“You were in the hospital,” our father said, like a fool.
She looked at him. “Well, yes. A long time ago, I was.”
Mandy Bernstein, his acknowledged fiancée. Daniel Abraham, his fraternity brother and friend. Their two victim-spirits had been his companions every day since that day, two lost people fastened to him and walking gravely beside him, step by ponderous step, and never once did he imagine they might release him, because he truly did not believe he deserved release. And not once, not one time in all these years, had he given a single thought to that other person in the back seat, that other body in the tumbling car, because he hadn’t killed her and because there was so much else, too much else, in the way: Mandy and Daniel, who were dead. This woman wasn’t dead. Had he ever even seen her? Had he turned back, offered a hand or a word of welcome? He had been listening, half listening, to Mandy as she narrated the story of the movie her sorority had screened the night before. He had been wondering if he shouldn’t run into the fraternity house to use the bathroom before setting out. He had been questioning whether he’d fastened the canvas roof correctly the last time he’d had the car out and was showing somebody how the convertible top worked, but he was too proud to ask his girlfriend to get the manual out of the glove compartment. He had barely turned his head as the two of them, his passengers, climbed into the back.
Had Danny said: Morning! This is Stella.
Had Stella said: Nice to meet you!
Had Salo said: Great to meet you, too.
But he remembered nothing else, nothing about her at all, not even that she was Black, which was not a non-thing, not in 1972, and then he was turning in the air and they were dead and yoked to him forever, except that here this woman was in the foyer of the Metropolitan Pavilion.
“I’m sorry,” he heard his own voice say. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Salo,” she said quietly, “it wasn’t your fault.”
And right then, right there, he started to cry, not silently and not with restraint, and this was the first time, the only time, if he was being honest. All those years, not once: never by the roadside, or in the emergency room, or down in the horrible basement morgue with a pathetic Ace bandage on his wrist, or at either funeral. Never, it now occurred to him, with his wife, whose entire purpose, he knew, was to persuade him of the very thing this stranger had just, so matter-of-factly, said. Of course it was his fault. Every moment since that day had been formed around the understanding that it was his fault. He shook with the weeping, he felt its aftereffects on the skin of his cheeks, and chin, and neck. Both of those men, the impatient one who had pushed him aside and the impatient one behind the table, were looking at him now. Salo could see it, from the extreme blurred edge of his vision, but he couldn’t get himself to care about it. He might be a grown man in a business suit sobbing in the crowded entryway of the Metropolitan Pavilion, but for the first time in so many years our father was also standing still. Perfectly, beautifully still, and rooted to the ground. The endless tumbling that had been his life since that awful morning: it had all just … stopped.
“Do you want to come upstairs with me?” said Stella. “We could talk.”
He nodded. He had not one thing to say. The delirium of stasis had silenced him.
He followed her up three flights, barely able to catch his breath as they climbed, his absent wife, his children who did not acknowledge one another at school, the little-girl soldiers somewhere in that building, all now utterly forgotten. Salo kept his eye on her, on her slim legs climbing the steps, on the video camera bouncing against her hip. When they reached the fourth floor she led him through the booths to the back of the building. There were people here, but not as many as he’d expected, not with those crowds in the lobby.
“I thought there’d be more people,” he said to the back of her head.
“They’re all on the second floor, where the Dargers are. Apparently, no one can resist a female child with a penis and a sword.”