And yet I hadn’t thought of it in nearly two decades, until this summer when I read So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, a slim, powerful novel at the heart of which is a friendship cleaved apart by violence and a fateful encounter years later in a school hallway. The moment was so large in my mind at the time. Much had been said about the accident, and the driver’s return to school, and now here they were: two old friends separated by a crime that most people called a murder, approaching one another in a quiet stretch of corridor for the first time since everything had changed. I had just started at the school that year as a seventh-grader, so it was with a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety that I found myself one afternoon, on a bathroom break from science class, in the same empty hallway as these two young men. He was sentenced in court as a minor, and I think he did only a year or two in a juvenile detention facility, so that he returned to the high school for his senior year, much to the outrage of the local community. What I am sure of is that the drunk driver was a classmate and friend of the student whose mother he had killed. In fact, this could all very well have happened the following year, when the blizzard came, or even the one after that. The Christmas lights were still up on the houses, and so it must have been before New Year’s, but that may not be correct. All that remained was a police car with its blue flashers on and a crowd of people standing around in their heavy coats. I was in my early teens, and I remember driving past the scene with my father shortly after it happened. The mother of a well-known student from the local high school was run over and killed by a speeding, drunk teenager one evening while she was out walking with her husband.
One winter in rural Virginia, where I grew up, there was a terrible tragedy in our small town.
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