Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,45
television, which my parents locked in the basement in case I was old enough to connect our accident to the vigils and fund-raisers for the dead children and their surviving family; Liddie’s three weeks of complete silence, which caused our parents to call every child psychologist in the New York area; the dinner-table silences as our parents tried not to blame each other; my own silence, because I had no one to talk to; and the silence of my parents’ friends and colleagues, who knew it wasn’t technically their fault but could not bring themselves to offer condolences.
The children were survived by their bereaved parents and an older child who had not been in the car, Carlos, age ten. They were poor and immigrants and there was a public outcry when the family returned to El Salvador to bury the children and was denied reentry into the country. A popular right-wing talk show host lost his job for saying it served them right for being here illegally and implying they’d been driving poorly because they couldn’t read English. There was too much tragedy to be compounded with sympathy for us.
If you were wondering who to blame, it goes like this: The family is driving back from the city, coming around a curve only to find the road blocked by fallen lumber. The father, maybe he looks backward, maybe he thinks about whether he can make it if he swerves, maybe he confers with his wife, but he slows, he stops the car, he gets out to move the wood so they can pass. We are coming around the corner, on our way home from dinner at my aunt’s house, and my father does not see them until it is too late. Maybe it happened because the road was curving and poorly lit and no one could have. Maybe I shouldn’t have whined that I wanted to stay at my aunt’s house until the cartoon I’d been watching was over. Maybe my mother shouldn’t have told my father to hurry up so that she could make her church board conference call that evening. Maybe my father, who had been drinking wine with my aunt, but wasn’t drunk by any legal standard, should not have had the second glass. Maybe the other father should have swerved around the roadblock. Maybe he should have put his hazards on. Maybe the city should have lit the road better, or maybe it’s all the fault of some jackass truck driver who let lumber fall off the back of his truck and drove off scot-free.
The official police report says that it was a no-fault accident, but it is always someone’s fault. At the start of high school, they sent me home with this puzzle: The king of a vast empire is so impressed with his new and foreign territories that he is hardly home, forgoing the palace to visit the rest of his realm. Lonely, the queen takes a lover, a nobleman in a neighboring town. Not wanting to raise the awareness of the king’s loyal guard, she sneaks out of the palace to meet him disguised as a peasant. The guard is aware of this deception, but says nothing and does nothing to stop her. Traveling alone, the queen is attacked and murdered by highway robbers who have no idea who she is. Who is most at fault for the queen’s death: the robbers, the guard, the queen, the king, or the lover?
I took the puzzle home and told Liddie about it. I said the robbers were to blame, Liddie picked the queen. The next day, the teacher told our class that who you blamed showed what you valued: justice, duty, faith, love, or family. I thought it was bullshit, and when I got home I lied and told Liddie that the teacher had said she was wrong, that only the robbers were at fault, because only they acted with intent. Liddie shook her head and said that was stupid, the queen probably knew the road was dangerous and anyway the robbers were the only people who didn’t owe anybody anything to begin with.
To me the accident is something like that, blame for everyone and no one. A stupid puzzle, not worth solving. My parents never saw it that way. It was a difficult fall and a worse winter. Once Liddie spoke again, my mother began talking to her nonstop, about everything but the accident. Mid-conversation my father would get up and disappear. My mother