The Wreck (3 page)

Lieutenant Collins returned a few minutes
later. “Carly is understandably in shock. They’ve sedated her and are taking
her in as a precaution, but they don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

Brian stood. “I want to go with her.”

“Her parents are on their way to the
hospital.” The lieutenant rested his hand on Brian’s shoulder. “I’m not going
to tell you what to do, but I think where you need to be right now is at home
waiting for your parents. They’re going to need you, Brian.”

“Yeah, okay.” Brian knew the lieutenant
was right, but with all his heart he wanted to stay with Carly. “Can I see her
for a minute?”

“Of course.” He led Brian over to where
the paramedics had loaded her onto a gurney.

Brian leaned down to kiss her cheek and
was startled by the vacant, empty look in her normally vibrant brown eyes.
“Carly, it’s Brian. I’m here.” He took her cold hand and held it tightly. As
tears blinded him, he wanted to assure her that she would be all right but
couldn’t bring himself to make such a promise just then. “They’re going to take
you to the hospital to make sure you’re okay. Your parents will meet you there,
so you won’t be alone.” He wiped the tears on his cheeks. “I’m going to go home
to wait for my parents, but I’ll be over to see you just as soon as I can.”

She never looked at him or acknowledged
she had heard him. Fear worked its way past the numbness and settled like a
block of ice in his gut.

Lieutenant Collins rested his hand on
Brian’s shoulder. “Let the paramedics take care of her. She’ll be okay after
they get her to a doctor.”

As Brian kissed her cheek and then her
lips, he wondered if either of them would ever be okay again.

“Officer Beckett is going to give you a
ride home and wait with you until your parents get there, all right?”
Lieutenant Collins asked.

The medical examiner approached, but the
lieutenant held up his hand to stop the other man until he had Brian settled.

Brian nodded and was led to one of the
patrol cars. Since the road leading to his house was blocked, the emergency
personnel cleared a path to allow the cruiser through. On the brief ride home,
it occurred to Brian that this horrific night would come down to a matter of
minutes. Had the others left the pizza place a minute or two later, maybe they
would have arrived safely. Only two bends in the road separated the place where
the lives of his brother and their friends had come to a fiery end and the
split-level house where he and Sam lived with their parents.

If Brian and Carly had left the willow a
few minutes earlier, they would’ve already been at his house and wouldn’t have
witnessed the aftermath. If Brian hadn’t been worried about the teasing that
seemed so ridiculous in hindsight, maybe he and Carly would have lingered at
the willow a while longer and wouldn’t have seen it. Minutes and seconds,
making all the difference between life, death, and purgatory.

Because he had given his keys to Sam,
Brian had no way to get in the house, so he and the patrolman sat in uneasy
silence in the driveway.

While they waited, Brian continued to
play the “what if” game as his mind raced with scenarios that somehow might’ve
brought about a different end. If he and Carly hadn’t been so anxious to be
alone, they would’ve been in the car, too. Remembering how Sam had teased him
about taking “a walk” with Carly had Brian sobbing again with the kind of
helpless, massive grief from which there’s no escape once it wraps itself with
maddening finality around those who are left behind.

They were the last words he would ever
hear his brother say. Ever.
Sammy
. The numbness began to wear off, and
Brian cried the brokenhearted tears of a young man who’d lost his only sibling,
the one person in the world who shared most of his memories, his very best
friend. He had a lifetime to mourn the others. For right now, he could think
only of Sam.

“Is there anything I can do?” Officer
Beckett asked.

Brian shook his head but couldn’t speak.

Thirty long minutes passed during which
Brian wasn’t sure what he wanted more—his parents to get there because he
needed them or for them to stay away for that much longer, to be protected from
what they would hear and how it would change them forever. He was grateful they
would be coming from the other direction and wouldn’t have to drive past the
accident scene. By the time they finally pulled into the driveway behind the
cruiser, Brian had decided that Sam had gotten the easier end of this deal.

His father came rushing out of the car.

Brian and Officer Beckett got out of the
cruiser. The expressions on their faces stopped Chief Westbury in his tracks.

“What?” he whispered, touching Brian’s
face and then his chest, as if to confirm his son was safe. “They said there
was an accident. What happened?”

“Dad,” Brian said, his voice breaking.
“It’s Sammy.”

From behind his father, his mother’s
scream was eerily reminiscent of Carly’s. Before Brian could tell them that Sam
hadn’t died alone, his mother fainted.

T
he small town of Granville is nestled in
the rural northwest corner where Rhode Island comes together with Connecticut
to the west and Massachusetts to the north. With an easy commute to Providence
and Boston, Granville attracted executives looking to raise their families in a
more bucolic setting. The “commuters” tended to gravitate to the fancy new
subdivisions on the south side. Residents who could trace their roots back to
the town’s early nineteenth century origins clustered closer to a downtown made
up of converted mills from Granville’s glory days as an industrial hub.

In a town of just over fifteen thousand,
the loss of six teenagers touched almost everyone in some way or another,
uniting the commuters and the townies in a shared grief that brought the usual
buzz of activity to a halt during the week following “the tragedy,” as it came
to be known.

Flags flew at half-mast, routine meetings
were canceled, and the high school suspended classes but offered counseling to
students who needed help making sense of something that made no sense. With an
unexpected week off from school, young people gathered in subdued groups in the
town common, at the beach by the lake, and in all their usual hangouts
downtown.

Within two days, the scorched earth
around the Tucker Road crash site was almost completely hidden by a makeshift
shrine erected by the victims’ classmates. Freshly painted white wooden crosses
bearing the six names—Sam, Toby, Pete, Michelle, Jenny, and Sarah—were
surrounded by flowers, candles, balloons, stuffed animals, letters, and
drawings protected from the elements by plastic bags.

