The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,17
or fantasy on the part of the audience—and the filmmaker, of course. What fantasy was he yearning to fulfill?
For a long moment he sat still, his pen unmoving, then he pulled a sheaf of papers from the back of the notebook. Photocopies of old newspaper clippings, from the autumn of 1988, most of them reiterating the same information. The top story was taken from the Albuquerque Journal, November 1988. A photo showed the marks on a tree trunk and a hill with crosses standing against a twilight sky.
LOCAL TRAGEDY
FOUR TEENS DEAD, ONE CRITICAL IN CAR CRASH
AP Espanola—Four teens were killed instantly and another critically injured in a high-speed crash on State Highway 76 Thursday night when the driver lost control and slammed into a tree. The teens were all students at Espanola Valley High School. Three were from one family—the driver, Isobel Alvarez, 18, a senior; her younger brother Albert, 14, and the lone survivor, Elena Alvarez, 17, who sustained catastrophic injuries and has not regained consciousness. She was airlifted to an Albuquerque hospital and is listed in critical condition. The other victims were Edwin Valdez, 18, the survivor’s boyfriend, and Penelope Madrid, also 17, a cousin to the Alvarez family. Alcohol was not a factor in the incident.
Julian flipped the edge of the paper with his thumb. An ordinary story in ways, both utterly banal and absolutely devastating. It happened every day—cars trying to beat an oncoming train, drag-racing up lonely farm highways, navigating bad roads in the dark; drinking and driving in any fashion at all.
It still left a pit in his belly, a hollowness. Three children ripped from a family in a single swath, two siblings and a cousin dead, and a fourth so badly mangled that it appeared it had taken more than a year for her to leave the hospital.
He fingered the silky goatee beneath his lip. An ordinary horror. Like a murder, a woman being snatched out of a grocery store parking lot and murdered, her body dumped in a field. How many times each year did it happen? Once a week? Once a day?
How did those families survive the loss? He couldn’t even bear to think of the loss of his daughter, for fear that it would bring it closer. Even he, who thought of dark things for a living, skittered away, whispered preventive prayers to angels he didn’t believe in—never, never, please, not ever that. The darkness on the other side of such a thought was unbearable.
He’d found the article when he ran a Google search on his new chef. He ran checks on anyone he planned to hire in a leadership position, just to make sure nothing untoward showed up. The Vancouver newspaper article had hinted that Elena Alvarez had experienced a loss in her youth, but had not elaborated.
Catastrophic injuries. What did that mean? How long, he wondered, had she lain in a coma, unaware that her siblings and friend and cousin were dead?
In the quiet room, Ella Fitzgerald started to sing in her haunting way, “Summertime,” a song that always sent a knife through his heart. When he’d found the article, he’d wanted to throw it away, forget it, let it go.
And he’d known, equally clearly, that he would not. It was a story he had not explored, another angle on the endless question of his movies—how did people grapple with darkness? His creative curiosity had been snared, even as he was a little shamed by it. Was it prurient or the natural curiosity of a storyteller?
Once the door was flung open, there was no closing it. His muses, skinny and pockmarked, stalked the alleyways of dark events, taking notes on events that made others look away. What, he wondered, were the statistics on people who survived such catastrophic events? Did they tend to thrive or self-destruct? What issues did they face?
From the black granite and cherry table at his elbow, he lifted his notebook computer, rubbed the mouse square with the edge of his thumb and brought up Google. He tucked his pen between his teeth to free his hands and typed, survivors catastrophic car accidents.
A slim figure emerged from the shadows of the hallway. “Whatcha doing?”
Julian shut down the search, feeling weirdly guilty. “Nothing, kiddo. What’s up?”
His daughter Portia flung herself into an easy chair. “I’m bored.”
“School starts in a few days, and it will get better.”
“Oh, like I love school so much.” She twisted a strand of extra-shiny blonde hair around a finger. Her outstretched foot