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Excerpts

Prologue

If this were the small town Jennie had always imagined existed somewhere in the Midwest, she might have heard about the crash at the hospital that very night. Whispers of horror and shock would have passed through the corridors -- "all young kids, such a heartbreaker," "the Linders girl," "Kevin Cleary's daughter," "that new boy, family came from out west." The staff would have hurried to attend, the whole place holding its breath until they knew whether the girl they'd brought in with a heartbeat was going to make it or not.

It seemed to Jennie that that's how it should be -- a car accident calling on everyone in the town to help, all collectively hoping or praying, as beliefs allowed, waiting and knowing and mourning. But this wasn't a small town. It had been once, and some of the older residents remembered it as such, though it had grown into a suburb -- 68,000 at last census, a place where people mostly got the news from TV or the morning paper, not from one another. And geographically, it was huge, twice as big as the Manhattan island where so many of its residents made their living. The town's fifty square miles began at the ocean and stretched inland, from beachfront houses through the offices and boutiques of the town center, past older neighborhoods of colonials and capes and tudors out to backcountry acreage, old stone or clapboard houses with their own streams or ponds or studios, bordering nature preserves, horse farms, forests. That was where it happened -- out there on the back roads, where there weren't even road signs because the town council insisted they would mar the beauty of the landscape. There were miles and miles of roads back there. Curvy. Heavily shaded. At night, pitch dark. Jennie had lived in this town all her life but wasn't able to picture the stretch of road where it happened until she actually drove past.

She wondered later if it would have truly made a difference, knowing about the accident that night, instead of the next morning. Her proximity was to make her breathless later, for Jennie was on the fourth-floor maternity ward when they brought them into the emergency room, a fifteen-year-old boy and two girls, each just sixteen. That's when the large suburb revealed its intimacies, created by children carrying news and goodwill across lawns and streets. Jennie knew all three of the teenagers who had been in the car: Rachel and Erica were her daughter's best friends, and Matt was the boy it seemed they had all begun to love.

Copyright © 2000 by Nancy Woodruff