Imperfect Spiral (3 page)

“I know I must have seen the accident, but what sticks in my mind is sensing that it happened. Sensing the—impact.”

Weirdly, I also seem not to have heard the accident, which
may defy the usual laws of nature, or at least physics. But I don't tell the officers this.

“Were you distracted by something else when Humphrey ran into the street?”

“No. But I wasn't expecting him to run into the street, so I was surprised. It all happened so quickly.”

“We understand,” says the female half of the team. “So about the car that hit Humphrey—can you tell us anything?”

“Not really,” I say. “Wasn't it the blue minivan?”

They don't answer my question. I guess
they
get to ask the questions here, not me.

“We're just trying to understand the sequence of events leading up to the accident,” the man says. “Whether there was anything going on in terms of speeding, reckless driving, distractions, whatever.”

I have no idea.

They take pity on me and say we're done for the night. If I remember anything, I should call them—they give me their cards. And they will probably want to talk to me more, but for now they know I need to settle down and try to get some rest.

The phone rings as soon as Dad closes the door behind the police officers. Mom picks it up in the kitchen, then comes to the living room where I'm still sitting. She settles next to me on the sofa, puts her arm around my shoulders, and squeezes.

“Humphrey didn't make it,” she says.

Sunday—the morning after the morning after—the earth stubbornly continues to spin, and my buzzing phone forces me to give up fighting the daylight.

I heard. Quelle tristesse. R u ok? I can't text or call as much as I'd like to—you know camp rules.

Becca.
Quelle tristesse
is like saying “How sad,” only more so. French really is better at some things than English, and Becca likes to sprinkle French into her speech. And into her texts. She was in super-duper-advanced-AP-plus-plus French last year when we were freshmen. They've already run out of French classes for her to take. She adores French.

This summer Becca's been at camp, the camp I used to go to, and love, as well. She's a CIT. I didn't want to go back as a counselor-in-training and be a babysitter for a whole bunkful of little babysittees. I didn't think I'd be good at it.

It's more than that. It's more than whether I'd be good or bad at being a CIT. CITs have to be leaders—song leaders, cheerleaders, dance leaders, team leaders. Not my thing. So I stayed home for the first summer in six years and was a babysitter for just one little babysittee.

I'm okay. Thanks.

The phone buzzes again:

Vraiment?

That means “really,” in case you're not as
française
as Becca and me.

Oui.

I take French, too. I'm not as fluent as Becca, but I can keep up with her in our texts.

Vraiment vraiment?

I hesitate. Then I type:

I was holding him. He might have died in my arms.

I am so sorry.
You must be in pain.
How awful for you.
Danielle?

Three unanswered texts; she's wondering if I'm still here.

Yes, thank you. I am. It is.

Mon amie, it's the wake-up gong. Must go. Talk later.

I know that using your cell phone is basically forbidden at camp. I remember that if you're a counselor, you're allowed to have your phone in your possession—which isn't permitted if you're a mere camper—for use when you're off work. I don't know what the rule is for CITs, but I'm sure Becca won't be getting to her phone much.

I wonder if she's already turned it off and put it away. I did want to say one more thing. Quickly, I type:

He was such a great kid.

I send and wait. No response. She's moved on. Which may be a metaphor, anyway, for where our friendship is going.

Our “friendship.” I'm not sure why I feel the need to put quotation marks around that. Becca just called me “
mon amie
”—friend—in her text. We have been friends forever. But sometimes I'm afraid it's becoming more a matter of habit than of feeling, at least on her part.

Becca Sherman and I have known each other since elementary school. She's older than me—almost everyone in my grade at school has always been older than me. I have a late December birthday, and my parents sent me to school with the older kids rather than hold me back a year. Believe me, it was all about height, not brains or maturity. I was taller than nearly everybody my own age, and looked like I belonged with the older kids. I still am taller than nearly everybody my own age; to be precise, now I'm taller than nearly everybody of every age. When people meet me for the first time, they always expect me to be a basketball player.

