I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on the interstate, February, black ice, nobody’s fault. We had a closed casket. I have one good photo of her from that last Christmas and I’ve looked at it so many times the edges are soft from my fingers.
My friends say I’ve been doing better. My wife Donna left two years after the accident – not because she stopped loving me, she said, but because watching me not heal was making her not heal. I still live in the same house. I still drive past the exit where it happened.
Last Thursday I was at the Dunkin’ on Mercer, waiting on a large coffee before my shift, and a girl walked in.
She had Becca’s hair. Not similar – the exact same dark brown, the same way it fell past her shoulder on the left side and got tucked behind her ear on the right. She had Becca’s way of pulling her sleeve over her thumb. She ordered something and laughed at something the cashier said and I heard Becca’s laugh come out of a stranger’s mouth.
I sat in that booth for forty minutes.
My hands wouldn’t work right. I kept telling myself I knew what this was – grief does this, the brain fills in faces, I’ve read about it. But she sat down near the window and pulled out a notebook and just WROTE in it, and Becca used to do that, always paper, never her phone, and I couldn’t leave.
When she got up to go, I followed her out.
I told myself I was just heading to my car. But I followed her to the parking lot and I said, “Excuse me.” She turned around and looked at me and up close she looked nothing like Becca. Different nose, older eyes, a scar near her chin I hadn’t seen inside.
She said, “Can I help you?”
And I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing. I said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone I knew,” and she looked at me the way a young woman looks at a middle-aged man who followed her to a parking lot, and I wanted to die of shame.
She took a step back and said, “Okay,” and then she said something else – quiet, looking at her keys – and I couldn’t hear it.
But my brother thinks I traumatized her. My coworker Janelle says what I did was creepy and she’s not wrong. My friend Doug says grief makes people do crazy things and I should let it go. They’re split, and I don’t know what I am.
What I DO know is that I went back to that Dunkin’ the next morning.
She was there again. And this time she saw me walk in first.
What She Saw When I Walked Through That Door
Her eyes found me before I got two steps inside.
Not the eyes of someone who’d forgotten Thursday. She’d thought about it. I could see that. She’d probably told someone – her roommate, her mom, a group chat – this weird guy followed me to my car. And now here he was again, same gray jacket, same hollow look, same Dunkin’ on Mercer at 7:40 in the morning.
I should have left.
I know that. I knew it then. My hand was still on the door and I had one clean chance to step back out onto the sidewalk and drive to the Sunoco on Route 9 and drink their terrible coffee and never come back. My body didn’t do that. My body got in line.
She was at a table by the window again. Notebook open. Pen in her hand but not moving. Watching me.
I ordered my coffee. The kid at the register – young, couldn’t have been twenty, a little acne scar on his jaw – he asked if I wanted a muffin and I said no thank you and I paid and I stood at the end of the counter and I thought about Becca.
Not the accident. Not the casket or the February light or the state trooper sitting in our kitchen with his hat in his hands. Just Becca at nineteen. The way she made fun of my handwriting. The way she used to call me at work for no reason and then pretend she had a reason. Dad, what’s the capital of Myanmar? That kind of thing. Just to hear me answer.
My coffee came. I turned around.
The girl was standing up.
She Came to Me
She walked over like she’d decided something.
Not fast. Not slow. Deliberate, the way you approach something you’re not sure about but you’re doing it anyway. She stopped about four feet from me, which is the right distance. Far enough to run. I noticed that and felt sick about it.
She said, “You were here yesterday.”
“Yes.” No point in anything else.
“You followed me outside.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
She looked at me for a second. Her eyes were brown, not like Becca’s at all – Becca had this weird hazel that went green in summer – but she had the same way of looking at you like she was deciding something before she spoke.
“Who did you think I was?”
I hadn’t expected that question. I’d expected her to tell me to stay away from her. I’d expected anger, or fear, or to hear that she’d already talked to someone at the counter about me. I hadn’t expected that question, so I answered it honestly.
“My daughter,” I said. “She died four years ago. You have her hair. The way you tuck it.” I stopped. “I’m not – I know what it looked like. I know what I looked like. I’m not going to bother you.”
She stood there. The coffee machine behind the counter made its noise. Someone’s kid knocked a cup and the mother said Marcus in that specific mom-voice.
“How old was she?” the girl said.
“Nineteen.”
She looked at the floor for a second. Then back up.
“I’m twenty-two,” she said. Which wasn’t an answer to anything I’d asked, but I understood it.
Her Name Was Carly
She didn’t have to tell me that. She did anyway.
Carly Pruitt. She was getting her master’s in education at the state school twenty minutes north. She came to this Dunkin’ because the one near campus was always packed and she liked the quiet. She wrote in her notebook every morning because she had to – not because she was artistic or whatever, she said, she just had anxiety and her therapist told her to and it worked so she kept doing it.
