Love and Other Ways of Dying (23 page)

For instance, I had friends who, at the time of the accident, had just finished playing paddle tennis at the country club up the road. They’d heard the loud crash, and when they came out of the parking lot, they were startled by a car shooting past them. Later, when piecing it back together, they kept wondering: Why was Flynn’s car speeding away?

But all of these things soon became clear when the police chief paid Jax that awaited visit one day in his hospital room, offering a surprising theory that went like this: On that dark stretch of twisty road, as Jax zoomed north, Flynn’s car went to pass, bumping the rear left panel of Jax’s car, which sent him careening off a telephone pole, into the protracted skid that listed left to right, and hurtled his car into the tree.

Could it have been true?

When confronted with the theory, Jax was incredulous. According to the police transcript from the taped interview, he said, “I don’t think any of my friends would do that.… First of all, [Flynn] and I are damn good friends.”

(Beneath the fusillade of his verbal assaults, one of Jax’s greatest redeeming traits was that he saw those in his inner circle as figures of unimpeachable character, as loyal as he. For the sport he made of us—and we of him—he was absolutely blind to the
deeper stamp of one’s defect. His belief in his friends was so complete it verged on naïveté.)

Sometime around Christmas, then, Flynn’s car was impounded, the rumor being that paint found on its front fender matched that of Jax’s car. By spring, Flynn had been charged with negligent homicide, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, and evading responsibility. The narrative that had Jax in a moment of singular teenage elation and irresponsibility now opened to another: Two cars traveling at a high rate of speed when one car passed on a tight turn and drove the other off the road. Or this: Flynn’s car passing without warning. That is, as much as Jax had screwed up, maybe it hadn’t been all his fault in the end.

So much of what happened in my town—the ancient town I knew and loved, the sprinkler-fed garden that existed during the Reagan Pleistocene in one of the outer rings around Manhattan—was never spoken of, or if so, only in whispered gossip. Affairs, eating disorders, teenage pregnancy, trips to rehab: Everybody seemed to know everybody’s business, but it was cloaked and closeted. No matter how egregious or boorish the behavior or betrayal, to say it out loud, to reveal it beyond the social circle for which it was meant and belonged, was an affront almost as egregious. Every scarlet letter was partially hidden.

This is true of many places, or perhaps true of
every
place. No small shame accompanies the moment when our failings are made public—and it’s with tense, bated breath that most wait for the unpleasantness to go away. However unsettling the news, a year, or two, or three, and it can be relegated to the snowdrift of memory and then forgotten, replaced by the new drama of the day.

As a child, I found this disorienting. The parents were whispering about
something
, something with intimations of pain or dread, dark fairy tales of some sort, but
what
?

The charges against Flynn made the story uncomfortably public, and soon the paper ran a long article detailing the events of that night before Thanksgiving; the strained, surreal situation at our high school of friends trying to pick sides, or figure out what to believe in the first place; and the tragedy of alcohol-related car accidents in our town. Was it suburban privilege, or our access to cars, or the dark, winding roads? The police chief was quoted as saying that, over the course of the past three years, a dozen young residents had died in automobile crashes. The minister said he’d never seen such “tragedy with youth.” The leader of a youth religious group claimed, “There’s nothing but victims.”

Like a lot of seniors, I’d spent the fall visiting colleges, and that winter I worked in a frenzy to finish my applications, mostly for the sake of my parents and guidance counselor, as I really had only one school in mind, this place I’d seen up in Vermont, in the freezing cold, after the accident. What I remember most about it wasn’t the tour or one person’s friendliness or the snowstorm that left more than a foot. I remember looking up from the parking lot when we got back to the hotel that night after dinner, standing there alone as my dad went into the room, and breathing in the multitude of stars, lungs burning, ghosts rising in the exhalations, feeling almost—perhaps a year away from—
free.

