18.
The death of my sister split my world open.
This occurred on April 6, 1991, and marked the beginning of the end of me and Lindy’s year of dreadful silence. It also left my mom ruined.
My specific memory of this event, however, is hazy. This is not something I’m proud of.
All I recall is being home alone one Saturday morning. My mom was off at the mall, shopping for clothes, getting a haircut, who knows. I was barely sixteen years old at the time. I didn’t have a car. At approximately ten o’clock that morning, the phone rang and a woman asked me if my sister Hannah was home. She was not. Hannah was twenty-seven. She had an apartment on the other side of town. I told the caller as much. A series of subsequent calls then trickled in, all by a woman with the same voice who asked me if my parents were home, and how old I was.
I suspected a scam.
“Don’t call back here,” I told her.
“Please,” she said. “Just take down this number for me.”
I didn’t bother.
And since this was a time before cell phones, I have no idea how my parents received the news. I only remember one final call, from my father, who told me there’d been a car accident. He then told me he was picking up my mother to go to the hospital because she couldn’t drive herself.
“Is she okay?” I said. “Is Mom okay?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not your mom. It’s Hannah.”
“What’s going on?” I said. “People keep calling for her.”
“Just stay there,” he told me. “Don’t go anywhere.”
This was as much as I got.
The next few hours were spent in itchy solitude. The phone continued to ring, yet it was never my parents. The voices instead morphed into aunts and uncles and grandparents who were cagey and guarded in what they said to me, prefacing it all by asking what I knew. I told them the greatest truth.
I knew nothing.
When late afternoon came I saw my family drive up to our house, all sitting together in one car, and this remains to me the clearest image of the event. My father drove the Mercedes with two passengers in the backseat, and I watched them pull into the garage behind the house. It took me a long time to understand who these people were; such was the distance from the last time they had looked like a family. In the car sat my mother and my other sister, Rachel, a person I realize I’ve not even mentioned by name before now.
There’s nothing behind that. We simply weren’t close then. This is nobody’s fault.
A decade older than me, Rachel was already off to graduate school in Lafayette at that time, an hour away from Baton Rouge, and so a large amount of thought went simply to what she was doing back home. It made no sense. I watched her help my mother out of the car, and this took some effort.
My mother looked like a stranger at that moment and, in truth, it would be a long time before I saw her beautiful again. Her back was hunched over. Her face was slack and wet. If I had the ability, I could draw her for you, her sad figure, still crystal clear in my mind. But I don’t. Just know that my sister was also disheveled and upset, and that my father looked composed as a robot.
This is what gave it away. I bawled before they told me the news.
My final memory of that moment is of burying my face into my father’s stomach and crying until I made his shirt wet. After this, a large chunk of time disappears.
When I think back about this scene, most of my thoughts go to why I chose him to cling to. What must my mother have thought? What did I say to console her? Was I so selfish that I thought only of myself? When I try to remember the specifics, it seems that I can only hear my mother in the background saying, “I’m sorry, son. I’m so sorry,” but why would she be apologizing to me?
This is a time I want back.
Yet I can only flash forward to that evening, when a stream of relatives began rushing through our front door. Old friends of the family. The people of Woodland Hills. And then, worst of all, there was Hannah’s inconsolable fiancé, a man we called Finally Douglas.
I didn’t really get this joke back then, likely because, as a teenage boy, I didn’t much care. But I understand now that the nickname Finally Douglas was a compliment to this man named Douglas, a sigh of relief on my mother and Rachel’s part that Hannah, after a number of bad relationships, had finally found a person who treated and loved her in the gentle way that all good people recognize. They were to be married in October of that year at a plantation called Magnolia Mound, a beautiful stretch of land in the northern part of Baton Rouge.
And now this.
And to further establish my credibility, I will confess to you the unfortunate truth. I don’t remember much about Hannah. When I think of her now, all these years later, I think only of her death, and the details go like this:
On a bright and blue day, she was sideswiped by a gray pickup truck while backing out of a shopping center on Jefferson Highway. Her neck was snapped. She was pronounced dead on arrival. She didn’t feel any pain. I heard this phrase again and again.
Still, I have to wonder about the accuracy of these things.
How much of the truth was I spared? In turn, how much truth am I sparing you?
If she was dead on arrival, for instance, why were they at the hospital so long? Why didn’t they call me? The common rumor passed around at her wake was that she had been pulling out of an ice-cream parlor when the accident occurred and that she still had a bit of her favorite, double chocolate fudge, on her lip when she passed. She died happy, people said. It’s hard to imagine a better way.
I clung to this for years.
But now I think about the time of the first phone call, ten a.m., and wonder what kind of ice cream is sold at that hour. I understand that I could easily flip through the phone book and call the place where it happened. I could casually ask when they open. I know this.
But I refuse. I want to rely on my memory. It’s important that you understand this. What else, besides love, do we have?
That said, when I think deeply about Hannah, only a few scenes arise from the rummage. They are of no obvious consequence. One from when I stayed the night at her apartment where she and Finally Douglas made us veggie pizzas. We played Sorry! and watched Dune. I didn’t understand a bit of it. I recall no particular conversation. Most vivid to me is that she had a small table in the corner of her living room that doubled as a chess set. You could lift the top of the table and store the marble pieces beneath. It was made of a dark lacquered wood. There you go.
Thank you, memory.
Another time, in her senior year of high school, when she was listening to music in her room. I was only seven years old, yet I remember walking in to see her staring at herself in a full-length mirror, wearing a green cap and gown for her upcoming graduation. The record she was playing was by a band called Madness, a song titled “Our House (In the Middle of Our Street),” and the album cover, which she had tacked to her wall, depicted the band members all huddled together and smiling, their heads framed behind the rack of a billiards table. The song was loud, and Hannah was smiling. She saw me in the mirror and turned around. She held out her arms.
“Hey,” she asked. “Does this thing make me look like a wizard?”
I wish these memories were more vivid. I wish there were more of them.
The one I cherish most took place in a time I can’t quite finger, though I now imagine it to be during the Finally Douglas days. I was in my room, where Hannah had come to sit on my bed and ask me something. A favor, perhaps, a question, an invitation; I don’t remember. All I know is that her hair was long and dark brown. It was straight, unlike mine, but she had done something to curl it this day. It twisted in soft columns on her shoulders, and she fiddled with it as she spoke. She smelled of perfume and wore a white cotton sweater with blue jeans, a turquoise necklace. The sweater was made of thick braided ropes and hung loose around her neck and shoulders. I’ve since gotten the impression from my family that Hannah was somewhat of an artist, a freer spirit than the rest of us, and so I imagine this sweater being fashionable at the time. I have no idea what information was exchanged between us.
I only remember that when my sister got up to leave my room she was happy, and her life was good. I know this by the slight flourish she gave to her exit, reaching up to tap the top of my door frame as she entered the hall. I clearly recall the playful little hop she gave to this gesture, the way I heard the thin bracelets on her wrists jangle, and the obvious manner in which I loved her.