DJ regained his composure enough to excuse himself. “You may as well go to sleep,” he told his mother, “because I don’t think I’m going to be sleeping for days.”
As soon as he closed the door to his bedroom across the hall, Lorraine heard him begin bawling again. His cries punctured the air, closing the space between them, making it seem as though he were still hunched over on the floor next to her bed. “Why, God, did this have to happen?” she heard him saying. “Why did you have to take these guys?”
Stepping into the funeral parlor, DJ was relieved to have his girlfriend at his side. The combination of sleep deprivation and indescribable sadness had left him feeling as though he’d been sleepwalking for the four days since the accident. As much as Dana and his mother tried to comfort him, though, DJ was racked by survivor’s guilt. Why had that tunnel taken the lives of Billy and Tim but spared his? He was haunted by the memory of Billy asking him to change places at the last moment.
His mother, a faithful Catholic who’d attended her share of wakes over the years, had handed DJ a prayer book to give Billy’s family as a gift. As close as DJ had been with Billy, this awful occasion marked his first time meeting Billy’s parents, Olga and Bill, and his younger sister, Jolene. DJ instantly took note of Bill’s mustache. It was more tapered—and grayer—than his son’s, but it must have been the inspiration for Billy’s. Yet DJ was struck by how much more Billy favored his mother physically. He wasn’t as tall as his father and had his mother’s dark complexion and oval face. Remarkably, they even shared an unusual birthmark on their brown eyes—Billy’s was beside the pupil of his left eye, the mirror image of the one Olga had on her right.
As he scanned the packed room, DJ noticed the unusual alignment. Billy’s parents and sister were arrayed on one side, while Michelle stood with Ken, Deb, and Tap on the other. As he knelt before the open casket, DJ was surprised to find Billy wearing a nice shirt and a tie that featured purple, yellow, and mauve pansies. He was used to seeing Billy only in coveralls. When he walked over to pay his respects to Michelle, he struggled with what to say. So he tried to lighten the mood, telling her, “You should have buried him in his Carhartts.”
Bill Juse felt dazed as he stood in the receiving line next to his daughter and estranged wife, listening to the kind words being said about his son. He had to wonder what it meant that all these people who had been so close with Billy were nothing but strangers to him. He felt like an outsider, standing alone in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, except in mourning rather than in celebration.
Bill had always thought he had a good relationship with his son, unlike the stormy one he’d had with his own father. He knew he’d missed a huge chunk of Billy’s childhood because he was on the road so much. In his mind, he’d done that to provide for Billy and his sister so they wouldn’t want for anything. He had to admit that the breakup of his marriage to Olga had deprived the kids of a single home base they could return to. So he understood the appeal for Billy in forging a second family here in New Hampshire. Still, Billy’s own family had managed to remain close in their own ways—Olga as a nurturer, Bill as a provider, and Billy as a dutiful big brother to Jolene, never failing to send his sister pink and purple flowers on her birthday. Bill had intended to keep providing, hoping to turn over his small Florida beverage business to Billy someday, when his son finally tired of the brutal New England winters.
Bill liked to think he had taught Billy everything he needed to know in the world, and that they understood each other intuitively. So he was crushed248 when he discovered that Billy had somehow felt the need to conceal from him the news that he had sold his share of the Black Dog business. Had Billy really thought his father would have been any less proud of him because he’d left the ranks of small business owner? Billy should have known that his trust in his father mattered to Bill a whole lot more than whether he was signing paychecks or punching a clock.
Standing in this receiving line, listening to the comfort of strangers, Bill was growing more agitated. When he spotted DJ chatting with a couple of other divers as they headed out the door, Bill bolted out of the line to follow them. In the parking lot, he approached the divers with the question that had burned in his brain for days: “Guys, what really happened?”
There was an awkward silence. Bill could tell how drained and wounded the divers were. He also sensed that they had been told not to talk, or maybe they were just too exhausted and despondent to relive their hell. All they really said was that there were “things that should not have happened.”
The next morning Bill returned to the funeral home to prepare for the procession. Ken, Deb, Michelle, and Tap had made all the decisions about Billy’s arrangements—the church, the cemetery, the fund they’d set up in his memory. Bill appreciated all their effort and obvious affection for Billy. Still, this was son, his only son, the last male to carry the Juse name. At the last minute, Bill walked over to the cluster of men who had been selected to be Billy’s pallbearers, and he delivered the news: I’m going to be a pallbearer for my son. He knew it was uncommon for a father to serve in that capacity. But to him, the more important point was how uncommon and unnatural it was for any father to bury his own son. Unbearable, really.
He had one reason for wanting to be a pallbearer, for wanting to carry the casket from the church and then to the gravesite. He wanted to be the last one to let Billy go.
Amid all the heaviness, Ken tried to inject lightness where he could. A few days after eulogizing Billy as the son that God gave him later in life, he accompanied Michelle and Tap to Boston to retrieve Billy’s pickup truck from the racetrack parking lot and drive it back to New Hampshire. Once they arrived, Ken found a big Tupperware container with the remnants of one of the meals that only Billy could have enjoyed. It wasn’t as off-putting as a deer heart, but there were some bits of Vidalia onions and cucumbers and some spice-heavy sauce that had to have been disgusting even when it was fresh. When Ken flipped off the lid, he was attacked by an odor fouler than a carnival Porta-Potti. “Oh my ever-loving God,” Ken cracked. “He should have died of thisV’
They sat in silence, on folding chairs arrayed in a circle in the driveway. Every few minutes, someone would stand up and offer a remembrance about Tim and then sit back down. More silence. Then someone else would stand.
Hoss didn’t know what to make of this Quaker-style memorial service, which was being held a month after the accident, at Tim and Judy’s house in Washington. He knew Tim was neither a Quaker nor a churchgoer of any stripe. But Judy explained that Tim had liked the serenity of a Quaker meeting they had once attended. And Hoss could see how this low-key approach would have suited his friend’s style. The setting sure seemed right: the secluded five-acre swath of God’s country where Tim had spent countless hours toiling and taking care of the many creatures that also called it home.
Still, Hoss could find no peace himself. He was distracted by two of the other people sitting in folding chairs. Ever since the accident, as he had struggled to assign blame, his mind had returned again and again to Harald and Roger. He was furious with Harald for saddling the divers with such a half-assed system and for ignoring all the concerns they raised about it. And he was angry at Roger for having let Harald put their lives in jeopardy, despite the warnings the divers had given him about how poorly things were going on the job. Hoss was also pissed at the Norwesco owner for the smaller but inexplicable slights in the days immediately after the accident. He still couldn’t get over Roger’s response when Hoss had told him back in Boston that the Norwesco divers planned to stay there so they could attend Billy’s wake: Who’s going to pay for the motel rooms? Hoss knew Roger wasn’t an unfeeling man. When the Norwesco crew had gone to the Boston funeral home to pay their respects before Tim’s body was cremated, Hoss had seen both Roger and Harald break down in sobs. Still, Hoss had trouble reconciling that with the other instances of tone-deafness. On the flight back to Washington, as Hoss had crammed his six-foot-five frame into coach, Roger had reclined in first class.
248 (Chapter 12, note 8)
So he was crushed: Bill and Olga said they learned about Billy’s sale of his partnership sometime after the funeral, when they began going over his financial papers.