Crash (11 page)

24

School Days

Neil came home from his first day of school exhausted. He collapsed onto the couch and slept until I woke him for dinner. He woke up with a headache. I gave him some Tylenol. At the supper table we fished for details about his first day. Neil could be a typical monosyllabic teenager at times, and our conversations sometimes felt more like interrogations than discourse. We learned that his two classes were physics and calculus, his two advanced placement courses. He had missed out on several weeks of work and had come home with stacks of makeup assignments.

“Do you think you can catch up?” I asked him.

“We’ll see,” he said into his pork chops, not lifting his head. He disappeared into his room after supper.

Neil woke up the morning after his first day sore. He showed me chafing bruises under each armpit where his crutches had rubbed his skin raw.

“Try to keep your weight in your hands, not your underarms,” I advised him. I padded the crutches with gauze and tape and drove him to his second day. I dropped him off at the side door where he could take the elevator and avoid the school’s slick granite stairs. I sat in the car waiting several minutes until I thought Neil would be safely ensconced in his class. Then I entered the school too and went to find Neil’s guidance counselor. I had met with Mrs. Bombard many times during Neil’s junior and senior years. She had been invaluable at helping Neil put together a list of colleges to apply to. His top choice was Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He had fallen in love with its bucolic campus the previous year on our college road trip. He had applied early decision but hadn’t gotten in. Mrs. Bombard was fairly confident that if he could just bring up his physics grade, he could get in through the regular admissions process. Now that was all in question. Now I just wanted Neil to finish high school.

What I didn’t know at the time, though maybe I should have, was that I could have applied for a 504 plan for Neil. Part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it requires school systems to put in place accommodations for students with disabilities so they can participate fully in the school’s curriculum. I hadn’t known such a thing existed. I only learned about it years later at a Brain Injury Association conference. I knew I could have applied for disability for him, but I didn’t really think of him as disabled. I also didn’t want to saddle him with a label or stigmatize him among his peers. I also knew I could have applied for special education services that would have qualified him for an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan. But I feared that going from making the honor roll to needing special education services would wound Neil’s ego or mark him like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Maybe a 504 plan wouldn’t have looked so very different from the accommodations his school was already making for him—a shorter class day, exemption from midterm exams—but as a doctor and his mother, when I learned of the possibility of a 504 plan, I felt that I had let my son down.

I went to see Mrs. Bombard with the hopes that she could reassure me about Neil’s abilities. That he would finish the year successfully, maybe even go on to college. But the guidance counselor was too caught up in her own uneasiness.

She offered me a chair at her desk. She asked about Neil. But she was obviously distracted.

“They keep sending me students to counsel over Trista’s death and Neil’s accident,” she told me, clearly still shaken. “I don’t even know how to deal with it myself. What am I supposed to say to them?”

I knew I wasn’t going to get the reassurance I needed. At least not today. I shook her hand.

“No one knows what to say,” I told her honestly. “I’m sure the students just want someone to talk to.”

Neil gradually caught up with his classmates in every course except one. He dropped AP physics at his teacher’s suggestion and replaced it with the regular level physics class. With that move he was able to bring up his grade in the one class his guidance counselor thought had doomed his early-decision chances at Skidmore.

I continued driving Neil to school every morning and picking him up every afternoon. I never asked him if he wanted to go back to taking the bus. He had ridden the bus with Trista every day since September. I thought riding the bus alone would have been too painful, her seat next to him now empty. Also, to catch the bus he would have had to traverse the same path he’d walked the night they were hit by the drunk driver. I didn’t think he’d be anxious to retrace those fateful steps any time soon.

After just a few weeks of adjusting to this truncated schedule, Neil was able to ramp up to a full day. He traded in his crutches for a hand-carved walking stick he picked out himself at a camping store. At this point he could bear weight easily on his injured leg, using the stick more for security and balance than actual support. Once I was sure Neil was able to tolerate the full day, I too went back to work. But I kept my hours part-time, arriving later and leaving earlier than I used to so that I could continue transporting my son.

I liked driving him. I felt like I was contributing to his safety and his recovery. It also gave us some enforced alone time together. Sometimes we drove in silence. But sometimes he shared his struggles with me. He told me things were often awkward at school.

