American Wife

Really, almost no one said anything, no one suggested I see a counselor, not even my grandmother, who was a reader of Freud and Jung. The Sunday morning after the accident, my mother had knocked on my door and said, “Daddy thinks it’s all right for you to miss church, but we’ll pray for Andrew, just you and me.” I let her lead the prayer (the scab on my left elbow hurt when I bent my arms), but the lack of comfort I drew from it was my first indication that I’d begun to lose my faith. The next evening, Monday, my father came into my room and said, “I went to see Mr. Imhof, and there aren’t going to be any charges pressed, not by them or the county. Mr. Imhof is an honorable man, and we’re very lucky.” I was sitting at my desk, and soberly, he patted my shoulder. But I was less grateful for this news than startled to learn charges against me had been a possibility; so dumbfounded was I by everything else that I hadn’t considered it.

This was just about all either of my parents ever said on the topic of the accident. A consensus seemed to have been reached among everyone in Riley, including my own family members, that the best thing was simply not to mention it at all.

ONE PERSON WAS direct with me. At the end of that first day back at school, when I went to drop off books in my locker before going home, Dena was waiting. Unsure what I was in store for, I stopped a few feet short of her.

“I’m so sorry I made you drive to the party alone,” she said, and she burst into tears.

“Dena—” We stepped into each other’s arms, we clung to each other, and her tears fell on my neck and shirt.

“I know he liked you better,” she blubbered, “he always liked you better, and if you’d ridden with Nancy and me, it never would have happened.”

I took a step back so I could see her; her face was red and smeary. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. Already, in the privacy of my mind, I had considered her culpability and ruled against it. No matter what events had led up to that moment in the car, I was the one who’d run the stop sign.

“I just can’t picture him, you know”—she paused then whispered —“dead.”

Instantly, an image came to me of that strange angle of his head, his face obscured. Why hadn’t I gone to him, why hadn’t I climbed through the passenger window and across the seat and wrapped my arms around him when he’d been so alone there, amid the broken glass and ruined metal? There are many ways I tortured myself in the subsequent months and years, and one of them was wondering if he’d still been alive then, and if he had, whether human touch, my touch, could have saved him. But I do not think this way any longer. If I’d climbed in the car and he’d still died, I’d have been convinced that that, too, had been a mistake.

To Dena, I said, “Are people mad at me?”

“Robert thinks your family should move away, but he’s an idiot. I told him he should move away.”

Robert thought my family should move away? He had graduated the previous spring and was working at White River Dairy.

“What else have people said?” I asked.

Dena sniffled. “You don’t have a tissue, do you?”

I did; I pulled it from my bag and passed it to her.

After she’d blown her nose, she said, “When I found out, I thought the police were going to arrest me. I was so scared, I made Marjorie sleep in my bed.”

“I never even told anyone about our fight,” I said. “Dena, really, that isn’t why it happened.”

She bit her lip, clearly trying to suppress more tears. “I just shouldn’t have gotten in the way of him being your boyfriend,” she said. “But I didn’t think I could stop it, and that’s the only reason I tried.”

I NO LONGER attended church with my parents and grandmother. I had stayed in bed that Sunday following the accident, and then the next Sunday as well, and after that, it seemed they never expected me to return at all. In fact, and it was a painful notion to consider, my absence might have made churchgoing easier for them; the other parishioners wouldn’t stare, or if they did, they’d do so less intently. On the last Sunday in September, I waited until my parents and grandmother had left, then pulled the envelope I’d already sealed from my desk drawer and walked out the front door. I had not driven since the accident, and I had never driven this car—it was a newer model and a different color of the Chevy Bel Air. The day my father had brought it home, which had been the week after the accident, I’d heard my mother say, her voice anxious, “Black, Phillip?” and he sounded very tired when he replied, “Dorothy, it was what they had.”

It was a cool gray fall morning, and I drove out of town under twenty miles an hour, my heart jolting against my chest and my hands shaking. I could never have another accident, I realized; I would always have to be extremely careful. The streets were quiet and empty because everyone was at church—including, I presumed, Andrew’s parents, who were Catholic. The emptiness was calming. By the time I picked up De Soto Way, I felt confident enough to press my foot more heavily against the accelerator. I wasn’t at the speed limit—though I hadn’t been speeding before the accident, I’d never speed for the rest of my life—but I was close enough to the limit that a car behind me would not have honked. Luckily, there wasn’t a car behind me, and I was alone in a way I hadn’t been since the accident, alone in a way I no longer could be at home. Even when I was by myself in my room, with the door shut, there was someone on the other side of the door—my mother or father or grandmother, individually or in combination—and that person or those people knew. They might be sympathetic, but they still knew that I was in there and that I had done something hideous, however inadvertently. In other parts of the house, they walked and breathed and sighed and shifted, and their presence was always a question, even if they weren’t speaking, even if they were consciously refraining from asking me anything: Are you going to come out of your room? Are you crying right now, or not crying? When will enough time have passed that this misfortune won’t hide in every corner and wait beneath every conversation, including the conversations that seem at first to be about something else? Obviously, they weren’t really asking these questions, which meant I didn’t need to answer. And I was willing to fake it, willing already to pretend I was fine, that life was close to normal. I didn’t want them to carry my burden but preferred for it to be condensed and only mine, a knapsack of distress. Out on the road, though, beside the bur oak trees and silver maples, the hickories and elms, I felt a gratitude for my own insignificance. I was nothing but a nameless, foolish girl. The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn’t care what I had done.

I knew I’d need to stay neutrally focused as I approached Farm Road 177, and I repeated to myself, Turn right, turn right, turn right, the world reduced to two words, and then I did turn, and the site of the accident was behind me. I had driven past it without weeping or hyperventilating, without even slowing down. From there, I had to concentrate on finding the Imhofs’ driveway—I’d been out at their house once, for Andrew’s birthday party in second or third grade—and after a mile, I saw it, a black mailbox with a red metal flag, recently harvested cornfields flanking the narrow driveway.