the opposite end of our apartment, my mother is resting. She's in her bedroom, as she tends to be, behind a closed door. She's able to sleep once again; the spirit of her cousin no longer visits her. There are nights when he comes to her in dreams, but for the most part he's gone. And though his spirit has never spoken to her, this vision was an answer to her prayers. Someone has heard her call for death and responded:
Soon, soon.

JUSTIN CRONIN

FROM
Narrative

F
OUR YEARS AGO
, driving home from picking up our twelve-year-old daughter from summer camp, my wife reached into her purse for a tissue and lost control of the car. This occurred on a stretch of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio, near the town of Gonzales. The accident occurred as many do: a moment of distraction, a small mistake, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. My wife and daughter were in the midst of a minor argument over my daughter's need to blow her nose. During high-pollen season, she is a perennial sniffer, and the sound drives my wife crazy.
Get a Kleenex
, Leslie said,
for God's sake
, and when Iris, out of laziness or exhaustion or the mild day-to-day defiance of all teenagers, refused to do so, my wife reached for her purse, inadvertently turning the wheel to the left.

In the case of some vehicles, the mistake might have been rectified, but not in the case of my wife's—a top-heavy SUV with jacked-up suspension. When she realized her error, she overcorrected to the right, then again to the left, the car swerving violently. They were on a bridge that passed above a gully: on either side, nothing but gravity and forty vertical feet of air. That they would hit the guardrail was now inevitable. In moments of acute stress, time seems to slow. The name for this is
tachypsychia
, from the Greek
tach
, meaning “speed,” and
psych
, meaning “mind.” Thus, despite the chaos and panic of these moments, my wife had time to form a thought:
I have killed my daughter.

This didn't happen, although the accident was far from over. The car did not break through the guardrail but ricocheted back onto the highway, spinning in a one-eighty before flopping onto its side in a powdery explosion of airbags. It struck another vehicle, driven by a pastor and his wife on their way home from Sunday lunch, though my wife has no memory of this. For what seemed like hours the car traveled in this manner, then gravity took hold once more. Like a whale breaching the surface, it lifted off the roadway, turned belly-up, and crashed down onto its roof. The back half of the car compacted like an accordion: steel crushing, glass bursting, my daughter's belongings—clothes, shoes, books, an expensive violin—exploding onto the highway. Other cars whizzed past, narrowly missing them. A final jolt, the car rolled again, and it came to a halt, facing forward, resting on its wheels.

As my wife tells it, the next moment was very nearly comic. She and my daughter looked at each other. The car had been utterly obliterated, but there was no blood, no pain, no evidence of bodily injury to either of them. “We've been in an accident,” my wife robotically observed.

My daughter looked down at her hand. “I am holding my phone,” she said—as, indeed, she somehow still was. “Do you want me to call 911?”

There was no need. Though in the midst of things the two of them had felt alone in the universe, the accident had occurred in the presence of a dozen other vehicles, all of which had now stopped and disgorged their occupants, who were racing to the scene. A semi moved in behind them to block the highway. By this time my wife's understanding of events had widened only to the extent that she was aware that she had created a great deal of inconvenience for other people. She was apologizing to everyone, mistaking their amazement for anger. Everybody had expected them to be dead, not sitting upright in their destroyed vehicle, neither one of them with so much as a hair out of place. Some began to weep; others had the urge to touch them. The cops arrived, a fire truck, an ambulance. While my wife and daughter were checked out by an EMT, onlookers organized a posse to prowl the highway for my daughter's belongings. Because my wife and daughter no longer had a car to put them into, a woman offered to bring the items to our house; she was headed for Houston to visit her son and was pulling a trailer of furniture. The EMT was as baffled as everybody else. “Nobody walks away from something like this,” he said.

I was to learn of these events several hours later, when my wife phoned me. I was in the grocery store with our six-year-old son, and when I saw my wife's number my first thought was that she was calling to tell me she was running late, because she always is.

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to say hello, “where are you?”

Thus her first tender steps into explaining what had occurred. An accident, she said. A kind of a big fender-bender, really. Nobody hurt, but the car was out of commission; I'd need to come get them.

I wasn't nice about this. Part of the dynamic in our marriage is the unstated fact that I am a better driver than my wife. I have never been in an accident; my one and only speeding ticket was issued when the first George Bush was president. About every two years my wife does something careless in a parking lot that costs a lot of money, and she has received so many tickets that she has been forced to retake driver's education—and those are just the tickets I know about. The rules of modern marriage do not include confiscating your wife's car keys, but more than once I have considered doing this.

“A fender-bender,” I repeated.
Christ almighty, this again.
“How bad is it?”

“Everybody's fine. You don't have to worry.”

“I get that. You said that already.” I was in the cereal aisle; my son was bugging me to buy a box of something much too sweet. I tossed it into the cart.

“What about the car?”

“Um, it kind of . . . rolled.”

I imagined a Labrador retriever lazily rotating onto his back in front of the fireplace. “I don't understand what you're telling me.”

“It's okay, really,” my wife said.

“Do you mean it rolled
over?
”

“It happened kind of fast. Totally no big deal, though.”

It sounded like a huge deal. “Let me see if I have this right. You were driving and the car rolled over.”

“Iris wouldn't blow her nose. I was getting her a Kleenex. You know how she is. The doctors say she's absolutely fine.”

“What doctors?” It was becoming clear that she was in a state of shock. “Where are you?”

“At the hospital. It's very small. I'm not even sure you'd call it a hospital. Everybody's been so nice.”

