Wrecked (15 page)

“How are you, Mama? I was so happy when Papa said you were alive. That was the most important thing for me.”

Right. Fuck the rest of them. She would probably rather have died if her sons could have lived as a result. But there are no deals to be made. Just coincidence and misfortune.

“I know. Yes. I’m alive.” She says this in a strange voice. Has she gone crazy? She sounds very … not the way she usually
sounds. She’s speaking in a different voice. Higher. More shrill. As if everything that happened were hilarious. “Are you in pain?”

“No, they are giving me painkillers. I burned my feet. I can see it, but I can’t feel it. And a vertebra in the middle of my back is broken. Ha.”

Wow, she’s laughing. She has gone crazy. But I guess that’s the very least that would happen after something like this. My own mother is crazy. Or is it just the drugs? Hope so. Painkillers. Psychotropic?

“I don’t want to stay here. I told them they need to take me home. They are going to drive me home tomorrow. They’re overcrowded here anyway. I’m going home in an ambulance.”

“Mama? Are you serious? You can be transported? You’ll be home tomorrow?”

“No, not home, you dummy.”

Jesus, why is she talking to me like that? She’s never called me a dummy before. This word isn’t even a part of her vocabulary, as far as I know. She’s also speaking to me in German, which she never does. Normally I speak German to her and she answers in English. Normally. But nothing is normal right now. Nothing will be normal again after today.

“They are taking me to the hospital near our house. You know the one I mean? Where Lukas was born.”

But Lukas is … better change the subject.

“Yes. Aha, that one. Then we’ll fly back to Germany tomorrow. So I’m able to be with you.”

“But you have to get married. It’s no big deal if we’re not all there.”

“Yeah, we’ll get married and then fly back.”

My boyfriend looks angrily at me. I press my lips together, open my eyes wide, and shrug my shoulders.

What am I supposed to say? I want to get off the phone. I’m not going to argue with a crazy person. Get married. Sure.

“See you tomorrow, Mama. I’ll be there. I’ll take care of you tomorrow.”

“Have fun tomorrow,” she says in a quivering, distant voice. She’s aged years. But at least she’s high on Ecstasy or something.

I hang up.

My eyes are only half-open. I let out a long, deep sigh. The tension of the last few hours and, most of all, of having to talk to my crazy mother on the phone dissipates. I’m no longer the main focus of pity. Unfortunately. Now that my mother has survived, we all have to look after her. I won’t be taking care of myself; I’ll be taking care of her. Hold everything. In my head I have to go back and reorient myself. No more taking; giving.

My head starts to spin. I’m drunk. Finally. I want to sleep. One more call. I need to rebook the return flight for tomorrow.

In English I say, “Good evening. We have an emergency. We’re a large wedding group. The wedding was supposed to take place tomorrow. But there’s been a massive accident on the autobahn. My three brothers are dead. We need to fly back tomorrow to visit the injured in the hospital.”

They give us two seats in a plane going first thing in the morning.

My boyfriend’s family will have to wait another day for a return flight. He calls and explains it to them. They’ll have to kill time in England, in the country near the eastern coast. All they have with them are nice party clothes. Nobody thought about having to attend a funeral. I don’t believe in funerals
anyway. Load of nonsense. We don’t believe in Christ, after all. We believe only in Coincidence.

They’ll just have to go for walks or whatever it is people do when a wedding is canceled. I can’t take care of them. They are all still alive. They are adults and they’ll just have to figure things out for themselves. There’s nothing else I can do.

We lie down in the guest room. Here everything is dark purple, even the toilet paper in the bathroom. We stare at the ceiling, wiped out from dealing with the good and bad news. We don’t say a word. Then we fall asleep. There’s nothing either of us can do for the other. I noticed that the first day. It’s every man for himself.

That’s when it started. Working through everything alone. The various ways of mourning. The disgust at the other person’s mourning. Grief doesn’t bring you together. It splits you apart. We aren’t holding together, we’re pulling apart.

We are awoken with tea at our bedside.

“Morning. Wakey, wakey!” Everyone in our family says that when they wake someone up. “We have to leave for the airport soon.”