I suppose the antipode was what I was feeling now: trapped. It could have been that dreamed-of senior year, but for the funeral (
Let it be Seger
), or the sharp rise in my snotty attitude toward my parents, or my weird regressions (for instance, Neil
Young’s “Words” on perseverating repeat, which put me at odds with at least my Joy Division–loving brother), or the trips each day to the hospital, to Jax in his mechanical bed. When I applied myself, I proved myself capable only of a kind of high-achieving mediocrity. But mostly I, like my friends, found myself reliving an event, one for which I’d been absent, one that couldn’t be repossessed or rewritten, a derivative that defied solution no matter how hard we tried to ace it.

One night during our monthly organizational meeting at the ambulance service, in a room packed with sixty kids—everything coming to a standstill at twenty-minute intervals as another commuter train roared by—I found myself launching a prayer, the first, really, since the night of the accident. This particular evening included the awarding of special gold stars, reserved for the members of a particular crew for an exceptional call, our version of the Medal of Honor. This crew, as I remember it, had responded to a very bad crash on the interstate, had performed CPR under harrowing circumstances, and had brought someone back to life.

To be so recognized was the pinnacle, to have your name called to come down and receive a star from the ambulance service’s founder, to be so distinguished for heroics among your own hypercompetent, wildly applauding peers (we all knew they’d seen and done something we both hoped to and hoped
not
to). It meant that for at least that moment the prophecy was true: You were so good, in fact, that you could raise the dead.

Dear God
, I found myself praying,
give me something horrible and bloody. Let my next call be a multiple car crash with gasoline glugging all over the highway, or a cardiac arrest in a house fire, or a kid electrocuted on the railroad tracks. Let it be a shark attack or alien invasion,
whatever makes the best movie. Whatever is the most impossibly fucked-up, Lord. Just let me lay my hands on some big, honking, metal-twisted tragedy, so I can work my own miracle this time.

Jax came out of the hospital with snow on the ground, then convalesced at home for a while. Eventually, he returned to school on crutches, which later gave way to this clunky stimulating device he’d sometimes wrap around his leg and plug into the wall, what we called his “bone machine.” He hobbled the same halls as Flynn, but they studiously avoided one another now while the various lawyers prepared for the criminal trial. Meanwhile, it seemed clear that Seger’s family would bring a civil suit of some sort, perhaps against all the boys involved. But, at least on the surface, everything carried on, despite the awkwardness. College applications were completed and sent out; no one got dumped by his girlfriend.

Time accelerated. The snow melted, the season changed, and our town bloomed: daffodils and forsythia at Easter, the dogwoods and cherry trees not long after. Lawns turned green again, the leaves drawing lush curtains over everything. The Pier was repainted, boats were put back in the Sound, their sails snapping in the wind.

With the passage of time, Jax made the switch from guilty party to partially aggrieved with difficulty, especially as he doubled his efforts to retrieve some shard of absent memory. The most important night of his life to that point, and he couldn’t remember anything but leaving Seger’s house to go to a party. It was some cruel, cosmic joke. His antipathies, guided inward by guilt, now had an outward target. When Flynn pled innocent to the charges, reiterating through his lawyers that he hadn’t been at the accident scene that night—a version of events backed by
Xavier, his passenger that night—Jax became animated again: He could have forgiven them if they’d admitted it from the start, but as they clung to their innocence, Jax’s fury grew.

It was simple: Knowing what they knew—or Jax believed they knew—how could they have left him there? And where had they gone?

In Physics, Jax sat in the last row, wisecracking. From my desk, I could reach back and touch the rough cast on his leg. Our teacher, whom Jax had nicknamed Beaker, was the kind of crusty dinosaur who, over time, had become a caricature of himself, playing up the batty and distracted perhaps as a tactic so he didn’t have to deal with the particular obnoxiousness of people like us as we carried on our conversations with impunity. But one day he snapped, not at us but at Jax.

“You’ve missed half the year,” he burst out, a vein flicking on his forehead, “don’t you think it’s time to shut up and listen?”

From Jax’s point of view, he’d lost half a year of jokes. He was entitled to some fun. (Or just a semblance of normalcy.) “The fucking Beaker,” he said. Though he’d put his best face on it, it was hard for him to concentrate on anything but the accident. Everything went back to that stretch of road.

We drove it every night, in our minds. And Jax tortured himself with trying to remember. Eventually, in conversation with his parents, it was agreed that he would visit a Yale psychologist who used hypnotism. It was maybe something Jax would have once regarded skeptically, but what other choice did he have?

