Sleeping was not the problem, it was what flew through her head as she lay awake: the moments after the accident rendered in a blinding flash; Jeff making love to Stacey in their bed (the bed she still slept in, though she stripped it and sprayed the mattress every week with Lysol, as if that could kill the memory); the woman in rehab who screamed herself to sleep, exhausting all of them. This was her version of that, with visions instead of hallucinations, her demons real.
She’d been pinned in the car, her knee mashed under the dashboard and hurting, blood running down her face, flecking the cuffs of her shirt, wetting the front. For some reason she was off the road, a stretch of wire fence filling the passenger window. Her car had stalled but her lights were still on, the speedometer on zero. The other car sat attached to hers, T-boned, smoking, the other driver partially eclipsed by the air bag, a woman her age, her one arm rising and falling as if she were waving to her, flagging her down for help. Her first conscious thought after the impact was ironically relieved—that she hadn’t been drinking—as if the woman had caught her at just the right time. She didn’t remember what happened, only that she’d been driving. It was not her fault.
She had a cigarette somewhere—knocked from her hand—and thought the cars might catch fire like they did in the movies. She could open her door. It swung free, and the cold and snow poured in, attacking from all sides. Her arms were fine, and her one leg, but the other wouldn’t budge. She thought someone should be here already, the police at least. It was a busy road, even at this time of night.
“Help!” she yelled, but the snow seemed to swallow her words. The other woman waved her hand mechanically. On the road another car sluiced by. “Help us,” she said weakly. For Christ’s sake, stop.
Of the moments in her life she would never forget, this one returned to her most often. It was the one she singled out as the turning point, the reason she decided to become another person, though Jeff never tired of pointing out—as she herself did, remembering—that she hadn’t been drinking that night.
“I just as easily could have been,” she argued, until he no longer listened to her. That was when Stacey came into the picture, walking out of their bathroom naked, noticeably younger than her, perky and carefree, a lover Jeff might have dreamed up, jumping on the bed like a trampoline, trying to touch the stucco ceiling as he laughed beneath her, while Meg lay in her private room at Winding Trails, freezing under the covers, the stitches in her knee healing. Down the dark hall, night after night, she heard the woman pleading with Jesus, screaming for him to save her.
These were the secrets she didn’t tell anyone but selfishly held on to, bringing them out in the last minutes before sleep to turn them over again, trying to glean some meaning from the awkward combination of the three. The woman in the other car suffered a serious spinal injury but survived. It had been the other woman’s fault, the police report determined, she’d been driving too fast for conditions. The woman down the hall she never found out about. The screaming stopped after her first week, the room empty when she passed it, awaiting its next occupant. The third woman was herself (Stacey wasn’t a woman, just a symptom), and there her analysis foundered, leaving only what had occurred, vivid and irreducible, meaning she was free to revisit the events anytime, which she did.