When she was thirteen, Jenny and her friend Linda Serrano were walking up Chopsey Hill one spring afternoon, talking a blue streak, planning a party that was to follow their eighth-grade graduation, just weeks away. They were not far from Linda’s house, where Jenny had been invited for spaghetti and meatballs: her favorite, and Mr. Serrano’s specialty. All the way from school, Linda had been walking on the inside and Jenny on the outside; then, for some reason — Jenny cannot remember why — they changed places, and not thirty seconds later a car came speeding up behind them, hit Linda, and killed her.
The car never stopped, but another was following not far behind, and that one did stop. A man and a woman jumped out. The woman put her arms around Jenny and turned her away. The man flagged someone down and told him to go call an ambulance and the police. Jenny heard him shouting that it was a hit-and-run. He described the car and the man driving it and said that the bastard had “killed a woman.” Of all the sickening details of that mild spring afternoon, the one that sickened Jenny most was hearing her friend called a woman.
And that horrific thunk. Of course the driver had felt it; of course he had heard it. Who could not have heard it? It filled the world. There had been no sound of a car coming up behind them — at least, none that Jenny could remember — no screech of brakes or squeal of tires, just that unthinkable thunk as Linda was knocked out of the universe. There was not a sound from Linda, either, no cry or scream. The last thing had been her saying, “That Catherine George, she’s so —” (Afterward, Jenny could not see Catherine George without wondering how that sentence would have ended. She was glad when Catherine George went to a different high school and she could stop thinking about it.)
And then there was what the impact of the car had done to Linda. It had quite literally ripped her open. Jenny had seen a torn breast and a leg bent at an impossible angle, like one of those rubber dolls whose limbs can be twisted every which way. Then the woman came and turned her away, pressing her face into a yellow spring coat that smelled so strongly of camphor that Jenny had a clear image of the woman lifting it just that morning from a trunk in her attic.
How had Linda been ripped open in front, when she was hit from behind? Had she whirled around at the last second? That would have put her even more squarely in the path of the car. But Jenny has no memory of those last seconds. As far as she is concerned, the puzzle remains unsolved, although by now she has watched enough crime shows to know that a coroner or forensic expert could have figured out the exact angle at which Linda was hit.
The undertaker, Phyllis Fisher’s father, did a heroic job. He must have worked all night to put Linda back together. Jenny stood for some time at the open casket in which her friend lay serenely, looking as lovely as ever, with her dark hair and her tawny skin set off by the white dress she had bought for their graduation, a sleeveless summer dress with a closely fitted bodice. Jenny was trying to memorize the way Linda looked now, and not the way she had last seen her, when Anthony Benvenuto and some other boys came up behind her. She heard Anthony give a low whistle through his teeth and whisper, “Body by Fisher.” Because Linda Serrano had the best, the only figure in the eighth grade.
“Body by Fisher” was a joke people frequently made about Mr. Fisher’s work, because it was the slogan of an auto-body commercial that was on television then: “Body by Fisher.” Everybody said it — but never at a funeral. At the funeral of someone you knew, someone who was supposed to be a friend of yours, someone who could so easily have been you? Jenny had had a crush on Anthony Benvenuto until she heard him say that, and heard the other boys snigger. After that, Jenny hated Anthony Benvenuto. She hated them all.
When Jenny cried about it later, her mother said that people were sometimes so overwhelmed by the magnitude of death that they tried to make it smaller and more manageable by mocking it, even mocking the person who had died. She told Jenny about primitive tribes who put funny masks on the corpse and performed lewd dances around it as a way of rejecting death, of refusing to let it touch them.
“Those boys didn’t mean anything,” she said. “I’m sure that, in their own way, they were just as upset as you were tonight.”
Oh no they weren’t.
Jenny did not tell her mother, did not tell anyone, even the police when they asked exactly what had happened, about how she had just changed places with Linda. She felt guilty. Had she not changed places with her, Linda would still be alive. If anyone knew that, they would wish it had been the other way around. No one, except for her own mother and father, would choose Jenny’s life over the beautiful, popular, shapely Linda Serrano’s.
