I'll See You Again Part 35

"Then I won't sell," she said. "I'll live here forever. I'm not leaving you, Jackie. I wouldn't do that."

Her loyalty moved me, but how could I ask her to make that kind of sacrifice? I'd already learned how a life plan can fall apart. "Maybe you should think about moving," I said. "It's okay. I don't know how I'll feel once the baby is born. What if you build this big house and then I want to move?"

But Warren wasn't planning to move, and he felt adamantly that Isabelle and Mark should stay. He and Isabelle talked about how our baby-to-be would make everything just like it used to be. The two yards would be filled with happy children again.

"You two are unrealistic," I told Warren. "What Kailey, Ryan, and the girls had isn't going to happen again. It's never going to be like it was."

"Why not?" he asked. He wanted to recapture the past, but it wouldn't happen. The kids wouldn't be anywhere near the same age.

"Ryan will be eleven when the baby is born. Maybe he'll babysit, but he won't be her best friend. And the baby's not walking through the gate to Isabelle's house anytime soon."

For once I was the rational one in the crowd, able to see clearly what they didn't want to admit.

"Warren doesn't want me to move," Isabelle said one morning when she came over to talk about her expansion plans.

"Then Warren's being selfish," I said. "Anyway, have you looked at the house for sale on Adams Street? It looks pretty online. It's the right size for you. And it's only a mile away."

Isabelle shook her head. "I don't want to look."

"You should," I insisted.

Some days later, Warren called me from work and he was crying. Even before I heard his voice on the phone, I heard a loud, gulping sob.

"What's wrong?" I asked him.

"I told Isabelle she could move," he said. "She liked the house you told her about. I think she's going to make a bid."

I called Isabelle and she was crying, too. "How will I get breakfast if I move?" she asked, only half joking.

Leave it to Isabelle to find the sweet spot of our friends.h.i.+p. Her husband, Mark, and I were early risers, and on weekend mornings, one of us would go out to pick up bagels for everyone. We both have excessive energy, while Isabelle and Warren like to sleep in. We always joked that if Mark and I were married, we'd have a big clean house and be doing projects all the time.

"The bigger question is what Warren is going to do for junk food if you move," I teased back. Given that our own cabinets were either barren or stocked with healthy food, Warren often called Isabelle asking if she had any Ring Dings or Doritos to spare.

The day the moving van pulled up to Isabelle and Mark's house, I felt lower than I expected. Her move to Adams Street signaled a fresh start, and though my pregnancy should have signaled the same, I didn't feel it yet. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my children. I wanted my children playing with Isabelle's children between our backyards.

That night, I showed up at Isabelle's new house with dinner.

"You came!" she said happily, flinging open the door.

"Don't get too excited. It's just takeout," I said, putting dinner down on top of an unpacked box.

She giggled and brought me inside. Despite the boxes, I could see how happy she was in her new house. We both would have liked the gate between our backyards to swing forever, and for our houses to ring with the happy voices of Kailey, Ryan, Emma, Alyson, and Katie all playing together. But that was gone and something else had replaced it. I understood for maybe the first time that change didn't have to destroy me.

"I'm happy for Isabelle," I told Warren when I got home. "I guess this is what people mean when they tell us we have to move on."

"We'll never move on, Jackie," he said. "What happened will stay with us forever. But we do have to try to move. Just keep moving, a step at a time. That's the best we can do."

He was right. Getting on to the next phase of my life would happen slowly. I looked at my belly, which protruded slightly under my s.h.i.+rt. One small step at a time.

Twenty-two

Once when Alyson was very young, we were talking in her room, and I asked her if she wanted to be famous.

"Nooo, Mommy, I don't want to be famous," she had said, shaking her head.

"You don't?" I asked, surprised. "Why don't you want to be famous? I'd looove to be famous." I stood up and struck a movie star pose.

Aly giggled. "I'm happy just the way I am," she said. Outgoing and comfortable in life, she didn't need to imagine a spotlight s.h.i.+ning. "But you should be famous, Mommy. You are famous!"

Sometimes those words came back to haunt me.