“Everybody stops talking whenever I walk into a room, Mom. When is that going to end?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. This was a huge tragedy for the whole community. A teenage life had been lost. Another teenager would make his way through the courts—and the headlines—for many months to come. And Neil was the face of that tragedy: a living reminder of how this community had changed and all it had been through.

Neil tried to move on. He dated briefly in high school. He felt his friends were judging him for moving too quickly. The relationship eventually ended. He dated again in college, but he told me the girl acted a little too much like Trista, and so he broke things off.

If Neil reminded Newburyport of all it had been through, Newburyport reminded Neil of everything he’d lost. He ached to leave town, to move on. I suppose most teenagers feel the same way, anxious for the next phase of their lives to begin. But for Neil the future couldn’t come fast enough, because the past carried so much pain.

25

Court

The court appearances began immediately after the accident. The drunk driver was arrested the night of the crash and charged with reckless driving, two counts of driving while under the influence, being a minor in possession of alcohol and marijuana, and two counts of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in personal injury. He was arraigned the next day, the day of Neil’s surgery, the day of Trista’s death. It was the only court appearance where our families were unrepresented. It was the one time he would not have to look us in the eye. Either Saul or I and both Mary and David Zinck made it to all the other hearings, arraignments, sentencings, and changes of plea.

The wheels of justice turned slowly, and we did not always like the path it took. Two weeks after Trista died, the drunk driver incurred additional charges: motor vehicle homicide and leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death. He posted bail and was free that same afternoon. More than a year later, he finally changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to three and a half years in the House of Correction. That lenient punishment was a tough blow for us. We had done our best to argue for a lengthier jail term. We had read our carefully constructed victim impact statements detailing all the difficulties Neil was having—all the ways the drunk driver had changed his life—but to no avail.

The spring after the accident, another young man was charged with providing the alcohol to the drunk driver. He had purchased beer across state lines with a fake ID and provided an unsupervised home for his buddies to get drunk. He was nineteen at the time. He had graduated from Newburyport High School the previous year. To his credit, he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to a year in jail. But in the week he was given to get his affairs in order before serving his time, he had a change of heart. He hired a new lawyer and changed his plea to not guilty, necessitating more court appearances, including one before the State Supreme Court, where his lawyer challenged the legality of the original charge. (He lost.) I can understand a mother’s desire to keep her child out of jail, but the change of plea and the appeal of his conviction added to our feeling of being pushed and pulled by the judiciary.

The owners of the liquor store where the alcohol was illegally purchased faced their own charges. They lost a civil suit against them and were ordered to pay eight million dollars, the largest penalty in Massachusetts history. Neither Neil nor the Zincks have ever seen a dime.

Neil rarely went to any of these appearances. At first he was not well enough. Later he did not want to replay Trista’s death or face her killer. He once told me he feared he would attack him. I always let Neil know of each hearing, inviting him to say his piece. I have to admit, I was always relieved when he declined. I couldn’t protect him against everything, but I could shield him from this.

26

The Media

From the beginning, ours was a story that people couldn’t get enough of. For weeks our story led the evening news, or if there was a really big breaking story, we might come in second. Reporters hounded us for comments. We’d find evidence of them everywhere. Our answering machine was filled with messages from them. When we opened the front door, their business cards came fluttering down to the doorjamb like confetti. We’d even catch camera crews in front of our house, using it as background for their stories on the six o’clock news. Journalists and camera crews covered almost every court appearance the drunk driver made. Whenever we left the courthouse, microphones were thrust in our faces. Journalists’ pads and pens were ever ready to copy down our responses: us, the victims.

Saul and I shied away from the coverage. We are both private people by nature. We knew there was no way to keep our story out of the papers altogether, but we weren’t eager to add our personal take on things.

We also wanted to protect Neil.

We weren’t always successful. Saul and I always tried to get to the phone first when it rang. We turned down reporters’ requests for comments from our son.

But we had to go out for milk once in a while.

One day while I was out on a quick grocery store run, my cell phone rang. It was Neil.

“They want to interview me,” he said. My heart raced.

“Who’s they?” I asked. I had already abandoned my grocery cart and was headed toward my car.

“I don’t know. I think she works at ABC. I told them you’d be back in an hour.”

I exhaled.

“That’s good, Neil. Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

It’s one thing for the media to stick microphones in our faces and shout questions, but Neil still suffered from headaches and memory loss. His response time was slow. It took a few minutes for him to process things. They’d eat him alive.

