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This is a small piece of a larger work. My master's thesis, actually.
Feel free to eviscerate me. The shit's 13 years old.
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Prelude
July 8, 1994, 6:41 PM
My sister is dead.
She would have been twenty-four next week. I have her birthday present in a bag in my closet. It’s a Rutgers sweatshirt, one size too big for her, the way she likes it. Liked it, I mean. I’m going to Rutgers in the fall, and she said she liked the school colors and dropped the hint that she wanted something to wear with the logo on it. We both knew that it wasn’t the colors. She was just proud of me getting in and getting the scholarship and all, and she wanted to kind of show me off. It’s not the kind of thing we ever talked about, but we both knew the truth just the same. So I got her the sweatshirt. I wonder if I still have the receipt.
That wasn’t funny, and I don’t even know if I meant it to be. I’ve been having thoughts like that since it happened, but I haven’t been saying them to anybody. Aunt Iris said that I might experience some kind of defense mechanism manifesting itself in the form of inappropriate humor (her words), so maybe that was what that was, right there.
Anyway, my sister Janice was a runner. She ran in local 5K races pretty regularly, and even did the 10K once. She also had insomnia, and she sometimes used to pull the cross-trainers on and do a few miles late at night, while most of the rest of the world was sleeping, and it was cooler out. Mom used to get on her case about it, how it was dangerous, young lady, and just because she lived in the suburbs now didn’t mean that nothing bad could happen to a woman alone at night. Janice would always laugh and quote the crime statistics she’d gotten from the Narberth Chamber of Commerce. Safe as kittens, she’d say, which was exactly the sort of corny thing she liked to say.
She was wrong, though. She wasn’t safe at all, as it turned out. And it wasn’t a mugger or a rapist or a mugger-slash-rapist or any other kind of thing that Mom was always harping on her about. It was a car. A guy in a car, I mean. A hit and run. Three-thirty in the morning two days ago, they think. They can’t be sure because no one noticed her until almost dawn, but that’s what time they think it happened.
All those warnings from Mom didn’t wind up helping at all, then. A whistle and judo classes and pepper spray don’t do much good against a car. That’s almost funny. Not really, but almost.
I’m not changing anything I write, though, since Aunt Iris says not to, unless I’ve misspelled a word or something. Iris is a shrink – she hates that term, but that’s what she is -- with a little brick-walled office in a really crappy building in Camden. This whole writing thing is her idea. She says it’s supposed to give me an avenue (her word) for talking about this stuff. I don’t feel like it’s helping much so far, but maybe that’s not fair to say after one page. But then, it’s not like anything else is fair, either.
Mom’s not doing well with any of this at all, obviously. She’s been crying since we first heard, and she hasn’t stopped. It’s not always like that screaming kind of crying that you see on TV, although she did actually do some of that at first. It’s more like a steady cry that doesn’t stop. Lots of sniffing and deep breaths and shaking and stuff. I can hear her upstairs right now. She asked me to give her some time alone with Iris, so I’m doing that. She’s trying to get it together for the funeral tomorrow, and since I don’t hear either Iris or Uncle Ned saying anything, I figure they’re just sitting on the bed with her, each holding one of her hands. That’s all they did last time, too. With Dad, I mean.
My dad was a fireman. He died in a fire.
That looks stupid, written like that, but I’ll leave it that way because it’s true. I mean, he died the same way a lot of firemen do, the way a couple of guys in Dad’s unit did die when I was really little. I was 11 when my dad died, so that was in May of 1987. Mom and Janice were totally wrecked by it, and I guess I was too. I mean, I cried about as much as they did, even though I felt like Dad would have been disappointed in me for doing that. He didn’t like crying.
Which brings me to the fact that I haven’t cried at all about Janice yet. That’s a pretty weird thing, but it’s not like I can force it or anything. Iris says it’s just a matter of time, and I guess she knows what she’s talking about. I kind of hope she’s right. I mean, Mom hasn’t stopped, and I can’t even start. Maybe I’ll start when she stops. I don’t know.
