How to End a Love Story(74)

He remembers the sex being good, and sad, and maybe good because it was a little sad.

“I can’t do this again,” he said, as he stood on the other side of Desiree’s bedroom door for the last time. “I have to go.”

“I wish you weren’t so sure,” she said. “That’s the part that hurts the most.”

Grant wishes now he’d been less sure.



Grant doesn’t remember the song on the radio, or the color of the car in front of him, or the flavor of soda he had in the cupholder of his mom’s minivan.

He remembers the time—

2:03 a.m.

and the weather—



cloudy, with a chance of showers

and his destination—



Lauren DiSantos’s house,

but maybe his own house,

he didn’t have to decide until after the next stop on Route 22.

He remembers the speedometer—



60 MPH—

and looking up to see—



A PERSON, SHIT—

65 MPH



Grant doesn’t think he should tell you this part, but you want to hear it.



Grant remembers opening the door to the smell of smoke in the air and the crunch of glass beneath his feet. He remembers the car not showing much damage—he thinks, but that might not be true, his parents got rid of the car the following week. There were other people—their faces and clothes and genders all blurred by memory now—silhouetted by blinking hazard lights formed in an arc around him.

“Did you see who the driver was?” he heard one person saying to another.

“Just some kid,” they answered. “He looked terrified.”

Grant wanted to ask, Are you talking about me?

But he had to check on the victim first.

He remembers his approach being stopped by the firm grip of a stranger, a man in his late forties who looked the way Grant imagined fathers were supposed to look. (This didn’t make any sense because Grant had a father, one who looked nothing like this man, but that was neither here nor there.) “Son,” Grant’s not-father said. “You don’t want to go over there.”

“I have to,” Grant said. “I have to see if they’re okay.”

The man shook his head. “We all saw what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”

Grant remembers a sudden, swooping dread filling his stomach.

“Am I in trouble?” he asked.

“What’s your name, son?” the man asked in response.

Grant remembers wondering for one wild second if he should lie.

“Grant,” he answered, and it sounded like he’d run a long distance just to tell the truth. “Grant Shepard.”

“How old are you, Grant?”

“Eighteen.” He was crying by then, because behind the man he could see a limp figure in the dark being covered by some Good Samaritan’s dark green coat. The coat had clear glass buttons, and he could see them catching the light, along with the glass on the ground.

“Look at me, Grant,” his not-father said, and Grant wiped his tears and obeyed, focusing on the stranger in front of him instead of the dead girl—he was pretty sure by then it was a girl, by the size of her—a few feet away. “You been drinking?”

“No, sir,” Grant said, and he remembers feeling like he was lying, though the Breathalyzer test he took later said he wasn’t.



Helen thinks of all her memories of that night as locked in a single, flooded room in the back of her mind. Before she opens the door, she always tries to remember the good things first.



How as a toddler, Michelle had been a strangely sweet shadow following her everywhere, always willing to share her toys and candy. How she’d been obsessed with animals, and how they’d spearheaded a joint campaign to adopt a chocolate Labrador puppy, or an orange tabby kitten, or maybe just a pair of parakeets, it doesn’t matter what color, we swear (all unsuccessful). How much Michelle loved the strawberries growing in the backyard of that first cramped duplex apartment in Union, New Jersey, where they’d shared a bedroom—and how she’d cried the entire car ride as they left the plants behind to move to Dunollie, with its better school district and much-needed space.

In the brief sixteen years of their sisterhood, Helen estimates they were too young to remember the first two years, close as adolescent sisters could be for ten years, and at near-constant odds for the last four years. In the balance of things, it seems like a ratio she should be able to wield in her favor, to ward off the memory of one tragic night.

But it never seems to work out that way.

Helen remembers being left behind while her parents went to the morgue.

She doesn’t remember how she felt—sad, is what she told the school counselors who asked, a week later—she remembers only an overwhelming need to clean Michelle’s room now, now, NOW before Mom and Dad get back. It was a mental directive so imperative she could feel it itching in every skin cell still touching her comforter as she lay in bed waiting for the sound of the garage door to shut behind her parents’ car. A family friend was on their way to the house to watch over Helen; she didn’t have much time.

She remembers racing into Michelle’s room and feeling silly once she got inside. The room smelled like confirmation that Michelle was still very much alive, like she’d burst in at any moment pissed that Helen had gone through her things.