And so on. By the time the call ended, I had some idea of the seriousness, though not completely. Gonzales was three hours away. I abandoned my grocery cart, raced home, got on the phone, found somebody to look after our son, and got in my car. Several more calls followed, each adding a piece to the puzzle, until I was able to conclude that my wife and daughter were alive but should be dead. I
knew
this, but I didn't
feel
it. For the moment I was locked into the project of retrieving them from the small town where they'd been stranded. It was after ten o'clock when I pulled into the driveway of Gonzales Memorial Hospital, a modern building the size of a suburban dental office. I did not see my wife, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out over the empty fields behind it. I raced inside, and there was Iris. She was slender and tan from a month in the Texas sunshine, and wearing a yellow T-shirt dress. She had never looked more beautiful, and it was this beauty that brought home the magnitude of events. I threw my arms around her, tears rising in my throat; I had never been so happy to see anybody in my life. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn't know; one of the nurses directed us outside. I found myself unable to take a hand off my daughter; some part of me needed constant reassurance of her existence. I saw my wife standing at the edge of the lot, facing away. I called her name, she turned, and the two of us headed toward her.

As my wife tells the story, this was the moment when, as the saying goes, she got God. Once the two of them had been discharged, my wife had stepped outside to call me with this news. But the signal quality was poor, and she abandoned the attempt. I'd be along soon enough.

She found herself, then, standing alone in the Texas night. I do not recall if the weather was clear, but I'd like to think it was, all those fat stars shining down. My wife had been raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, but a series of intertribal squabbles had soured her parents on the whole thing, and apart from weddings and funerals, she hadn't set foot in a church for years. Yet the outdoor cathedral of a starry Texas night is as good a place as any to communicate with the Almighty, which she commenced to do. In the hours since the accident, as the adrenaline cleared, her recollection of events had led her to a calculus that rewrote everything she thought she knew about the world. Until that night, her vision of a universal deity had been basically impersonal. God, in her mind, was simply too busy to take an interest in individual human affairs. The universe possessed a moral shape, but events were haphazard, unguided by providence. Now, as she contemplated the accident, mentally listing the many ways that she and our daughter should have died and yet did not, she decided this was wrong. Of course God paid attention. Only the intercession of a divine hand could explain such a colossal streak of luck. Likewise did the accident become in her mind a product of celestial design. It was a message; it meant something. She had been placed in a circumstance in which a mother's greatest fear was about to be realized, then yanked from the brink. Her future emerged in her mind as something given back to her—it was as if she and our daughter had been killed on the highway and then restored to life—and like all supplicants in the wilderness, she asked God what her purpose was, why he'd returned her to the world.

That was the moment when Iris and I emerged from the building and called her name, giving her the answer.

Until that night we were a family that had lived an entirely secular existence. This wasn't planned; things simply happened that way. My religious background was different from my wife's, but only by degree. I was raised in the Catholic Church, but its messages were delivered to me in a lethargic and off-key manner that failed to gain much traction. My father did not attend mass—I was led to believe this had something to do with the trauma of his attending Catholic grade school—and my mother, who dutifully took my sister and me to church every Sunday, did not receive communion. Why this should be so I never thought to ask. Always she met us at the rear of the church so that we could make a quick exit “to avoid the traffic.” (There was no traffic.) We never attended a church picnic or drank coffee in the basement after mass or went to Bible study; we socialized with no other families in the parish. Religion was never discussed over the dinner table or anyplace else. I went to just enough Sunday school to meet the minimum requirements for first communion, but because I went to a private school with afternoon activities, I could not attend confirmation class. My mother struck a deal with the priest. If I met with him for a couple of hours to discuss religious matters, I could be confirmed. I had no idea why I was doing any of this or what it meant, only that I needed to select a new name, taken from the saints. I chose Cornelius, not because I knew who he was but because that was the name of my favorite character in
Planet of the Apes.

Within a couple of years I was off to boarding school, and my life as a Roman Catholic, nominal as it was, came to an end. During a difficult period in my midtwenties, I briefly flirted with church attendance, thinking it might offer me some comfort and direction, but I found it just as stultifying and embarrassing as I always had, full of weird sexual obsessions, exclusionary politics, and a deep love of hocus-pocus, overlaid with a doctrine of obedience that was complete anathema to my newly independent self. If asked, I would have said that I believed in God—one never really loses those mental contours once they're established—but that organized religious practice struck me as completely infantile. When my wife and I were married, a set of odd circumstances led us to choose an Anglican priest to officiate, but this was a decision we regretted, and when our daughter was born, the subject of baptism never came up. Essentially, we viewed ourselves as too smart for religion. I'll put it another way. Religion was for people who wanted to stay children all their lives. We didn't. We were the grown-ups.

In the aftermath of the accident, and the event that I now think of as “the revelation of the parking lot,” all this went out the window. I was not half as sure as my wife that God had interceded; I'm a skeptic and always will be. But it was also the case that I was due for a course correction. In my midforties, I had yet to have anything truly bad happen to me. The opposite was true: I'd done tremendously well. At the university where I taught, I'd just been promoted to full professor. A trilogy of novels I had begun writing on a lark had been purchased for scads of money. We'd just bought a new house we loved, and my daughter had been admitted to a terrific school, where she'd be starting in the fall. My children were happy and healthy, and my newfound financial success had allowed my wife to quit her stressful job as a high school teacher to look after our family and pursue her interests. It had been a long, hard climb, but we'd made it—more than made it—and I spent a great deal of time patting myself on the back for this success. I'd gone out hunting and brought back a mammoth. Everything was right as rain.