When I got to the house (less than a five-minute drive from the store), Rhondella Richardson, an on-air reporter from ABC, was teetering down our brick steps in high heels. Behind her, an unkempt cameraman shouldered a huge video recorder, his middle-aged paunch stretching out against his white T-shirt and over his jeans.

“What are you doing?” I yelled, half in and half out of my car.

Rhondella turned, her made-up, camera-ready face souring at the sight of me.

“My son just told you his parents weren’t home,” I shouted.

“We were going to ask his permission,” she huffed.

“He’s seventeen. He told you to wait an hour until I got home. That was five minutes ago. You had to know he was alone,” I railed.

My heart was racing. I am not a confrontational person by nature, and here I was confronting a famous Boston reporter. Then I remembered one spring when a robin built a nest in the rhododendrons in front of our house. When the baby birds hatched, the mother robin began dive-bombing us as we came and went through the front door. I felt like that protective bird dive-bombing perceived danger.

I asked her to leave my property.

“They all won’t be as nice as me,” she warned, her face turning ugly as she clicked back up the brick steps. “At least I called first.” Her response was charged and accusatory, as if she were the victim by not being granted access to my son.

I ran inside locking the front door behind me. I called Saul.

“Rhondella Richardson was at our front door, ready to interview Neil,” I panted, still short of breath from my uncharacteristic rant.

“Calm down. Where are they now?” Saul’s voice smoothed my ruffled feathers.

I parted the blinds and looked up at the road. Rhondella Richardson was speaking into her microphone gesturing toward our house as the camera rolled.

“They’re still here. They’re at the top of the stairs filming.”

“Just let it go, Cal. They won’t be back.”

And they weren’t. Despite the reporter’s insistence that others “wouldn’t be as nice” as she, the fact was everyone else was very professional, keeping their distance, respecting our privacy when asked. The media attention gradually died down, flaring up only occasionally over the years, when the drunk driver changed his plea or came up for parole. They also stopped calling us for comments. They knew a journalistic dead end when they saw one.

Mary and David were much more eager to give quotes to the media. A drunk driver had stolen their only daughter from them. They were deeply wronged, wounded, filled with rage at the injustice of it all, and anxious for the public to hear their story. They quickly became the media’s go-to family, always ready with a reaction to any verdict or sentence. Their sound bites were raw, agonizing.

“There’s no spot in hell hot enough for him,” David said after one sentencing.

“He is a murderer and he’s free. My daughter’s in the ground,” Mary lamented bluntly when the drunk driver was let out of jail.

We did allow one reporter to spend time with Neil. Meredith Goldstein of the
Boston Globe
contacted us about a year after the crash to do a feature article. At the time, the drunk driver was less than a week away from his sentencing. Neil, Saul, and I talked about it together and weighed the pros and cons. None of us liked interviews, but perhaps we could have some positive impact. Perhaps whatever Meredith wrote would be read by the judge and influence him to administer a lengthy sentence. We agreed to the interview. Maybe it helped that she was a member of the tribe.

We met at The Grog, a local watering hole, and together crowded into one of the creaky wooden booths in the back of the dim, noisy restaurant. We ordered Cokes all around and talked for hours. We liked Meredith, a young woman not so many years older than our son. She treated us all with respect and listened closely to our responses to her queries.

By the end of the evening it was clear that what she was really interested in was doing a story on Neil—on how he was progressing after his loss. By now we felt comfortable enough with her to let her have an additional meeting with Neil, one-on-one and without us. They arranged to meet a few evenings later, again at The Grog. We kissed Neil good-bye then waited nervously for his return.

“How was it?” we asked when he came home several hours later.

“Kind of fun,” he said. I wouldn’t have predicted that would be the word he would use, but I was glad.

A photographer came to the house the next day, taking many photos of Neil in many poses. He helped pick one for the story.

What resulted was not the hard-driving judge-influencing piece we’d hoped for, but a thoughtful profile called “The Cadence of Grief.” Meredith portrayed Neil as a sensitive, caring young man, doing his best to adjust to life without his first true love; trying hard to honor her memory by living his own life with quiet authenticity.

After so many bad experiences with reporters over that year—watching them get things wrong, having their microphones and cameras shoved in our faces, chasing them away from our home—here was a woman who seemed to focus on Neil as a person, not a story. She may not have completely restored our faith in the media, but Meredith showed us what one kind reporter was capable of.