Group

The rain was pounding down on my car, and I could feel myself starting to panic.

I’d avoided driving in the rain ever since the accident, and I’d tried my best to avoid it tonight, but Kimberly begged me to come and I’ve never been able to say no to my older sister.

There was a flash of light, and I slammed on the brakes in the middle of the empty road, peering in front of my car. Nothing was there; no one was there. No vehicle, no person. The grief group Kimberly and I had been attending was located in a red brick building on the campus of a local hospital, and I was on the long driveway leading up to the hospital’s main entrance.

You don’t need to get out and check, I told myself. We’d all talked in group last week about the ripple effects of a loss - the small anxieties. Henry and Elizabeth, a married couple, talked about how they’ve been hovering over their living children since their young son died. A guy in his twenties named Leo discussed how he hasn’t worked out since his brother died, because they were gym buddies.

The group leader, a lovely earthy woman named Sarah-Kate, taught me how to trace my fingers when I was trying to get through an anxious moment. I looked down at my hands in my lap, around the front seat of the car. It still looked new; I’d bought it a month after the accident and had barely driven it. I took the bus and daydreamed about moving to New York, a carless utopia, riding the subway everywhere.

I got out of the car, and walked around to the front, looking up and down the street, the rain pouring down. There was no one. It was safe.

I’d only been attending group for four weeks, but Kimberly started coming right after the accident.

“Do you want to go to individual therapy instead?” she asked me.

I didn’t. Our parents were gone - we were orphaned at twenty-seven and twenty-five - and it was all my fault. I stayed home and drank, and Kimberly attended grief group. It was how we coped. Up until four weeks ago, when she begged me to come.

The room where we met was designed to be therapeutic. Sarah-Kate always lights candles, giving the carpeted room a pleasant smell and a dimly lit aura. We sit in a circle, but no one is on a folding chair; Sarah-Kate arranges loveseats and armchairs so that we can all see each other when we’re talking and sharing. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be spending every Thursday night talking about my feelings with six strangers, I would have called you crazy.

I was still learning about each of them. Some of their stories spill out during every session. I knew who Elizabeth, Henry, and Leo had lost, but not the others. From what Jules, the thirtysomething girl with the curly red hair, shared, it sounded like there had been a motorcycle accident, and Eddie, who was an older guy, mad references to “the crash.” Then there was Harriet - the youngest person in the group, and the quietest. She said very little, but I noticed her every week; she was strikingly beautiful, with dark hair cropped close around her ears and wide, beautiful green eyes. I had no idea who she’d lost, and how. It didn’t really matter. I understood what Kimberly had been talking about. It felt good to be in a room full of people who knew what it felt like to be walking through regular life in a daze, because your entire sense of reality had been altered.

I saw Kimberly right away after I parked. She smiled at me. “Thanks for coming,” she said, her voice a little breathy.

I nodded. I was still a little shaky from my panicked moment a few minutes earlier, and honestly, I was annoyed that Kimberly had insisted on my presence. I’d had a busy day at work, and I just wanted to stay home on the couch with a glass of wine. I knew I was drinking too much since everything happened. Was that why Kimberly had insisted that I come?

“I need you there tonight,” she’d said to me earlier, when I called and tried to beg off coming.

“Why?”

But she couldn’t answer me. And now that I was here, seeing her nervous expression, I was glad I’d come at the same time I was annoyed. “It’s possible to have two feelings at once,” Sarah-Kate was always telling us. I could love and miss Dad terribly and also be incredibnly angry that he’d needed me to drive that night, for example. I was annoyed at Kimberly for asking me to come but also glad to be here for her.

She was the only family I had left.

We entered the building. The room we utilized was on the second floor.

“I was right behind you as you were coming down the driveway,” Kimberly said.

I frowned. It was a strange thing for her to say. Particularly because it wasn’t true. “I didn’t see you,” I said.

“I was there. I pulled in right behund you,” she added.

When we were growing up, Kimberly had a bad temper. She was just like our mother in that way - the ultimate caregiver, nurturing and aurthoritative, but flashed hot and red when she was angry. It taught me, with both of them, to tread lightly and to not pick arguments unnecessarily.

We walked up the stairs and down the hallway. We were steps away from the door when I heard Sarah-Kate scream. I froze where I was; Kimberly began to run, crashing into the therapy room and letting out a shriek of her own. “Lila, get in here, quick! Call 911!”

