The Best American Essays 2016 by Jonathan Franzen

Author:Jonathan Franzen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

When Elizabeth and I reached our hotel in Alajuela, we walked into the reception area and gave our names to the man at the desk. In a barely audible voice I told him about the accident, that the police might be calling to speak with us.

Nodding, he handed me a piece of paper where he’d written some names and phone numbers. The truck driver had already called. So had the police. They all wanted Elizabeth and me to drive back to the scene and give a statement.

This was not going to happen. It had taken us ninety minutes to get to the hotel from the accident scene. All through San José, traffic had been a mess. When we’d reached Alajuela, the main road through town was under construction, so we, along with the rest of the late-afternoon commuters, had been detoured onto side streets, which were clogged. We’d progressed one or two car lengths at a time, moving slower than the pedestrians on the sidewalks. This invited people to walk through the lanes of traffic and cut between our SUV and the cars in front of us. Normally this is fairly innocuous behavior—anyone who’s navigated a jammed parking lot following a concert or sporting event has done it. People who live in New York or other big cities prone to gridlock do it every day. But having seen what we’d seen, it struck us as reckless and terrifying. Each time someone had walked in front of the SUV, I’d pressed harder on the brake pedal. Eventually my leg had cramped.

“No,” I said. “We can’t. We can talk to them on the phone. If the police want to come here, we’re happy to answer any questions they might have. But we’re not getting back on the road.”

The desk clerk registered how serious I was and nodded. “I’ll call the driver back.” The driver didn’t pick up, so the clerk left a message. I told the clerk I would sit in the lobby until the driver returned the call—I’d already left the driver hanging once, and I was determined not to do it again. I suggested that Elizabeth take the key and go find the room, but she didn’t want to separate. Neither did I. We took each other’s hand and sat down to wait.

The clerk had someone bring us glasses of water. Knowing that our reservations had been booked by Aratinga Tours, a company that caters to bird-watchers, he tried to take our minds off the situation by asking what birds we’d seen on our trip. We did our best to respond, but our hearts were not in it.

After twenty minutes, the driver called back. To avoid any confusion that might be caused by my less-than-perfect Spanish, I asked the clerk to translate. But the driver was only calling to tell me that my statement was no longer needed. Other witnesses had come forward to say what Elizabeth and I would have said, that the driver had done nothing wrong. A few people who lived in the houses adjacent to the highway had also come forward.

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