At the Bottom of Everything (10 page)

So she hadn’t died. So we weren’t killers. These were like rosary beads that I never let out of my sweaty hands. (And finding out that she was twenty-two meant almost nothing to me, or nothing more than any other age would have. Twenty-two, when I was fifteen, seemed solidly adult.)

Another thing that kept me from collapsing completely was the idea, which didn’t seem quite so insane at the time, that maybe our car hadn’t had anything to do with the accident after all. Just a terrible coincidence. In middle school we’d read a short story in our dreary blue English class anthology called “The Necklace,” about a woman who borrows a diamond necklace from a rich friend for a party. She loses it, then spends the rest of her life miserably trying to earn enough money to buy a new one, only to find out on the last page that it was a fake diamond in the first place. (“But it was only a paste!” was the big, tragic reveal; the impact of this line in class was undercut by Mrs. Fleche’s monotone reading voice and the fact that none of us knew what “paste” meant.) Anyway, I kept thinking, and trying to convince Thomas to think, that we might be ruining our lives over something that really hadn’t been our fault: maybe the woman had been trying to kill herself; maybe the man driving the SUV had been falling asleep; maybe our car actually hadn’t rolled so far out into the road as it had seemed at the time. Who could really say?

Driver says second car cause of Connecticut pedestrian accident; police seek witnesses
.

When you’re in a state of mind like I was for those couple of weeks, everything you hear takes on terrifying undertones. A few days after that second story ran we were eating dinner
at Thomas’s when Sally said, “Admit it—were you out partying? You two look like you could just drop,” and I couldn’t answer right away because I couldn’t breathe. Police cars cried,
A-dam, A-dam, A-dam
. I saw a man on the street with a bald head like the SUV driver’s and the cable snapped on an elevator in my chest.

That Saturday morning we were driving with Thomas’s dad to the Potomac to watch a regatta, pulling the same car into the same intersection, and Richard seemed to stop for a full minute before he turned onto Connecticut, as if the car were whispering to him. And in fact he did horribly say, not then but on the way back, “You know somebody got hit crossing right around here? You be careful when you’re out walking around at night.”

“We are,” Thomas said. “Do we have any cream cheese at home?”

In one of the terrible dreams I had, starting that week and repeating for months afterward, I was standing in the middle of a highway knowing I was going to be run over and praying that the next car would be the one, that it would be done already.

“I don’t understand how you’re not more insane about this,” I said one afternoon when Thomas and I were sitting on stumps in the homeless encampment, where we hadn’t been for months. It was that part of the end of summer in D.C. when the gnats gather around your head, trying to be swallowed.

“I am, it’s bad. It’s really bad. But it’s just us who know, literally just the two of us. So if we don’t panic, I don’t think anything’s going to come of it.”

“But how do you have a
choice
about whether to panic?”

“What do you want me to do? Bite my nails? Punch something?”

“I don’t
want
you to do anything. But maybe you should acknowledge that because of you—”

“Because of us.”

“Because of you! You! I would never have been so fucking stupid!” By that age I’d learned how not to cry, but only by putting my face and voice through contortions that were every bit as weird looking as crying.

But no matter how mad I got (and I did, in that conversation or another one, tell Thomas I hated him and that I was so sick of his fucking face that I never wanted to see him again), we were stuck together, closer, in a way, than we’d ever been before. My interactions with every other person in the world—the bizarrely sweet head counselor Carlotta at work; my mom, who would find me staring on the couch and ask if she could make me a sandwich; the homeless man who shivered all summer in his trench coat on the steps at the Friendship Heights Metro station—all of them took place on a stage, under lights, according to a script that couldn’t have had any less to do with what I actually felt than if I’d been playing Mary Poppins. The only backstage I had was with Thomas. Only with him could I say, “This whole thing is really the fucking baddy,” and feel that the pipeline between my brain and my mouth was finally, for a minute at least, open.

CLEVELAND PARK WOMAN, 22, DIES AFTER BEING HIT BY CAR ON CONNECTICUT
.

