Chapter 3: Grief

Less than two weeks after graduation, Theo's boyfriend Derek died.

It was one of those stupid and thoroughly avoidable teenage tragedies. Six teens, all of them drunk, were packed into a sports car that could barely seat four. They were coming down the mountain road from Greyloft to Lakeside when the driver lost control and the car flipped. Everyone except the driver was thrown from the car. The 19-year-old driver was killed instantly, and two others, including Derek, died shortly thereafter of their injuries.

Theo was a widow, or at least felt that way. It was her first experience with this kind of intimate death. She had known elderly relatives who had passed away, but their deaths were not unexpected and everyone said they lead full lives. Derek was just starting his. His death came came out of the blue and made no sense whatsoever. He was a smart boy, #11 in their class by grade-point average. He was heading to Princeton in the Fall, and, as they said over and over at the funeral, he had everything to look forward to.

Theo cried for a few hours, but the more dominant feeling was a sense of unreality, like she was watching the whole thing from afar. Once the initial shock wore off, she realized that she had certain duties to perform. As the unofficial widow, she saw herself as responsible not just for her own grief but for shepherding everyone else through theirs. She played the role of counselor to Derek's younger siblings and to countless of her classmates. She told each of them what they needed to hear based on their own belief system, and she watched herself do it, evaluating her own performance after each encounter.

In truth, her relationship with Derek had been complicated. They had been dating through all of senior year and outwardly they looked solid, but in her mind she had broken up with him a hundred times. They were in love, it seemed, but Theo couldn't quite say what love was. Was it sex? Yes, they had plenty of that, mostly in the back seat of her car, and they always said, "I love you" afterwards, but it still wasn't terribly clear what should happen next. Derek had dropped hints of marriage and family. Was that what she wanted, too? She didn't know.

"The only problem," she told Derek in her fantasies, "is that I don't know what I want yet. It's too soon to make plans because I don't know who am or what I want to be."

But she never said this to Derek directly. She would never do anything to hurt him -- directly. She knew he was very emotionally dependent on her and would be crushed if she withdrew. Instead, she let geography do the dirty work. The truth is, she had been accepted to Princeton, too, but when decision time came, she chose Brown instead, a half day's drive away (at least for him). She liked Brown and wanted to go there, but the fact that Derek wasn't going there may have secretly factored into her decision.

But she wasn't ready to let him go so soon. For one thing, he knew her secret, at least better than anyone outside her family. She had made an investment in explaining it to him -- how she could "walk through walls". It was a lot to swallow, but he seemed to accept it and feel comfortable with it even if he didn't fully understand and couldn't see it for himself. "All that matters is that you love me," he said. She wasn't sure she could do any better than that in the outside world. Should she give up the safety of Derek for the possibility that no one would ever love her again? She was afraid of being suffocated by him, but she was equally afraid of being alone.

She had run through countless scenerios in her mind for how their relationship might end. In one scenario, she would meet a special boy at Brown, one who knew her better than Derek, and she would have to break the news ever so gently to him over the phone. In another hypothetical scene, she would "pop in" on Derek unannounced, just to surprise him, and would find him with another woman at Princeton. This second scenario always incensed her and made her insanely jealous, which she herself recognized as incompatible with the first scenario.

Now all the fantasies and scenarios were moot. That's one of the things that disoriented her about Derek's death: There was no more room for speculation. All of the endless possibilities between them, all the infinitely maleable futures, had now been reduced to a single, non-negotiable reality.

* * *

Through the predictable cycle of grief, from the first unconfirmed news to reasonably stable acceptance, Theo's step-dad Howard was on call, doing what little he could to soothe the pain and enforce normalcy around her. This meant, in part, managing Mom. Theo's mom was a wreck, as usual, and the irony was not lost on Theo that she was consoling her mother about Derek's death and not the other way around. Theo knew from their past that her Mom could be strong when she had to be, but when she didn't have to be, she often crumbled at the slightest frustration. Thanks in part to Howard's strength, Mom was crumbling a lot these days, even without the deaths.

But this time around, Theo had another supporter: her other dad, her biological one. He appeared the day after the deaths were announced, as if he had read the newspapers. Theo was walking alone in the woods when her father turned up beside her. He looked clean and freshly shaven this time, not quite as scraggly as usual.

"Hi!" he said, and that was all she needed to throw her arms around him and start sobbing.

"Oh, babe, it's okay," he said, in just the right tone.

She didn't know for certain how much he knew, but she felt like he knew it all.

"So what does it mean, kitten?" he asked.

Theo's dad wasn't one to get bogged down in details. He rarely volunteered specifics about his own activities or asked for them from her. Instead, he usually spoke at a higher, more philosophical level. "What does it mean?" was one of his favorite lines.

"It means," she said, "that I should never fall in love."

"If that's what you choose it to mean," he said. "The message to me would be 'Everything is temporary.' That's the nature of life. Enjoy your friends today because they may not be around tomorrow. You'll still fall in love again, but even your new love is going to pass out of your life eventually. C'est la vie."

She turned to look at him. "Are you going to die?"

"I'm heading that way. Probably not tomorrow or the next day, but sooner or later. I don't know about you, but I'm aiming for 100."

"Don't you know when?"

"No."

"But you can see things that I can't see. You saw that bullet coming at me and stopped it. Couldn't you have done the same for Derek?"

"I could but I can't. There are billions of threads. I can't monitor all of them. It's like listening to billions of radio stations at once. Could you do that? No. The best you can do is listen to two or three radio stations, and even then the quality of your attention is degraded. The rest of those transmissions you got to let go. They have to go their own way."

"You mean you have to let people die."

"Yes."

"I guess I'm glad I don't have that skill."

"Ah, but you do, my dear. Maybe not in the same way I do, but you are deciding even now who will live and who will die."