And Jenny was afraid of what Mr. and Mrs. Serrano’s reaction would be. Already they could hardly bear to look at her. When it was her turn to offer her hand and tell them she was sorry, she knew they were wondering why she couldn’t have been the one hit by the car, instead of Linda. They were probably thinking that if she hadn’t been coming home from school with Linda, it never would have happened. Linda would have been walking alone, along the edge of the road, not so far into it. If they knew about the changing places thirty seconds before, who could tell how they would feel, or how much they would hate her?
So at first it was guilt and fear that kept her from talking about it. Then later, it was impossible to tell the story because she would be suspected of making it up after the fact, perhaps from some self-centered desire to attract attention or sympathy. Her parents did not like their children to call attention to themselves, and her mother, who was English, was very much of the “put it all behind you” school of thought. No, it was something that had to be told immediately or never.
But not having told the whole truth disturbed Jenny more than she would have thought. And, too, there was her witnessing the accident, seeing her best friend, a lively, high-spirited, beautiful girl, reduced in an instant, in the middle of Chopsey Hill, in the middle of a sentence, to an ugly, inert mass of blood and flesh and bone. Naturally, this started her brooding about the fragility of life, and also about the complete randomness of it, the huge element of chance in matters of life and death. Even though she had survived, she no longer believed herself to be in the care of a benevolent being who watched over and protected her; rather, she saw herself as having barely escaped the blind swipes of a huge and blundering — if not downright menacing — hand.
The priest at Linda’s church tried to put a good face on it by acting as if Linda had been selected to receive some great honor. Jenny would never forget the words of his sermon, delivered so sadly. The priest held on to the podium with both hands and looked out at the congregation, at Linda’s family and all those stunned children — the whole school was there — as if he couldn’t think what in the world to say. Then he took a deep breath and, just like the undertaker, made a heroic effort to conceal the truth from them.
“We will never know why God has chosen Linda.”
Or not chosen me.
Jenny would never again hear the expression “chosen people” without flashing back to that day on Chopsey Hill.
All this changed her in some subtle but essential way. Just as she and Linda had been on their way to a spaghetti-and-meatball dinner, Jenny had been on her way to becoming someone else. Exactly what kind of person she would have been if it weren’t for the accident, she couldn’t say. Maybe someone like that Catherine George, who was so . . .
Years later, Jenny tells the story at a gathering of her husband’s family. The occasion is a milestone birthday, but even when they’re together for a funeral, as they often have been, Jack and his brothers like to stay up late talking, reminiscing, telling stories, laughing. In the past, they have been known to drink too much and laugh themselves silly, despite their mother’s parting admonition on her way to bed: “Now, I don’t want anyone getting drunk.”
This time Jenny is the only wife present; the other wives all had other commitments. But the five brothers are here, and that’s what matters. Living in different parts of the country, they don’t see each other very often. And they are all inveterate talkers, so the wives don’t usually say much at these gatherings anyway.
The theme tonight seems to be “close calls”: The brother who, while trying to rescue his twelve-year-old dog, fell through the ice on a mountain lake in Wyoming and nearly drowned or froze to death before the dog got them both out. The brother who, while driving back to college after spring break his sophomore year, lost control of his convertible, which sailed through the air, flipped over, and, fortunately, landed across a ditch, where he hung upside down by his seat belt all night, unconscious. There are more close-call stories, including two told by the brother who nearly always begins with “I’ll give you two for one.”
So Jenny is moved to tell her own close-call story. But as soon as she’s told the bare bones of it — about walking along the road and changing places just before her friend was hit by a car — she’s sorry she began, because she can’t give the group anything to laugh at. The other stories, though not exactly “funny,” were told in such a way that they provoked a lot of good-natured ribbing and joking among the siblings, an understood prerequisite for taking part in these genial family seminars. Maybe someone else could tell Jenny’s close-call story in a way that would get laughs, but Jenny can’t. And so, after a few sympathetic comments, an awkward silence falls. She can tell by the questioning look in her husband Jack’s eyes that he will ask her about this later, and she will tell him everything, lying side by side with him in the dark. But he is a generous, loving man. If she were in his place, she would be thinking, Do you see what you have done? Do you hear the silence in this room?
It’s Billy, Jack’s son from his first marriage, who picks up the snipped thread of entertaining narratives and begins to tell about a recent harrowing experience of his own. He, too, has always been a listener at these sessions, but now he’s out of college and working in Washington; he’s tall, handsome, intelligent, articulate. He has the confidence it takes to claim the floor in this company of big talkers. Or maybe it’s just that Jenny’s contribution was so poorly received; he knows he can do better than that.
