They have traveled just ten miles from the motel, but their journey is nearly done. The road veers sharply upward, descends into a hollow smothered by snowy trees, then rises again, ascending toward some unknown apex; at the top, as the car crests—the beams of his headlights vault into space—Arthur can see the sky again, a starless mass of stone, and then below him, the highway curving along a steep embankment. The dropoff is vast, a plunge into nothing; far below he detects an icy glint of river.
Perhaps he sees this. Perhaps, sleeping, he sees nothing at all.
Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear. Silence, and his parents, and the snow: he inhabits this moment as if it were not imagined but remembered, with a vividness that seems to lodge in his bones, just as he feels, with his body, the moment when the car lifts on the ice and begins its long, languid arc toward the embankment. There is no guardrail, nothing for the car’s front end to strike, to impede its progress or in any way change the nature of the scene, its dreamlike silence. The total, parabolic energy of their vehicle—thirty-five hundred pounds of diesel-powered French station wagon, traveling at or about the legal speed limit of fifty miles per hour—is suddenly, amazingly, tractionless. It is unbounded, set loose from the earth, and though jealous gravity will soon assert itself, whisking his parents to the valley floor at a velocity sufficient to snap the chassis in two, for this moment they are free; they are as free as ghosts, as comets, they are streaking across the heavens; Arthur and Miriam, together at last.
He was nineteen years old, happy. He did not know yet that it was possible for his life to change, and that once it changed, it would never change back. An hour would pass before his parents were found, and that is the hour O’Neil returns to, every day: the car in the river, the river in the valley, the valley gone under the snow.
ORPHANS
July 1983
O’NEIL BURKE WAS twenty-three years old, a college graduate who had traveled to Europe, but by the time his sister came to get him at the hospital in Stamford, six hours after the accident, he felt as if his life had stopped. It was eight o’clock when Kay arrived, still in her suit from a day of work, a slim leather case under her arm; the wide glass doors of the emergency room sighed open on their hinges, and there she was at last. She stood a moment in the doorway, searching the room with narrowed eyes, until she found him parked in his wheelchair by the sign-in desk, his left leg encased in plaster of Paris from knee to toe.
“God, look at you.” Kay raked her fingers through his hair, clotted with knots of dried paint. She was a pretty woman who worked too hard—slender and brown haired like O’Neil, with a small nose and deep walnut eyes—and her tired face said: Now this. “Couldn’t they have cleaned you up a little?”
“That was extra.” O’Neil held up the magazine he had been reading, which was Business Week. In two hours, since the nurses had wheeled him back to the waiting area, he had read through the rack, everything from Highlights for Children to Modern Maturity. “Now,” he said, directing her attention to the article, “it says here that what we are experiencing is not so much a recession strictly speaking, as a period of contraction before an expansion. Does this make any sense to you?”
“You’ll have to ask Jack. O’Neil, what did they give you?”
He returned the magazine to the pile. “Some Demerol when I first got here. It made me throw up.”
“It can do that. Listen, honey. I hate to ask, but do you have any insurance?”
“A technical question,” O’Neil said, and paused for effect; the news was not good. “Technically, no.”
Kay paid for everything with her Master Charge, then pushed O’Neil’s wheelchair into the parking lot, where the orderly, a large black man named Donnelle, helped her drape O’Neil across the backseat of Kay’s Volvo. The light in the parking lot was evening light—the day had disappeared—and insects throbbed in the trees.
“Thanks for everything, Donnelle.” O’Neil leaned out the window so the two could shake hands; Donnelle met his hand with a firm grip.
“You mind that leg, now,” Donnelle said.
When they had pulled out of the lot, Kay lifted her eyes at O’Neil through the rearview mirror. “Please don’t pout, honey. I didn’t even get the message until forty minutes ago. I came as soon as I could.”
He had left messages for her everywhere: her office, the house, even the restaurant where she sometimes met Jack after work for dinner. “Oh, it’s all right,” O’Neil said after a moment. “Donnelle was good company.”
“I can stop somewhere if you’re hungry,” Kay offered.
O’Neil shook his head. “There was a candy machine at the hospital. Also, they gave me some codeine, after the Demerol wore off.”
In the front seat Kay sighed hopelessly. “What am I going to do with you?”
O’Neil tilted his head back and let the codeine wash over him like a warm, salty bath. He had more, twelve pills in all, in a little paper sack. “It’s anybody’s guess,” he said.
They drove on, into the June evening. Under the spell of the codeine the headlights of the oncoming cars pulsed benevolently, and O’Neil watched them until his eyes fell closed. He began to dream, a loosely knitted patchwork of images from the past, but then his mind turned sharply to the moment of the accident: the noise below as the ladder popped loose, his roll down the roof and then the long fall through open air to the ground below. It had taken forever, and was over in an instant. The orthopedist who cast his leg had marveled at the quality of his injury—like a crack in porcelain, he said.
