An excerpt from Devin's Way, Chapter 4


CHAPTER 4
            We got back to my mother’s house and I collapsed in a chair. I tried to call Ruth once more, got her voicemail again, and hung up without leaving a message. She would get it soon enough. I knew they canoed the day before, and were probably hiking today.
            I called up my e-mail and did something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I clicked on the photo Lou sent and blew up to a larger size.
            On the screen in front of me was a tightly cropped face shot of Devin, obviously taken on the highway, obviously dead.
            It was Devin, but did I really think it wouldn’t be?
            He was dead.
            I called Lou back to make it official, and asked him to tell me more about the accident.

            “Gary,” Lou said, “I will never lie to you. There are things I won’t tell you, but I won’t lie. He did have lower body trauma. Again, Gary, I am so sorry …”
             What wasn't he telling me? I didn't have the will to ask.
            We continued talking a few more minutes. It's as if I was watching my body go through the motions. It gave me a strange, small comfort that Lou was giving me this information -- that someone who knew us was taking care of this part, but it didn’t change the fact that Devin was dead. I knew Lou was sorry. I knew this was more personal than other stuff he had to do.
            The next few minutes were spent calling the emergency number for my government travel to get a return flight as soon as possible. Surely, the death of a son would warrant a seat on an airplane, any airplane, to get back to Wisconsin. While the travel agency put me on hold, my phone beeped. Another phone call was coming in.
            I looked at the screen.
            It was Ruth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Heaven for real?

Image
Writing from the Atlanta airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to Milwaukee ... Is Heaven for real? I capitalized it, so I must believe it is. But it's a good question. This isn't what I was going to write. After hearing someone too-young-to-be-drinking say on the airplane she was, "hungover as fuck," I thought it would be good for some meandering observations of life in an airport. But then perusing the rack of alluring paperbacks at one of the gift shops, I spied the novel, "90 Minutes in Heaven" (Now a major motion picture!). I'm never sure if the proclamation of a book turning into a movie spurs more book sales or less. On one hand, you may say, "It's so good, they made it a movie! I must buy it and read it first!" Or you could say, "Reading words is so tiresome. I'd rather go to a place and pay way too much for popcorn and a soda and have someone spoon feed me the information with dramatic music."
Read more

Where tooth drillin' and deer killin' go hand in hand

Image
"So, ya' wanna go deer huntin' after I fill that cavity?" "So, ya' like to deer hunt? Would you like to go deer hunting sometime?" I've had plenty of dentists tell me to spit (get your minds out of the gutter!), and plenty of dentists yell for not flossing enough, but never been asked to go kill a deer ... until I moved to Wisconsin. Eleven years later, I still remember that's the way Dr. Pete Janovic introduced himself to me. It was even funnier back then because I thought everybody in Wisconsin -- and especially Doctor Pete -- had an accent somewhere between the Swedish Chef and a bad Sarah Palin impersonation. I didn't know who Sarah Palin was 11 years ago, mind you, but once I heard her say, "You betcha," I said to myself, "Oh! So that's how Petey and everybody else sounds!" I'm also aware after more than a decade in Wisconsin, I sometimes sound like that myself, ya know! You betcha. Pete became our
Read more

The image is horrifying so we should never forget

Image
This is the picture. It's the one I see in my mind when I really don’t want to, the one that will always be there and never go away. It’s the car the driver drove, while talking on her cell phone, that hit my son, who was pedaling his bicycle home from work, that amputated his leg and killed him. His name is Devin. I’m not really sure how long he lived after he was hit, as the driver kept driving with him on the car for 800 feet and didn’t stop for three-quarters of a mile, and didn’t call 911 until … when?  According to her police statement, she was on the phone. Her phone records show there were three calls to or from her boyfriend at 12:34 a.m., 12:35 a.m. and 12:45 a.m. She told police the crash happened shortly after the first phone call. She said she heard someone say, “Hello,” then she closed her eyes for a long blink and heard a bang. If the crash happened shortly after the first phone call, that means it happened after 12:34 a.m. but before 12:35 a.
Read more