Because of the accident, I knew what it was like to have photographers snap my picture when I least expected it, or to have store clerks' eyes widen when they saw the name on my credit card. Interest in what the tabloids had dubbed the "Taconic Tragedy" seemed to linger, though Warren and I did nothing to encourage it. We didn't speak to the reporters who continued to knock on our door, and while I became email friends with at least one well-known network TV reporter, I let her know from the beginning that I didn't plan to do an on-air interview. What would be the point? Except for the written statement we gave early on, we tried to stay out of sight, maintaining a public dignity.

My brother-in-law Danny had no such instincts.

Maybe Danny's desire to clear Diane's name overrode everything else-including his better judgment. From the beginning, Warren and I distrusted Dominic Barbara, the sleazy lawyer who used Danny to whip up a media storm right after the accident. In February, the courts found Barbara guilty of various misdeeds and suspended him from practicing law for eighteen months. He promptly retired. But plenty of other people were still turning Danny's head. In late winter, we heard that HBO planned to run a doc.u.mentary on the crash, produced by a filmmaker named Liz Garbus. Danny signed a deal with her.

"Why is he doing this?" I asked Jay, Danny's sister-in-law and his media sidekick. Since Danny didn't speak to Warren and me anymore, I got all my information through her.

"I guess we're all still looking for answers," Jay said.

And maybe Danny wanted money. The Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported rumors that "Daniel Schuler was paid $100,000 to partic.i.p.ate in the film." (The film's publicist said it was much less-and it probably was.) When Warren and I got a call from the filmmakers, we immediately declined any offer to be interviewed. No discussion. We doubted the doc.u.mentary would make HBO proud. Filmmaker Garbus seemed to be continuing on the path Barbara had set of finding a medical explanation for the accident, something that would shed light on why nondrinker Diane had been drinking. I didn't object to her skepticism, and I shared the view that something must have happened that none of us really understood. But the idea of making a public spectacle of it was too much.

"What do you think the movie is going to say?" I asked Warren one night. "Is there any way we can stop it?"

We couldn't stop it, of course. A free and open press is great-until you become its victims. Thinking about the doc.u.mentary made my stomach churn. Why bring the story up again? In our 24/7 news culture, shouldn't something else be front and center by now?

Warren received a letter from the producers, asking for permission to exhume Diane's body. Since we owned the cemetery plot, he would have to agree before anything could happen. It seemed sordid and horrifying, but Warren and I decided that if Danny needed answers, we didn't want to stand in his way.

Much as I wanted to stay out of the spotlight, I also wanted people to remember our daughters. It drove me crazy when reporters talking about the accident said that the victims had included Diane, her daughter, Erin, and "her three nieces in the backseat."

I am the mother of those three beautiful girls! I wanted to scream. Emma, Alyson, and Katie are not just anonymous "nieces."

Meantime, talk of lawsuits continued to swirl. We had lost three children, and now we could lose everything we owned, too. According to the convoluted laws of insurance and legal responsibility, Warren could be sued because Diane was driving his car. Really? You sue a car, not the person driving it? Apparently we could have a round robin of suing: I could sue Diane's estate on behalf of the girls. Danny could sue Warren on behalf of Bryan, because it was his car. And so on. The press jumped in, having a field day with stories of family-turning-against-family, which infuriated me all over again. Maybe we weren't in Norman Rockwell bliss at the moment, but all anyone wanted was to get whatever was due from the insurance companies. Though it was a complicated way to divide a very small insurance pot, the lawyers insisted it was necessary.

Warren simply wanted it over. He told the b.a.s.t.a.r.dis, the family of the men killed in the SUV that hit the Windstar, that we would give up any money that we might deserve from the insurance if we could just settle quickly. Through their lawyer, they said no. I certainly understood that people in mourning after a tragic accident can get caught in a tortured cycle of anger and recrimination. But this might have been the ultimate example of blaming the victims.

My nerves were already frayed by the pregnancy, and now we were dealing with lawyers and lawsuits and the ridiculous possibility of our being sued for big sums of money. Knowing that the whole horrible story would be a TV show that people watched for casual entertainment drove me completely wild.

Just when everything was as grim as could be, it got grimmer. HBO announced that the t.i.tle of its doc.u.mentary would be There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane. Emma's last words to me.

"Oh my G.o.d, how could they do that to us?" I wailed. "That's horrible! It's cruel! Do they even have the right to use that t.i.tle?"