Just Breathe
Follow Your Heart
Be Grateful
Try
Create Your Own Happiness
Be Silly
Keep Your Promises
Nothing Is Worth More Than This Day
When Stacy and Jim had driven Ashley to Penn State, they had stayed overnight in Happy Valley. Ashley had begged them to. She just didn’t feel comfortable. But that afternoon at Penn, Stacy left a few hours after she and Madison had finished unpacking. Maddy was walking to the dining hall for dinner, and Stacy hugged her hard, then got in the car and returned to Allendale. Stacy was not concerned. During high school, Maddy had easily pivoted from one endeavor to the next, smoothly adapting to new sports, to harder classes. Jim and Stacy had always felt that Maddy, self-sufficient and clever, was the child they’d never have to worry about. This next step, to Penn, was harder than anything her daughter had previously faced, but Stacy had only seen her succeed, and believed she would again.
Plus, Penn was only ninety minutes away, not a full day’s drive like Penn State, and Maddy seemed excited, ready for the start of this next adventure.
Allendale is a mostly white, upper-middle-class town about twenty miles from New York City. It is farther from New York City than some of New Jersey’s more affluent suburbs, such as Teaneck and Ridgewood and Montclair, which are filled with families whose parents commute daily into Manhattan. Jim travels to the city once or twice a month and spends the rest of his time working from the basement of his home. The Holleran family included five kids: four girls (Carli, Ashley, Madison, and Mackenzie) and one boy (Brendan) who is also the youngest.
The Hollerans live on a street less than a mile from the high school Maddy attended. The road is not a cul-de-sac; it simply stops, becomes woods. Beyond the back of their property, and the soccer goal on which Maddy spent hundreds of hours practicing, is an open field with horses, where kids can learn to ride and jump. The town’s personality is flexible, depending on what each inhabitant wants to make of it: some see it as a bedroom community just miles away from the world’s busiest city; most see it as self-sustaining, self-contained, thankfully out of earshot of New York’s noise and bustle—a quiet haven in which to raise kids.
Northern Highlands High has about 1,300 students. The school also draws kids from surrounding towns, including Ho-Ho-Kus and Saddle River. Even so, Highlands is far from being one of New Jersey’s largest high schools.
Allendale’s small downtown offers a Starbucks as well as a few local shops, plus a bar and grill where many patrons know one another and where community members often host celebratory dinners. The well-manicured main street is like a slice of Americana, with the Stars and Stripes flying during the height of summer. The town has money: enough that most want for little, but not so much that its residents appear wasteful or excessive, as in some of New York’s other suburbs. Like hundreds of other boroughs across the country, Allendale has its distinguishing backstory and quirks: the town was named after William Allen, a surveyor for the Erie Railroad; it is home to the Celery Farm, a nature preserve through which Madison often liked to run; and scenes from the movie Presumed Innocent, with Harrison Ford, were filmed there.
Jim and Stacy moved to Allendale when the company for which Jim worked, Dow Chemical, asked him to relocate to the tristate area from Michigan. The move was a welcome one for the couple, as both had grown up on Long Island. The East Coast was more their style, and living there would bring them closer to both their families. Jim and Stacy had actually been high school sweethearts, but their story had a lengthy intermission. The two had known each other since they were little, played tennis together growing up, and dated in high school. But they broke up while in college: Jim at High Point, in North Carolina, and Stacy at Southern Illinois. Each married someone else. Stacy had a daughter, Carli, with her first husband, with whom she lived in Georgia, until the couple divorced. Around the same time Jim, too, divorced. He and his ex-wife did not have children.
Soon the two were back in touch. And not long after that, Stacy and Carli were moving to Michigan to be with Jim, to start a new family together. A few months before their move back east, Ashley was born. Madison was born two years later, on a beautiful, crisp fall day. In fact, the morning of her birth, Jim was at the soccer fields with Ashley, watching Carli play. He remembers the day clearly—how bright and blue the sky was, how he went to the hospital straight from the field, how later that day they added another child to their growing family. Over the next five years, Jim and Stacy would have two more children: Mackenzie, then their only son, Brendan.
Jim continued working for Dow Chemical as an account manager. He had majored in chemistry in college, but now worked in sales. Stacy, who had played tennis in college, began giving lessons, which she still does five days a week.
Jim and Stacy raised the kids as Catholics, but the most religious among them was Jim. As a family, they went to church just a few times a year, always on holidays, and all five kids were baptized and confirmed. Maddy took her confirmation seriously, choosing the confirmation name “Amelia” and later taking the first steps toward exploring her own, independent feelings about God and religion. Still, while in high school Maddy rarely attended church with Jim, who went faithfully, alone, every Sunday morning.