Entwined Summary PDF

Summary Entwined Short Story by Brian Tobin This summary of the...

Summary Entwined Short Story by Brian Tobin This summary of the short story includes targeted passages from the text for you to read on your own. Background The word entwine means “to twist together.” This story is about how characters’ lives get twisted together, or connected, after a deadly car accident. The narrator tells the story from the present, remembering events in his past. Summary The narrator begins the story by stating that he killed Russell Gramercy on September 12, 1994. It happened during the narrator’s second week of college. The event happened 18 years ago. Since then, the narrator has gone over the details of the event many times in his mind. He begins to tell the story: © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company ©Ocskay Bence/Shutterstock On September 12, 1994, the narrator is driving back from a trip to a lake. He is alone. He has not been drinking. He is not speeding or driving in a dangerous way. It is a beautiful day in upstate New York. A song he loves, by the band Pearl Jam, is on the radio. He notices a sign about road work ahead. Then he sees Daria Gramercy walking along the road, ahead of where he is driving. She looks beautiful and is walking with two men. Entwined 1  Summary The three of them have been forced off the sidewalk because of the road work. They are walking in the road even though signs tell walkers to go to the other side of the road, where it is safer. TARGETED PASSAGE Read this passage from the selection to learn what happens right before a moment that changes the narrator’s life. 5 At the time, I have to admit, I didn’t notice those signs. Even though the radio was blaring “Alive,” I blaring: playing loudly. could also faintly hear children playing: a Pee Wee League soccer match was just beginning. 6 If only it could have stopped there. If only I could go back in time and slam the brake pedal, so that nothing more would have happened except Pearl Jam, the orange traffic cones, the young woman in white trivial: not important. short shorts, the sound of kids playing. Then it all would have just faded, one of millions of trivial sense stand still: stop. memories that disappeared. READING CHECK 7 But time didn’t stand still. What does the narrator wish he could do? The narrator drives closer to Daria and the two men. Then one of the men stumbles into the road. The next thing happens very quickly. The narrator’s car hits Russell Gramercy. His body breaks the windshield. Then he flies off the car. The narrator smells his tires burning from braking so quickly. He hears Daria Gramercy screaming. Everything seems unreal to the narrator. He turns off the car. He notices bits of glass on his shirt. Russell Gramercy’s body is in the road. The narrator runs to where the body and other people are. Russell Gramercy’s body is very broken and bloody. Daria is crying. The narrator is still © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company noticing her appearance. He’s not proud of himself for having this thought. The police and an ambulance arrive. Daria cries and Chris, her older brother, holds her. The narrator realizes that he knows Chris. He played baseball against him. Russell Gramercy was the coach of Chris’s baseball team. Chris was a star player. Russell is also a chemistry professor at the narrator’s college. Entwined 2  Summary Russell Gramercy is taken away in the ambulance. The narrator talks to the police and a detective for a long time. They talk to Chris and Daria, too. Daria didn’t see the car hit her dad, but she heard the sound of it. Chris says that his dad stumbled. Chris says that it wasn’t the driver’s fault. Chris tells the narrator that there was nothing he could have done to stop the accident from happening. But Daria looks at the narrator with anger. The detective tells the narrator that he isn’t going to be charged with a crime. The narrator’s father drives him home. Russell Gramercy dies. The next day the narrator can’t eat or sleep. His parents keep saying that the accident wasn’t his fault. His father wants him to go to the Gramercy home. But then the car insurance company calls. The company will handle the fees related to the accident. The company says not to talk to the Gramercy family. The narrator’s family does what the company says. The narrator does not apologize to the Gramercy family, and he does not go to the funeral. There is a memorial for Russell Gramercy at the narrator’s college. He attends. Speakers say kind things about Gramercy. One speaker stands out to the narrator. He talks about how he became a doctor, and how his career wouldn’t have been possible without Russell Gramercy. He talks about the connections between people’s lives. The narrator leaves college and moves to New York City. He never drives again. For ten years, he has nightmares. In his early twenties, he has boring jobs that are meaningless to him. Then he starts a small business. He never marries. He thinks that his failures in relationships are connected to the accident. The narrator says that he had a moment in his life that completely changed him. This separates him from other people. In the next part of the story, the narrator says that the first body was found in April 2011. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Russell Gramercy’s wife has sold their cabin at the lake. It was a place Russell Gramercy had often gone alone. The new owners find a buried skeleton. Then the police dig up eight other bodies. The police discover that Russell Gramercy killed them. All but one were young men. The next summer, the narrator gets a call from Daria Gramercy. She wants to meet with him. The narrator has been hoping for this moment for a long time. Entwined 3  Summary They meet at a coffee shop. The narrator apologizes for not seeing Daria and her family after the accident. He tells her everything that he can remember about the accident, and he cries. Daria says that the accident wasn’t his fault. Then she apologizes. She says that she has been visiting all of the families of the people whom her father killed. She wanted to see him too. Daria says that several years ago Chris died in a traffic accident. He had been drinking. The narrator mentions the speaker at the memorial, who talked about how everyone’s lives are connected. The narrator and Daria talk about how the accident, which took Russell Gramercy’s life, may have saved others from being killed by him. In the next part of the story, the narrator is at a cousin’s house watching old videos. One of the videos is of the kids’ soccer game that was happening near the accident. The narrator takes this video home. In it, he can hear the screech of his car when the accident happened. Before that, he can see tiny figures walking on the road as his car comes close to them. Something about what he sees doesn’t make sense to him. He watches the video over and over, but the figures are too small to see what really happens. On the internet, the narrator finds a forensic video analyst, an expert who studies videos of crimes. His name is Irving Beckstein. The narrator takes the video to Beckstein. TARGETED PASSAGE Read this passage from the selection to learn about how the narrator tries to figure out what the video shows. 117 Beckstein had cropped and blown up the footage cropped and blown up the ­footage: cut and enlarged the of the accident. “Forget what you see on TV. Our video. software can’t miraculously sharpen an image so it looks like a thirty-five-millimeter movie. But we can do quite a bit.” He went on to explain what he had © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company done. His words seemed well burnished, as if he had given them many times in front of juries. 118 Then he played the images for me on a large, sixty- pixilated: made up of colored inch monitor. Though heavily pixilated, it showed dots; blurry. Chris Gramercy shoving his father into the path of READING CHECK my oncoming car. What does the narrator learn from watching the video? Entwined 4  Summary In the next part of the story, the narrator tells about support groups he’s joined for people who have caused deadly accidents. He doesn’t think anyone in these groups has been involved in a murder in the way he has. The narrator does nothing with the information he learned from the video. Then Daria calls. She is very upset. She thinks that Chris may have been involved in the accident. She says that Chris would get drunk and talk about whether there was ever a good reason for killing someone. The narrator tells her that Chris was not involved in the accident. He says that Chris was not near his father and that Russell Gramercy stumbled into the road on his own. Daria cries and then thanks him. The narrator is not sure if lying to Daria was the right thing to do. But he says that his worries and nightmares have gotten better since he did. TURN & TALK Do you think the narrator should have told Daria the truth about Chris pushing their father in front of the car? Why do you think the narrator lied? Are there ever good reasons to lie? Discuss your ideas with a partner. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Excerpts from “Entwined” by Brian Tobin. Text copyright © 2015 by Brian Tobin. Reprinted by permission of the author. Entwined 5