Late in the summer, Melissa and Brad invited us to their vacation house on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, and Warren and I decided that a sandy beach and new scenery might do us good. The getaway had an effect I wouldn"t have expected.
On the second day of the vacation, Warren took a shower after a day at the beach. I looked at him as he dried off with a towel-and felt a twinge of our old attraction. For the first time since the girls died, I imagined having s.e.x with my husband. Just as quickly as I felt the pull, I was racked with guilt. Was it wrong to feel desire? Even though I wanted to be close to Warren, I couldn"t let myself want to, I couldn"t give in to it.
A strong physical attraction had been a part of our marriage from the start. Warren had complained once, years ago, that I never initiated s.e.x, and all I could do was laugh.
"How could I? The minute I walk into the bedroom, you"re all over me," I teased him.
Since the accident, we often stayed far apart, going to sleep at different times or in separate places. Alone together in the bedroom we were more likely to fight-or cry-than to make love. But something about the beach house-the fresh air, the freedom from the oppressive silence in our own home-let us both remember what used to be. That night in bed, I was drawn to him, and he responded. As the beach breeze wafted through the window, Warren forgot that he was a man in torment and remembered only that he was a man.
"Warren, we can"t do this," I said, suddenly feeling uncertain and pulling away.
"Yes, Jackie, we can. We have to," he said.
"But the girls-" I began to protest.
"This isn"t about the girls. It"s about us."
Having s.e.x that night, I let myself be distracted for a few minutes from the black horror I couldn"t otherwise escape. It was nice to feel my husband close, but I felt guilty about experiencing pleasure and wouldn"t let the connection unfreeze my heart. I remember that night on Long Beach Island so strongly because it didn"t happen again for a long, long time.
Six
In my unhinged state throughout August, I felt that I had two mysteries to solve. The first was why Diane drove onto that highway. The second was how Emma, Alyson, and Katie had died in the car. Maybe it was obvious to other people that a horrific car accident could snuff out three little girls. But it made no sense to me. I kept thinking of how normal and pretty they looked when I gazed at them before the funeral.
"I want to see the autopsy reports," I told Warren.
"No you don"t," he said.
"I do. I swear I do. I have to know what happened to the girls."
"The autopsies won"t give you any answers."
Warren had the autopsy reports but kept them hidden from me. I knew exactly where they were-and one day while he was out, I finally got the courage to read them.
I could feel my heart pounding as I slowly took the official doc.u.ments out of the drawer. Would the medical examiner"s findings tell me some secret that I hadn"t yet known or imagined? Would I finally understand what my daughters felt during those final, horrible moments?
I held the autopsy reports in trembling fingers, stunned at first by how short each seemed. Three skimpy pages, one for each girl. Barely one tiny paragraph on each page. How could the girls be dead with so little wrong with them?
I read the few sentences over and over, but the words just blurred in front of me. I called my friend Maria, a hospice nurse, and she rushed over to help me understand the clinical lingo. Emma and Alyson had died at the scene, Katie at the hospital. The dry report blandly enumerated the findings of head trauma, broken clavicles, and internal injuries. Clearly this wasn"t the grandiose explanation I wanted.
"It doesn"t make sense," I said, calling Jeannine later that afternoon. "The girls looked so perfect at the funeral home. Something else must have happened."
"Like what?"
"I don"t know. But how could they all die?"
"The force of the trauma from the car accident caused internal injuries," Jeannine said simply.
An instant, an accident. How could that one moment end everything that mattered in my life, everything that defined me? Our lives are supposed to go on a straight path, and when they veer so dramatically, how can we grasp that what has been so vital and alive is no longer here? I still wanted to believe in an orderly universe, to find bigger forces at work that would give meaning to what right now felt so completely meaningless.
I called our pediatrician, Dr. Ana Dellorusso, and asked to see the girls" medical records.
"Jackie, they were healthy children," she said gently. "What are you trying to find?"
