The Choice — A Story for the Season

It was around this time of year, a few days before Halloween, when Davis told me his tale.

I was in the common room of the rehabilitation center that morning, quite proud of myself for making it all the way to the self-serve coffee bar, doing the simple — but until lately, grueling — tasks of walking under my own power, getting a cup, putting a pod in the machine and returning without staggering in pain. Davis and other volunteers were decorating the bright room with corn stalks, pumpkins, and little bouquets of fall flowers sprouting from witches’ hats.

I had been there six weeks and was about to be set free in one more. I was coming out of an 18-month torment of four surgeries, steel pins and rods implanted in my left arm, leg, and shoulder, and then the long education on how to walk, use a spoon to eat soup, or the remarkable feat of bending down to pick something up off the floor.

I asked Davis one day as he was helping me bathe, if I would ever be able to forget the SUV rounding the corner of the road and not seeing me on my bike. “I hope not,” he said, which I thought was a strange response. Like most of the staff, he was professional, encouraging and dedicated, but unlike the others he had genuine warmth, an understated empathy, a true connection.

Someone pasting paper ghouls to the bulletin board said she’d read a news story where an obscure legal term was used and asked Davis to explain. As he filled little bowls with candy, he gave her a clear, brief explanation that summed it up. “If I’m ever arrested, I’m calling you,” she said, as others laughed. Someone said, producing another surge of the laughter, “You couldn’t afford him.”

Something clicked. His name. And as I looked closely at his profile, I knew who he was. An attorney, he was as famous as the clients he represented, such as movie stars in deliciously messy divorces, a U.S. Senator acquitted in a trial of corruption involving private planes and prostitutes, a scion of enormous wealth accused — and acquitted — of murdering his parents.

Later, as he gently coaxed me to lift weights attached to my ankles, I said, “Could I afford you?”

He didn’t look at me, but smiled and said, “For you — pro bono.”

“So —

“What am I doing here? When we finish, you’ll have my deposition.”

It took a few days of pestering before he said, sharing scones and coffee with me, “OK,” with the resigned air of a man facing the most difficult item on a list. “Believe me, or don’t,” he said, looking at me squarely. “But here it is.”

He had been visiting his daughter and her family in a small Midwestern town in late October a couple of years ago, when his youngest grandchild, Megan, 7, asked him to take her to the traveling carnival that came to town every autumn. He said her mother would take her, but Megan was fiercely determined, as only certain little girls can be, that he take her.

“We went in the late afternoon, just getting dark,” Davis said. “It was what I expected. Oh, God, I’ve always hated those things.” He described the cheap canvases and wobbly floorboards of makeshift stages where magicians in stained tuxedos wowed only those under the age of 8; the moth-eaten lion, the abused elephant, the terrified monkeys; the dodge-em cars piloted by undomesticated teenage boys crashing into you; the smell of grease, week-old popcorn, manure from the goat-petting pen.

At the edge of the carnival grounds was the “House of Horrors,” another canvased structure made to look like (not even close) a decayed mansion. “Little Meg kept pulling me that way, and even after I distracted her by winning a toy at the shooting gallery and nearly poisoning us both with cotton candy, she still insisted on the house.”

As candy-colored lights came on in the early evening, they mounted the platform and climbed into one of the two-seated cars on a track with an attendant securing them. It started with a jolt and they followed the car ahead through swinging doors into the darkness.

“Creepy music, and whenever a new car on the track entered the house it would light up the dusty floor, the cracked wood, and the — what would you call them, exhibits? — were hilarious,” Davis said. “Bed sheets with holes cut for eyes and mouths on wires waving in front of you, right? Witches — oversize dolls on wires passing, one on a broomstick that was bent out of shape. But Meg was having a ball and I would go, ‘Whooo!’ which made her even happier.”

But then, the life-changing moment happened.

Their tour was almost done. He could see the car in front of them breaking through the doors and out to the raised platform above the midway. Meg was looking to her right at the final ghost streaming by, when out of the corner of his eye to the left, something was moving toward them through shadows. “It was a man, in a shirt and jeans all stained with something dark, and blood on his face, nearly covering it, stumbling toward us, holding in one hand what looked like a phone and his other hand out, beckoning me. But it was his eyes! Pain, confusion. Beseeching.”

And then they burst out through the doors and into the lights. In the moment before the attendant came to let them out, Megan looked at her grandfather and said, solemnly, “You said very bad words.”

“I didn’t realize I’d said anything, but I must have. I immediately went up in full alpha attorney mode to the jerk running the house, demanding to know what was going on. Was it part of the show? Was there a maniac loose in there? What? Everyone looked at me like I was nuts. ‘Just a show, man,’ the guy kept saying. Other people said they hadn’t seen what I saw. ‘Just a show, man.’”

And tugging at his hand was Meg, tears in her eyes, suddenly frightened of her grandfather and his incensed cross-examination. He led her away, apologized to her, and they left quickly.

Davis waited as I poured him a cup of coffee and broke off a piece of scone. “Strange, right?” he said. “But it got even stranger.”

Two nights later he woke from a sound sleep. No dream awakened him; he was just immediately awake, a memory of 20 years past flooding him. “I was a terrible father — and not much of a husband either, ignoring the people I loved. Madly in love with myself, my work, my ego … you know that person. That Halloween, my daughter — Megan’s mom, Claire — who was then 14, was going to be in the school play, playing the lead role in Cinderella. I promised to be there, and then the day of the play, I realized I had to write a brief and told her I’d have to miss it. Claire just stared at me. ‘I hate you,’ she said, and walked away. That cinched it. I had to go.”

The night of the play he was late — he was always late — but thought he wouldn’t miss much of the performance, speeding along, taking a short cut along a narrow country road in the darkness. Around a curve was a car crumpled against a pole, hood popped and crushed, one headlight beaming straight up through smoke, the front window a cobweb from the crash. And a young man in shirt and jeans, with dark spots on his clothes, his face covered in blood, a phone in one hand stumbling toward him. “And those eyes,” Davis said.

He drove by, in fact went faster. “The only thought as I passed was: ‘He has a phone. I don’t have to help.’”

Davis arrived in the middle of the third act. He hugged Claire when he greeted her in the school auditorium after the show, her face beaming though her stage makeup.

“And I forgot every detail of that crash until I woke up that night years later after the Haunted House episode with my granddaughter,” Davis said.

He began a series of consultations with psychologists and therapists. All agreed he had suffered dissociative amnesia, a condition that protects traumatic incidents from your consciousness by blocking them. “But I knew it was more,” Davis said. “It was not the horror, it was my selfishness, my need to make amends with my daughter, to come off as the world’s greatest dad, and leave the wounded there on his battlefield. I had to do something. I got in touch with the cops, the hospital, EMS, private doctors, tow truck shops. But … not a trace, not a whisper of any kind of accident.” He paused. “For the first time in my life I understood the word ‘haunted.’ And the consequences of making a choice.”

That something he had to do came when he read a notice in the paper about the need for volunteers at the rehab center.

“Has it helped?” I asked. He didn’t answer, standing and putting a hand on my shoulder. “Now look, I’ll probably see you, but if I don’t, you and the family have a really Happy Halloween.”