Headache. Fucking alcohol. Can’t someone invent something that you drink with alcohol to eliminate the hangover? Mankind is still super primitive, when you think about it.

Neither of us showers. In a situation like this, you have to stick to the basics. We stay in the same clothes we fell asleep in and eat an unhealthy English breakfast. Toast with salty butter and marmalade that has more sugar than fruit. Sweets for breakfast. Disgusting.

My uncle is usually a funny guy. In every family photo he’s holding a can of beer in one hand and flipping the bird with the
other. He’s laughing loudly and belching. You can’t tell that from the photos, obviously, but I know he burped in each picture because I’m usually standing next to him when we take pictures. And in the photos his mouth is wide open. He is able to belch on command and always manages to burp as the flash of the camera goes off. Not everyone can do that. Today, however, he is silent as he drives. He’s most likely thinking of his big sister, my mother, who lost three children yesterday. Yesterday? Yes, yesterday. My sense of time is totally off. It’ll never get back to normal. That’s what happens with a tragedy like this. It opens a wound in your soul, even if there is no such thing as a soul. How should you describe it? Your heart? Your psyche? In any event, it creates such a huge wound that you are never able to believe any time has passed since the tragedy. And the wound never heals. It hurts just as bad today as it did in the car that first day on the way to the airport with my almost husband and my uncle.

He drops us in front of the airport. We check in and sit down in the boarding area. My phone rings.

It’s a number I don’t recognize. It could be my mother’s hospital, or my father calling from a Belgian phone booth. Who knows.

“Hello?”

“Hello, am I speaking to Elizabeth Kiehl?”

“Yes.”

“This is Herr Paulsen, from the newspaper
Druck
. I’m sorry, Frau Kiehl, to have to tell you this. You’re going to have to be strong. There’s been an accident and three of your brothers are dead. A comment, please?”

I take the phone away from my ear. I don’t say a word. I’m smart. I want to react correctly. When do you ever have a
chance to say that? My boyfriend asks who it is, what’s going on. I have a strange look on my face again. I must look weird, given the way he is looking at me. We are sitting next to each other in the waiting area. I have to think. I put my finger in front of my lips so my boyfriend doesn’t say anything more. This beast, this evil incarnate, will not get any more information about us. I look at my phone—he’s still on the line. I can’t believe what is happening here. I’m more outraged than I’ve been in my entire life. The rage is just as great today as it was in that moment. A newspaper, a person, who makes out as if he is doing a job, takes the liberty of calling me in this situation. And to top it off, he thinks that he is breaking the news to me, that he is the
first
to tell me. Getting me on the phone for a story to publish, based on violating the lowest moment of my entire life. This pig is trying to do the work normally reserved for the police or, in my case, my father. But not to be helpful. To make money.

I stare at the display on my phone. The person on the other end hears nothing except my boyfriend whispering at regular intervals to ask what is going on. It’s freaking him out that I’m taking so long to answer. This is how they get their stories! Every day something new. That’s how they fill their pages. At that moment I knew I wanted to stay on the side of goodness and fight evil. These are evil, depraved people. All of them. They profit daily from this method of work. No decency, no morality, no respect for people’s grief. No respect for pain.

I’m the type of person to get revenge. And I’ll definitely get revenge for this. Of that I’m sure. Revenge against the people responsible for making this phone call. Revenge against the people who make money from this sort of call. The ones who’ve gotten rich off it. Who probably present themselves as good
Christians. They’ve stepped over a line. And this isn’t the end of it. This invasion into our lives and our grief for the sake of a story had only just begun. An enemy was born. And so was an embittered warrior. A woman warrior. Track them down and smoke them out of their holes.

I push the glowing red button as if it’s the trigger for a bomb.

Call ended. It’s what every single person should do when these vermin call. That would quickly take care of the problem. Cut them off, shun them. That would be a peaceful solution. There wouldn’t be any more stories about dead children, cancer, alcoholism, divorce, bankruptcy. The only reason there are things to publish is because so many people talk to them. Why doesn’t everyone just shut up?

Just hang up. Like I did. It wasn’t tough. Open your mouth and you have no one to blame but yourself. “No comment” will still get published. You’ve helped them even by saying that much. It’s easy to do the right thing if you stop to think about it for a second. Every single reader who buys a copy of that newspaper and gives a few cents to them every day is complicit in the phone call made to me that day. The only things that truly speak to them are numbers in the red—the only feelings they have are in their wallets.

I explain to my boyfriend what just happened. That they found out about it. That they got hold of my number somehow. I’m not in the phone book. Someone who knows me personally must have given them the number to be able to make the call. Of course I’ll never find out who it was. That’s not something
people brag about—selling somebody out, throwing someone to the wolves at a time when that person really needs peace and time to recover. I curse whoever it was. Though I don’t know the details, I know the accident was the result of some sort of human error. Accidents are always the result of human error—that’s why they call them accidents. The phone call was something purposeful. Which makes my rage that much greater. And now it’s a race against time, to try to stay ahead of other calls. I ring all my relatives, and they all express their condolences. How do you reply to that? Thank you? Same to you? Why don’t they teach that in school? In German, when relatives of yours die, people say to you, “Deepest sympathy,” to which you’re supposed to answer, “Deepest sympathy to you, as well.” Sounds too stiff. I decide to say, “You, too.” It’s a bit less formal. Not so ponderous, not so stiff.

Once that’s taken care of, I explain to each relative that I’ve just been pestered by someone who probably considers himself a journalist but whom we will refer to henceforth in our family as the rapist reporter scum. I tell them that they should just hang up without saying a single word, not even “no comment.” That anything they say can only hurt us and play into the hands of those who want to exploit the situation. I get everyone in line. Our family is going to be threatened. Our peace is going to be threatened. Our grief is going to come under attack.

It’s finally quiet on the airplane. I hold my boyfriend’s hand and, for the first time in my life, worry that I could die in a plane crash. Not my boyfriend. Just me. I think how awful it would be for my mother. She can’t lose another child before she herself dies. Three is enough. I consider myself my mother’s property now—I have to make sure I don’t go missing. Not
because of me, my boyfriend, or our life. That, at some point, with luck, will be okay again and halfway normal. Because of my mother. My mother can’t go through anything bad again. I have to make sure of that.

I grip his hand tightly and stare at the
EMERGENCY EXIT
sign two rows in front of us. I run through a water landing in my head—how I’ll hop over those two rows to be the first one out. I don’t mention anything about the plan to my boyfriend. It would be too difficult for us to do it together. I have to stay unencumbered, flexible. Have to be the first one out so my mother doesn’t have to deal with an even bigger body count. Because of the accident, I’ve learned how quickly life can end, and I want to keep that from happening. I don’t want to live for myself. I live for my mother now.

I’m cold and covered in sweat when we land. I was sure for the entire flight that we were going to crash. In my head I’d already said my good-byes to everyone. I wrote my will in my head as well, despite the fact that I have virtually nothing to pass on. With our new wedding luggage, bought for happy times, we drive to the hospital my mother mentioned on the phone. There we meet three fathers, each of whom has lost his only son. Meaning that on the fathers’ side of the family there are six grieving grandparents. My leftover sister is also at the hospital. I have to keep going over who is dead and who is alive. I can’t get it through my head. My fourteen-year-old sister, Emily, and I are alive. There’s just two of us. Dead: Harry, twenty-four; Lukas, nine; Paul, six.

We hug each other in front of the hospital. I laugh because I’m so glad to see them. We’ve already expressed our condolences on the phone. They all say how sorry they are that the
wedding had to be canceled. My sister, who is also standing there in front of me, was also invited, of course. She was going to fly over to England today. Right. The wedding was supposed to be today. Today. If the worst thing ever to happen to us hadn’t put an end to everything. I hope it remains the worst thing ever to happen to us and that nothing worse comes along. I look at my watch. I would have been married four hours from now. I look at my boyfriend from the side. I can’t believe it—all that planning for nothing. I love him. Will we try it again? Or stay unmarried forever? Fear starts to creep up my chest and take my breath away as I imagine having to plan another wedding and then having to find out I’ve lost more family members traveling to it. And in my family weddings always involve traveling. People have to come from all over the place. Or I guess we could just do something by ourselves. Then nobody would have to come—and nobody would have to die on the way.