A Book A Week: Carry the One by Carol Anshaw

Carry the One: A Novel by Carol Anshaw, Simon & Schuster 2012 (Received in a Twitter #fridayreads participation giveaway; all opinions are my own)

In haunting physical and emotional detail we witness the ways in which trauma and guilt lead to action, inaction, self-torture, and occasionally, beauty.

On the night of Carmen’s wedding, she packs a group of friends and family into a car and waves goodnight. A musician friend named Tom, Carmen’s new sister-in-law Maude, and Carmen’s sister Alice and her brother Nick let Nick’s girlfriend Olivia drive them back to Manhattan from the rural artists’ co-op where Carmen and Matt get married. Never mind that they’re all less than sober, that Olivia and Nick are tripping on mushrooms, and that their post-party, late-night fatigue and libido might make the back-country roads dangerous. The ten-year-old girl walking in the road that night doesn’t get much warning because the headlights on the car aren’t turned on. In the moment when the riders in the car see her face against the windshield, her life ends and theirs change forever.

We never learn much about the dead girl, Casey Redman. The audience sees her in fragments. For us, she is more symbol than character: green smocked shirt, moccasin slippers, shorts, youth cut down.

The story unfolds from the perspective of the three siblings, Carmen, Alice, and Nick, from the time of the accident in the early eighties more or less to the present day.

Carmen is an activist, working in a shelter, attending protests, protecting the disenfranchised and poor. Her earnestness and steadfastness make her the pragmatic center of the family.

Alice is an artist. She struggles through an obsessive relationship with Maude, but the dead girl haunts Alice’s painting. Casey returns in Alice’s work, aging slowly, experiencing a life she was denied in reality.

Nick, with a promising career as an astronomer, remains faithful to Olivia while she is in prison, and eventually marries her. Olivia is the one who pays for the crime with prison time. She was the driver. She takes direct responsibility for the girl’s death, but eventually makes her life right for herself. But Nick bears the weight of the pain and the guilt of the group, unable to let go of his grief and remorse. He does not see the girl as a symbol, and we eventually learn that he is the only one who has been brave enough to confront and connect with the girl’s family. The pain eats him up with addiction and self-destruction.

Like Casey, Olivia is more absent than present in the story. We do not know how she copes with the tragedy, but religion is hinted, as is sobriety and a hard center that comes to rely on a memory of the dead girl.

Their lives are both extraordinary because of their involvement in this tragedy, but also ordinary because everyone has some experience that damages them in some way. Their lives are weird, hopeless, and boring in ways divorced from the girl. But even the mundane is inseparable from her. She is like a blunt object in the center of their memories. Their choices bend around their feelings about the girl they didn’t know in life. They come together and apart and they live, never feeling that they completely deserve love or success.

The phrase ‘Carry the One’ is a mathematical pun about personal arithmetic. “Because of the accident, we’re not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” They each carry Casey Redman for the rest of their lives. But they eventually struggle more with carrying each other than with carrying the girl. It’s easier, finally, to carry their feelings about Casey, with the certainty that she is always with them. Guilt is too easy, the story reminds us. “Much more complicated was living past the guilt, bearing the permanence, accommodating the weight of having done something terrible and completely undoable.”

I have resisted allowing a tragedy in my life to define my life and actions. That is the only way I have found to keep moving forward, and now to be able to look back and find some incomplete understanding. But I know that I have the experience of that tragedy in my history, that moment that is present in the living room of my subsequent decisions like a bulky piece of furniture. With time, it has become easier to move the moment to a corner, to move more freely around it. But that moment still limits the arrangement of the other furniture, and I still whack my shins on it from time to time. Books like Anshaw’s Carry the One remind me in smart, sensory, and richly emotional ways that accommodating the difficult memories is not easy, but I do not do it alone.