The Whole World: A Novel - By Emily Winslow Page 0,28

tickled me when I was a kid: a distinctive kind of breathy whooping.

He didn’t walk through to the TV room, but he called out to make us stop.

We did so immediately. We dressed. When Jeremy turned off the TV, I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed something to dull the full effect of what was about to happen.

“Are you dressed?” Dad boomed from the front room.

“Yes,” I called back. Jeremy shoved the sheet into his backpack and took my hand to go meet him.

Tears slid down my face, but I didn’t cower.

Dad told me to walk myself home. He wanted to drive Jeremy to his house to talk to his parents. Jeremy shrugged. What else could we have done?

Jeremy kissed me on the cheek and said he would call me. I smiled bravely in return, and walked out past Dad without acknowledging him. From the next street I heard the yellow car start up in Uncle Joe’s driveway.

Dad said that when he and Jeremy got into the car, he saw Burger King bags on the floor of the passenger side, and a couple of big bags from a camping store in the back. We had used the car that day to buy a tent from a store out of town; a bunch of us were going to go up into the White Mountains later in August. Jeremy and I might have otherwise met at Uncle Joe’s on foot, and Dad would never have known we were there. But we’d had the car and, after getting a tent and a small grill, had stopped at Burger King on the way to Uncle Joe’s. When the lawyer prompted him, Dad described everything from this point onward—Burger King bags, camping stuff—in emotionless detail. He gave everything equal weight, to dull it, I guess. To flatten it all out.

When I got home no one was there, and I’d given Dad my key ring for the car. I sat outside on the step. I heard it happen, three streets over.

Dad admits that Jeremy didn’t say anything during the ride, which made it difficult for Dad’s lawyer to prove provocation in the moment. Dad says he doesn’t know why he did it, he just felt, compellingly, that it needed to be done. He makes it clear that this feeling wasn’t rational, and it isn’t one he retains. In fact, he says, as soon as it was over he recognized it for the horror it was. But as he did it, he said, it was as unthinking as a routine. You don’t put on your tie in the morning because you want to, he said. You do it because that’s what you do.

The prosecution had a slow ramp-up to their full description of the act. They had street diagrams and skid marks and experts on that particular engine to indicate where and how quickly Dad had accelerated. Apparently, Jeremy would have briefly seen it coming. Dad drove straight for the oak tree in the Palmers’ yard, no swerving. He had nothing against the Palmers; it was just a big tree near the road.

The defense tried to make it look like an act of suicidal depression, but Dad had aimed the car so the passenger side would impact the tree and the driver side wouldn’t. One could argue that that was luck more than good aim, but Dad admits it was intentional.

Jeremy had been thrown into the windshield. His face got shredded and sprayed blood like a cloudburst. His head was cracked open by the impact, and Dad said he could see Jeremy’s brain. He said it like it was just a detail, the same way he had seen the Burger King bags. Dad said Jeremy had seemed unconscious, but breathed in a rattly way for a while beside him. The coroner says that death was instantaneous, but I believe Dad because he was there.

Dad had had an airbag. He cracked three ribs.

In the trial, there was some haggling over whether Dad knew that the passenger side didn’t have an airbag, whether he knew that his side did, and whether he’d noticed that Jeremy hadn’t put on his seatbelt. He was given seven and a half years, and will likely serve only five.

And all of this happened because Will broke his arm.

I finished high school at home with tutors. I didn’t have too many credits outstanding, so there wasn’t that much to do. The school was nice. They didn’t make me come in for classes, but let me