Surviving Valencia

They were supposed to arrive Wednesday evening. All night my mother waited for them, a saucepan of hot cocoa simmering on the stove until it turned into dark, sweet, chocolate mud. My father and I waited up with her. She made us drink milk because she didn’t have enough cocoa for all of us. Again and again I rearranged the Barbie feast and touched up my hair with a curling iron. Nervous excitement filled the air. At one point my mother remarked, “Look at us, you’d think the president was coming.”

My dad fell asleep first, snoring on the recliner. Then I dozed off on the couch. But my mother stayed awake all night, adding milk to that pan of cocoa, stirring. At one o’clock in the morning, I heard her on the phone, calling Van’s dormitory to see if, because of the weather, they hadn’t left yet. She called again and again, leaving messages with the answering service because the whole dorm was empty.

At four o’clock she woke up my father and, together, they called the police. I started to get really scared at that point, but still did not believe that anything could truly be wrong. I was scared in a perverse, excited way. In that way that makes you think, I can’t wait to tell the kids at school about this, before the gray reality of tragedy sets in. Scenes cut from soap operas and primetime television played in my head, vivid images of police officers in smooth blue uniforms with shiny badges. My brother and sister would be wrapped in blankets, sipping black coffee at a bustling police station, safe from peril but with a dramatic red gash across Valencia’s lovely forehead and Van’s arm in a sling.

I imagined my parents and me rushing to them crying, “We’re so glad you’re safe!” We would all be one big happy family, hugging each other and crying. The worst would be over and we’d go home and play a board game. We were one of those middle class families with the attitude that anything truly wonderful or terrible only happens to other people. We were complacent, dull, and selectively oblivious. We subscribed to the superstitious mentality that made safety and luck one in the same. Believe in Jesus, lock your screen door and latch the gate, take your Flintstone vitamins. I was only eleven. How could I know anything different?

The police told my parents to relax and go to sleep. They asked what route Van and Valencia might have taken, and said they would send someone out to take a look. Don’t worry, they said. These things turn out to be nothing. But then at six thirty in the morning they came to our door.

I remember the doorbell ringing, and I woke up. I was still in the living room on the couch. My mother opened the front door and saw the police standing there in their uniforms, both with their mouths poised to speak and no words coming out, and she instantly knew. She started screaming and sobbing, and her knees bent beneath her. She fell forward, right at their feet wailing, “No, no, no.”

At the time I wasn’t sure why she was reacting to them like that. I remember thinking that she needed to pull herself together because these policemen probably had some important news for us. I got up and wrapped my blanket tight around me. My pajama top was thin and I remember feeling self-conscious in front of these important men. I stepped back into the darkness of the dining room, unsure of what would happen next.

My dad came running out from the hall. He picked up my mother and held her as she screamed and moaned. Snot was streaming from her nose and nothing seemed real. What’s going on, I wondered. Are Van and Valencia dead?

Then my dad was saying to the policemen, “I think you’ve made a mistake.” His voice sounded flat and reasonable, like always. This frustrated me even more. After all, the police still had not spoken. At that point one of them asked, “May we come in?”

My father nodded and my mother continued crying, sobbing, wailing. The room was filled with her gasps. They must be dead, I thought. This must be the real thing. But I still wasn’t sure. It just seemed too impossible. Then I watched the police and my parents sit down in the living room. I waited to be noticed and to be sent away to my room, but somehow I became invisible.

As the police began their story I learned that yes, in fact, Van and Valencia were dead. I felt a selfish, irritated pang of resentment for being the last one to get it, the last to understand. A pang of bitterness that would be absorbed, digested, and forgotten, so that later in my life, when I remembered the night Van and Valencia died, there would only be the appropriate feelings of devastation and sadness attached to these memories, as it should be. A trick of self-preservation, a selective amnesia of sorts.

