Free Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss

who’d survived her daughter in the one contest that made possible any other.
    “We’re flexible,” the lawyer said, “but we aren’t that flexible, where we won’t fight if we can save this much money. So.”
    That, I was sure, settled it. The moment felt so decisive: stirring, certain, a thunderbolt. I laid out plans to go to a hotel.
    The top, social level of who I was shrank from trialpossibilities. Still, there were deeper, muckier layers. These parts of me didn’t mind confrontation; these parts of me felt relief that it would at least now be over. My innocence (or my guilt) would have the official stamp of the U.S. court system. Again, I was mostly terrified. But something in me—the same tiny something that had longed for Melanie Urquhart’s anger—craved, finally, a decision from twelve people. They’d hear witnesses, cops, statistics, the journal entry. It would no longer be just my daily fluctuating opinion. The official world would have to listen, nod, and answer the question of that highway and that day. A government-sanctioned conclusion: you are culpable; you are blameless. This could bring ruin as easily as release. But the one sure thing it would bring was an end.

And yet.
    With what seemed a shiver of disgust, the proceedings came to an immediate close.
    Just hours before the trial was to begin, the Zilkes’ lawyer suddenly advised his clients to take the go-away money, the original $20,000. (Minus his thirty-percent cut.) He didn’t want to go to trial. And, like that, it was over. This is the missed beat at the heart of the story.
    For years, as I continued to feel sorry for the Zilkes, I could measure time by calculating how much money they might have earned if they’d tucked away the original twenty grand with interest in some bank.
    After everyone had dusted themselves off, had shaken hands and shut off the lights, after taxes, after years , the Zilkes by my calculations got something like $9,800 for what had happened to Celine and to me.
    All because, as the Zilkes’ lawyer finally told them, there really was no case.

Some years ago, researchers at George Washington University studied the psychological effect of what police call “dart-out” deaths and what insurers call a “no-fault fatality”: car crashes, like Celine’s and mine, where someone hurries into an automobile. In the United States, some two thousand drivers a year survive “dart-outs.” And these drivers are more likely to get laid out by post-traumatic stress syndrome than are those who are irrefutably to blame in fatal accidents. No one knows why. Probably the brain prefers a sturdy error to fixate on. It’s hard to learn so viscerally that the questions of guilt and worth are managed with indifference, by nasty chance.

We’d had the accident at the age when your identity is pretty much up for grabs. Before it, I hadn’t been so introspective; I’d had nothing to introspect about. Nor had I hidden anything from the world.
    For years, when I woke each morning, no matter where I was—home, my dorm, some friend’s couch, a woman’s bed—if I took an inventory of all that was good and bad in my life, the good would change (as it tends to do). But the bad remained a constant—Celine’s unresolved death, the sharp menace of a trial: that clock that ticked in my life. However, the world now meant to put Celine behind me. The New York Justice System’s gaze had moved to newer, bigger problems. No one would ever weigh in. I couldn’t call a trial for myself, say: “Please investigate me.” And so now, forever, I’d need to be satisfied with a personal answer, the one I’d never been prepared to give myself.
    I thought my trial’s collapse would bring—to use a dicey, odious buzzword—“closure.” But there was no end to something like this, of course. For me the question, the black scribble in the margin, will always be Celine.
    The biggest fact about me—the part that threw me into three