Only her voice could have broken me out of my freeze. I sprinted to the door, entering the room, seeing immediately what had brought Kimberly and Sarah-Kate so much distress.

It was Harriet, her beautiful face frozen, her eyes lifeless, a puddle of blood surrounding her head.

It was Kimberly’s birthday, the night the accident happened. I didn’t want to go out that night, but our parents always tried to bring us out for our birthdays, even once we became adults. We rolled our eyes about it, but we usually tried to make it work. Our parents were cheesy and corny, but we’d been around enough friends’ families to know that we were extraordinarily lucky to have them.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to go that night was Dad. Our grandfather - his father - had died a month earlier, and Dad’s drinking was getting worse. Looking back now, I can see that my father was a functional alcoholic throughout my childhood, but I can’t see much harm that came out of it. He worshipped my mother, brought home a paycheck every week, and his instability forced my older sister and I into a closeness that I don’t know if we’d experienced otherwise.

We met at our parents’ house - the home where Kimberly and I were born and raised - an hour before the dinner reservation. We always drove together on occasions like this, our parents up front, Dad driving, me and Kimberly huddled in the back of their Honda giggling like we were little girls again.

But that night, when we arrived, I could tell that Dad had already been drinking. His words were slurred, his face just a little bit flushed. When I tried to meet my mother’s eyes to confirm, she avoided my gaze, reminding me of all the times in my life when she’d done the same - avoiding connection with me in order to protect my father’s drinking.

I’d snatched the keys from Dad’s hands angrily, ordered Kimberly to sit in the passenger seat, and gotten into the car, waiting for my parents to meekly climb into the backseat of their own vehicle. It had been a cloudy day, and I think they might have lingered for longer except that the skies opened and it started to rain.

To witness pure chaos at a place that you usually associate with calm and healing is disturbing. Ambulances arrived, police cars, and, one by one, the members of our group. I stared at Harriet steadily - her dead eyes, open and staring lifelessly, so green and beautiful - until an EMT took me by the arm and escorted me downstairs to the front of the building, where the attendees of our grief group had gathered, all but Leo, who was typically late.

It was Kimberly who brought me back to the present, squeezing my hand. I looked up at her gratefully. Elizabeth was crying, Henry holding her. Jules and Eddie looked stunned. When Leo arrived, he immediately looked to Sarah-Kate, as if she was still our facilitator in all things, even this.

“What happened? Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I found - I found Harriet,” she said. “She must have fallen. She was in the group room. She’s -” Sarah-Kate seemed to be struggling not to cry, as if she still felt it was her job to maintain her composure.

“Dead,” Kimberly said, her voice sounded strained. “She’s dead. Sarah-Kate, what happened?”

Our group leader shook her head. “I don’t know. She was like that when I came in.”

“She must have fallen, yes?” It was Henry who spoke. His arm was around Elizabeth, who was sobbing, and I thought of how she’d shared two weeks ago that she was the one who’d found her son after he died. “She must have hit her head. On the incense table?”

I’d been trying not to think of the scene I’d just observed, but I brought it back into focus. Harriet - beautiful, frozen, dead - had been laying just near the table where Sarah-Kate lights incense and candles. The table had sharp corners. Could that have been what happened?

“Did anyone see her arrive, Sarah-Kate? I know I didn’t get here until just after Lila.”

I paused, and I looked at my sister. She met my gaze and she smiled, a sad smile, a smile perfect for the moment after a death - wistful and sad and scared.

I was gripping the wheel so tightly the night of the accident. It was partly because of the weather - the rain was hammering down on the car, and five minutes into my drive it turned to sleet.

It wasn’t just my nerves about driving in the weather, though. I was furious.

I’d never been close to my mother, but Dad and I were tight; we had a lot of similar interests, and usually at family dinners we’d end up talking about books and fine wines and running while my mother and Kimberly chatted. He’d always drank, but it had escalated significantly since my granddad’s death, and it disgusted me.

“They have a nice Pinot at this restaurant.”

It was Dad who’d said this, from the backseat of the car, his voice almost drowned out by the sound of the rain.

I turned to glare at him. “You won’t need it,” I said crisply, staring at him, the car still in motion. “Since you’ve already gotten started.”

