What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? - The Sunday Long Read

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Ryan Nickerson poses for a portrait outside of his home on Friday, November 8, 2024 in Palm Bay, Florida.<br>(Zack Wittman for The Sunday Long Read)<br>" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/zwSLRRyanBW02-1.jpg?fit=1024%2C819&ssl=1" />

What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?

Nov 20, 2024

by

Joshua St. Clair

in Original

Prologue

One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home through the morning swelter having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon.

He’s 37 and between jobs. Since he moved from Georgia to Florida, after it happened, work’s been hard to come by. Work’s been hard to keep, too, after it happened. Five years ago next week. He dreads the anniversary.

He turns his blue Nissan truck onto his street. The neighborhood is quiet. It’s a coastal suburb east of Orlando in the shadow of Disney. Rows of one-story houses. Hip roofs. Wide driveways for double garages.

The girls love it here.

Reese, his middle child. And Addie, his oldest, who says she wants to stay and live with him—instead of with Mom in Georgia. She loves Disney and the zoo and SeaWorld and the beach and pancakes and horror movies and Tower of Terror and those water slides that drop you, standing, down a chute after the floor gives out. Addie has no fear. She is 10.

He pulls up the drive, parks the truck. He leaves it out, uncovered, where it gleams bright blue for the whole neighborhood. The girl hit the front left bumper. And then she rolled beneath the back left tire. There’s still a scratch where she hit. He looks at it every day. For a long time he couldn’t bear to drive the thing, but what else could he do? He was behind on payments. He couldn’t afford to get rid of it. It has 150,000 miles on it now. It’s paid off. He can sell it but doesn’t want to. It’s as if she is still alive, still with him. Was she afraid? She was 10.

He goes inside. Fires up the stove, for pancakes. The summer is almost over now. The girls will be leaving soon. Next week he will fly with them back to Georgia, drop them off with their mom, and then wait for Christmas. He only gets 10 weeks each year with them. No time is ever enough time.

He makes the girls breakfast and then he goes out to the porch to sit and watch the day. The July heat depresses the neighborhood, the grass browning, the leaves drooping in the flowerbeds.

He sits here and he thinks about it. Everything that happened. He can feel it coming on, the weight of everything, because it always comes on now, always in July, always his body that feels it first.

Addie asked him about it last year.

“Daddy, why are you sad?”

He figured she was old enough to know. He told her he didn’t do it on purpose, that it was an accident. She seemed to understand.

She comes out from the kitchen now and joins him on the porch.

She has strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes and is wearing a white shirt with printed rows of fruit, and when Ryan looks at her, he is afraid. That she is growing older. That she will one day hate him. That he might die before she hates. And worst of all: that she might die first. That he might lose her the same way Mrs. Patterson lost her daughter, five years ago next week: suddenly, in a blink, with a bright blue Nissan truck barreling into and then over her, the driver totally unaware he had just killed a little girl.

On July 20, 2017, Ryan Nickerson was driving to work when he killed Kennadē Patterson.

She was 10 and she crossed a highway in the dark, having gone out early with her sister and brother to buy snacks. Ryan was never charged.

Every day, 20 people in America are killed by a moving vehicle—which means every day, 20 drivers could become killers, many of them accidental killers. There is no moral to these stories, and there is no moral to Ryan Nickerson’s story. One would like there to be a moral. Suffering demands a thesis. But what thesis can Ryan share? The killing was just one suffering. It was less than a minute of his life. He had suffered before. He will suffer again.

Perhaps the story of Ryan Nickerson is nothing but a litany of suffering.

Or perhaps in that litany something else happens. Something unexpected. Something that only happens when suffering happens. Perhaps it is grace.

Ryan Nickerson poses for a portrait outside of his home on Friday, November 8, 2024 in Palm Bay, Florida.<br>(Zack Wittman for The Sunday Long Read)<br>" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/zwSLRRyanBW01x.jpg?fit=1024%2C819&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/zwSLRRyanBW01x.jpg?resize=4000%2C3200&ssl=1" alt="" class="wp-image-12746"...