“No?” an adult will say. “Western's girls could use a center like you. You'd be awesome!”

Adrian, by the way, thinks people over forty should be barred from using the word “awesome.”

Or, if it's not that I owe it to society and Western High School to become a basketball player, it's that I owe it to my family:

“You could save your parents a boatload of money in a few years by getting yourself a nice athletic scholarship, heh-heh.”

Is it so terrible that I just use my body to move myself around the planet?

Becca and I not only went to regular school together, we also used to go to Sunday religious school together, and then Tuesday–Thursday Hebrew school, before our Bat Mitzvahs. We would demolish the boys in Ping-Pong matches in the synagogue's youth lounge before class. Height, I'm happy to report, is an unsung advantage in table tennis. In class, we used to pass games of hangman back and forth when the Hebrew teacher wasn't looking—Hebrew hangman, since we figured that it would look better, and be more forgivable, if we were caught.

Now, though, our pointless Ping-Pong matches and Hebrew hangmen are history. Becca doesn't do pointless anymore; the two words—
p
words, coincidentally—that describe her these days are “purposeful” and “passionate.” She's doing all kinds of school activities. In the fall, she's going to be one of the editors of the school newspaper, a huge deal for a sophomore. And she'll be an officer on the student council. And she'll join a bunch of other clubs and groups, and about two minutes later she'll be their treasurer or vice president.

Becca has tried to get me involved, but I've always declined. She tried to get me to come back to camp as a CIT. I declined. I think this has made her impatient with me. I think she thinks I've become apathetic, and apathy is annoying to Becca. Of all people, she must know it's not apathy. But she can't help herself from pushing and encouraging me; she's just such a go-getter.

“Tall people have a huge advantage when it comes to
leadership,” she told me last year. “People just naturally look up to them. No pun intended.”

“And you know this how?” I asked. Becca is five two.

“I read it somewhere. Studies have been done.”

“Becca—”

“I know, I know,” she said. “All I'm saying is I know how good you would be if you came out of your shell. If you could get over your—thing. You'd sweep everyone off their feet, and you'd have more fun.”

“I'm having tons of fun already, thank you very much,” I said in a prim voice meant to get her to laugh and stop being so earnest. “Tons. Metric tons—the big ones.”

It worked. She laughed.

I love Becca, but I don't want to get elected to Student Council or be a student journalist or go out for the French club or be a center on the girls' basketball team. We can't all be leaders and overachievers. Deep down—actually, not so deep, but pretty much right on the surface—I'd still rather be playing Ping-Pong in a basement. Becca and I on the same team, crushing the boys in a meaningless competition before settling into a dozen or so harmless games of hangman while the Hebrew teacher droned on.
That
was a metric ton of fun.

I'm fully awake after my exchange of texts with Becca. No use fighting it, so I head downstairs. Adrian stayed over again last night—that makes two nights in a row—and he's standing over a frying pan of French toast.

“More quality time, Danny,” he says by way of a greeting.

This is our private little joke. Emphasis on
little
. “Quality time” is Dad's thing. “I want us to spend some real quality time as a family”—this weekend, this holiday, this vacation, whatever the occasion happens to be.

“So the difference between ‘quality time' and ‘quantity time' is what, exactly?” Adrian asked me one Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago. It wasn't a real question, though, because he answered it himself immediately after asking it.

“In ‘quality time,' say a Monopoly game, you don't know
when it's going to end, or if it's ever going to end,” he said. “Whereas in ‘quantity time,' say going to a movie, you know you're committed for about two hours and then everyone goes their own way again. It's like the difference between torture, when your kidnappers black out the windows and take away the clocks so you end up going crazy from losing all track of time and a sense of reality, and a regular jail sentence.”

Adrian would opt for quantity time any day. I don't have such strong feelings about it. But I also don't have the headbutting relationship with our parents that Adrian does. I don't feel like everything I do is a disappointment to them. I didn't move out of the house the day after I turned eighteen.

