Objects in Motion, Objects at Rest

You know how this story ends. You may not know the details, the click of the rotating sprinkler heads, the sound of crunching glass and metal, the smell of sparklers mixed with ozone and blood, but you know the ending. Because, like all stories, if you follow the thread long enough, it ends in tragedy.

It ends at the 1998 Independence Day Block Party on Estrellita Circle, a charming little cul-de-sac community with a broad street and bright green lawns sprouting up out of the high plains. But it starts on a frigid day in early January when John Lucero shot himself in the head in the backseat of his Trans Am in the parking lot of an abandoned Sears.

There was a rare snowstorm that night that dropped an unprecedented 39 inches. Schools and stores closed as the town got the situation under control. It took 3 days for them to find the body, but at least the cold had preserved him.

John was a junior that year, along with my brother Ray. I was a freshman. Nobody knew why he did it, by all accounts he lived a pretty good life. He was handsome (or at least the other girls at school always said so) and he was a captain on the football team. But you never know what’s happening in someone else’s head.

In any case, this story isn’t about John. He had his own tragedy and his own story and that’s someone else’s to tell. It’s about what happened next.

When they finally found the body, the school did what schools do in that situation. They sent all the kids home, and we came back the next day to an army of counselors and therapists just begging us to talk about our problems. I didn’t even know John. I mean, I would have recognized him in the halls, but I didn’t really know him, so I didn’t have much to say to anyone. I feel kind of weird even talking about him now, but I have to for you to understand. Anyway, that didn’t stop a lot of people. People who he wouldn’t even have recognized were breaking down in the counselor’s office. And my brother took it really hard. Harder than any of us realized at the time.

It wasn’t that they were close. They played on the football team together, so they were acquaintances, but they didn’t hang out. I doubt they even had each other’s phone numbers. But John’s death haunted Ray. He spent a lot of time in the counselor’s office at the start. My parents were concerned, but I thought it was just a ploy to get out of classes. But he kept going, and talking, and crying, until he stopped going all at once. That should have been the first red flag. I don’t think grief stops all at once, doesn’t it kind of ease off, and heal slowly like a wound? Well maybe it was the first warning, but what would I have known? I was just a kid.

Ray and I had always been incredibly close. We were best friends, and we were both homebodies, so we had always spent a lot of time hanging around the house and chatting, sitting in the big front yard, and climbing the sycamore trees along Estrellita Circle when we were younger. We were never much for parties, even in his junior year, he never went drinking with his friends or stayed out late. But something had changed, and after that January he started to act differently. We would later find out that in his grief and panic he’d already fallen in with her.

His grades started to plummet. He started to break curfew, and would come home with glazed eyes and a stumbling gait. Mom and dad grounded him, obviously, and that helped a bit. But he would sneak out. Sometimes he’d get away with it, sometimes he’d get caught. They searched his room and found weed in his dresser. Not a huge deal now, but this was 1998, so you’d have thought the sky was falling. But there were worse things we’d find later, white powder and thin sheets of paper covered with cartoon characters. I didn’t recognize the LSD at the time, but my parents did.

He would pass his junior year, but it would end up being a close call. We all struggled with how far and fast Ray was falling, could it have just been mismanaged grief? But then she showed up. She came to pick him up one day driving 45 down our calm cul-de-sac in a beat up 1983 Ford Thunderbird and sliding to a screeching stop in front of our house. Apparently they’d been seeing each other for a while since John’s suicide. God knows why.

She wore a bomber jacket, ripped jeans, and had her blonde hair pulled up in a disheveled bun. She wasn’t normally what you’d think of as a teenage rebel, more like someone trying to dress the part, but she whistled for Ray who came running out to jump in her car, and she flicked a lit cigarette on our lawn. We saw her pretty often after that. Our parents forbade Ray from seeing her, but she’d still come speeding onto the cul-de-sac in the middle of the night to drop Ray off after he snuck out his window.

It pissed off the neighbors. There was talk of putting in speed bumps along our road. My parents were appalled.

It wasn’t just her, I would learn later. There was a whole new crew Ray was spending time with. But I never met them. They would drop acid and attend underground concerts in an old bunker outside of town, and get drunk out on the range, shooting guns and fence posts until the ranchers came and drove them off. My parents had to bail Ray out of jail once for trespassing. He ended up getting community service.

Our relationship deteriorated entirely. I hated what he was doing, and I just wanted him to be safe. So I told my parents when I saw him sneaking out, and for that he cut me out entirely. We all tried so hard to stop the fall, and when we couldn’t we thought maybe he’d grow out of it. It’s the grief after all. He’s young and stupid, sure, but he’s young, and there’s plenty of time to grow out of high school idiocy.

He would keep getting grounded. He got fired from his part-time job. My parents wouldn’t give him money. They took his car. But then she would keep speeding down the cul-de-sac and he would hop into that Thunderbird and they would drive off. And so it went.

