I'll See You Again Part 8

Warren and I were not yet capable of going anywhere on our own, so our dear friend Isabelle had driven us to the meeting at Elaine Stillwell's house. Now as we hurried back into Isabelle's car, she told us that reporters were mobbing our neighborhood again. Police had closed off our street after the accident, and they might have to do it again. The previous week, the "Wrong Way on the Taconic" story had grabbed newspaper readers and tabloid TV viewers with its anguis.h.i.+ng human tragedy. Now the disaster had America's other favorite element: scandal.

Instead of driving us home, Isabelle decided we would head in a different direction. Looking for someplace safe to escape the press, we went to the suburban retreat of our friends Brad and Melissa, in the neighboring town of Garden City. Suddenly we were fugitives from our own lives. Too many times this week we had evaded reporters by having Isabelle take us to her house and help us get inside undetected. Then we would slip out her back door, sidle across the two yards, and sneak into our own home from the back. The furtiveness unnerved me. We were the good guys in the story, not the villains. We hadn't done anything wrong. But I suddenly realized how the toxicology findings would sound to the rest of the world.

"We have to make a statement," I said, panicking now as we pulled up at Melissa and Brad's house. "People are going to think I was an irresponsible mother."

Despite the powerful eulogy he had given at the funeral, Warren didn't consider himself a public speaker, and he felt wrong talking to reporters. "I don't owe them any explanations," he said stoically. "I talk to the people I care about."

We called my brother and asked him if he would speak for the family. Three years older than me, Stephen had been the person I turned to when we were growing up. My mom suffered from postpartum depression, but the problem was so little understood forty years ago that she was hospitalized and given shock treatments-which only made it worse. My parents separated quickly and divorced when I was ten. Though I saw my dad every day, my mom and Stephen and I formed a tight threesome. When Stephen went to Annapolis for college, I was devastated. Now he lived in New Jersey, not far from where we grew up, with his beautiful wife, Caroline, and my nieces and nephew.

Since Stephen had a job getting bigwigs positions in the financial sector, he was used to public speaking and agreed to appear at a press conference where he would read our statement but not take any questions. The reporters pounced. Like hungry birds, they were determined to peck at whatever they could get.

In front of a throng of cameras, reporters, and commentators near our home, Stephen explained that he was speaking for Warren and me-but not for Danny. He said that we were "shocked and deeply saddened" by the information in the toxicology report, and that it was "the absolute last thing that we ever would have expected." Then, speaking in our voice, he made the most important point of all:

"We would never knowingly allow our daughters to travel with someone who might jeopardize their safety."

Never, under any circ.u.mstances. Never ever. I wanted him to repeat that line a thousand times. He continued with the words we had carefully chosen:

"Because we have never known Diane to be anything but a responsible and caring mother and aunt, this toxicology report raises more questions than it provides answers for our family."

Listening intently, the reporters immediately sensed the first hint of a rift. And they were right. The Hances and Schulers had grieved together last week when our family bonds promised to trump all. But the toxicology report changed everything. Diane was buried alongside my girls, so we were connected to her forever, and realizing that brought a new, unexpected wave of pain and confusion.

Four

People began asking how I felt about Diane. No one can imagine how complex that question is. How does a person go from being like a sister to me, loved by my girls and cherished by my husband, to being the person who ruined our lives? Diane treated the girls like her own children-calling them before the first day of school, sending loving cards for Valentine's Day, and stopping by just to see them and say h.e.l.lo. How could this person I loved and trusted have done something so unthinkable? Not to have any answers was torture.

Grief is an overpowering sensation that fills every crevice of your heart and every synapse of your brain-and doesn't leave room for anything else. But now another emotion began to creep in.

Anger.

The encroaching rage was like a surprise intruder on my grief, demanding a response I didn't have the strength or emotional resilience to give.

If the toxicology findings were correct, my children didn't just die-they had been murdered.

I began to discover that as torturous as grief may be, it doesn't claw at your soul in the same way that anger does.

"Why couldn't they have just been in a regular car accident?" I whispered to one friend. "Then I could deal with the grief without having all this anger, too."

People began talking to me about "healing," but the word rang hollow. It wasn't as if I had sc.r.a.ped my knees and would start feeling better with some Band-Aids and lollipops. My life had essentially ended. Everything I cared about had been ripped away, and I grew increasingly angry at G.o.d for leaving me in this position. Our friends started looking for therapists who might help us, but many of the professionals didn't even want to talk to us. Our tragedy was too much for them. They couldn't begin to be helpful. Like the priests, they didn't have any answers.

After the toxicology report became public, we wanted to take the high road, looking for answers while also expressing our sorrow and sympathy for everyone involved. Danny, meanwhile, fell prey to loudmouth lawyer Dominic Barbara, who had offered to represent him. That's when the small rift between our families became a chasm.

In the part of New York where we lived, Barbara's name would always be linked with Joey b.u.t.tafuoco, the unsavory car repairman who had an affair in the 1990s with Amy Fisher-a teenager who shot and seriously wounded Joey's wife, Mary Jo. Dubbed the "Long Island Lolita" by the media, Amy went to jail for seven years, and Joey got six months for statutory rape. The story was a favorite in tabloid TV for years and was even made into a movie, with Dominic Barbara fanning the flames however he could.

