So, after she died, I endowed this scene with great power.
When I would sit alone in my room in the year that followed, pretending I didn’t hear my mother and sister sobbing in the spaces adjacent to me, I would stare up at that spot on the door frame. I thought about the impulse that makes a person go out of their way to touch a thing like that. It must be joy. It must be some sort of deep satisfaction. It must be peace.
Don’t tell me any different. I am happy with memory here.
The reality, however, is that this event laid waste to my family.
My mother became a person whom I could no longer understand. Yet she was never neglectful of me in the years that followed. She instead became overly gracious and forgetful of nearly all my flaws, and, in truth, she may have erred in this way. With everything else turned sour in her life, I suppose she needed to believe me an angel. I only wish I could have provided.
What else is there to say?
My sister Rachel was also changed. She dropped out of graduate school and moved home for a year. And although, as a family, we’d always been quietly Catholic (going to Mass on the holy days, attending Sunday school if nothing else was going on), my sister Rachel found Christ in bold and permanent ways when Hannah died. It was infuriating to me at the time. The random death of an innocent person seemed to prove to Rachel that God had a plan for everyone, while it poisoned for me the idea that there could be a God at all. So, I antagonized her by picking fights about all the obvious religious hypocrisies, like how a Christian God could doom people to hell because of where they grew up, like how he could unleash disease and war on those who had not sinned against him, et cetera, and although I was mainly just trying to pester her, although I was mainly just jealous of the way I would see her and my mother hold hands to pray at the dinner table, I believe I was also teetering on the brink of true faithlessness in those years, as many teenagers do, and it scared me.
Sensing this, Rachel began to leave little prayer cards on my pillow. She hung a poster above our breakfast table that had a lone set of footprints in the sand and began to speak almost exclusively in religious clichés. She talked about God “closing doors while opening windows” and “carrying us through the hard times,” while her favorite phrase of all became “everything happens for a reason,” and I found her impossible to talk to. I think now, of course, that I was simply afraid of her faith and the strength it took for her to have it. It was much easier for me to be angry about Hannah and about God and about the state of my family, which, in those years, seemed to be shrinking.
And then there was my father, as well.
He had not been on good terms with my sisters, Hannah especially, since the divorce, and this made the timing of her death, from his point of view, particularly torturous. And even though this always made sense to me in a generic way, the way the two of them didn’t get along, I didn’t find out the real reason until many years later when I learned that Laura was an acquaintance of Hannah’s, and a member of the same sorority Hannah had quit. This cleared some things up for me. Although I’d always understood that Laura was young, it was not until I received the image of her possibly standing beside my sister in that same green cap and gown that I felt it sink in. Perhaps they had chemistry class together. Perhaps they once shared a whisper about the same handsome guy.
Worse than that, when my mother pictured my father with Laura, when she thought about their sex, perhaps she could muster only a version of Hannah still in her diapers, some hard candy stuck to the front of her shirt. How deeply my father’s character must have changed for her. How strange he must have looked. What kind of man could be with a girl, after all, who would let an old man like him touch her? Worse, even, what kind of woman could my mother be, who’d let this old man back into her bed?
Such were the troubles on Piney Creek Road.
All told, Hannah’s death had made each of our faults obvious, and in the end, this ate my father up. Years after this, once my father and I could drink together and he considered me a man, when we grew to be friends, he would sometimes lapse into a deep and momentary despair. And it came only upon the mention of Hannah.
“I can’t even talk about it,” he’d say, and then he’d ask me how often I spoke to Rachel.
“Just like you,” I’d assure him. “Mainly on the holidays.”
“I don’t understand it,” he’d tell me. “Why won’t she love me like you do?”
What was I to say? The man asked only answerless questions. He still does this.
So, I have always considered him punished.
But the ultimate truth of this event, I suppose, the real reason I’ve led you here, is to explain to you the most unexpected consequence of Hannah’s death.
It brought Lindy closer to me.
19.
The event was called the Spring Bash.