She said all of this standing up, still four feet away, still with her keys in her hand.
I told her my name was Ray. I didn’t tell her my last name and she didn’t ask.
“The thing with the sleeve,” I said. “Your thumb. Becca did that with every sweatshirt she owned. Drove her mother crazy because she’d stretch them out.” I didn’t know why I was saying it. “Sorry. You don’t need to know that.”
“It’s okay,” Carly said.
She wasn’t Becca. Standing there in that fluorescent light she looked nothing like her, really. Different face, different build, different way of holding herself. What she had was a handful of details that my brain had grabbed and assembled into something it wanted badly enough to believe. That’s all it was. I knew that.
Knowing it didn’t make my chest feel any different.
“I’m not going to keep coming here,” I said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. In person. Because you deserved that.”
What She Said Before She Left
She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “My uncle lost his son. Overdose, six years ago. He sees him everywhere.” She shrugged, one shoulder. “He once chased a guy three blocks in Philadelphia.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not saying you’re not a little scary,” she said. “You are. You were. But I’m not – ” She stopped. Started again. “I’m okay.”
Then she picked up her notebook from the table and put it in her bag.
“You should talk to someone,” she said. Not mean. Just. You know. True.
She left. I watched her go out the door and I didn’t follow her.
I sat in a booth – not the same one as Thursday, a different one, closer to the door – and I drank my coffee and I looked at the window where she’d been sitting. The seat was still warm, probably. I didn’t go check.
What I’ve Been Carrying Since February
Here’s the thing about driving past the exit where it happened.
I do it every day. Not because I’m punishing myself, or not only that. I do it because it’s the last place she was. It’s the last place she existed in the world and if I stop going past it then I’m the one who leaves, not her. I know how that sounds. Donna knew how it sounded too, and she was right, and she still couldn’t stay.
I have the photo from that Christmas on my phone now, not just printed. I added it six months ago. Progress, my brother Gary says. Sure, Gary.
Becca was a junior at a school two states away. She was home for break. She was driving back on a Sunday because she had class Monday morning and she didn’t want to miss it. That’s the part that gets me, every time. She was responsible. She was doing the right thing. She left on time. She was being good.
The ice didn’t know that.
The ice doesn’t care about anything. That’s the whole problem with it.
I go to a grief group on Tuesday nights at a church on Halsey. I’ve been going for eight months. There are eleven people in that room and every single one of them has a story that makes my chest seize up. A guy named Phil lost his wife and both his kids in a house fire. A woman named Barb lost her brother to a stroke at forty-one. There’s a kid, can’t be older than twenty-five, who lost his dad and he still flinches when old men talk to him, and I watch that and I think: that’s what I did to Carly. I was the flinch.
I told the group about Thursday. I told them about Friday too.
Nobody called me an asshole. Phil said he’d done worse. Barb said grief makes you stupid and she meant it kindly.
Our facilitator, a woman named Gwen who has the patience of someone who has heard everything, said: “You went back and you apologized. That’s not nothing.”
The Morning After
Saturday I didn’t go to Dunkin’.
I made coffee at home. It was bad. I stood at my kitchen window in the gray morning light and I drank it anyway and I looked at the backyard, which still has Becca’s old basketball hoop, the net rotted half off, and I thought about what Carly said.
You should talk to someone.
I’ve been talking to someone. I’ve been talking to Gwen and to Phil and to Barb and to Gary who means well and to Donna sometimes, still, on the phone, because we’re not enemies. I talk plenty.
What I haven’t done is talk to Becca.
I don’t mean that in a supernatural way. I just mean I haven’t said the things I didn’t get to say. I’ve been so busy trying to process and heal and do the steps that I skipped the part where you just. Talk to her.
So Saturday morning, bad coffee, gray light, the rotted net hanging off the hoop.
I talked to her.
I told her I was sorry for following a stranger to a parking lot because she tucked her hair the same way. I told her that was embarrassing and she would have given me so much grief about it. I told her the photo from that Christmas, the one I’ve touched so many times the edges are soft – she looks happy in it. She looks like she doesn’t know anything bad is coming, which she didn’t, which is the only mercy in the whole thing.
I told her I still drive past the exit.
I told her I’m going to try to stop.
Maybe next week. Maybe the week after.
The basketball hoop didn’t say anything back. The net moved a little in the wind.
I finished the bad coffee and I washed the cup and I got ready for work.
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For more stories about parents in tough spots, check out My Son’s Teacher Left Him Sitting Alone While His Class Walked Away or The Pastor’s Wife Said My Sister Couldn’t Come Back. I’d Been Recording for Three Weeks., and you might also find this one interesting: She Had My Dead Brother’s Eyes and She Didn’t Know Why She Recognized Him.