In other words, he was not the person you would turn to if you wanted to prove your family's high moral integrity.

Dominic Barbara called a press conference almost immediately. Danny asked Warren's father and his brother David to be there at his side, but they declined. Danny was upset-not understanding how sordid it felt to the rest of us that he was going on TV. He wanted to defend his wife, but recklessly spinning the story just added fuel to the already-burning press fire.

Famously flamboyant Barbara seemed delighted to play master of ceremonies at the press conference, chatting happily and setting rules. He said a few sentences about what a terrible tragedy had occurred, but the words rang false. Standing outside in the suns.h.i.+ne, he told reporters that Diane Schuler could not possibly have been drunk. He turned to Danny for confirmation. "I never saw her drunk since the day I met her," a tearful Danny announced.

Barbara suggested that something else must have caused Diane to go the wrong way. "Something happened to her brain," he said. He talked about a possible stroke and raised the issue of a tooth abscess that caused her pain. He didn't say that the toxicology report was wrong, but he introduced his investigator, Thomas Ruskin, who had been on the case only twenty-four hours but confidently announced that what happened was "so out of character for this woman, [there] has to be some other explanation."

Danny seemed slightly out of it. He looked uncomfortable, staring off into s.p.a.ce as he spoke, but his lack of eloquence at least made him sound genuine. Rumors had swirled that Danny and Diane had fought the morning of the accident and that she was distraught driving home because he told her he wanted a divorce. "Not so," the lawyer declared.

"I love my wife, we loved each other," Danny said on cue. "She was a perfect wife, outstanding mother, hard worker, reliable person, trustworthy. I'd marry her again tomorrow. She's awesome. The best."

When Danny faltered a few times, he was helped out by his sister-in-law Jay Shuler, who is married to Danny's brother Jimmy. Angular, slim, and well-spoken, Jay was supportive-and sounded smarter than Danny. Barbara quickly pulled Jay in front of the microphone, where she said all the right things: Diane had been a nanny before she became a Cablevision executive. She treated her nieces as if they were her own girls. Family was the most important thing to her. There was no way she would jeopardize the children.

Except that Diane had jeopardized the children.

Danny wouldn't apologize for his wife's actions. Whatever the reasons behind the tragedy, the results were horrific-eight people dead. Instead of acknowledging that, he made it worse.

"I go to bed every night knowing my heart is clear," he blurted at the end. "She did not drink. She is not an alcoholic. My heart is resting every night when I go to bed."

The words curdled in the warm air. His wife and baby daughter were dead, and his heart rested comfortably every night?

Dominic Barbara seemed oblivious to the blunder. Pleased with the press conference, he decided to take his sleazy show on the road. With Jay as his new foil, he showed up on Larry King Live and CBS's The Early Show. Hearing about the media circus, I felt vaguely nauseous. Barbara was a clown, happy to perform, and I couldn't bear to watch or listen. Why would Danny be doing this? Could he really prove that the toxicology was wrong and something else had been behind the accident?

But I also felt just the tiniest speck of relief. Though it wasn't the way I would have handled the situation, or how I would want to investigate, I desperately needed to believe that something else had happened. I didn't want to be angry at Diane, and any explanation that could release that fury and make sense would be okay with me-whatever its source.

One comment, though, jumped out at me and I couldn't make it go away. Barbara had begun the press conference by announcing that Danny would not answer any questions about marijuana use.

Which immediately caused everyone to jump to their own conclusions.

I knew Danny had problems with anxiety and he'd had a bad reaction to the antianxiety drugs a doctor had prescribed. Was he self-medicating with pot? I could believe that, but Diane was a different story. She was a hard worker who took care of everything in the family.

Danny said he and Diane had a couple of cups of coffee together the morning of the accident. Everything was fine. A few hours later, Diane had done the unthinkable.

We all wanted to know what could possibly have happened between that last cup of coffee and Emma's call. Days later, the cell phone would be found, discarded at the side of the road, near a small truck stop. I had envisioned the children at a busy McDonald's when I last spoke with Emma, but that wasn't quite right. At that point, Diane had simply pulled over at an unattended spot by the side of the road.

The police investigation found she had made two other stops. First, early in the trip, she went to a McDonald's to buy everyone breakfast. Everyone remembered her because Bryan had wanted Chicken McNuggets and the guy at the counter insisted they didn't serve them that early. Wanting to make sure that the children all got what they wanted, Diane asked to talk to a manager. She had been completely rational-and determined-in the conversation.

Later, she stopped again at a gas station and went into the convenience store. She left the kids in the car, and the surveillance tape at the store showed her walking through the aisles. She left without buying anything.

And that's all we knew. We would keep coming back to those sc.r.a.ps of information over the next months, twisting them into different shapes, trying to make them tell a story. But the evidence didn't add up to anything that ever made sense, so we kept going around in circles with no escape.

Five