intersection, he slowed for a split second, waiting for the light to turn green, then leaned down over his handlebars and barreled through.
Patrick pedaled hard to catch him and had nearly made up the lost ground as he raced across the intersection. Jimmy saw a glint of metal out of the corner of his eye and skidded to a stop, turning back in time to see the driver who had run the red light hit Patrick at full speed. Patrick rolled all the way over the car and slammed down hard on the pavement. By the time Jimmy got to his side, Pat lay crumpled on the ground.
Jimmy tried to get Pat to move off the road but he was unconscious, blood seeping out of his head. In Boy Scouts, Jimmy had learned that you’re not supposed to move someone who’s got a head injury, so he left him lying in the road and tried waving down another car to get help.
It was a quiet street in a residential neighborhood. Fading in and out of consciousness, Patrick was lying in the intersection next to two fallen bikes. He must’ve been easy to see.
At dinner that night, we’d all been doing Monty Python and Rich Little impersonations, when out of the blue Patrick said, “You know, if I ever get hit by a car, I won’t get hurt. I’m going to jump up quickly, then roll over the hood and down the back.”
We didn’t think much of it at the time; it’s the kind of thing boys say all the time. But when the bumper hit his bike, that’s exactly what he did. Patrick leapt up and rolled over the hood and down the back of the car. It left him with a broken leg and a head injury, but he was going to be alright.
Jumping up and rolling was a good plan. It would’ve worked, except the driver of the second car was drunk. He ran right over Patrick, killing him instantly.
Every detail of that day is burnt into my memory. The neighbors had volunteered to watch us when my parents were called to the scene. I was sitting in their hallway with Vince when these two kids came to the door. They didn’t realize that we were the siblings of the boy who was hit.
“Hey, we just saw an accident! A kid’s head got fuckin’ squashed like a melon!”
We were speechless, and the kids just kept going on and on like that until the adult nearest the door told them to get the hell out of there. Vince was the youngest brother, and I was the youngest child, so we used to fight all the time, but right then we found ourselves holding each other’s trembling hands. Then the door of the neighbors’ house opened again and my mom came stumbling toward us, clutching the bloody blue bandana left behind when the paramedics lifted Patrick’s body from the street. I saw in her face that what the kids said was true—Patrick was dead.
She took us back to our house. A few minutes later I saw my dad walking toward us, having just identified his dead son. He was halfway across the front lawn when he suddenly fell down on all fours and started throwing up in the grass. He stayed there, alternately retching and weeping. I don’t think he could get up. It was the first time in my life I’d seen him cry.
And then there was Jimmy. The memory of that day would come to cost him dearly. In the months that followed, Jimmy would wake up screaming every night. There are a thousand ways to blame yourself when something like that happens and he probably tried them all on for size. When he grew older he sought solace in drugs. Intensive psychotherapy and rehab brought him back from the edge. He’s been sober for many years, but Patrick’s death continues to haunt him to this day.
In the aftermath of Pat’s death, my parents couldn’t look at one another. We moved around the flat, alien wasteland of Houston in a daze. We’d only been there a few months, and we had no friends to comfort us, only the well-meaning strangers at church.
Our family never recovered.
It was the first time alcohol abuse had taken something beloved from me. It wouldn’t be the last.
On the Sunday after the funeral, my mother got us ready for church, but when we filed out into the living room, my dad was reading the paper, still in his bathrobe.
“God is a bastard,” he said. “I’ll never set foot in a church again.”
I completely agreed. Patrick’s death had taught me that when fate swings against you, the only person you can rely on is yourself.
After less than half a year in Houston, we packed our bags and prepared to move home to Connecticut, minus our brother. But before we left there was something I had to take care of.
Unlike my father, I had taken Holy Communion. As I understood it, I was married to Christ, so things were a bit more complicated for me; I was going to need a divorce. I went out into the woods alone, to a place my mom had shown me on one of our family walks through the Houston countryside. In the shade of a weeping willow there grew a rare lady’s slipper orchid. My mom had explained that I should always treat them gently, because they were endangered, to which my brothers had kindly added, “You could also be fined five hundred bucks or have your hand chopped off if they catch you messing with them!”
It was the closest thing I knew to a sacred place.
I took the tiny rosary I’d been given for my first communion and wrapped it in one of my favorite hankies—a little German number from my grandmother with “Edelweiss” embroidered on it—and buried it beside the orchid. Then I solemnly said the Lord’s Prayer and called the whole thing off with Jesus.
Maybe that explains why, years later, when I took up praying in earnest, God took a while to return my call. He was probably wary of being dumped again.
2. ONE IN FIVE1
Years passed, and just when it looked like things might be returning to normal I received the news that would turn our lives upside down again. It was a couple of months away from my fourteenth birthday, and I was home alone in Connecticut when the phone rang. It was my dad calling from the other side of the country.
“Guess what? We’re moving to California.”
I burst into tears. I was so upset because I finally had my own friends and something that resembled a regular life. I’d even started theater classes, and now we were moving. Again. He must have felt bad about my dramatic reaction, because at the end of the conversation he told me for the first time that he loved me. He wasn’t an emotionally demonstrative man, and the impact of that rare admission only made me cry more. I was settled in Connecticut. We had moved before and it hadn’t gone well. Now the very idea of leaving behind everything that I knew and loved felt both strange and overwhelming, like taking an unexpected voyage to another planet.
The bad news was offset by my big dream that I would one day become a working actress. I imagined that our house would be near the San Gabriel Mountains with a view of the Hollywood sign, that my mom would take me to auditions, and that I’d be an overnight success.
Also, there was one bad memory of Connecticut I wanted to escape. When I was in the eighth grade, my boyfriend Frank and some of his friends raided a liquor cabinet and drank Jack Daniels and vodka until they passed out. When the other boys woke up, they found Frank dead. He had choked on his own vomit and died during the night.
So I’d learned, even at that young age, to stay well clear of hard liquor. My mother wasn’t a big drinker, and my father had quit drinking, so there weren’t bad role models around the house, but it seemed that with Patrick’s death at the hands of a drunk driver and my boyfriend’s death from overconsumption, the negative effects of alcohol abuse were beginning to haunt my life.
Looking back, I can see that those ghosts weren’t done with me, not by a long shot. They would follow me across the country to my new life.
We flew out to L.A., and by this time my dad must have been feeling really bad, because he felt he needed to butter us up with a trip to Disneyland. I had my fourteenth birthday in the Disneyland Hotel. We decided to celebrate by taking a tour of our new house at Nellie Gail Ranch. With a name like that I expected something similar to what we were used to in Connecticut: beautiful period homes, acres of woods, and little creeks and ponds.
Nellie Gail Ranch turned out to be a cookie-cutter housing estate, a tract home development. Our house was in a little cul-de-sac. There was no lawn, it was the middle of summer and stinking hot, and only about 40 percent