“Aw, fuck.”
Again, Kay’s eyes met his through the rearview mirror. “O’Neil?”
He shook his head to send the memory away. “It was a long way down,” O’Neil said.
The accident occurred on a Wednesday, the third Wednesday in June. O’Neil had been painting houses for six weeks, since returning from eight months of backpacking around Europe. The company he worked for was called Professor Painter. The parent office was in Montreal, but Professor Painter had franchises all over the East Coast, and O’Neil worked for a branch that operated out of an apartment building in South Norwalk. O’Neil had no experience with this kind of work, but after he’d watched the training video, his boss, a Canadian named Joe, asked him if he’d like to be a foreman. What this meant was that O’Neil worked alone, though sometimes Joe sent other people to help. Usually they were college students, and most lasted only a few days before finding better, easier jobs.
The work was hard and paid just five dollars an hour, but O’Neil liked it and took care to do it well. Painting a house was a large undertaking that required a certain amount of tactical thinking, but once O’Neil laid out his plans, his mind was free to go where it wanted. His months abroad had been a happy time, and that was where he spent his days, remembering the golden light of sunset on the Lido of Venice, or the sad, exciting spectacle of a bullfight in Barcelona. For many years he had been afraid of heights, but he discovered, to his surprise, that this fear had left him. Many days he drank his morning coffee or ate his lunch on top of the chimney or some other apex, his legs dangling in space. The houses where he worked were all located within a few miles of Long Island Sound, and over the crowns of the trees he could see the water, its soothing and imperturbable vastness, and on the clearest days, the island of Manhattan, a spiky smear etched into the southern horizon. People walking by on the sidewalk below would stop and wave, and O’Neil waved back, or lifted his coffee in a little toast.
/> When the accident occurred, O’Neil was working alone on the jobsite, a large Victorian in awful shape with handsome willows over a level yard that always seemed damp. The house, in an upscale neighborhood of old homes that had all been meticulously restored, was owned by a striking-looking woman in her mid-thirties with high, sculpted cheekbones and hair the color of onyx, and her husband, whom O’Neil had never laid eyes on. They had just moved in, or were preparing the house for sale—either way, their rooms were nearly bare. The couple had a child, a luminous baby boy named Henry who cried all day long, and O’Neil felt sorry for the woman, whose name was Patrice. She spent her days alone in her house with an inconsolable child and seemed to pass the hours in a state of suspension, waiting for her husband to return from wherever he was. O’Neil was curious about her, as he always was about the people whose houses he painted, though the fact that she was pretty, and seemed to like having him around, made him more interested than usual. Yet, as the weeks went by, he learned very little about Patrice. In all the time he spent there, no one had ever come to the house; sometimes she would drive off with Henry in her car, an old Mercedes with rust on the door panels, but these errands produced nothing more than groceries. It took him two weeks before he realized that he had never even heard her phone ring. What was she doing here, in this fancy neighborhood, in a house with no furniture? What did she do for money? Who were her friends? Most of his customers paid him no attention at all, but often Patrice would appear at the base of his ladder to ask him how the work was going, or else they would talk at the end of the day while he was cleaning out his brushes and trays. O’Neil looked forward to their conversations, as he believed she did too. Standing in her driveway he told her of his progress, or stories of his adventures in Europe—hitchhiking through the hills of Tuscany and the green valleys of the Rhine, waking at dawn on a ferry from Catania to Naples to find a purser rifling through his backpack, seeing Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Prado in Madrid and weeping for an hour. O’Neil was not lonely, but when he told her these tales, he found they poured forth from him without effort, as if they were not things that had happened but living presences inside him, seeking release. But always on the drive home he would realize, with embarrassment, that he had done all the talking; she had told him nothing of herself.
The day of the accident, O’Neil was getting ready to take a ladder up to the porch roof to paint a pair of third-story gables when Patrice emerged from the side door, carrying a tray of lemonade. It was a hot, damp afternoon, the sky the color of old ivory, and the two of them sat at a picnic table in the yard to drink the lemonade. Henry was napping—finally napping, she said with a wry smile, for the little boy slept rarely, and never for long—and when she had seen him outside working, she’d thought: here was a chance to bring him something cool to drink. Patrice was wearing cutoff shorts and a loose man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as she spoke she placed her glass of iced lemonade against her long neck, holding it there between sips. How do you work in this heat? she asked him. She didn’t mind the winter—she had been raised in the cold—but sometimes in the summer it was all she could do not to lose her mind entirely. O’Neil wondered about the shirt, and the person it belonged to. On her ring finger Patrice wore a plain gold wedding band, and a large diamond that sparkled against her skin. These came from somewhere, of course, but O’Neil had never seen her husband, even though he usually worked at the house till six o’clock. In all their conversations she had never mentioned him, not even in passing.
