by Alice Hatcher
The sole survivor of the car crash that claimed the lives of three high school seniors, including my best friend’s cousin, D, was the last person to arrive for the funeral Mass. She arrived alone and took a seat at the back of the church, as if she had no claim to the grief connecting the mourners huddled near a closed casket flanked by white tapers and floral wreaths. Hearing a movement at the back of the church, I turned around. I couldn’t help it. All week, D’s family and friends had been speculating about whether she would show up at the funeral, and I was no different as far as unchecked curiosity was concerned. In some ways, however, I might have had a very different relation to the survivor than other people seated in the church.
Though I had never met the sole survivor, I found her haunted stare, greasy hair, and the way she cradled her arms beneath her ribcage so familiar that I could have guessed her identity even before my friend’s two great aunts twisted around in the pew in front of me and whispered, “I didn’t know if she’d actually show up,” and “She must have been drinking with all of them.”
Beside me, my best friend tensed. The day before, she had spent hours at her cousin’s wake, listening to distant relatives, family friends, and bare acquaintances speaking in hushed tones about D’s rumored drug use, the role alcohol might have played in the high-speed collision that killed D and two others, and the seventeen-year-old girl the paramedics had pulled physically unscathed from the twisted metal blocking an intersection on Chicago’s West Side. Expressions of grief shaded into gossip until D’s father, overhearing someone, loudly declared, “I don’t know if my son was drinking. All I know is that he’s dead now.” Everyone, wisely, had fallen silent.
Eighteen hours later, D’s father was hunched in the front pew, bent beneath the weight of his grief and, all too likely, an awareness of people again whispering about culpability in the echo chamber of the church. As for the girl, she had exiled herself to the back pew, possibly to spare D’s father the sight of a survivor, or spare herself the scrutiny of people consumed with the question of “why?”—specifically, “why D?” Until she graduated from high school and left town, she would be known as “the girl who survived the accident” and, worse, as the girl who had probably been drinking with D in the hours before his death behind the wheel of a used Kia Rio.
In the girl, I saw a partial reflection of myself at seventeen, two weeks after paramedics pulled me from a car wreck that left me in a coma. Unlike the girl, I had not been the sole survivor. The driver had attempted to kill herself by driving, without warning, toward a line of trees at nearly 100 mph, with me in the passenger seat. The car flipped before hitting the trees and broke apart in a withered cornfield. Six days after coming out of a coma, I ended up in the principal’s office at my high school, fielding questions about how much I had been drinking on the day of the crash. Raw, muddled, and enraged at being the collateral damage of someone’s suicide attempt, I couldn’t form the words to explain that the driver and I had both been sober. I ended up storming out of the principal’s office and, for months, suffered the sideways glances and speculations of teachers and the sting of unfounded shame.
With hindsight, I can now imagine reasons for the principal’s behavior. For all I know, the principal was projecting anxieties about his own daughter, who had been in and out of rehab for years. It’s possible, too, he was reckoning with his own guilt. In the months leading up to the accident, as I have since learned, various teachers had brought the driver’s violent outbursts and self-harming behaviors to his attention, and he had ignored the stark warnings about her mental health. Maybe he was shaken by the near death of two students and just wanted to fix something, or someone, when what I needed to heal was time, space, and the support of good friends. I’ll never know.
In the same way, I’ll never know why so many people at D’s wake and funeral felt the need to speculate about drunk driving in the presence of a gutted father and a severely traumatized girl. Perhaps they were engaged in the flailing of the aggrieved, forcing narratives and assigning responsibility to stave off intolerable feelings. Suffering without meaning is torturous. Those at D’s funeral were no different than the people who hear about someone’s cancer diagnosis and immediately ask about the afflicted individual’s smoking history. The helplessness implied by chance—the random cell mutation and its countless equivalents—is too terrifying to countenance. Everyone whispering at D’s funeral was likely casting about for meaning and moral certainty, reaching for any unbalanced compass to navigate a sea of existential obscenity and escape the void that, sooner or later, we need to accept if we are to grieve and go on living.
I don’t remember a word the priest said. I was lost in that void, consumed with ghostly wreckage from my past and thoughts of the girl sitting alone to avoid moral dissection. During the sermon, I wracked my mind for comforting words to offer the girl, and then berated myself for the hubris of thinking I could ease her pain. My quiet agonies didn’t matter. By the time Mass ended, the girl had vanished. As my best friend and I filed from the church and onto a sidewalk lined with bright yellow daffodils, I could only hope that, someday, when someone asks the girl if she was drinking before the accident, she’ll love herself enough to respond, “I’m alive, and that’s all that matters.”
Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc 2018), which was long listed for The Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Fourth Genre, Chautauqua, and Bellevue Literary Review. Hatcher teaches at the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio.