Half a Life: A Memoir Read Free

eyes, a tear-stained pillow, a tear-stained life. What can one do with levels of gloom and guilt, fear and disbelief, of bewilderment above one’s capacity to register?
    I slept soundly.

A police officer called the next morning to say that Celine had died in the hospital. It was unclear whether her parents, who had been on vacation, had been able to see her.
    My father answered the phone. The officer never asked for me.

My surest memories of that day are the reflector running up the windshield and the sunshine in the cracks as Dad got me home. I can imagine the flash of impact, of course. Even if I’m unable to really call back much about it. But it’s not hard to guess at the terrible, scratched-out details.
    The truth is, anyone with a TV can fill this scene, taking snippets from the editing floor, plug-ins from the visual and sound-effects library we all carry. Pretty girl on bike, a shy little thud, hysterical windshield. And I’m somewhere in there too, trying to swerve, trying to disappear.

The police, Celine’s biking companion, and the recollection of five cars’ worth of eyewitnesses all conspired to declare me blameless. No charges were filed. A police detective named Paul Vitucci later told the newspaper, “For an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into what you might call the traffic portion of the street, and she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he”—meaning me—“could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever.”
    I remember coming down to breakfast, and my parents showing me that article. I remember thinking two things. 1) I am fine. The sweet, marshy part felt— You made it . And the other part said 2) Well, that’s it, I’m in the paper for the world to read about, there is no hiding from this. And I was right. After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone did find out. One friend of mine who lived about an hour north was startled awake by his mother with the news.
    I’m sure my parents worried about me, but I don’t remember what they said, and I don’t think they tried to make contact with Celine’s family.
    Very soon I got to the article’s denouement: Vitucci, eyewitnesses, unprovisional absolution. Society was clearingme. But how could any reporter be so certain? If I hadn’t been with my friends, felt them next to me and in the backseat—if I hadn’t tried to point all of us toward something fun—maybe I would have focused on Celine, or driven slower. Or honked sooner. (Though I was positive that I had honked, when I’d first seen her inch away from the shoulder and into the right lane.) Any of ten different actions on my part might have led to an alternate ending. Maybe I hadn’t felt the right amount of alarm, just before the girl jumped across two lanes.

On a map Long Island looks like a tailless crocodile with its mouth open. Its far shore yawns into a pair of peninsulas a hundred miles east of New York City, and the crocodile’s hind-end nestles right up against Manhattan. Not too far up the crocodile’s back sits Glen Head, my town: the patch of low, paved swampland where Celine and I went to school, at North Shore High.
    Manhattan casts a thin shadow onto Long Island. For most people, life in Glen Head verged on total disconnection from the city—ours could have been any suburb, anywhere—though when traffic was easy it took us just a half hour to reach tall and shaded Midtown.
    As you drive the Long Island Expressway toward North Shore High School, the city relaxes its grip on the land. Soon you’re in the middle of wide suburban ho-humness. Though western Long Island differs from a real country milieu in all kinds of major ways (traffic snags, no silos), it’s true that North Shore High—only a public school despite the upscale name, largely middle-class Italian and middle-class Irish—was small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business.
    Which meant many uncomfortable things. This wasn’tclose to first among my