Iris also says that I’ll go into an angry phase after I cry. That’s how it works, she says, in that order. Then some other things are supposed to happen, like bargaining and acceptance and some other things that I don’t remember right now. I wound up being pretty angry about my dad, so I guess what Iris is saying makes some sense. It’s just taking me longer to get the phases rolling this time, and I have no idea why.
July 8, 1994, 8:22 PM
The police just left. Detective Lieutenant Mitchell Herkleman and Detective Sergeant Ronald Jenkins, according to the business cards they handed out to everyone in the room, including me. Herkleman and Jenkins – kind of sounds like Heckle and Jeckle. They didn’t look much like the cops you see on TV. Heckle was really, really fat and Jeckle had a shifty eye and a bad comb-over and some kind of facial twitch. And he stuttered, like that kid Quincy from my third grade class. I guess that’s why Heckle did most of the talking.
Heckle and Jeckle had me get Mom and Ned and Iris from upstairs just so they could officially tell us all, in the living room, that they still hadn’t figured anything out for sure. They had a black and white photo of this smudge against something shiny. They said it was part of the tire tread on the blacktop surface of Narberth Drive. Heckle said their forensic boys (his words) were trying to use the smudge to identify the type of car, but the rain had washed away most of the evidence. Six inches of rain in half as many hours, he said, which is a lot, I guess.
Jeckle held up a baggie with some silvery flakes in it and said that the c-car was g-g-grey. They’d gotten the paint chips from the guard rail. Since there was no indication that the driver had even stopped, Heckle said that they were going on the assumption that the driver was drunk or half-asleep or something at the time of the accident. Either that, or maybe the accident was connected to some guy they’ve been investigating who they thought ran over four people on purpose over in Fishtown because he seemed to like doing that sort of thing.
Then Jeckle opened a sketch pad and showed us this really cheesy drawing he’d probably made on the drive over from Narberth. It was supposed to be some kind of schematic of what the accident had been like. It was an overhead view of the curve on Narberth Drive, the part that was carved out of a big rock ridge with a lot of trees around it. The trees looked like freaky fat stick people with curly hair covering their heads and hands. Then Heckle walked over and pretended his finger was the grey car. He traced the path on the schematic, entering the curve and passing a notation that said “45 MPH”, and then he showed how the car had lost control at the end of the curve, scraped the guard rail in the center of the road, and slammed my sister into a wall of rock.
He could have been a little more sensitive about it. The way his finger sped up and smacked into the little normal-looking stick figure with a plain circle for a head really freaked Mom out. Until he did that, she’d actually been able to keep from crying for a couple of minutes, but right then, she broke down all over again. That’s when Uncle Ned showed them out, saying “thank you” when they handed out business cards and promised to keep us informed.
I don’t think they’re going to have much more to tell us. I don’t know why, but I just don’t think they’ll find the man who did this. They may even have been making up that stuff about the color of the car and the tire mark on the road. I mean, maybe they’re not, but what I’m saying is that we’d never know either way. They basically flashed badges and said things that didn’t help much and tried to be professional and wound up not making anyone feel better at all.
July 9, 1994, 7:07 PM
I think I’m getting ahead of myself in the process Iris told me about. I still haven’t cried, but I’m really, really angry all of a sudden. It’s hitting me just now how stupid it is that Janice is dead. She lived here in the city, this supposedly dangerous place, for her whole life, and nothing bad ever happened to her, except for the time she fell out of a tree in Fairmount Park and broke her elbow. Well, that and Dad dying, but that’s different. What I mean is that there were all these opportunities for her to get hurt or jumped or robbed or mugged or raped or drive-by’ed (driven-by’ed?) or whatever else during her first twenty-some-odd years of life, and none of that happened. Then, after she got out of grad school, she left the city and moved to the suburbs, where there’s hardly any crime or real physical danger at all, and in less than a year, she got killed.
And the way she got killed is so dumb, because there were so many ways for it not to have happened at all. Here, I made a list:
1) She could have not had insomnia that night.
2) Or, she could have had it, but decided to read or watch TV instead of going running.
3) She could have run a different route, even one single turn different.
4) She could have left her apartment at a different time, even just thirty seconds earlier or later, I figure.
5) It could have started raining at three instead of four, so she would never have gone running at all instead of getting caught in the rain in the middle of her run.