Billy’s close call happened only last month. He and his girlfriend and another couple decided to get out of the city for the weekend and go camping in the mountains: a nice long hike, drinks around a campfire, simple food, a night under the stars. None of them were serious campers (and probably none of them ever will be now) but they borrowed the necessary equipment — a tent here, a few backpacks there, some sleeping bags — and set out.
An ice storm the previous spring had caused most of the tree branches above a certain line to snap off. The dead limbs, which had dried out in the heat of the summer, blanketed the forest floor. Billy and his friends hiked all day, mostly uphill, and soon grew sick to death of the crunch, crunch, crunch of fallen branches beneath their feet. The dead wood did not make for easy walking, either. They wanted to get up as high as they could, and see what they could see, but they were exhausted from trudging through all that debris.
“Then we noticed how fast the sun was sinking,” Billy says, “and we thought we’d better stop right where we were, clear a space, and pitch our tent. Obviously, we couldn’t have a campfire, because of all that dried timber lying around.”
“Thank God,” Jack says. “I thought you were going to tell us you started a forest fire.”
“But we had plenty of food. We’d made enough sandwiches for ten people, and Annie had made brownies.”
Wine bottles and six-packs were too heavy to carry, so they had filled four flasks with bourbon, but drinking whiskey got them all a lot drunker a lot sooner than they’d expected. And when it got dark, they didn’t have any light at all. There was no moon. They lay on their backs for a while admiring the stars, then packed up all the leftover food, brought it into their tent, crawled into their sleeping bags, and went to sleep.
“Passed out, you mean,” says Jack.
“Wait a minute. You brought the food inside the tent?” Billy’s uncle, the one who nearly drowned ice-fishing, is incredulous. He looks at Jack. “What did you send this kid to college for?”
“What are you talking about?” Jack is strictly an urban animal; he doesn’t know a thing about the woods.
“Go on.” His brother nods to Billy. “This should be good.”
“Well, sometime during the night,” Billy says, “I woke up to this crunching sound. We’d been hearing it all day, our own feet crunching over all those dried branches and twigs. But these were really big feet I was hearing. These were giant feet crunch-crunch-crunching straight towards us.” Billy leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and looks around at each of them, and Jenny knows she is witnessing the birth of a good storyteller. Jack is practically bursting at the seams just looking at him.
“It was more like crash-crash-crash than crunch-crunch-crunch, and I was suddenly wide awake and very sober. I lay absolutely still. Then I heard the sniffing, like a giant sniffing nose coming closer and closer. My head was just two inches from the opening of the tent. I could practically feel the hair on my head being sucked out, inhaled.”
Jack takes his pipe out of his mouth in the way that pipe smokers do when they become very attentive, and even the ice-fishing brother, who practically lives in the wilderness, pricks up his ears.
“Suddenly, we were on our knees, all four of us. When we compared notes later, it turned out we had all woken up at the sound of the bear crashing towards us, and we had all lain absolutely still, listening to it sniffing, and at the same exact second, without a word, we tore out of our sleeping bags and started hurling the food out of the tent, throwing it as far as we could.” Billy makes sidearm pitching gestures.
“We hurled out the hot dogs we hadn’t been able to cook, and the buns, and all the leftover sandwiches and brownies, and everything the food had been packed in. We threw out every scrap of tinfoil and plastic wrap, every baggie, even our flasks. Afraid of missing some drop or crumb, we hurled our backpacks out there too. Then we knelt in a huddle listening to the tearing and ripping and gnawing and slurping until just before dawn, when he finally went crunch-crunch-crunching away.”
“How did you know to throw out the food?” Jack asks, clearly impressed with Billy’s presence of mind.
“Jesus.” The ice-fishing brother shakes his head. The others all laugh helplessly.
“The ranger told us.” Billy has a sheepish grin. “When we drove in, he told us if we had any food we should sling it up a tree before turning in, or a bear would come after it.”
