THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Ella and I read a chapter of
I froze. Trying to keep my voice steady, I said, “Did someone mention him to you?” Could Dena have, when and if she’d given Ella the tiara? We’d also run into an old classmate of mine, Mary Hafliger, on Commerce Street, but surely Mary wouldn’t have said anything about Andrew. And even if she had, or if someone else had, I’d have heard it.
From the nightstand, Ella lifted a large navy blue hardcover book. It was my high school yearbook, I quickly realized, seeing the embossed silver cursive on the cover:
Ella pointed to the dates and said, “Does that mean he died?”
I stepped toward the bed. “Andrew was a boy in my class, and he did die, when we were seniors in high school. It was very, very sad.”
“How did he die?”
My heart had enlarged in my chest and was blocking my throat, making it difficult to speak or breathe. Was Ella old enough? She’d been in kindergarten when she asked where babies came from, and I had told her, simply and briefly but clearly; I’d used the words
I took a deep breath. “He was in a car accident,” I said.
“Was he wearing his seat belt?”
“A lot of cars back then didn’t have them,” I said. “They weren’t as safe.”
“Did you cry when he died?”
“Yes,” I said. “I cried a lot.” Then—I was not sure this wasn’t an error in judgment, but I wasn’t sure that staying quiet wouldn’t be an error, too—I said, “I was involved in Andrew’s accident. I was driving one car, and he was driving another car, and my car hit his.”
Ella’s eyes grew huge. “Did you go to the hospital?”
“Yes, I did, but I wasn’t seriously hurt. I was lucky, and Andrew was unlucky. He was a wonderful person, and I liked him very much. I’d known him since both of us were younger than you. When he died, it was the saddest thing I had ever been through.”
“Sadder than when your dad died and when Granny died?”
“It was different. When someone dies young—it doesn’t happen often, and it’s not something that will happen to you, although that’s why you wear your seat belt, or it’s why you look both ways before crossing the street, because you need to be careful—but when a young person dies, it’s different from an older person dying. People are supposed to grow up and get married and have children, and when they don’t, it feels like a mistake.”
“Like Jesus?” Ella was possibly the most serious I had ever seen her—entirely focused, listening to every word I said.
“Well, Jesus was an adult when he died. But you’re right that he didn’t get married or have children, and his death was sad, too.”
Ella was silent, pondering. “Do you think Andrew Christopher Imhof and Granny are together now?”
I smiled. “He was just called Andrew, or Andrew Imhof. You don’t have to say his middle name. You know, he and Granny did know each other a little—as you’ve probably noticed, Riley is so small that everyone knows everyone else. When Andrew and I were a year younger than you are now, Granny and I ran into him and his mother at the grocery store, and Granny thought Andrew was a girl. His hair was a little bit long and curly then.”
“She thought he was a
“I don’t think he was too offended.”
Beneath the sheets, Ella had propped her legs into a tent, the open yearbook resting against her thighs. She scrutinized the photo. “Did you love Andrew?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did.” In a way, it was nice to be able to talk about him—these were questions no one had ever asked me, questions no one besides a child would have dared—but it also was striking to think, standing there in my old bedroom, how far behind I had left him. I still dreamed of Andrew regularly, but in the dreams, a certain blurriness, an elasticity of facts, kept us peers, allowing me to ignore what was in this moment starkly obvious: I was twenty-five years older than he had been when he’d died; I had lived longer, by a significant margin, since the accident than he had lived before it; Ella was much closer to the age he’d died than I was. Was it disgusting, was it unseemly, that as a woman of forty-two, I could remember so clearly the anticipation of kissing him for the first time, how tan and handsome he had looked in his football uniform, how warm his skin would have been to touch? And now I dyed the gray from my hair, I had lines at my eyes and mouth, and my face was weathered—not in a terrible way, I wasn’t someone greatly pained by my own aging, but no one would have thought I was any younger than I was. So much time had passed since Andrew’s death. That was what was hard to believe, that so much time had passed and that the accident was no easier to understand than it ever had been. I could find words to describe it so that it sounded awful and faraway, tragic but long ago, when, really, if I thought about it, it was as difficult to comprehend as it had been in 1963. How could I have driven my car into Andrew’s, and how could that have killed him?
Ella said, “Did you love him more than Daddy?”
I blinked. “Oh, sweetie, it’s not like that. It’s not—Andrew wasn’t my boyfriend. We were friends, and I think we kept track of each other over the years, but we never dated. Because we came from the same place and were in the same grade, you could say we knew each other well, but that doesn’t compare to the way you know someone when you live with them. We know almost everything about Daddy, don’t we? What his snores sound like and which
