The Beginning of Everything(77)

Cassidy lapsed into silence again, and I didn’t blame her. I reached for her hand, and we stared down at our hands clasped together. At mine, calloused from tennis but growing soft. At hers, small and freckled and trembling, with gold nail polish that had largely chipped off.

She pulled her hand away, wiping her eyes and sniffling even though she wasn’t quite crying.

“One night,” she continued, “he snuck a scalpel out of his lab and into his dorm room. And he called to tell me he was so scared, and so sorry, and so stressed, and I told him to fly home. I told him I’d take the train down that weekend, and we’d talk to Mom and Dad together. But they were awful about it. We were at this stupid fancy restaurant out in Back Bay, and they kept ordering drinks and arguing low over our entrees, and finally Owen grabbed Mom’s keys and just slammed out of there. And I didn’t stop him. I didn’t run after him and make him give me the keys.”

Cassidy turned to me, choking to hold back her tears.

“But he died of a, um, heart thing,” I said. “Not a car accident.”

“Ezra,” Cassidy said, begging me to understand. “When he left the restaurant, he took our mom’s black Land Rover.”

I felt my whole soul twist as I realized what she was telling me. The car. The one at Jonas Beidecker’s party that hadn’t stopped after it crashed into the side of my roadster.

“No,” I said as the full weight of it hit me head on. I was slammed back into the memory of that night, the jolt of our collision, the sickening skid of everything I’d wanted and everything I’d had slipping through my outstretched hands. It was the answer to the wrong mystery—the mystery I didn’t ever want to solve.

And so we sat there in the sickening sillage of the truth, neither of us angry, or upset, just muddling through this shared sorrow, this collective pity. And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor, and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unheroically injured things that people never write poems about, I didn’t.

“How long have you known?” I managed.

“The afternoon of the dance,” she said. “When you called me from the florist.”

“Voldemort the Volvo,” I said, remembering.

So that was what had happened. I’d supplied the missing details of the accident. And once I’d unknowingly told her, she’d wanted to get as far away from me as possible. She wasn’t running from me, she was running from the obligation of having to look me in the eye and tell me exactly who’d driven that black SUV through the stop sign.

“You know, he told us that he hit a tree.” Cassidy shook her head. “And my parents were furious, but they believed him. I went back to Barrows, and he stayed home since he wasn’t feeling well, but I figured he was just avoiding school. He thought it was panic attacks, you know? Because there’s this horrible joke that med students always think they have some fatal disease, and he didn’t want to be laughed at. But he had this embolism from the accident, and the clot got into his heart. Four days later, my parents came home and found him dead.”

Cassidy squeezed my hand and stared up at me, as though asking forgiveness. For what, I wasn’t quite sure.

I was thinking about how her brother had died in that house. It made an odd sort of sense, the way it had always felt ghostly to me, haunted. No wonder she never wanted to go home.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled.

Cassidy shrugged, because as far as I know, scientists have yet to discover the proper reaction to “I’m sorry.”

“What I can’t figure out,” she persisted, “is why he didn’t say he hit anyone. Maybe he was so out of it that he honestly thought you were a tree.”

“Or maybe it wasn’t him,” I said, hardly daring to hope. “There are lots of black SUVs in Eastwood.”

“Ezra,” Cassidy chided, like I was being irrational. “The Friday night before prom, around ten? The roads between Terrace Bluffs and Back Bay? It was him. I couldn’t tell my parents. I haven’t told anyone, except you.”

She smiled sadly, and squeezed my hand again, in a way that constricted my heart.

“Well, I’m glad you did,” I said. “It’s better this way. We’re two sides of the same tragic coin. It’s like we were tied together before we even met.”

“No,” Cassidy said fiercely. “It’s not like that. Don’t you see? We can’t ever be together. When I look at you now, all I see is Owen. I see him dead in you. The way you’re sitting with your leg out, I see him crashing that car into you. And I think, how can I introduce you to my parents? The boy their dead son cripp—injured, sorry. So we can’t. Not ever.”

I considered this. Stared at the industrial clock on the far wall without really seeing it. Ran a hand through my hair. And then I looked over at her, aching to hold her close to me but knowing not to. Maybe part of me had already started to understand that reaching for Cassidy was the same as pushing her away. Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

“I wish you’d let me decide what I want to do,” I finally said. “Because I’m serious, none of this changes that I miss you and want you back. We’re so good together, and it’s a tragedy in its own right to throw that away because of something neither of us did. Because the way I figure it, everyone gets a tragedy. And all things considered, I’m glad that car accident was mine. Otherwise I wouldn’t be applying to East Coast colleges, or on the debate team, or any of those things, because I wouldn’t have met you.”