Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss

lawyer and I shook hands, and above his soft grip his face was pale and serious. This was not the face of mere formality. As he hurried us down the lobby (lights and footsteps spanking off the marble floor), he told me I was being “litigated against.” Wait, the Zilkes are coming after me? In the flurry of information, I didn’t catch the guy’s name. Why would they sue me, after their promise? It wasn’t until the elevator doors shut that I felt control over my features and bodily functions return.
    My dad and I followed the lawyer into a room in thelower floors. And here the lawyer divulged the cruel, galactic sum the Zilkes could get from me if the trial went horribly wrong. (It was beyond what the insurance company even covered; it was more money, I was sure, than I would ever have.) The low-ceilinged place we entered was called a Special Hearings room. I had to recalibrate myself again: Mr. Zilke sat about ten feet from me.
    All at once I could see him bringing me that iced tea in his front room. And now he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
    I’d imagined this deposition would take place in a judge’s cozy chambers—polished wooden desk; a sort of brass-based, green, LA Law -ish lamp. Instead we’d all sidled one-by-one into this chalky and hideously lit sub-basementy place. A long plastic table commandeered most of the room.
    “You okay?” my father asked me.
    “Yeah,” I said. I raised my chin, spoke confidently, and meant it. “Yes.”
    And as fast as that, under the burnished presence of a judge, the event began. Right away the Zilkes’ lawyer trained his expertise on me. How far did her body fly?
    Before I opened my mouth, I realized the confidence had been a bluff, a kind of performance for my father and myself, too. It was the weighted bat you swing bravely in the on-deck circle, which can’t stop your knees from buckling when you step up to the plate.
    How much did your car skid on the grass of the median before it came to a stop? With a hunter’s eye, the Zilkes’ lawyertargeted small rifts in my self-assurance and certainty. Five cars around, why did she turn into yours?
    The lawyer flexed his eyebrows as he spoke—eyebrows that didn’t believe me, that were already garnishing wages, spending the balance of a salary I hadn’t earned yet.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    Over and again, question after question. “Don’t know. Not sure.” I looked at my father for solace. This wasn’t anything we’d expected. All he could do was watch me. Mr. Zilke, of course (there was a great deal of intensity at the table), saw that I was looking to my father.
    “I don’t know,” I said, each time more softly than the last. “I don’t know.”
    “What do you know?”
    Then the Zilkes’ lawyer inhaled through his nose and shut his eyes, slowly. A man visibly calming himself.
    He came back from his settle-down place and continued. His style was a kind of word fog in which I couldn’t make out any detail, only the growing sense of being lost and wrong: “What’s the exact amount of seconds, son, between when you saw her and you killed her with your car? Because, right now, it doesn’t seem like, with your answers—or lack of answers—there’s any, shall we say, it’s just that you strike me as someone who might be telling less than the fullest extent of the truth. Do you follow me?”
    He searched my eyes, and for a moment, I got to search his. I made out, to my surprise, what looked like regret. Something shaky in the face, there in the spry brows—aremorse about the power and edge that experience has over anxiety and weakness. (This was my thinking then.) “Take your time, son,” he said.
    In any court setting, where people have nothing to do but lean forward and listen, silences feel drawn-out. They convey an impression of somebody using the shade of a few extra moments to put together a hasty lie. I wasn’t going to lie, though; I just didn’t want to give the only answer I had. But