This was still 1991, the month that my sister died, and I’d been out of school for two weeks, dealing with funeral stuff and moping around the house in black T-shirts. Hannah’s death had provided me with the ultimate excuse, I suppose, to act as selfishly as all teens want to act. I ate Burger King every day. I stayed up late watching pornography that came fuzzy and scrambled through the small television in my bedroom. I slept at odd times, sprawled out on the sofa, and I imagine from the outside I probably looked troubled, perhaps even depressed and devastated, but the truth is, I didn’t feel that way. When I look back upon that version of myself, a lanky kid in ripped jeans watching The Price Is Right, a kid annoyed at the voices of neighbors visiting with my mom in the kitchen, I think that little was deep in me then. I was just lonely. I was just lazy. I just didn’t want to deal.
Still, my mother insisted I go.
It had been arranged, unbeknownst to me, that I would escort Artsy Julie. In the years since our early youth, in the time since she’d so blissfully tossed clovers at the bed of moss, Artsy Julie had changed only in physical ways. This was not a bad thing. Still, she’d gained some weight to become a girl that people would backhandedly compliment as “big-boned,” but she was not at all unattractive. Her only failure was that she seemed to have been birthed in the wrong decade, as she was clearly a hippie in bloom. She put flowers in her hair at school, drew things like unicorns on her notebooks, and read thick novels of heroic fantasy. I saw her once, for example, sitting in a circle of pimply boys at school, playing Dungeons and Dragons at a lunch table. She pumped her fist when she rolled a certain number on the ten-sided die. She pretended to sprinkle magic potion all over her mashed potatoes. She seemed to be having some genuine fun. We were in high school at the time, though, and this, of course, was social suicide. If she had been popular, I suppose that all this independence may have looked hip to us. But she was not.
She wore the wrong type of shoes with her uniform, made excellent grades, and told what seemed to be inside jokes that nobody shared. Her hair was black and long and often unwashed, and her hairbrush left tracks where she combed. Her sole earrings, I remember, were green plastic butterflies. She gave us so little to work with. Artsy Julie, however, had also become buxom in the turn of her freshman year, the top of her plaid jumper suddenly chock-full, and so she was not altogether ignored.
She picked me up for the dance in a green and ruffled dress, more uncomfortable than even I seemed to be in my blue blazer and polka-dotted tie, and we gave each other corsages. Our parents made a big deal of this, taking our picture in various poses both in and outside of the house, and we made faces to screw up the photos. My mother still has these pictures, framed and hung up on the wall, and it’s like I travel back in time when I see them.
When Julie and I arrived at the dance, a band was already onstage playing cover songs like “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Mustang Sally,” and she acted as if she’d landed front-row tickets to the Stones. She left me alone and danced wildly by herself in front of the stage for hours. She took up a massive amount of space, moving dramatically, as if summoning up some tribal god. In times the music swelled, she would be joined by more popular boys and girls who danced with irony, but she never engaged them. This was a personal thing for her and, despite the way she was skewered for it socially, or perhaps because of it, I always admired her for this. She was a person who, as long as I’d known her, seemed able to do what I could never do, and simply not give a shit. Her hair, done up by her mother in sparkly braids and green barrettes, was fallen by the fourth song. She had sweat stains on the belly of her dress. I finally spoke to her during the intermission, where she was guzzling punch at the snack table.
“You having fun?” I asked her.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said.
That was as much as I got.
As soon as the guitarist finished up his cigarette outside the auditorium and climbed back onstage, Artsy Julie was gone, using her high heels to play air drums before the music began. A few guys came up to me as she did this and patted me on the shoulder. “Smart move,” they told me. “Those ta-tas are amazing.” So, in this way, I learned that Artsy Julie wasn’t unwanted. She had her own thing going on and, truth be told, I was not unaffected by it.
What’s most important here, though, is that I learned something about myself at this dance as well. Apparently, the death of my sister and my ensuing absence from school had granted me some type of celebrity. Guys who never spoke to me much before this, good-looking guys who played football or ran for student government, gave me a thumbs-up. Girls who rarely acknowledged me behind them in hallways or in Latin class asked, “Are you coming back to school on Monday?”