Angel at the Intersection
Some of you, dear readers, were present for this one. All names have been changed.
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Here’s a story. It starts with a song.
“Winter in the country
fills my heart with glee.
When the snow falls gently
it falls for me.
Snow on the mountains,
snow on the trees—”
Is what the fourth graders sang in the winter concert.
“Wiiiinter fills my heart in the countryyyy,
where I can feel safe and warm, by the fire.”
Levi had not shown up for the school concert. He was a popular kid, so sometimes he got in trouble, fulfilling basic popular kid duties, like playing “the penis game” where you yell “Penis!!!!” as loud as you can till the teacher catches you. Or maybe throwing a rubber ball too high, toward a girl’s face, in dodge ball. But missing a concert?
He would never.
Levi was in the choir and had dutifully practiced with us all semester. He was my neighbor and my Hebrew school carpool buddy and I figured that, maybe when I was 11 or 12, we would kiss, though I hadn’t strictly pinned a timeline on it.
On December 12th, Levi turned ten and on December 14th, we sang for the whole school,
“Snow on the mountains
snow on the trees,
and the whole meadow fills with
a cool winter breeze.”
After the concert, we hugged our parents and I could feel, underneath the festive pitch of good cheer and the crinkle of wrapped bouquets, the low hum of Levi’s absence.
“He was in a car accident, we think,” my mom explained. She seemed caring, but not worried, as she handed me my purple coat lined with down and swirls of color. “I’m sure he’s going to be okay. Maybe he broke his leg.”
I imagined his cast. I would meticulously draw one of those ‘S’ symbols comprised of little dashes connected with diagonals. The Superman ‘S.’ And if space allowed, what with him being both popular and having not a very big leg, I’d also draw a peace sign. Maybe a star — a Star of David, because of the whole Hebrew school thing.
We all got back to our friend Edie’s house as planned and, unloading our coats, flowers, violins and saxophones, we ate crackers, smoked nuts, and nice cheese to celebrate the many merry sounds we had produced in the winter concert.
Edie’s dad, Mark, called Levi’s house down the street to check in on his absence. The kids kept chattering, but the parents got just a little softer.
“Hi,” he said. “We wanted to make sure everything is okay. We heard there might have been—.”
Mark went quiet.
A wooden swivel chair squeaked mid-turn at the kitchen counter. Hands froze above bowls of mixed nuts. Diet Coke stopped fizzing. Breath stopped breathing.
“Oh. God.” Mark said into the phone. “I’m so sorry. Ok. Yes of course. Goodbye then. We are so — we’ll be here — for you.”
“Did Levi break his leg?” I asked, because it did seem that the worst had happened.
Mark hung up the phone to face the assembled crowd of parents and children. “Levi’s parents just returned from the hospital. He was hit by a car walking to the concert. He died. It was a hit and run.”
Hit and run. I thought. Hit … and run. “Winter in the country—.” Hit. And run. “Fills my heart with glee.” Hit and run.
And the descant section: “Wiiinter fills my heart in the country…” which we’d practiced so hard, melded with this phrase that I had not practiced at all, but now felt I knew so keenly. Hit and run.
Levi had slipped on the icy road. He’d lost consciousness and then been hit by a school parent taking her daughter to play an angel in the Nutcracker. A macabre and bizarre start to a night of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa and non-denominational winter music.
She’d been in a rush and not stopped after hitting what she thought perhaps was a dog, so the story went. She planned to come back and see. They were running very late to the Nutcracker. Bethany was the girl’s name. The girl who was playing an angel. She was a third grader and already bullied and not so popular. Even before … before her mother killed Levi, the popular boy.
When Levi was really gone; gone not just in the shocked conversations of our parents, but gone also from the lunch line on pasta days, gone from first-picked in gym class, gone from the carpool; we planted a tree for him. It’s big now in front of the synagogue. To see it today, it looks like any natural-sized tree that just shows up in a place or gets carried over as a seed on the wind, but I remember the day we planted it as a baby tree; small, sensitive and winsome, like Levi himself. A large rock is engraved for him, too, at Morley School. A 1994 rock. What an awfully long and busy time to stay dead.
Four-way stop signs were placed at the Ardmore intersection. When I learned to drive some years later, I’d stop there, always with no other car around. I’d stop and I’d wait. Each time interrupted, surprised, and just a little haunted to find myself there.
By January of ‘95, you could no longer see the chalk outline of a small boy in the middle of the road, who’d been playing, so the story went, in the ice on the walk to meet his buddy, Kris. They were to meet there, at halfway, to walk to school where they’d sing together the tenor part of “Winter in the Country.”