He was about to ask her about this, deciding how he might do so without seeming to pry, when the sound of Henry’s crying reached them from his bedroom window. Patrice, sighing with irritation, left him alone at the table; it did not seem she would be back soon, so O’Neil returned to work, taking his ladder and paint up to the porch roof. This was when he made an error in judgment that was, in hindsight, completely obvious. The roof was pitched ten degrees, and the standard practice was to nail a pair of blocks into the roof joists to brace the legs of the ladder; the company training video was absolutely clear on this fact. But as O’Neil stood on the roof in the sweltering heat, his mind afloat in the image of the glass of lemonade against Patrice’s neck, this extra step seemed like a technicality. What the hell, he decided, I’ll just do it fast. Without another thought he propped the ladder between the windows, kicked its base tight against the shingles, scrambled up with his paint and brush, and had just enough time to realize his mistake before the whole thing came down in a clattering chaos of paint and equipment. The porch roof broke his fall, and for one hopeful instant he believed he might stop there. But then he was in space again—a sensation so awful he knew he would carry it inside him all the days of his life—and the only thing left to do was see what happened next. A sound poured from his lungs, a wail of purest terror, and then he landed, hard, on his back, the ladder twisted up in his left leg like an enormous ski; in the sudden silence that followed, he both felt and heard a tiny crack of bone. For a few moments he lay there, amazed by everything, watching the paint he had spilled dripping from the gutter above his face, and then Patrice came running. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and O’Neil wondered what she was apologizing for; the accident was, in every way, his fault. With damp rags she cleaned him up as best she could while Henry wailed on a blanket, and then she drove him to the hospital in her rusted Mercedes, watching from the doorway as O’Neil was wheeled into X ray, Henry still crying in her arms.
O’Neil had been living with Kay since he returned from Europe in late April, sleeping on a cot in a tiny room behind the kitchen that they use for storage, and paying her and Jack fifty dollars a week. The house, a one-story bungalow encased in aluminum siding, sat on a block that ended at a high cement wall and the freeway, and though the street seemed fine during the day—clean and neat in a neutral sort of way—at night a gloom descended, dogs began to bark, and groups of young men gathered on the corners. One early morning as he left for work, O’Neil discovered in his car an empty pack of cigarettes, and three butts in the ashtray. Otherwise, the car was untouched. No harm had been done, but O’Neil still worried about his sister, living in a neighborhood where strangers would smoke in your unlocked car when you weren’t looking. The room where he slept was full of boxes with words written on them in black Magic Marker—Dissertation Notes, Office Misc., Kitchen/Bath. Early on, O’Neil had opened one box, marked Wedding Presents and found, inside, three brand-new waffle irons, still in their packages. The hidden bounty of these boxes amazed him, for O’Neil himself owned almost nothing. He had sold most of his belongings to pay for his trip and was still living out of the backpack he had carried with him to London and Paris, Lisbon and Rome.
Kay, who was five years older than O’Neil, was the director of a state agency that assisted teenage mothers, and Jack was an economist, doing his postdoc at a think tank in Stamford. When this was done, in a year or two, they would sell the house and move to wherever Jack found a tenure-track position. O’Neil hadn’t a clue at all about Jack’s job, which had something to do with labor, and Kay often joked that it would have rounded out his expertise nicely if he actually did some around the house. At such moments she appeared not to like her husband very much, but these glimpses were brief. O’Neil didn’t feel one way or the other about Jack, who seemed to regard him with the generic masculine warmth of a fraternity brother. “How’s the man?” he would ask O’Neil as they crossed in the hallway, or maneuvered past one another in the cramped kitchen. “What’s the word, O’Neil?” One Friday, a few weeks after his return, O’Neil had come home late from a bar and heard Kay and Jack talking in low voices in the kitchen. He paused in the dark hallway to listen. Although he couldn’t make out their words, he knew from their measured, parental tone that they were speaking about him. When would he move on? What would become of such a person as O’Neil?
Back from the hospital, Kay helped him to bed in his little room of boxes, a
nd in the morning O’Neil awoke late to find that Kay and Jack had already left for the day. Balancing on his crutches, O’Neil made coffee and took some more codeine and then paged Joe, who called him back in the early afternoon while O’Neil was watching a soap opera on the sofa, his cast propped on a stack of pillows.
“I just drove by the house,” Joe said, and in the background O’Neil could hear the wash of traffic on the Post Road. “What the hell did you do to the roof?”
“I had an accident,” O’Neil said.
“Those people are going to be royally pissed. Just get over there.”
“Joe, I have a broken leg.”