A Gift of St. Patrick’s Day

A gift of St. Patrick’s day                            

It must have taken several attempts for my landlady to bang hard enough for me to recognize her summons as something other than the ongoing howls and thumps of the early spring storm seething through the neighborhood.  I had just returned from the corner store, having picked up the requisite diet soda and cigarettes. The hood of my car, nosed up to the tree standing like a column at drive way’s end, was probably still hot from the trip, despite the cold rain driven to earth at angles anything but perpendicular to the muddy minefield her dogs and chickens made of the yard.

It was St. Patrick’s day, ten years ago, and the soda, cigarettes and backlit e-book were the sole ingredients of any celebration I’d be having.  The wind had taken out the power about an hour before I went out for supplies to fuel my solitary party. I don’t remember what I was reading, but probably something about god or belief or how and why it is that we come to those understandings.  

The noise of the storm and my own alarm at the unexpected visit acted together in a way that has obscured most of the content of her message.  Words poured from her darkened face in the unlit entryway outside my front door. What I understood and remember only dimly now was that she was very sorry about what had happened, about what the storm had done. 

I know that I told her not to worry, that the loss of power didn’t concern me that night. I was content to ride it out, sipping soda and peering into the glow of my little, battery-powered screen. I must have smiled and waved it all off.  That makes sense. She said something about my car, her face obscured, her words indistinct and diminished by the insistent storm.

Then she asked whether I’d been outside.  No other memory of my interaction with her that night survives.  She went her way, and I went back out into the wailing, windy world outside our doors.  I think she chose to make herself scarce. The streetlights hung dark and useless on their poles, and it took several steps from the porch for me to see the storm’s windfall in my life.

I always parked there next to the tree, parallel to the little street, as there was no room in the driveway for two cars.  The white oak fell right down the middle, crushing my VW Bug lengthwise. Enough room remained on each side of the rough trunk such that, while both the front and rear windows were smashed, the glass of the door windows on each side of the car stood whole and uncracked.  I pulled out some jackets, some CDs and whatever else I could reach and find around the tree’s bulk. The rain soaked me through and I went back to my bed, dropping my sodden pile of recovered items just inside the front door.

I don’t know who I called first, probably my younger brother Pete in Phoenix.  I’m sure I sobbed, feeling as though my new bad was definitely worse. After we hung up, Pete surely called my brother Sean, who lived about half an hour’s drive from my Norwalk apartment.  I learned from Pete that Sean was coming to pick me up so that I could stay at his family’s house that night. I called Pete again, angry and overwhelmed. I did not want to see Sean. I did not want to go anywhere at all.  Not with him.

After 12 years in Orlando, I had moved back to southwestern Connecticut, my childhood home, to help Sean run a business there.  It was a new venture, and all of my old ones in Florida had disappeared, failed or been taken away. At the time, the move and the job had seemed like salvation.  I cried tears of relief in my sister’s kitchen in Cranston when Sean first asked me to come work with him. After six back surgeries, a job I’d lost after all the sick time that followed, a marriage then in separation, the door Sean opened looked both promising and singular.  No other options were clear, and my thinking, after repeated and sustained loss, was anything but.

Before I’d even closed the passenger door of his car, Sean pulled a burning pipe from his mouth and shoved it into my face.  I smoked a little and handed it back, watching him goose the gas with his right toe while his heel kept pressure on the brake.  This was only necessary when the clutch was depressed at a stop. His car was always on the verge of a stall. It’s just the way he ran things.  Still does I figure. His primary motivation for picking me up that night was the chance it gave him to get out of the house and get high. I understand that now.  I should have known then. I should have stayed home with my crushed car.

The ride to Sean’s house in Brookfield was uneventful save the need to avoid a few downed branches on the quieter back roads.  He didn’t speak much to me, but we’d moved away from small talk in our relationship months before. We communicated only as needed, which sometimes meant I’d leave notes on his desk at work, and that I’d wear headphones and listen to podcasts, anything really other than him as I methodically moved around in the grunt work he seemed incapable of seeing, let alone doing.  

His daughters were already in bed when we got back to his house.  His wife Annie was up, and she made me a plate of food that we took into the TV room so that I could sit and eat.  And stop, and breathe. I don’t remember what was on, just as I don’t recall really what it is we all talked about.  I was in a daze that had little to do with marijuana.

Eventually. Sean went back to their bedroom and disappeared for the night.  Annie and I stayed there on the couch while the final stones of the dam holding back the flood in my psyche washed away in that St. Patrick’s day storm.  I spilled it all: Sean’s habits with money, the bounced checks, the little straws I found on his desk after a locked door session with his “friend” (read: drug dealer), the near constant marijuana use, the horrifying work ethic, the inequity in our work roles, all of it.  I was tired, in pain and broken. My world had been smashed through once again.

We gave up, both of us, soon after my revelations and each went to our beds.  Mine was a blanket on the floor of the girls’ playroom upstairs. Accordingly I woke up early, though the girls were already up and gone to school.  I made calls to my insurance company, to my landlady, to my parents. For no reason at all, I decided that I needed to be back with my car, so we drank some coffee and off we went, back into the bright, post-storm day.

