I was too much in shock from the afternoon to know what I felt about anything, really. I wanted to write to Nicholas and tell him I was sorry I hadn’t gotten to say good-bye. I wanted to confess my sins and become a monk.
The next day I got a message from Barbara that I could only stand to listen to the first few seconds of.
Adam, I don’t know where you are right now or what’s going on, but you really need to call me, really need to call me, because I just had one of the most disturbing conversations of my life and I am freaking out because …
I spent the rest of that week in the apartment, in my bedroom, like Saddam Hussein in his spider hole. I gathered, from the quality of light in my one high window, that it was beautiful outside, but I had no real idea. Eventually I turned off my phone. I told Joel I was fine but I needed to be left alone for a while. Every couple of hours I worked myself into a panic that I was going to be in some kind of legal trouble, which would send me to the computer, where I’d lose myself in dozens of pages of useless, panic-worsening discussion threads about people with distantly related, or not at all related, problems.
On one of these afternoons I opened my computer and there was an email from Claire.
Hey you. Is this totally awkward? I was all convinced that I definitely shouldn’t write to you and that you might still be mad at me, or that I should be mad at you or something, but I’m kind of hoping all that’s passed. Has it? I definitely feel on my end like there’s been some kind of clearing up. Or maybe I just miss you? Or maybe the weather’s just nice? Hard to say. But if you’re still around and if you feel like getting a cup of coffee, consider me up for it.
x,
C
I understood that I’d been waiting for a note like this for a long time, that some important emotional buttons were being pushed, but for the moment the wiring in me all seemed to be disconnected. Hard to say. My adult life, which I’d thought I could build over the mess of my teenage life, had collapsed around me with a kind of beautiful speed. Sometimes I thought I was going to end up in jail, sometimes I thought I was going to end up driving into the Chesapeake Bay. My forearms were noticeably bigger. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a glass of water.
Barbara sent me a letter on Capitol Tutoring letterhead telling me that I was in no way associated with the company, and that if I sought contact with Peter or Anna or any of the Raffertys, she was leaving open the possibility of legal action.
Claire sent me another email, this one saying she should never have reached out to me and that she wouldn’t make that mistake again.
My mom called to say that they hadn’t heard from me in ages and they were making flatbreads on the grill for dinner if I felt like coming by.
All of a sudden I had plenty of room in my life for thinking about Thomas. Room for thinking about everything.
I didn’t sleep the night of the accident (one of the very few nights in my life about which I can say this unequivocally), and the next morning, under a sun like a bare bulb hanging just overhead, I had to walk down to Connecticut to get to the Metro to go to work. It was just after nine and it was already ninety degrees; throwing up seemed like a possibility that my body was just barely able to keep from becoming mandatory.
You’d think that coming upon the actual scene of the crash for the first time would have been momentous and horrible, but one effect of not sleeping is that everything starts to feel gauzy. Even if I’d slept eight sound hours on a feather bed, though, there might have been something dreamlike about it: hundreds of cars obliviously pushing their way toward work, sealed against the heat, getting honked at by buses.
Here was all the evidence I could see, in the few seconds I let myself slow down on the corner: an inside-out surgical glove in the gutter and a forked maroon trail in the middle of the road, about which my first thought was: Isn’t it weird that someone would have spilled something here that looks so much like blood? Because you’d think that actual blood would have had to announce itself, it would have had to be cordoned off or cleaned up or at least somehow set apart from the flattened 7-Eleven cups and Lotto receipts. Otherwise what was to keep someone from mistaking it for raspberry syrup or for the kind of fake blood that comes in a white tube and that we used to squeeze onto the corners of our mouths before the Halloween parade? What was to keep a dog, like the German shepherd now walking past with its nose to the ground, from licking it up?
The worst of my suffering in those next few days—which felt like being poisoned, a freezing empty charge moving through me—came over me maybe once an hour, whether I was awake or asleep, helping to stack the nap mats at work or standing in the corner of my bedroom talking to Thomas on the phone. Each time I’d think: I can’t tolerate it, I’m going insane. This must be why people turn themselves in for things. But then it would … not pass, exactly, but slip back into some more inner part of my nervous system, leaving me sore and shaken, and I’d think, OK, I’ll survive, it won’t ever feel that bad again, and I’d try to more or less go about my life until it happened again.