Spring turned to summer, and we’re back at the block party.

The Independence Day Block Party is the high point of the year on Estrellita Circle. Our neighborhood has wide streets and deep yards, spotted with tall, old sycamore trees with tire swings hanging from their long branches. The lawns are green and manicured, a time-honored competition between the homeowners. On July 4 everyone moves the party to their front yards. Grills and coolers full of beer line the sidewalks. We close the cul-de-sac as much as possible to make room for bounce-houses and to let the kids play street hockey. At night we set off fireworks into the wide open sky. It’s the most fun party of the year, and we all look forward to it, but that year was different.

Things had been better with Ray over the last couple weeks. He agreed to see a therapist again and had started to spend more evenings at home. She would still call the landline and hang up as soon as anyone other than Ray answered, but things were moving in the right direction. Until the night before the block party, when Ray snuck out again.

My parents tried to track him down. They called his friends, his friends’ parents, eventually the police. They even went out looking for him all night, to return at around 4:30am, just before dawn. They collapsed on the front porch and took turns calling numbers while the other rested as the hours creeped by. The block party slowly took shape.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day. 82 degrees of dry heat and a warm, cloudless sky. Grills were set up and we heard the sizzling of hotdogs and burgers as we panicked more and more. American flags waved above pickup trucks. Someone lit a sparkler. Kids played hockey in the street.

The air hummed with a quiet tension. Things were in motion, like a series of movie frames driving inexorably toward their conclusion. I sat on the front porch swing and watched my parents pace. Neighbors came by with beers to chat. My parents tried to make small talk, but mostly pushed them away. Another sparkler. Someone’s sprinklers come on so the kids can run through them. The brilliant sky vibrated blue and gold.

Ray shows back up at 2:15pm. The party is in full swing. The Thunderbird comes speeding around the corner of Estrellita at its usual 45 miles per hour. But she doesn’t know about the block party. She sees the road is closed and starts to swerve, cutting around a barricade and overcorrecting near a fire hydrant. The wheels screech and the breaks scream, but it’s too late. Things are in motion. There’s a lot of yelling, someone drops a beer can.

The Thunderbird slides and the wheels turn again, it clips the edge of the bounce house, deflating it but missing everyone inside. It turns back toward the road but, you see, she also doesn’t know about the new speed bumps. She hits a speed bump and the car jumps the curb, its right front wheel spinning out in the mud on our neighbor’s lawn. Ray leans out to shout something to my parents. He’s scared, his eyes are glazed.

When the wheel gets traction again it takes one last lurch forward. Ray’s eyes meet mine, and for a moment nothing moves at all, the world just hangs in breathless silence, and the weight of a life that we will never see passes between us, then vanishes like steam. The car slams into a 65 foot sycamore tree, glass shatters and metal roars as it tears apart, and the Thunderbird comes to a stop. The engine hisses, the metal whines, and all else is still for a moment.

But just for a moment. Because then the screaming starts.

She will later blow a 1.0 once she regains consciousness, God only knows how drunk she was while she was driving. She’s saved by her airbag and seatbelt. She breaks her nose and her left arm, and gets a pretty bad concussion. She will make a full recovery.

But Ray is leaning out of the window trying to shout to my parents when the car accordions around him. The frame collapses, hitting him below his left ribs and above his right hip, slicing muscle, bone, and flesh. He falls to the grass. I watch him try to crawl towards us across the perfectly manicured lawn, oblivious to the extent of the damage. You need legs to crawl.

We run to him. I put my head on his and hold him. There’s tears and yelling. Then the sirens, then the police, then the coroner, then the quiet. And through it all the gorgeous, cloudless sky looks down, no longer radiant, but hostile and empty. It doesn’t seem right. The world should weep with us.

And there you have it, the tragedy. But the thing about tragedy, true tragedy, is that it wounds. When you’re lucky, the wounds leave scars, and when you’re not, the wounds never heal.

It’s now July 4, 2015, and I’m in a dingy, basement dive bar, the kind where the floor sticks to your shoes when you walk and it might as well always be 3am. I always get as far underground as possible on the 4th of July, and as far into a bottle as I can so that I can forget (I can’t) and stop feeling the things I feel (I won’t). I drink whiskey until it burns, and then until it stops burning, and I think thoughts I shouldn’t think (but I will).

She did some time in juvy I think, but she was a minor and she’s moved on with her life. She doesn’t wear the bomber or the torn jeans, and she covers her tattoos. I think she’s married now, with kids of her own. They probably live in the suburbs. Maybe they have block parties. Maybe she goes to them with her family and lights sparklers and chats with her neighbors about the PTA. She probably even sneaks a glass of sauvignon blanc here or there because, after all, who would be the wiser?

She probably doesn’t think about my brother much these days. She’s probably moved on. She certainly doesn’t think of me.

But I think of her. She’s all I think about. She occupies my every waking moment, and I can’t even speak her name.