Half a Life: A Memoir Read Free Page A

worries and sadnesses, but it would be a lie to pretend it wasn’t somewhere in my thoughts: I’d violated the primary rule of junior and senior high— don’t get people talking about you too much . This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby. The thought of returning to school made me feel swollen and incandescent again. I was disgraced, I was blessed (alive and journalistically absolved). I would be cafeteria news, the object of a discreetly pointed finger or nod. I would be the heavy dark ingot from the adult world—the world of consequences—introduced into the nothing-counts ethos of adolescence.
    So here’s the next stage of guilt: when it’s about to become social. There were two parts of me that I wanted to keep above water: a respect for Celine, and a concern for her family. That seemed right and maybe even selfless. But the water that kept lapping over was this: how would people see me? How do I keep the accident from being the main thing about me forever?
    Immature, offensive thoughts—someone died.
    I stayed away from school for almost a week. (I’d already gotten into college, and so was pretty sure I was risking absolutely nothing by skipping all those classes.) The days after the movie-theater mistake and the announcement of Celine’s death I spent behind my bedroom door, talking to no one in particular. I was more parrot than person—a parrot in underpants and socks, repeating his one cry. “How seriously will I be messed up by this?”
    Which is itself , I don’t have to tell you, a pubescently egocentric thing to wonder. My concern about Celine, in those first days, was in large part really for that future version of myself—that he not become a shadowy and impaired figure. A week before I’d been eighteen and getting ready to push off for college, for love (I’d imagined) plus adventures with friends, then some cool and genial job. When my brain focused on losing all that, I became twitchy and frightened and horrible. At the same time, this anxiety triggered a new guilt: I should not be thinking about something so self-centered. I would concentrate on Celine’s parents, and next (after the shiver passing through who I was; after the cold squeeze in the throat) on nothing. The muffling blanket would fall over my thoughts. I’d hear something distinctly: the hinge sound of a book I opened, or my own breath.
    One morning—Monday?—I left my room and went downstairs. A silent planet. Parents away at work, younger sister at school. I walked through the numbed rooms, stopping to read—because I was still allowed to take pleasure in magazines, right?—a Sports Illustrated . (Companies kept printing them, which meant time was still trudging ahead.) A photo of Danny Manning driving to the basket. How to face down a Nolan Ryan fastball. Can anyone fill John “The Wizard of Westwood” Wooden’s shoes? I’ve already read this stupid issue. And it was this second thought that cleared everything out. I was the kid I’d been three days ago. The morning passed with the sluggish, dusty feeling that comes to people when they’re loafing. But then, at thefridge, I was stopped by what struck me as a presentiment. Maybe I’d be okay right now if I could only get myself to remember—what? To remember or realize what ? And I stood in the kitchen with a glass in my hand and tried to figure out what that what was.

“We need to have you over at the accident site in a car,” said the Shrink. “What say you?”
    He was middle-aged, a gray and not very fit fifty—thrown together, it seemed, from sausage meat and behaviorism classes.
    “No, seriously,” he said, “that’s what you need today, is to drive that road again.”
    “Um,” I said. How could I just pop over to where I’d killed Celine? (This was, I think, four days after that nightmare morning. It also happened to be my first therapy session ever.) “Okay,” I said. I was