The scene that was unfolding was something like a movie, but happening in my living room. How was this ordinary moment holding such an unbelievable turning point? The snow had come down and the hot chocolate had thickened. I had finished one book and started another. My father’s snoring had been interrupted again and again by the purposeful banging of a wooden spoon against the saucepan on the stove, and somewhere, throughout this, my brother and sister had gone from this world to the afterlife. That was what we were being told. And in the span of time just before the doorbell rang to this moment, it had all caught up with us and now nothing would ever be the same. I wished the policemen weren’t here yet. I wished the time of not knowing had stretched a little longer.

I stood there in the dark, watching my mother breaking down, watching her expel the gritty devastation for all of us, and it was as if she was siphoning it away from me. I didn’t cry. I just stood there, becoming more and more numb. Is this really happening? No, I mean is this really happening? The more real it became, the farther away I seemed to float, up, up, far from myself, far from my parents and my house. I had a peculiar feeling, a silly almost hysterical feeling, like we were having the wool pulled over our eyes. This is weird. Is this really happening? No, I mean is this really, really happening?

Like police on television, the men seated in our living room reconstructed an entire chain of events, working backwards from the final scene: It had started raining as Van and Va

lencia drove home to us, and the rain had turned to ice. And then the ice had turned to snow.

“Yep, snow on ice. ‘Wintery Mix.’ It’s a real dangerous combination,” said one of the officers, shaking his head like we were talking about a parade getting canceled. Wintery mix. Chex mix.

Fuck off. I hope you die in some wintery mix, I thought. He was an idiot. He was saying the wrong things. He was the wrong person to be relaying this message. As a child I had contempt for stupid people. It takes the self-discipline of adulthood to overcome such animosity, to understand some people just aren’t smart.

“Then they lost control on that bridge by Red Wing,” he continued. I watched my mother pause from sniffling and gasping, open her mouth to speak. She made a raspy, gagging noise but no words came out. She wanted to interrupt, to say that they would not have gone that way, but my father put his hand on her arm and the officer continued. “The bridges always freeze first, you know, because there ain’t any ground under them. Just air, you know, and the rain falling on top, and, before you know it, the bridge is slick as a skating rink.”

“Slick as a skating rink,” parroted his partner, softly.

At five o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, the police found Van’s body lying on the banks of the Mississippi in tall, icy grass where he had landed. Dirt was in his mouth, all the way into his throat, said one of the policemen. He was a new, inexperienced cop, and didn’t know that families aren’t supposed to hear that kind of thing. He didn’t know that it’s details like that that never go away. I listened to it all, standing there in the shadowy dining room, softly touching Valencia’s class ring on my finger, feeling throughout it all that there was still the strong possibility of it being a dream. I never moved and my presence had no influence. It was as if I was watching a play; it would have been the same scene with or without me there.

“What about Valencia,” my mother cried, realizing at a point that they just kept talking about the weather, and about Van.

The officers looked dumbly at one another and finally the one who seemed to be in charge said, “Well, the car is in the Mississippi, you realize that, ma’am?” He made a noise, almost a laugh.

“In the Mississippi? In it? Isn’t the Mississippi frozen?” asked my mother, having regained enough composure to speak.

“No ma’am.”

“Oh,” she cried, covering her face, her body shaking.

“It don’t look real good for her, ma’am,” said his partner with bowed head respect.

My mother kept crying and my father kept holding her. They went with the police then, I guess to identify Van’s body, and my mother still believed Valencia was alive. My father seemed to have given up already, simply because these men wore uniforms, and that was enough to settle it.

I invisibly watched them putting coats and boots over their sweat pants and sweatshirts they’d been wearing. My dad had to help my mom. Her arms and legs didn’t seem to be working. Then they were going out the door and I was alone. I went into the kitchen and turned off the stove, and set the hot saucepan on the back burner.

My parents were too in shock to worry about what I was exposed to during the aftermath that followed. I am not blaming them, not this time, not for that.

When Van and Valencia died, every part of my world fell apart. Instead of the target I had been morphing into, I became invisible again. My mother went even crazier than she already was. I cannot say exactly how it affected my dad. He just went even more inside himself than before.