When Thomas handed me the newspaper (we were sitting side by side on his bed, where we’d looked at
New Yorker
cartoons in seventh grade, where he’d shown me his drawings of Michelle Koller), I thought, for what turned out to be a last breath before going underwater, that this was about a different person. Connecticut was seriously dangerous for pedestrians, was the point, and it could always have been worse.

“What do we do?” I said. I meant it on every scale: How do we live our lives? How do we go back downstairs? How do we survive the next minute?

Thomas shook his head, making a face I didn’t recognize right away that meant that he was crying; it was the kind of crying, silent and painful looking, that can turn, with no warning, into wailing. But instead of wailing he managed to say,
“See? Happy now? Better if I fall apart?”

I shook my head like a dog shaking water from its ears.

I wasn’t, and I’m still not, the kind of person who knows what to do when people cry (I’ve had more than one girlfriend interrupt her tears to ask me why the hell I’m just sitting there like a mannequin), but just then I didn’t wonder at all: I put a hand on Thomas’s back and kept it there as he lay down, kept it there as I lay down next to him, didn’t say a word as his breathing slowed down and as he finally, after what felt like half an hour, started shuddering less and less. The newspaper had fallen somewhere between the mattress and the wall. I found myself staring at a birthmark on the back of his neck, just above where my hand was, and every time I started to panic I made myself notice one new thing about it (a whitish hair, a pinprick red dot), and like that, vaguely comforted by the thought that at least whatever was going to happen would have to happen to both of us, I got through the hour.

“Thomas?” I said at one point, as if he might have somehow managed to die. “Thomas?” But he was, like a baby after a bottle or a criminal after being caught, asleep.

At some point in the spider-hole weeks after the Anna fiasco, I decided I couldn’t live anymore with Joel. The darkness of my bedroom, the cereal bowls soaking in the sink, the mildewy towels hanging on the bathroom door—they weren’t the cause of what had gone wrong in my life, but they were tangled up in it. So I called my mom one night (“I’d almost forgotten what you sound like!”) and asked her to talk to Frank about whether any of his new apartments happened to be empty.

My stepdad, who’d made (and was continuing to make) more money as a lawyer than he had any idea what to do with, had bought a few apartments in a new condo in downtown Bethesda. He had the vague idea that he’d sell all but one, which he and my mom would move into when they retired, but I think he mostly just wanted something to talk about, to ask his secretary to make phone calls about, to keep track of now that they’d renovated every renovatable room in their current house. It’s in the nature of empires to expand.

As a stepfather Frank was uncomfortable (I remember once, when we were at the grocery store without my mom, that I reached up to tap his arm, and for a second, before he caught himself, he recoiled as if a stray dog had nosed him), but as a landlord he was a natural.

I moved in that weekend, and I realized, settling in that first night on my mattress on the floor, looking out over the empty brick courtyard with its Lululemon and artisanal gelato, that I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. No girlfriend to know where I was. No roommate to stand in my doorway asking me to go out. Didn’t Lee Harvey Oswald have an apartment like this? I came home at the end of each day (for rent I was organizing files at Frank’s firm, sitting at the desk of a recently fired paralegal) and took the elevator to the ninth floor, where I’d lock my apartment door and proceed to make and break elaborate rules about when it was OK to start looking at porn and drinking.

I’d long since given in to both porn and drinking, and to the empty seasick feeling that came afterward, on the night when Sally wrote to me again.

Certain emails I read and then slam my laptop shut, as if I might be able to keep whatever news is in them from leaking out into my life. This was one of those, but none of my tricks—not shutting the computer, not even opening a new bottle of Cutty Sark—seemed to be working: the leak had already started.
We’re reaching out to you for help
. A very bad idea, was all I could think.
Your old friend is drowning
. Well, so was I.

Remembering the accident, after spending a serious chunk of my life avoiding thinking about it, I’ve found myself wondering: So how did the guilt not kill me? How did I manage to go to class or apply to college or to worry about girls or to do anything, really, other than pay secret visits to Mira Batra’s grave and weep?