Of course I didn't. I haven't even turned fifteen yet.

Our parents join us in the kitchen.

“What would you think about going over to see the Dankers for a quick condolence call?” Mom asks.

Oh.

“Should I?” I ask.

“I think it would be appropriate,” Mom says.

“Have you talked to them yet?” I ask.

“No,” Dad says. “We'll come with you, of course.”

So an hour later the three of us walk to the Dankers' house. Adrian stays behind. (“I'll go another time,” he says, drawing an unconvinced look from Mom.) There are cars parked outside the house. Good, it won't just be the Dankers and the Snyders. When Mom taps on the front door, an unfamiliar woman—a youngish woman, maybe in her late twenties—answers. She leads us into
the living room, to the left of the front hall. It's a room I've never been in during the two months this summer that I've been babysitting. Although the Dankers never told me to stay out of it, I always had the sense that it was off-limits to Humphrey, and if it was off-limits to Humphrey, it was off-limits to me. It's the grown-up room.

Mrs. Danker is sitting on a sofa. Another woman I don't know—someone around her age—sits next to her, holding her hand. A friend. Mrs. Crenshaw, the next-door neighbor with three kids, who are not here, is on the big sofa, too. She looks uncomfortable; not physically uncomfortable, but not at ease. She looks strangely glad to see us enter the room.

“Clarice,” my mother says to Mrs. Danker. “We're so very sorry.” Mom bends down to say this softly, and to take the hand that isn't being held by Mrs. Danker's friend.

“Thank you, Jan,” Mrs. Danker says.

Mom straightens up and moves to one of the chairs. Next, my father squats down beside Mrs. Danker.

“So sorry,” he says quietly. “What a great kid.” Not that Dad has any idea, really, whether Humphrey was a great kid or not.

My turn. Just then Mr. Danker enters the room with the young woman who answered the door and another man. The man looks like Mr. Danker, minus about, I don't know, twenty or thirty years. He has the same rectangular head, with the same kind of hair—like a grown-out crew cut, thick hairs standing at attention, only Mr. Danker's is salt-and-pepper and the younger man's is dark brown.

Dad is getting up from his squat when Mr. Danker walks in. “Tom,” Dad says. “My condolences.” He pivots to do one of those elbow-grabbing non-hugs men give each other.

Mr. Danker nods.

Mom jumps up when she sees Mr. Danker, and she, too, offers her condolences—as well as a hug. He doesn't say anything to Mom, either, and he stands straight as a general for her hug before he sits next to his wife on the sofa, squeezing Mrs. Crenshaw out of the way. He has to brush against me slightly to get between the coffee table and the sofa. He seems not to notice me.

It's still my turn, though. I scrunch down on my knees. The rug is thick and forgiving.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper. “I'm so very sorry.”

Mrs. Crenshaw, who is still sitting on the sofa, only now appearing physically as well as psychically uncomfortable, looks at me expectantly. That's when I realize I haven't actually said anything out loud. It seems I've been having this problem since Friday night. I try again.

“I'm so sorry about Humphrey.”

Mrs. Danker looks at me blankly at first. I've put on a skirt and blouse for the condolence call; could it be that after all these weeks, she doesn't recognize me without my T-shirt and shorts?

No, of course she knows who I am. “Danielle,” she says, and immediately she starts to cry. “Oh, you poor thing. We know it wasn't your fault. Right, Thomas? Humphrey could be so—so …”

She trails off.

“Humphrey could be a bit out of control,” says Mr. Danker.

No. No, he could not, not really.

“Yes, but,” Mrs. Danker says. “What five-year-old has great impulse control …”

Again she trails off. Her friend nods and squeezes her hand. Mrs. Crenshaw shakes her head, but I know that she, and the friend, and my father (who is also nodding) all mean to agree with Mrs. Danker's statement.

But not me. No. Humphrey's impulse control was excellent.
Vraiment
.