Many leaves and branches covered the roads and roofs of houses and cars.  I was in no state to notice, but my sister in law must have been acting strangely because Sean asked a couple of times what had been discussed after he went to bed.  Neither Annie nor I made direct response to this, and we proceeded as I had become used to when spending time with my brother, in silence. It could have been five minutes or two hours, it was all the same to me.  I just wanted to be apart from my brother.

They had their moment marvelling at the tree trunk splitting my car down the middle, then left quickly without entering my house.  I stayed out a little longer, reaching into the crushed cabin to see what else I could reach and rescue. It occurred to me, for the first time, how lucky I had been.  Imagine the fallen trunk, horizontally splayed on my car, as the hour hand on a clock face, marking the time as 12:00.

A wind shift, a power line, even another tree might have pushed the tree’s final hour to almost any time.  It would only have to have fallen about 60 degrees from where it did, to the hour of 2:00, for that trunk to have come right through the slate roof under which I lay quietly sprawled in bed, reading in the dark.  It might have happened as I pulled the emergency brake after picking up my soda and cigarettes. The root ball, such as it was, looked like it could have fit comfortably in the trunk of a car.

I left town that day, or the day after.  I’m no longer sure. My parents came to pick me up and take me back to their place in Rhode Island.  It was a rescue mission. At the time, it had seemed like a temporary measure, some breathing space while I figured out transportation and my life.  My phone rang steadily, my brother at the other end, over the next several days. We did not talk. I wasn’t really talking to anyone, certainly not him.  I knew what I had done.

When we finally did talk, I had already moved out of my Connecticut apartment, and moved on from being a partner to Sean in anything.  The most important thing he had to ask me was why I had not come to him first to ask what was going on, instead of dumping it in his wife’s lap.  My only answer, still, is that I shouldn’t have been in a position to have to talk to anyone about anything. I was angry and resentful. I carry some of that still.

The important part, for me, is not how I reacted to a brother sliding off the edge into heavy drug abuse, but that I had a brother who was flirting with death, abusing my trust, mistreating his family, treating me like an indentured servant and generally acting like an asshole.  He never considered that all those podcasts in my ears were less about learning than about blocking him out. Smashed car or not, the system we’d built and adapted to was incready unstable. Just the puff of wind accompanying my words to his wife had been enough to bring it, and all of us, down.

Lots has happened since then, though Sean and I still have no relationship.  Three years later, after my brother in law’s very unexpected death, Sean arrived half an hour late to the post-wake dinner.  He sat across from my parents, my sister the widow and a parish priest and proceeded to nearly nod out at the dinner table. His eyes rolled back in his head.  He lost his place in the middle of sentences. Even small children at surrounding tables took note of the oddness no one was talking about.

Clearly his trip back to Connecticut that morning was a resupply trip, and he was well into his own party throughout the two days the funeral and all the accompanying events took up.  (He’d siphoned gas out of three cars in my parents’ driveway to fuel his drug run.) There was yelling and ignoring and brief, huddled talks in quiet corners. The morning after the wake, hours before the funeral, I asked someone if he thought it would be a good idea for me to confront Sean and make him give me the drugs.  I got laughed at.

My brother in law still has no stone to mark his burial site.  Too much for my sister to face. I doubt she’s even been out there, but it’s sure not my place to tell others how to mourn.  Soon after the burial, we intervened on my brother, and we prodded him along to a rehabilitation center. He left halfway through the program, burning some more parental cash.  I’m on my second car since then, though both were used when I got them. My mother’s cancer came back, and Sean stole some forty plus narcotic pain pills from her a couple of months ago.  I guess the week’s supply in the opiate patch he’d left behind on the rug in my parent’s spare room had crapped out.

Sometimes, when a horrible thing happens, it is like the expansive, exuberant and brilliant finale of a fireworks show.  Lots of little blooms with different illuminations and sounds, then the over-the-top extravaganza with too much sound, more shapes and colors than can be counted.  Then silence and drifting smoke as people pack up the blankets and we ooh and ahh our way back to the parking lot. There is a clear ending, and a time to go home and get ready to try again tomorrow.  

I wish I had been able to hear the sound of that tree trashing my car.  It was, after all, the finale to a part of my life I look back on with horror.  It gave me an out, one which I happily took. The pops and bangs of my brother’s ongoing addiction still sometimes give me a start, because that show is far from over. 

As with such things, the ending will more likely be marked by fizzling and whimpers, but I refuse to be a part of that story anymore. The business failed, Sean’s wife divorced him, his new car was repossessed, he’s lost more jobs than I can count, and he now has less than three months before the bank takes his house.  My family members are still oohing and ahhing, and Sean is still an addict.

But that oak tree saved me, and I’m grateful.  My friend (now my wife) thought at the time that the tree would indeed produce positive changes in my life.  She knew of some of my struggles, with my brother, my health and my past. Though the details were a little off, she was right about those changes.  My life with her now, in our house, is joy. I had no faith in god or karma or any sort of comeuppance when I lost that car. Now I know, and I know better.