This table smells like french fries and my cheek feels sticky with someone else’s leftover ketchup or maybe jam. Better not to know. I lift my head, take a paper napkin from the dispenser, and dry my drenched face with the little dignity I can still muster. Who knew you could hit bottom twice in one day?
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, because it’s hard to find my voice. I don’t want to be the girl who spent the morning sitting in her own vomit and the afternoon crying in public with recycled condiments on my cheek. I want to be better than this. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
On the way over to McCormick’s, I resolved to be brave and honest. I realize I can’t keep going, not like this. My mom wanted us to build and then live in a glass house of lies. But it’s time to start throwing rocks. Let it shatter and rain down and cut us all up.
I will say these words out loud, the truth: I was driving the car. It was me.
No. I cannot say anything. My mouth has gone dry.
David stares at my shoulder. His fists are clenched tightly in his lap. He probably wants to throttle my neck. I don’t blame him. My mother was wrong to try to bury the truth like it was a physical thing. As if keeping my name out of the newspaper meant it never happened in the first place. My mom’s job is to spin things, and so she did what she does best. Ten minutes after a doctor told us my dad had died, she was in action, like the covert superhero I always knew she could be—Mandip Lowell to the rescue!—spinning what had happened into something more easily digestible.
We all know this was an accident, she said to the reporter, a grizzly older man with an unruly white mustache who looked annoyed that our family tragedy had interrupted his dinner plans. Why ruin a sixteen-year-old girl’s life? As if my life hadn’t already been ruined, as if reality turned on what people read over breakfast the next morning with their coffee.
Let’s just leave her out of this, she said, and I stood next to her, totally numb, it never once occurring to me to speak up and object. I’m not asking you to lie, she said. I’d never to do that. Just keep it vague enough to let people come to their own conclusions. The next morning, a picture of the accident scene graced the front page of the Daily Courier, and the reporter did exactly as my mother suggested. No mention was made of a second passenger; anyone who read the article came to the natural conclusion that my father was driving. My mother and I did nothing to correct this wrong impression. One more verbal sleight of hand.
Poof, just like that, I was never in the car, my involvement almost completely erased. There was no follow-up, no additional questioning, just my name on an accident report buried in the bowels of the police station. Apparently people die in car accidents all the time.
My mom said, Dad would have wanted to protect you. I believed her because I wanted to.
But we should have started clean. When the whole thing is not sugarcoated with euphemisms like accident, when my mom doesn’t pat my back and say It wasn’t your fault, when she doesn’t spin the truth. There are words for what I did: vehicular manslaughter.
“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” David says.
“I knew he wasn’t driving.” I stop, because the tears are getting in the way. I want to do this right, but I am not naive. Words are not things that can be handed over, simply passed from person to person and let go. They are a string. You’re still left holding one end in your hands. “There’s something I didn’t tell you—”
David can be trusted. He can keep my secrets. He’ll help make it better. Hold up the other end.
Maybe this is what I wanted all along when I started the Accident Project—for David to find out the truth, for me to finally be exposed and honest. For me to spectacularly self-sabotage and start over.
When I was little, my dad used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to me before bed, even that sad second verse no one else seems to know or remember: The other night, dear, while I lay sleeping, I dreamt I held you in my arms. When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I held my head down and cried.
The song echoes in my head, in his voice, and it makes me think about David’s theory of consciousness. Maybe my dad lives on in something as intangible as song lyrics. Maybe my dad can be with me when I need him.
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I held my head down and cried. Can I sing that as my confession to David? Those are simpler words. Easier to say than: I was driving. It was me.
“I get it,” David says, before I have a chance to explain myself. “Of course. How could I have missed it? I am a dumbass. You were driving.” The words come out with enthusiasm, like he’s just aced the SATs, emphasis cheerily on the you. He is smiling and his volume is too loud.
This is nothing like those other times, when David’s honesty felt good and refreshing: air, underwater. This time, it’s sharp and cold and precise, like being stabbed, and he whips my dad’s singing right out of my ears.
People at the other tables can hear us. I’m sure of it. I need him to stop talking; I need to undo whatever it is I’ve started. The world begins to spin, and his face morphs from handsome to cruel. I fold over myself. “You were driving, right? Your dad was the passenger. It all makes sense! You’re exactly sixty-four inches tall. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until now!”
He sounds perversely excited. Like this is one for the win column. Like I should high-five him in celebration: Yay, David! You figured it out—I killed my dad!
“Please, stop. Let’s not…” I am begging. I can’t do this. I can’t. Not here. Not like this, with his maniacal grin and booming, self-congratulatory voice. I understand my mother’s lies. The truth is too ugly. I want to put our string back in my pocket. What was I thinking?
Help me, Dad.
I was mistaken.
I was mistaken.
I wanted David to tell me that nothing could have been done to stop the car in time.
I wanted David to exonerate me.
I did not want this.
“I don’t understand why you lied to me, Kit,” David says, and then his face morphs again, and now he sounds accusatory. There is no warmth to be found. Not even a sliver of compassion or humanity. He’s Hannibal Lecter sitting down to an ice cream bowl full of my insides.
“Please…Please stop.” But my words are lost to the Formica table. I cannot lift my head. The tears flood my face, but I am not crying anymore. I am what happens after crying.
So I held my head down and cried.
Where are you, Dad? Where did you go? I can’t hear his voice. It is gone.
“How could you, Kit?” David demands, as if this has anything to do with him.
“David—”
“You’re like everyone else. A liar. You were driving that night. It was you. You lied!” David shouts, and then, like in a horror movie, because that’s what this has become, my very worst nightmare, everything goes quiet.
Someone drops their fork. I hear an audible gasp.
I had stupidly expected a soft landing. Not free fall.
I was wrong yet again, because of course I haven’t yet hit bottom. Here it is. Even colder, darker, lonelier than you’d expect.
I was mistaken.
I turn my head and that’s when I notice: Gabriel and Willow in a booth right next to us, eating pancakes covered in whipped cream. The kind of food happy, simple people get to eat.
They’ve heard every single word.