6) The driver could have taken a different turn somewhere and not wound up on Narberth Drive.
7) He could have been going a little slower or a little faster (again, thirty seconds either way would have done the trick).
8) He could have been not drunk or not stoned or not half asleep or not the guy from Fishtown.
What I’m saying here is that it seems like the odds were totally against Janice and that grey car being in the same exact point in time and space. It shouldn’t have happened because she was my sister and she didn’t deserve it, but it also just shouldn’t have fucking happened. I’ve never been good at math, but those odds have got to be ridiculously huge. So many ways out of it from either side, the driver’s or Janice’s, but none of those ways happened, and now she’s dead. So not only is it unfair, it’s unlikely.
It was different with Dad. We all knew how dangerous his job was. We’d been trained for that moment in one way or another for years, and reminded of the possibility each time any fireman in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania died on the job and it hit the news. Dad made sure of that, just to be safe, and maybe fair. Every time he went on duty, Mom and Janice and I all had to be ready for that phone call, and every time it didn’t come, we were relieved. When it finally did come, expecting it didn’t make it any less awful, but at least it wasn’t so out of the blue. A burning building collapsed on him because his job was to go into buildings that were burning. He was at risk every single day, and both he and we knew that. But it wasn’t supposed to be like that with Janice. She was a seventh-grade teacher who lived in a quiet little suburb that had crossing guards and block parties and Neighborhood Watch and the PTA. The school where she worked didn’t even have metal detectors. Nothing bad was supposed to happen to her. But it did anyway. And it’s just hitting me now how wrong that is.
It’s making me wonder why things happen the way they do. Or don’t happen the way they don’t, which all of a sudden seems to be equally important. I guess you could say it all comes down to luck or odds or chance or fate or whatever. But what do all those things mean? My father probably beat the odds just by staying alive as long he did. He was a fireman for over twenty years and he’d just barely made it out of lots of dangerous situations plenty of times before he died. But Janice beat the odds, too, because she had the kind of life that seemed safe, or safer than Dad’s, at least, and got killed anyway.
If that’s all about luck, then who’s rolling those dice?
July 11, 1994, 4:57 PM
I cried, finally. I still am, just a little. It feels weird. Natural. Like breathing, or getting sleepy when it gets dark. I’m supposed to hurt this much. I’d forgotten that part, since I’ve just been thinking about the whole thing as a “situation” too much without really letting myself experience it. I mean, this isn’t some story on the news or in the paper. This is my sister who’s dead. This is my family.
After Dad died, it was really hard to help Mom out because she was such a mess and not very receptive to help. When she was around, I tried to do that man of the house thing to make her stronger. I think it worked a little, but maybe that was only because she saw that I wasn’t a total wreck, too. But after she would go to sleep, I’d have to be me again, not the man of the house at all, but the boy whose father was dead. And it was Janice who knew that, Janice who never interfered with what I was trying to do for Mom. She saw through the whole thing and figured that it was as much for me as for Mom, that helping Mom was at least as important to me as getting through it myself, so she never got in the way of that, even though she must have been really worried about me, too. It was Janice who let me come into her room after Mom would fall asleep and let me put my head in her lap and let me muffle my face with her pillow and cry and not say anything. She would just scratch my back and rock a little and let me be. I’d wake up hours later and see her asleep, still sitting up with her neck leaning back at a weird angle against the wall with all the R.E.M. posters on it. I’d look at her puffy, closed eyes and wonder how it was possible that I hadn’t heard her crying at all. I still think that she must have held it all in until she was sure I was asleep, and then let it out, but quietly. It was like a circle. I did my thing to help Mom, and then she’d do her thing to help me. I hope that she was okay with that, because he was her father too, and I don’t remember me or anyone else helping her out too much. But she never said anything about it. She never made it about her. I guess she wouldn’t have, even if it was killing her at the time. And now it’s too late to ask her about it.
That was my sister, and now she’s not here any more. I can sit here and think and wonder about odds and unfairness and injustice and all that abstract stuff until I give myself a headache. But what hurts, and what’s going to hurt for a long time, is that no matter what conclusions I come to, however I wind up coming to terms with all of this, I’ll never see Janice again.
She’s gone.
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