“I’m sick of the Kennedys,” the woman told Lorraine in the late afternoon, before turning off the TV.
Lorraine, a woman of strong opinions herself, was fond of the man she referred to as “young John Kennedy.” Although she wasn’t Irish like his family, she was Catholic and working class and felt the Kennedys had looked out for people like her. She even had the kind of brogue and fair skin that made people mistake her for a native of the Emerald Isle. Still, Lorraine knew better than to argue politics with the woman who owned the home. So she picked up a basket brimming with laundry and carried it upstairs. Rounding the top of the staircase, she came across a small television set, which happened to be on and tuned to a station that was also covering the JFK Jr. story. She put down the laundry basket and listened to the anchorman.
Her eye caught a news bulletin scrolling along the bottom of the screen: accident at deer island project, two divers airlifted to hospital. Lorraine suddenly felt weak. Oh my God, she told herself, that’s where DJ’s at!
She sprinted downstairs and into the kitchen, where she announced: “My son was on a job in Boston, and I need to get out there! He had an accident. I don’t know if he’s involved, but I know he’s on that project.” She bolted out the door and climbed into her car. She shifted it into drive, but then quickly threw it back into park. Where in God’s name am I going? She wasn’t sure how to get to Deer Island, and anyway, she figured that by now all the divers had been rushed to the hospital. Determining which one would be no simple task. With a medical reputation that attracted patients from all over the world, Boston heaved with hospitals. In desperation to go somewhere, she raced home to Waltham. As she was putting her key in the front door of her apartment, she could hear the phone ringing.
“Is this Donald Gillis’s mother?” the voice on the phone asked.
“Yes,” Lorraine said.
The man said he was calling from the union hall.
“Don’t tell me anything about DJ!” Lorraine cried. “I know what happened. I don’t want to know if he’s alive. Just tell me where he is.” She knew she would have buckled under, right then and there, if he’d told her that her son was gone.
“Mass General Hospital,” the man replied.
Lorraine called a friend, who hurried over to pick her up. Throughout their ride along the Mass Turnpike to the hospital, she prayed and prayed that DJ would somehow be saved.
Judy Milner had just wrapped up a session with a patient in her child psychiatry practice outside Seattle. Even though her days were filled with heavy matters, she used her quirky sense of humor and irresistible laugh to keep the mood in the office light. Now, as the petite psychiatrist walked out of her office, she found her secretary, Janice, weeping along with another assistant. Judy noticed that one of her longtime friends, Robin, who was a social worker with an office nearby, was visibly shaken. “What’s wrong with you all?” Judy asked. “What happened?”
Instantly, she felt she knew the answer. Janice had a sickly dachshund at home, and for some time the secretary’s husband had been saying the dog needed to be put down. Janice had steadfastly refused, a stance that had won Judy’s full backing. “Let’s save the dog,” Judy had told Janice more than once, offering her assistance. Now Judy turned to her secretary and tenderly asked, “Did your dog die?”
“Can we talk?” Janice asked, wiping away tears. She and Robin guided Judy into her office and closed the door.
Judy turned to Robin. They had jointly treated a chronically suicidal patient, and now Judy asked if the patient had gone through with it.
“No,” Robin said apologetically. Standing with her back to the closed door, she told Judy, “It’s Tim.”
Judy immediately stiffened and responded brusquely, “Tim’s just fine. Now get out of my office.” When they refused to budge, Judy pushed open the door and tried to shoo them away. “Just get out!” she repeated. As a psychiatrist, she would have diagnosed her reaction as a textbook case of denial, but right now she had no interest in diagnosis. She simply wanted to erase the previous and most shattering minute of her life.
Janice stepped forward to close the door, positioning her body to block Judy from the exit. With that, Judy started to sob. “Oh, I told him not to go in that tunnel if he thought it wasn’t safe!” Her two friends moved in to hug her, but Judy’s denial had yet to lift fully. “You all have to leave,” she told them. “I have patients to see now.”
“I canceled all your patients,” Janice said. She explained that she had taken that step immediately after Roger had called to share the devastating news, a call that had come while Judy was in her session.
“You can’t do that. They’re expecting me,” Judy protested, before finally breaking down.
When she began to regain her composure, she realized that she needed to call Tim’s parents. She didn’t think the pain could get any sharper, but somehow having to call Shirley and Bob Nordeen, a couple she adored, and tell them their firstborn was dead sent her into a new spasm of grief.
As she entered the emergency room, Lorraine spotted a huddle of men, several of them crying. She didn’t know any of them, but she knew their look. “Are you boys divers?” she asked.
They said they were.
She introduced herself as DJ Gillis’s mother. Overhearing her, a state trooper approached. “Don’t worry,” he told Lorraine. “Your son is alive.” But he said she wouldn’t be able to see DJ for quite some time, because he was being evaluated and then he would be questioned by another trooper. Lorraine had no quarrel with any of that. She thanked God that the words she had dreaded hearing had not passed the trooper’s lips. She felt all that bottled-up fear suddenly flow out of her.
The trooper told her they’d give DJ a ride home later that night, so Lorraine decided there was no sense waiting around. On her way out, feeling relieved yet still somewhat dazed, she saw a young brunette walking toward her, wearing the same panicked expression that had been frozen on Lorraine’s face ever since she’d seen that bulletin crawl across the TV. Lorraine introduced herself. The young woman said she was Michelle, Billy’s Michelle. Lorraine tried to smile reassuringly, praying that she, too, would find good news here.
Olga Juse was a woman of precise routines. Several times a week, after leaving her job at the law office, she would meet her friend Sandy at the gym and they would work out together. Afterward she’d head home to her condo and make herself dinner. But this Wednesday was impossibly hot, even by the standards of south Florida, so after they’d finished their workout, she invited her friend over for a swim at her condo complex. Olga changed first and headed into the pool. When Sandy appeared in her bathing suit a few minutes later, she told Olga that the phone in her condo had been ringing. Olga said she’d pick up the message after their swim.
As it turned out, it was from Michelle. “There’s been an accident,” Michelle said, sounding distraught. “You need to call Ken and Deb’s house.” Olga was so nervous that she replayed the message three times but still couldn’t make out all the digits of the number Michelle had left on her machine.
After all the years Billy had spent bouncing around, Olga was happy that he’d found a soul mate in Michelle. And it comforted her to know that he’d found a tight extended family in New Hampshire. While other mothers might have resented hearing their son call another woman “Ma,” Olga hadn’t minded it, and she had hit it off with Ken and Deb during a visit to Wolfeboro two years earlier. Since she lived too far away to keep tabs on her son, she was relieved there were other good people who could.