Headlights(29)

The social worker and I sat down across from Noel and Marianne Stansfield. The couple was in their fifties, so much older than my actual parents, more than double their age. Marianne wore scarves and layers and colors and jewelry, and Noel wore a green sweater. They offered me every kind of snack I’d seen, and some I hadn’t, all laid out on plates made of wood and woven baskets and hammered metal that I would later learn were only a small sampling of the treasures they had brought back with them from all around the world. Hobby travelers, bohemians, philanthropists. Not that I knew what any of that was. Not yet.

I couldn’t stop looking at the ceiling, couldn’t stop wondering how tall it was. The windows overlooking the outdoors. Noel was talking about how they’d always wanted a son, had always wanted to adopt, once they had accomplished everything else they wanted in life.

I was staring out the window. The social worker touched my arm.

Blood.

My mom and my dad and—

I pulled my arm back, my heart racing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know if you could hear me.” She had already talked to me about my name, about how I could change it and go by something new if I wanted. They gave me a list of ideas to help but said it was my choice. I picked Daniel because it was close to Danny like Rose had called me, and I didn’t want my dad’s name. But I still didn’t always remember to respond to it.

Marianne Stansfield cleared her throat across from us. “We can’t imagine what you’ve been through, what any of it’s been like … We know that we can’t know. But we have space, we’re both retired so we have all the time, and we promise to work every single day to give you the best, most wonderful life possible. If you want it, that is. Or … if you want us.”

I grab my chest here, now, in this dark empty house. The pain of their absence, a terrible living thing.

I go to the wall, try the living room switches, which of course don’t work. I head for the giant hearth. Sit down, pile on some wood that still rests beside it, reach for the matches and start the fire, just as Noel showed me.

I stand up again. I can’t. Can’t be still in here, can’t sit with this pain. I stand beside the fireplace, nearly as tall as I am, and I watch the room darken in contrast to the glow of the flame, rub my chest with my palm. Breathe through it. Will I ever not be drowning in this?

Noel, my father, in this same room, even older, sitting across from me and letting out a long sigh. “You don’t have to do this, Daniel. There’s nothing to prove.”

Me, opposite him, just as I was on that first day. But now, eighteen, holding enlistment papers in my hand. “I don’t want to disappoint you. It’s not…” But I broke off. Because I didn’t know what it was. Or I did, but I didn’t know how to explain it to him. How I couldn’t live this life, couldn’t accept that it was mine or that I would ever deserve it. How in the moments in which I’d start to forget myself, start to enjoy any of it, her face would return to me. The motel room that could almost feel like a nightmare or dream. How my whole life I’d been outrunning this one person, and also so desperately, pathetically, hoping she’d return.

“Hey.” Noel leaned forward. He had aged, was nearly seventy, and it showed. He reached over the coffee table and took hold of my hand. “You could never, ever disappoint me, kid.”

I knew they were getting up there, but I wasn’t ready. I was so far from ready.

We’d gotten tickets a while before for the four of us to see Willie Nelson play at Red Rocks—Mom, Dad, Josie, and me. My parents closer to eighty than seventy now. The divorce initiated, Josie wasn’t coming. My dad insisted on driving, like he always had, and I didn’t fight him. I sat in the passenger seat, and my mom sat in the back, and we were talking about the case. A grown man riding to a concert with his parents, talking about his failures.

A grown man who’d let his aging father drive.

When the truck came at us from the side, I saw the split second in which I might have reacted if I had been in the driver’s seat. Saw what my dad didn’t. Both my parents on the left side of the car, their bodies silhouetted in the truck’s headlight beams.

Bright, brighter, so blindingly white that I thought I’d never see again. All the sound in the world, the crash so painfully loud, and then,

Silence.

My parents, the people who’d given me everything. The truck driver hit his head in the crash, also died on impact. I was the only one who survived.

I stuck it out for a couple months, moved back in here, planned a funeral, worked day and night to make any sort of headway on the case. Walked into the snow and onto the road and asked, Please take me instead. Please, let them have a little more time. Please, give them back.

And when it was clear that my marriage was lost, my parents weren’t coming back, and the investigation was going cold, I said fuck all of this and left Colorado.

The one thing my parents asked for, the one request in their lengthy will that continues to give generously to charities now and will for many decades, was this:

Don’t sell the house. Don’t let anyone else live there unless they live with you. It’s yours.

As if it heard me, a door creaks open upstairs.

I run my hands over my face.

Yeah. And then there’s the other thing.

At the end of my first visit, I got a tour of the house.