The Beginning of After

Chapter Two



My cell phone rang an hour later, just as I was finishing my French homework at the kitchen table.

“Can you talk?” whispered my best friend, Megan Dill, who lived one street over.

“Yeah, I came back early and nobody’s here. Sweet freedom.”

“How was it?” she asked.

“Awkward but survivable. David barely talked to anyone during the whole dinner.”

“He’s such a freak.”

I heard meowing and turned around to see our cats, Elliot and Selina, sitting anxiously at the back door, waiting to go outside.

“I know,” I said, getting up. “It’s like, once he decided to be friends with the Railroads, they gave him an instruction manual. Rule one, be grumpy and brooding at all times.”

I opened the door and the cats scrambled past my legs, apparently late for some appointment in the woods across the street. Elliot paused for a second to look back at me with half-closed “Don’t wait up” eyes, and then they were gone.

“Rule two,” continued Meg, “you may only smoke Marlboro Reds, wear high-top sneakers, and carry all combs in your right back pocket. They’re such a joke. They want to be rebels, but they’re obsessed with fitting in with each other just like anyone else.”

“You’re the one who had a crush him,” I said, noticing a pot roast glob on the kitchen counter. I wiped it with my thumb and sucked the sauce off, knowing how completely gross that was.

“Like a hundred years ago, when he was still partially human.” He’s alterna-hot, Meg used to say. I preferred not to go there at all with David; I’d known him for too long, and it was weird to think some girls considered him good-looking.

“Speaking of guys, how is Will these days?” I asked, ready to change the subject.

“I think it’s safe to say he’s not going to ask me to the prom.”

“Why not?”

“Apparently he started going out with Georgia Marinese last week.”

“Oh, Meg, I’m sorry.”

“Eh, it’s kind of a relief that he doesn’t like me anymore. I would have gone to the prom with him just to go, you know.”

“You can do better.”

“We’ll both do better.”

The prom was more than a month away but the frenzy was already building, and I wasn’t sure I wanted any part of it. As juniors we were eligible to go, but there was nobody I liked enough. There had never been anybody I liked enough. Meg was the one who clicked with every boy she ever met, with her easy wit and striking black Irish beauty. I was the runner-up version of her; the quieter brunette with straight, thin hair that could only sometimes inspire a ponytail or braid.

As a pair, we were not popular but not outcasts. Not gorgeous but not ugly, not fat but not thin. I was best known for getting As, starting the Tutoring Club, and painting scenery for the drama productions. Meg was in the show choir, and while she never got the lead in plays and musicals, she usually nabbed a juicy supporting role. Mostly people just didn’t think about us, which Mom always said was a good thing, but I never got why.

“If we don’t do better,” Meg added, “we won’t go at all.”

Good, I thought. That would make my life easier.

Suddenly, I heard something near the front of the house.

“Meg, hang on,” I said. “I think someone’s at the door.”

We sat silent for a few seconds, and I could hear my breathing sync up with Meg’s on the other end of the line.

There it was again, two short knocks. Insistent. But I wasn’t supposed to answer the door if I was the only one home.

“I’m walking you into the living room,” I said to Meg, shifting the phone to my other ear. “If it’s an ax murderer, you’ll be able to hear the whole thing.”

There was a big window adjacent to our front door, and I slowly drew aside the curtain, just a few inches, to see who it was.

A police officer, holding his hat in his hands, looking down at his feet.

That was it. The end of Before, and the beginning of After.

Now I had a new mental image for unyoke.


There weren’t many details about the accident for Lieutenant Roy Davis to explain to me. Things were said and things were asked, and suddenly I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, pushed down there by the weight of new information.

My mother, father, and someone they assumed was my brother had been pronounced dead on arrival at Phillips Memorial Hospital.

So had Mrs. Kaufman.

Mr. Kaufman was in the emergency room. Not dead on arrival. More like pretty seriously messed up on arrival.

Somehow, the new SUV had gone off the road, tumbled into a steep ditch, and caught fire. They didn’t know how, and they didn’t know why.

These were simply facts with nowhere to go. Leaves fallen on the water, floating in clumps, too light to break the surface.

