“I want you to talk to me,” I insisted. “I’ve been trying to get you to talk to me, hence the snowman, which you hated.”
“I didn’t hate it. I actually really loved it? I just didn’t want my parents to see it and ask where it had come from.” A look of anguish came over Cassidy’s face once more. “Ezra, I can’t do this. I’m sorry, but I can’t. You’re right, though—I do owe you an explanation. So I’ll play Sherlock Holmes for you, just this once.”
She toyed with the zipper on my jacket for a moment, and I listened to the nervous rhythm of it, like a heartbeat. Zip-zip. Zip-zip. Zip-zip.
“The thing about Owen,” Cassidy began, “isn’t how we’d mess with the universe or talk about subversive graffiti artists or sneak me into college classes. It’s how all that stopped when our parents forced him into medical school and it wrecked him. He’d call me, convinced his cadaver was someone he knew, an old teacher or someone. He’d break down on the phone over stuff like that, how he was trapped in that lab, expected to cut open human flesh and fill out charts before washing the blood off his clothes, and to tell people that they were dying, or their loved one was dead, or their insurance wouldn’t cover it, or there was nothing more he could do to take away their pain, and he was just completely terrified that this was going to be the rest of his life. He started showering a lot, because he said that no matter how much he washed, there were bits of the dead and the dying and the sick that clung to him, and little by little he was turning into a ghost, but he couldn’t take it back because he’d already wasted college studying the requirements for this, and he was too afraid of our parents to tell them that he wanted to quit.”
Cassidy lapsed into silence again, and I didn’t blame her. I reached for her hand, and we stared down at our hands clasped together. At mine, calloused from tennis but growing soft. At hers, small and freckled and trembling, with gold nail polish that had largely chipped off.
She pulled her hand away, wiping her eyes and sniffling even though she wasn’t quite crying.
“One night,” she continued, “he snuck a scalpel out of his lab and into his dorm room. And he called to tell me he was so scared, and so sorry, and so stressed, and I told him to fly home. I told him I’d take the train down that weekend, and we’d talk to Mom and Dad together. But they were awful about it. We were at this stupid fancy restaurant out in Back Bay, and they kept ordering drinks and arguing low over our entrees, and finally Owen grabbed Mom’s keys and just slammed out of there. And I didn’t stop him. I didn’t run after him and make him give me the keys.”
Cassidy turned to me, choking to hold back her tears.
“But he died of a, um, heart thing,” I said. “Not a car accident.”
“Ezra,” Cassidy said, begging me to understand. “When he left the restaurant, he took our mom’s black Land Rover.”
I felt my whole soul twist as I realized what she was telling me. The car. The one at Jonas Beidecker’s party that hadn’t stopped after it crashed into the side of my roadster.
“No,” I said as the full weight of it hit me head on. I was slammed back into the memory of that night, the jolt of our collision, the sickening skid of everything I’d wanted and everything I’d had slipping through my outstretched hands. It was the answer to the wrong mystery—the mystery I didn’t ever want to solve.
And so we sat there in the sickening sillage of the truth, neither of us angry, or upset, just muddling through this shared sorrow, this collective pity. And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor, and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unheroically injured things that people never write poems about, I didn’t.
“How long have you known?” I managed.
“The afternoon of the dance,” she said. “When you called me from the florist.”
“Voldemort the Volvo,” I said, remembering.
So that was what had happened. I’d supplied the missing details of the accident. And once I’d unknowingly told her, she’d wanted to get as far away from me as possible. She wasn’t running from me, she was running from the obligation of having to look me in the eye and tell me exactly who’d driven that black SUV through the stop sign.
“You know, he told us that he hit a tree.” Cassidy shook her head. “And my parents were furious, but they believed him. I went back to Barrows, and he stayed home since he wasn’t feeling well, but I figured he was just avoiding school. He thought it was panic attacks, you know? Because there’s this horrible joke that med students always think they have some fatal disease, and he didn’t want to be laughed at. But he had this embolism from the accident, and the clot got into his heart. Four days later, my parents came home and found him dead.”
Cassidy squeezed my hand and stared up at me, as though asking forgiveness. For what, I wasn’t quite sure.
I was thinking about how her brother had died in that house. It made an odd sort of sense, the way it had always felt ghostly to me, haunted. No wonder she never wanted to go home.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled.
Cassidy shrugged, because as far as I know, scientists have yet to discover the proper reaction to “I’m sorry.”
“What I can’t figure out,” she persisted, “is why he didn’t say he hit anyone. Maybe he was so out of it that he honestly thought you were a tree.”