The Girls from Ames

The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow Read Free Book Online

Book: The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jeffrey Zaslow
Kelly says to Marilyn when the two of them get to talking. “It’s your nature to confess. That was never part of my nature, but I’ve always tried to understand you.”
    When she was young, Marilyn would do almost anything for Jane, her closest friend of all, but Jane knew that Marilyn’s allegiances to family superseded everything. Marilyn was especially connected to her dad, a pediatrician who reminded people of TV’s Marcus Welby. He was a beloved figure in Ames, and he was even more than that to Marilyn. He was her absolute hero. Certainly, she grew up identifying herself as one of the Ames girls, and she reveled in her bonds with Jane. But when she defined herself, right down to her core, it was as “Dr. McCormack’s daughter.”
    Jane understood this better than the other girls. She spent so much time with the McCormacks; she loved them, too. She also knew details about Marilyn’s family life and history that the other girls did not. As Cathy recalls: “I always knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what it was.” Now, as adults, all of the girls know almost everything, and it helps them to better understand Marilyn.
    “Pretend I’m not here,” Marilyn says to a few of them as they lounge on Angela’s porch. She lifts her camera. “Beautiful. You all look beautiful.”
     
     
    T o understand lifelong friendships, sometimes you have to go back to a time before any of those friends were even born. And so in a way, Marilyn’s connection to the Ames girls can be traced back to September 25, 1960.
    That day, her parents decided to drive her four older siblings to a friend’s farm sixty miles north of Ames. It was meant to be a fun excursion on a bright Sunday morning, a chance for the kids to ride a tractor, check out the inside of a barn, and pass by thousands of acres of cornfields. Dr. McCormack was always trying to expose his kids to the wider world, to help them appreciate nature. This was just another one of those adventures.
    The McCormacks’ oldest child, Billy, then a few weeks shy of his seventh birthday, had been sitting in the third row of the station wagon, the row facing backward. That allowed him to smile and wave at all the Sunday morning drivers on the road behind them, while the corn whizzed by out the side windows.
    When they left Ames, Marilyn’s mom was in the front seat. But at about the halfway point, she decided to take a nap and switched places with Billy. He got in the front passenger seat, put on his seat belt—the car hadn’t come with seat belts, but Dr. McCormack had them installed—and they continued driving.
    The family was on a gravel road about a mile from the farmhouse when a fifteen-year-old boy in his parents’ car appeared out of nowhere and slammed, broadside, into Dr. McCormack’s car. Because it was September, the cornstalks were near their tallest point, obstructing the view at that intersection. An experienced driver, familiar with the dangers on rural roads, would have known to be cautious at such an intersection. But the boy had his foot hard on the gas; police later estimated he was traveling ninety miles an hour.
    Each member of the McCormack family was seriously injured in the collision. Sara, age five, had a forehead wound. Three-year-old Polly had a ruptured spleen. One-year-old Don was bleeding profusely from the back of his head. Mrs. McCormack had a shattered collarbone. Everyone had multiple lacerations. The boy who had driven the other car was also badly injured.
    The McCormacks’ front passenger door had taken the brunt of the impact. As a result, Billy, still buckled in the front seat, was the most severely hurt. Dr. McCormack, his hands and arms bleeding from windshield glass, his ribs cracked from the steering wheel, pulled his son from the car, and called upon all his medical knowledge to try to save him. For an hour, he hunched over the boy on that gravel road, attempting to stop the bleeding, to make sense of the internal

Similar Books

Absence

Peter Handke

Jarmila

Ernst Weiß

The Call-Girls

Arthur Koestler

Lighthouse

Alison Moore

Penguin Lost

Andrey Kurkov

The Doctor's Daughter

Hilma Wolitzer

Sword of the Silver Knight

Gertrude Chandler Warner

Beautiful Broken Mess

Kimberly Lauren