And now, things just stopped, hard. Like the air; I couldn’t feel it moving around me anymore. Or my ability to swallow; I was sure that if I tried it, my throat would freeze up and get stuck like that forever. It was as if I was suddenly sealed up in a bubble where everything was completely and totally wrong, wrong, wrong and I had to get out.

How do I get out? Can I take one big step and be on the other side of it? Maybe if I say something, anything, the whole thing will just POP.

So I blurted the first thing that came to mind: “What should I do now?”

Lieutenant Davis started to answer but stopped himself, biting his lip. Then I realized the scale of my question.

“I mean, do I need to go to a morgue or someplace?” I said. “Do I need to sign something?”

His face softened into a real sadness. “We do need someone to identify the . . . them . . . but it doesn’t have to be you. Is there a relative you’d like us to contact?”

Nana. I thought of her getting home from dinner at her friend Sylvia’s house. Combing the hairspray out of her hair, wiping the Clinique off her lips. There was no way I was making that phone call.

I gave Lieutenant Davis my grandmother’s number and handed him the phone.


An hour later, I lay on the white couch in the living room, the one we used only when guests came over, with my head in Meg’s lap. Mrs. Dill, Meg’s mom, sat on the floor holding one of my hands. Theirs was the second number I had given Lieutenant Davis. Mr. Dill and Megan’s sister, Mary, were on their way north, a three-hour drive, to get my grandmother.

“Just close your eyes and breathe,” said Mrs. Dill. “Just breathe.”

All I could think was, Mrs. Dill smells a little like cranberry bread.


Suzie Sirico showed up shortly after midnight. I hadn’t asked for her. I didn’t even know who she was. Lieutenant Davis said she was a grief counselor who sometimes worked with the police department. I tilted my head in Meg’s lap and looked at the woman sideways. She was short, with large features.

“Hi, Laurel,” she said slowly. “I’m Suzie.”

Mrs. Dill got up from the floor. “Can I get you some coffee?” she offered.

“That would be wonderful, thanks.”

They passed each other right then, switching positions like some careful team maneuver. Suzie squatted on the floor so we were at eye level.

“I know we’ve never met,” said Suzie, pressing her lips together with seriousness, “but I’m hoping you’ll let me help you with whatever you need right now.”

“There is something you can help me with right now,” I told her. “The cats are probably at the back door. Can you let them in?”

Suzie Sirico cocked her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. Probably making a note on a mental pad. I didn’t care.

“I’ll do it,” said Meg, and a second later she was gone into the kitchen.

If this woman touches me, I thought, I will barf right here on the white couch.

“Laurel, you’re clearly in shock, and that’s normal,” said Suzie, reaching for my hand but trying to balance in that squat position at the same time. “We don’t need to talk. I’m really just here to meet you and let you know that I’ll be available to you, for any reason, over the next days and weeks as you deal with what has happened to your family.”

My family.

The word hit me in the chest, a real punch that knocked the wind out of my lungs. I looked at Suzie Sirico the way, in a movie, someone looks at the person who just stabbed them, that moment of surprise before the pain kicks in and the blood starts gushing.

I heard the back door open, then close. Elliot and Selina came running into the room, their tails pointing straight up into the air, ready to get warm and dry and curled up for the night.

I made a noise like a whimper, but loud. It felt like it came not from me but something half-human, crouched at the base of my spine.


I was in bed when Nana got there, sometime before dawn. Mrs. Dill had given me two of the pills she always had on hand for her panic attacks. The medication was having fun with me, making me believe one thing was real, then another. In my mind, I was talking to someone at the Athens Theater ticket counter, begging them to let me in even though the movie had already started. “But everyone I know is in there!” I was yelling.

I felt my grandmother put her hand on my head, smoothing my eyebrow with her thumb. “I’m here, Laurel,” she was saying.

Now the popcorn machine behind the ticket counter smelled like Chanel No. 5.

The hallway outside my bedroom door was buzzing slightly with echoed voices from the living room. Somebody blew their nose.

Back inside my head, I wasn’t trying to get into the movie anymore. I’d given up and moved on, wandering down the street toward a supermarket, suddenly starving.