"How so?"

"You're walking in the woods. Instead, you could be feeding a starving child in Africa. You could be preventing a horrible murder or even genocide someplace else. For most people, these are only academic questions, but for you they are real. What if someone could have taken out Hitler before the Second World War? Think of the millions of lives that could have been saved. That's the sort of thing you're capable of."

"But I don't want to kill people," said Theo.

"You're doing it right now. You're killing people by neglecting to save them."

Something occurred to Theo. "You know," she said. "I could have saved Derek myself. I was invited to Jerry's beer bash, but I decide not to go. I thought it was stupid. If I had been there, I would have had my own car; Derek probably would have ridden with me, and he'd still be alive today."

"So you killed him then."

"No, I don't feel that way. There is no way I could have known. It was Derek's choice to get into that car. I couldn't be there to protect him from every possible threat. Nobody can."

"Exactly. Now suppose that you did know what was going to happen. Let's say you knew about the accident three days in advance. Would you have tried to stop it?

"Of course!"

"But what if you knew about everyone's death in advance? Is it your responsibility to go around trying to save everyone?"

"Is that within your power?" she asked.

"Not exactly, but this is more of an academic exercise. If you could predict all deadly threats before they happened, is it your responsibility to save everyone?"

Theo thought about it for a moment. "I guess I would write a software program that gave everyone information when they would be in peril. People could just call it up on a website and save themselves."

He laughed. "Good answer," he said, "but not the one I was fishing for. The correct answer is that you can't try to save everyone because it is simply beyond your resources to do so. Even your website is going to run into resource problems in some form. Instead, you have to make strategic decisions about who you are going to save and who you're going to let go, so you achieve the maximum possible good in the end."

"So how do you decide? How do you know who to save and who to let die?"

"That, my dear Theodosia, is the subject of my new training program: Saving the World 101. If you act now and call our 800 number, we may be able to enroll you in the next session."

"No thanks," said Theodosia. "I'm going to college."

"But you do have the summer don't you?"

"I'm working," said Theo, although she privately had some doubts. Her summer job was open to negotiation now that Derek wouldn't be there. Still, she wasn't prepared to release that information to her father.

"How about our two weeks, then? Aren't we still good for that?"

"Sure," said Theo cheerfully, suddenly filled with warm memories of summers past. The divorce decree gave her dad two weeks of exclusive vacation time with his daughter every summer, and he always used it, even when if he was flaky the rest of the year. Now that she was 18, she was a little worried he would forget. "What should I wear?" she said, "bathing suit or snow suit?"

"Just come as you are. We'll wing it from there."

"When?" asked Theo.

"How about next week. Monday at noon. You think you can get your affairs in order by then?"

"I think so," she said. "Where shall we meet?"

"Let's make it simple this time: Eiffel Tower, troisième étage. We've been there before."

"I remember. Is that noon my time or Paris time?"

"Paris time. You'll have to figure it out. Bring your passport!"

"Got it! See you then!"

He stayed behind as she hopped cheerfully into the woods, just like he remembered her.

* * *

Jerry Schnieder had a new car and three cases of beer that needed drinking. Don't ask where the beer came from; he just had it. He invited some of his best buddies to partake of it with him up at Greyloft and when they declined due to some lame-ass competing party, he invited some of his less best buddies. He ended up with Josh, Karen, David, Derek, Amber and himself. Derek's girlfriend Theo respectfully declined, saying she had some other engagement, but that wasn't any great loss. The real catch of the day was Amber, who was a babe of the highest caliber and currently unattached. Jerry looked forward royally to the opportunity to get her inebriated.

The car was a red Mustang convertible that Jerry's grandparents had bought for him in honor of his graduation. In honesty, his grades hadn't been all that great, but just the fact that he graduated at all was cause for celebration. He made ample use of the Mustang during the post-graduation parties but thus far had been unable to turn it into any serious girlie action.

In town, they all piled into the Mustang with Jerry at the wheel and the girls, unfortunately, sitting in other guys' laps. Jerry tried to compensate by burning rubber and squealing around turns, screaming past Lakeside and treating the mountain road like a video game. At the Greyloft overlook, they scrounged for firewood and whatever else would burn and built a towering campfire. The passengers seemed a bit stiff at first, but under the influence of the Jerry's magic brew, they all loosened up quickly. David produced a couple of joints, which added flavor to the moment.

By midnight, the two girls were trying, with some modest success, to do Arabian-style belly dances in front of the fire, having tied up their shirts to expose their midriffs. Derek provided a drum accompaniment on the bottom of a five-gallon bucket and the other boys were as mesmerized as cobras before the snake charmer.

Someone suggested they all go swimming down at Lakeside, but no one had any bathing suits. Someone else suggested they go skinny dipping. The girls giggled and said, "Sure!" and then the boys were, like, totally "Sure!" The campfire was hastily put out, and everyone piled back into the Mustang.

Jerry knew he was impaired, but he thought he knew his limits. He drove slower going down than he did coming up, and he didn't squeal around the turns this time. He held pretty squarely to the road, given his condition. The thing he wasn't counting on was the man standing in the middle of it.

It must have been a homeless guy. Jerry swerved to avoid him, but he turned too far. One side of the car caught an embankment and the car started to spin on its axis, and that was the last conscious experience Jerry had in this world.

After the noise went away, Derek lay dying on the pavement. His lower body had been crushed after the car rolled over him, but he was still conscious. He couldn't move and he couldn't breath, but he could see that a man was walking toward him, the same man who had been standing calmly in the road. In his last shimmers of consciousness, Derek recognized who it was: Theo's dad, whom he had met him at the reception.

"I'm sorry, dude, I really am," said Theo's dad. "This isn't the way I wanted things to be. It was just the way it all turned out."

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