"Maybe they all had a heart disease. Something genetic that they were born with," I said, trying to sound rational.
"Why would you think that?" she asked.
"Because it doesn"t make sense that they all died. Maybe there was an underlying reason I don"t know about. I want to see their records."
She could have told me to stop being silly, but instead she let me take the thick files that had acc.u.mulated over the years as the girls came in for vaccinations and well-child visits, for the occasional cold or strep throat. I didn"t find anything suspicious because there was nothing to find. All three girls had been perfectly healthy. The car accident-nothing else-had killed them. "What happened in that car was just the laws of physics," Dr. Dellorusso explained, trying to give me an answer.
Physics. Others had said the same thing to me, talking about trajectories and impact and force. But how could something so cold and mathematical explain what had happened to three warm and vibrant girls?
Not completely convinced, I turned my attention to the girls" teeth, conjuring mysterious dental problems from thin air. Danny"s lawyer had raised the possibility that a gum abscess had somehow been involved in Diane"s actions. The theory might have been a reach, but since we had all resorted to grasping at straws, I wondered if something comparable could have weakened the girls. Is that why they had died?
Emma had already started going to an orthodontist and wore a palate extender as a first step to the braces she would eventually get. We had a drama every night as I took the tiny key and turned it in the appliance, per the orthodontist"s instructions.
"I"m gagging! You"re choking me," she"d complain some nights, when she leaned back for me to make the adjustment.
"I know it"s uncomfortable," I would say, struggling to do it right. "But you look so pretty now when you smile, and you want to have a beautiful smile when all the grown-up teeth come in, too."
"I still don"t like it," she grumbled. But because she was such a good girl, she always took good care of the apparatus, even when she woke up the next morning with her mouth aching. She brushed carefully and worried about hygiene. The orthodontist had warned us to stay away from certain foods that could get stuck in the wires, so at the movies, she walked by the popcorn and only allowed herself Tic Tacs as a treat.
"What kid goes to the movies and only buys Tic Tacs?" I"d ask, teasing her. "You"d be okay with a chocolate bar. Can I get you a Kit Kat instead of Tic Tacs?"
"No, this is fine," she"d say, always cautious. Alyson and Katie made up for their abstemious sister by loading up at the concession stand and walking happily to their seats with popcorn in one hand, candy bars and a soda in the other.
Now I felt yet another pang of despair. I couldn"t bear to think that I had asked Emma to put up with a moment"s discomfort for the grown-up smile she would never get to show.
But maybe something else had gone wrong tooth-wise that I didn"t even know about. Once I started obsessing about the subject, Jeannine agreed to drive me to the dentist"s office so I could examine the girls" records.
"You"re not going to find anything," she warned me, trying to find the right balance between being supportive and sensible.
"I might," I said, not ready for rationality.
But, sure enough, the dentist"s records showed that the girls had good teeth, no abscesses, hardly even a cavity.
"I"m sorry," Jeannine said. "I know you wanted a different answer. But I guess it"s physics, just like everybody has been saying."
Physics. Even if Albert Einstein gave me a personal lecture on energy and force fields, I still wouldn"t accept the answer.
I knew my pursuit of the autopsy reports and the medical and dental records lacked logic, but I had a desperate drive to find a sensible story that could explain the absolute senselessness of what had happened. I wanted a practical reason that I could repeat to myself at night as I lay in bed forlorn and sobbing. Fighting with Warren and at wit"s end about how I could go on, I needed a narrative that put all the facts in place.
Having grown up in the Catholic Church, I was used to homilies and simple stories where all the facts lined up: good and evil, an orderly world, G.o.d"s reason for everything. But my story now was all disorder and chaos. Good and innocent children were dead, and unless I could understand why, it felt like the world had gone completely off its axis. My nagging Catholic guilt kept insisting that G.o.d must be punishing me, which just added to my anguish. I had no idea what I had done to deserve such outsize wrath and vengeance.