Thousands of people descended upon the
town to pay their respects, to offer their support, and to satisfy the odd
curiosity generated by epic tragedy. Recent Granville High School graduates
flocked home from colleges around the country, and the story garnered national
press coverage.

On Friday, one week to the day after the
accident, Sam was the last to be laid to rest in the town cemetery where six
fresh new graves dotted the landscape. Just two rows from his girlfriend Jenny
and four rows from Pete, Sam’s final resting place overlooked the town common
where he had spent many an aimless afternoon. Standing with his parents at the
gravesite after everyone else had left, Brian thought his brother would approve
of the location.

He gave his parents credit for attending
all six funerals, something many of the other parents had been unable to do. The
lingering numbness from the other five funerals had no doubt helped the
Westburys through this unimaginable day.
Was it really only a week ago that
the eight of us were dancing in Toby’s basement without a care in the world?
And now six of them were dead, Carly had yet to fully emerge from the stupor
she’d descended into after the accident, and Brian was more alone than he’d
ever been in his life.

His mother dabbed at her swollen eyes
with a handkerchief grown sodden with tears.

Resting a hand on Brian’s shoulder, his
father asked, “Are you ready to go, son?”

Michael Westbury’s broad shoulders were
hunched, and his ruggedly handsome face had aged overnight. That his son had
been driving the doomed car weighed heavily on the chief, as did the
preliminary findings of the investigation.

“I’m going to take a walk over to check
on Carly,” Brian said, adding quickly, “If it’s all right with you.”

Mary Ann Westbury had clung to Brian over
the last week, as if letting him out of her sight might bring about further
disaster. He’d done his best to be patient with her, but he needed some
distance, some time to process what had happened now that the protracted and
agonizing ceremony of grieving had finally ended.

“What time will you be home?” his mother
asked with an anxious frown. Mary Ann, a petite blonde with the hazel eyes she
had passed to her sons, was first and foremost a mother. A full-time homemaker,
she had devoted her life to her boys and their friends. More than anyone else
touched by the tragedy, Brian worried about her. Well, he was desperately
worried about Carly, too, but had yet to fully deal with that in the midst of
all the other details and concerns of the past week.

“An hour, maybe two,” he said in answer
to his mother’s question. “I’ll call you if I’m going to be any later.”

He knew she wanted him to come home with
them to where their extended family waited to offer what comfort they could,
and it seemed to cost her something to nod her approval. “Give Carly our love.”

“I will.” Brian wondered if it would
matter to her.

They hugged him and left him standing at
the top of the hill as they made their way to where the exhausted funeral
director waited for them. Brian watched his father put an arm around his mother
to guide her down the slope. He hoped they would somehow find a way to survive
the crushing loss.

After they had driven off in the limo,
Brian crouched down to run his fingers through the soft dirt that covered his
brother. “What’re we supposed to do without you?” he asked in a whisper as
grief gave way to the anger that had simmered just below the surface all week.
“What were you
thinking
driving like that? You didn’t even
try
to
slow down. They said there were no skid marks, that you just drove off the road
into that tree.
You knew better, Sammy!
How many times has Dad told us
we have to be better than everyone else because of who he is in this town? How
could you do this to him?” Brian’s throat closed, and tears filled eyes already
raw and gritty. That there could be any tears left astounded him. His voice was
once again a whisper when he added, “How could you do this to
me
? How
could you leave me here all alone?”

He bent his head and cried the same way
he had the night it happened, the same way he suspected he would cry for a long
time to come. Over the last week Brian had discovered there was no escape from
grief. If he was awake, it hung over every breath, every word, every corner of
his life. Sporadic sleep provided no reprieve, haunted as it was by vivid
dreams that forced him to relive the horror over and over again.

Wiping his face, he stood and took a long
last look at his brother’s grave before he turned and forced himself to walk
away. He ambled down the hill and crossed the street to the sidewalk that
wrapped around the town common. A group of boys he knew from school were in a
circle playing hacky sack on the grass. They stopped their game to watch him
walk by. Brian acknowledged them with a brief nod but didn’t stop. He couldn’t
bear to listen to another awkward word of sympathy from peers so far out of
their league they said only the wrong things.

As he left them to continue their game,
it occurred to Brian that he didn’t have any friends left. He had plenty of
acquaintances but no one he could call to hang out with. He’d always had Sam
and Toby, who’d been their friend since they were babies. Their mothers had
been close before Mrs. Garrett’s drinking had worsened right around the time
the boys started high school.

They met Pete through Toby, and with the
three of them always around, Brian hadn’t felt the need for more close friends.
Once he started going out with Carly, he’d had even less of a need for others.
The eight of them hadn’t set out to distance themselves from the rest of the
kids, but they had nonetheless. Now Brian was left without a friend in the
world and a girlfriend who either couldn’t or wouldn’t share her grief with
him.

Wanting to avoid the accident site, he
took the long way around downtown to Carly’s house on South Road. They’d once
counted the seven hundred and eighty steps between their houses.

The tulip border Mrs. Holbrook lovingly
tended was in full bloom on either side of the sidewalk in front of the
two-story white clapboard house. White wicker furniture with pretty floral pads
decorated a wide front porch where Brian had whiled away many an hour with
Carly. He closed the gate behind him and climbed the stairs. As he waited for
someone to answer the door, he tugged his tie loose and took off his suit coat.

Mrs. Holbrook came to the door in the
same dress she had worn to Sam’s funeral. A headband contained her short auburn
curls, and as she opened the screen door for him, he noticed her brown eyes, so
much like Carly’s, were still rimmed with red. “Brian,” she said, welcoming him
with a warm embrace. “How are you, honey?”