The session lasted nearly two hours. He left the hypnotist’s office not knowing anything, hypnotized as he was—and nor did his parents. The hypnotist promised that, after reviewing the videotape, he’d send it along. Jax could only confirm what the hypnotist had said, that things had gone “very well,” whatever that meant.

A few weeks later the videotape arrived. Jax called, I drove down to his house, and we joined his parents to watch it for the first time. When Jax appeared on the television screen—or what I remember of Jax on that screen—he sat straight up, wearing a button-down shirt. His eyes were shut, and he seemed fairly relaxed, answering some basic opening questions. He was apparently already hypnotized, and the hypnotist pointed out a needle stuck halfway into the flesh between his thumb and pointer finger, though Jax said he felt no pain and seemed to have no knowledge of the pin.

The hypnotist then asked Jax to navigate the first four-fifths of the night in question: Jax described how Seger had loaded in with Jax at Seger’s house, riding shotgun, how Flynn and Xavier followed in the other car. Jax led them up Ocean to Main; Main to Birch; Birch to the high school. Then the two cars emptied through the high school parking lot, turned left onto Coral, and took a right onto High. At this point, they were a quarter mile from the tree.

In the videotape, Jax, whose eyes are closed but tracking beneath the lids, seems at ease charting their progress, almost jovial as he recaptures the elation that propelled them. The hypnotist leads him slowly, asking him to travel another fifty yards down the road and stop to describe what he notices. He recalls talking to Seger, the music on the radio, the streetlights passing in longer intervals now. Occasionally, Jax reports what the needle shows on the speedometer: twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five … He reports on what he sees in the rearview and side mirrors, how they’re bathed in reflected light from the car trailing behind. Then, suddenly, he’s on the straightaway before the curve with the maple tree, and everything slows way down. He resists traveling another fifty yards, as if he’s suddenly aware of the trick being played on him.

There are leaves skittering over the road, dark branches overhead, a wedge of light before the sports car. He reaches to turn up the music, punches the gas, two hundred feet from the tree. The lights are reflecting in the mirrors, the other car right on his tail. He says he’s talking to Seger.

He says he’s talking to Seger. The music is blaring. Leaves are skittering. The road takes a turn. Music, leaves, dark branches. He says he’s talking to Seger. Five seconds from hitting the tree, he looks in the rearview mirror.

“Where’d the lights go?” he says out loud. For the first time he isn’t answering prompts from the hypnotist, he’s talking to Seger. “Where are the lights?” he says. A car pulls up along his left side. His eyes shut tight. He looks stricken, thin lips pressed together. And then his body rocks once, very hard.

Did it happen like this? If you’d seen the tape, you might have thought so. At the very least, it gave Jax a narrative to which he could finally cling as the courts began to parse the evidence of what had occurred that night.

First came the criminal charges against Flynn that hovered over him for a year, ending in a courtroom drama that found Jax hobbling in on crutches and Flynn home from college accompanied to court by a dozen family members. Despite five eyewitnesses placing Flynn’s car at the scene after a loud crash, and the judge’s admission that it was “a difficult case to evaluate,” the court dismissed all the charges. What seemed the final blow was the judge’s belief that a court would find the videotape of Jax’s hypnotism inadmissible. With it went the account that mattered most. Outside the courtroom, Flynn’s lawyer said the ruling “completely vindicates my client” and that Flynn was headed immediately back to college.

In the wake of that dismissal came an array of civil suits that dragged along for years, yet after Jax settled with Seger’s family, everything whittled down to one: Seger’s estate and Jax suing Flynn for his role in Seger’s death.

Four years later, the newspapers covered that trial blow by blow. On the stand, Flynn testified that they’d been drinking 7UP and vodka at Seger’s house, but stuck to his story, detailing the route of his travels, which were nearly the same as Jax’s, claiming he’d never seen an accident and only learned about it twenty minutes later, after arriving at the party. Under cross-examination, when questioned about the matching paint—and also a damaged right front bumper the police had noted after impounding the car—he said, “I never hit [his car] before, nor any other … car.”