“Lila!”

My sister seized the wheel from me, and I swivelled back quickly, slamming on the brakes as the car approached a red light. The Honda skidded slightly, but not enough to put us in the way of a car coming through the intersection. I took a deep breath and nodded at Kimberly gratefully. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m okay.”

I wasn’t okay. The truth was that I’d had three glasses of wine already that afternoon, and I shouldn’t have been driving. I stared out the front windshield of the car, watching the windshield wiper blades swing back and forth frantically, unable to fully stem the waves of water washing over the car.

That was when the vehicle smashed into us from behind.

I stared at Kimberly.

She hadn’t arrived after me. I knew she hadn’t. I’d been so hyper-aware of my surroundings since the accident that there was no way I would have missed her car.

The group is gathered around us, talking in hushed tones; everyone has moved on. I think I hear Eddie ask if the cops are going to want to talk to us; I think I hear Sarah-Kate say yes, that everyone needs to stay, but that it’s just a formality.

Because Harriet fell.

I continue to stare at Kimberly, and she stares back, a sad smile still on her face. I cannot read her eyes.

They were dead upon impact. Our parents. Our mother and our father. Neither Kimberly nor I remember much of the moments immediately following the accident; I hit my head on the steering wheel and lost consciousness. She says she never passed out, but she swore that she saw nothing, remembered nothing, of the aftermath.

The driver left the scene. We were told the police would eventually be able to find that person, but to my knowledge, they were never found.

Things have started happening. Our group has disbanded, and I can see Kimberly across the courtyard, speaking with a police officer. If I’m not mistaken, her eyes keep shifting toward me.

“Lila, are you okay?”

Sarah-Kate is at my side, her face looking concerned.

“Yeah, I’m alright,” I said, trying to force a smile.

“You just look so pale, and I know it must have been a shock to see that,” she said.

The wonder of therapists - that Sarah-Kate, the person who found Harriet laying there dead in her own therapy room, had the concern and wish to check on me.

“Has anyone called her parents? Her husband?” I asked her.

Sarah-Kate nodded. “The police officers did,” she said. “Her husband is meeting someone at the hospital. Her parents were notified, and I think she has two brothers in the area, too.”

I found myself thinking of the times I’d heard Harriet share - her quiet, nervous voice. The grief she expressed. The flashbacks she discussed. But all so vague - no mention of pronouns, no indication of what had happened to her loved one. I knew from Kimberly that everyone in the group had lost someone in some sort of accident; it was how Sarah-Kate structured her groups, when she could, trying to group people together who might have had similar experiences and knowledge to share.

Her husband. Her brothers. Her parents. All at the hospital. Had she lost a child?

“Sarah-Kate, can I ask who Harriet had lost? Like what family member she was grieving?”

I could hear the first sounds of rain - little splats of raindrops touching down on the pavement, a single drop hitting me right on my nose as the rain began to fall.

“It wasn’t a family member,” Sarah-Kate said. “She’d been in an accident. She was okay, but someone - two people - in the other vehicle died.”

Why, oh why, hadn’t I contained my temper?

I’d had that thought a thousand times since the accident.

It was wrong, though. Sometimes, I wish I’d become even angrier, or that my rage had come out in different ways. If only I’d been angry enough to call off the dinner. If I’d only been angry enough to scream at Dad, to lecture him about drinking. Ten minutes of anger might have saved my parents.

After the accident, I was distraught. I blamed myself. I drank. I hated myself for drinking, hated Dad and yet missed him with an aching ferocity. My sister, who’d always taken care of me, never left my side.

Looking back now, I wonder about when it happened. When her inability to protect me drove her over the edge.

“What’s going to happen now?” I asked Sarah-Kate.

“They’ll want us to go down to the police station - all of us,” she explained. I noticed a police officer walking toward me. “They’re especially going to want to talk to the three of us - you, me, and your sister - since we were the first ones there.”

The police officer is a female with a blond ponytail and a stern expression. I must look nervous, because Sarah-Kate takes my hand and squeezes it.

“Just tell them what happened, Lila - you arrived, Kimberly was right behind you, and the two of you walked in together.”

My sister is still talking to a police officer, but she’s looking right at me, giving me the same reassuring smile she’s given me for my entire life, and I wait for the questions I’m about to be asked, wondering what I’m about to say.