“And?” his uncle says. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Billy shrugs. “We just didn’t. Like I said, we’d had a lot to drink.” He shrugs again. “We just didn’t feel like it.” Then he gets defensive. “We didn’t know. We thought the guy was exaggerating.” He turns his palms up. “Put your food up a tree? Who puts food up a tree? Besides, it was all wrapped up and put away in those canvas packs. We didn’t think anything could get at it.”
“You not only put your food up a tree,” the uncle says, “you put your clothes up a tree. I mean, if you cook something, if you fry fish or something like that, the smell gets into your clothes, and if you go to sleep in them, you might as well have a big juicy trout in your sleeping bag.”
Jenny has been spending a lot of time on the telephone lately with her two daughters from a previous marriage, both around Billy’s age and both going through their separate crises. Suddenly she realizes that she has been wasting her breath giving them advice. When they call her, she should just listen. Why speak? Why expect your children to take your advice about the possible consequences of certain courses of action if they refuse to heed a warning about something as certain and immediate as being mauled by a bear within the next couple of hours?
“As soon as it was light, we got the hell out of there,” Billy says. “We didn’t have much to carry, aside from the sleeping bags and the tent, and the flasks: the bear couldn’t get the caps off. But he tore our canvas backpacks to ribbons. Everything was gone, every crumb. He even drank the orange juice and licked the cardboard carton dry.”
“Well, you can thank the ice storm,” the ice-fishing uncle says. “You’d never have heard him coming otherwise. He’d have been on you before you knew it.”
And Jenny sees it. It just comes to her. She sees the bear nosing its way straight to the tent. She sees the handsome head that lies between the bear and its food, sees that head mauled, or simply knocked out of the way by a hundred-pound arm and those knife-blade claws bears have. She sees that confident, well-developed chest ripped open, just like Linda Serrano’s. And she sees Jack not as he is now, legs stretched out and head thrown back, already laughing again, but a contracted, shrunken, grieving man huddled in the corner of the sofa, trying not to think, trying not to see, trying not to be. The kind of man Mr. Serrano dwindled into.
Jenny has not thought of Linda’s parents since eighth grade, but now, a parent herself, she realizes how much they must have suffered. Linda had not suffered at all, or not for more than an instant. But the parents. At the time, they seemed old to her. If she had thought about their future at all, she would have figured that their lives were nearly over anyway. But they were young, she suddenly sees, about fifteen years younger than she and Jack are now. She finds she can still see them quite clearly, both how they were before the accident, and how they were after: so much smaller, so shriveled-looking, as if all the life had been sucked out of them, the way the bear licked every last drop of juice from the carton. Plump, vivacious Mrs. Serrano, who sent Linda to school with breaded-veal sandwiches, and jolly Mr. Serrano, who put raisins in the meatballs for those wonderful spaghetti dinners he cooked. Linda was their only child, and life as they knew it ended that day on Chopsey Hill. Yet they had so many years to go. How had they managed to get through them?
And — she can’t help herself — she sees the years stretching before her and Jack, if there had not been an ice storm last spring, if there had been nothing to warn Billy out of the path of that giant bear paw in the sky. Life as they know it would be over now, too. Jack might never laugh again, might never smile, never tell a joke. He would have nightmares. (The dreams he had of losing Billy in the years following the divorce were bad enough.) Instead of bursting with pride at this very moment, he would be emptied out and licked dry. Jenny would grieve with him, but it wouldn’t be enough. She has read about these things, how a couple’s response to this kind of tragedy either makes or breaks them, how the grief must be equal if the marriage is to survive. As much as Jenny loves Billy, as proud as she is of him, she is not his mother, and Jack would find it difficult not to resent her for escaping his fate.
But, lucky Jack, he never sees what isn’t, only what is. So he is already laughing. Billy is laughing. Everyone is laughing except Jenny, who has missed the joke that’s been told and in any case can’t rid herself of the alternate future she has conjured up. Perhaps it’s the Irish whiskey, but she finds to her horror that her eyes have filled, and in the midst of this merry group, she feels something like Cassandra, burdened by visions of disaster no one else could see, those dire prophecies she was given in exchange for love.
Jenny gets to her feet and says good night. The ice-fishing brother gives her a warm wink, and Jack takes hold of her hand and absent-mindedly gives it a squeeze. She bends and plants a kiss on top of his head. He’s the one who’s had the closest call here. And he doesn’t even know.
This story originally appeared in North American Review.
