She couldn’t remember everything about the night of the car accident.
In the years that would follow, she would piece details together in her head, until she came up with the singular story she told herself again and again and again. The things she remembered: The pizza, the rain, Will’s teddy bear that Max had brought him as a gift. Then the things she couldn’t: It was raining so hard, they stepped out into the lot. They couldn’t see. A driver lost control. But what color was the car? Why was it driving so fast? And the truth was, she would never really know what had happened in the minutes just before she and Max were hit by a car and Will was spared.
All she would know was what George would tell her. (And even though she had hit her head, she still understood that George was an unreliable narrator.) George said she and Max had been hit in the parking lot of the pizza joint, walking out after they ate. The car had sped away. The cops never caught the guy. The only witness was Will, who was too young to truly understand, and who was found standing there sobbing in the rain, clutching a teddy bear, by a poor waitress who’d been crying too hard herself to get her story straight. Max died the next morning of his injuries. But Mare was lucky. She woke up. Her head injury would leave no lasting damage. Though, her leg had been crushed and she might never walk without a limp again. But still. Luck was luck. Living was living and dead was dead.
But was she really living without Max?
That thought crossed her mind again and again in the first few weeks after she woke up. How could it possibly be true that she would live the entire rest of her life without ever seeing him, being with him again? Now that she had felt love, she didn’t understand how a life without it was any life at all.
Then George brought Will to visit her in the hospital. He climbed up into her bed and wrapped his small arms around her neck, held on tightly. She inhaled the sweet Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo scent of his fine brown curls. And she felt it swell up in her chest, a love she felt for her son too.
“Thank god you’re okay.” George leaned in and joined the family hug, clinging tightly to both Mare and Will. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Mare.” They held on to each other, all three of them.
George finally pulled back, though Will still clung to her, and his cheeks were streaked with tears. “I’m going to try harder from now on,” he said, stroking her cheek gently with his thumb. “Do better.”
It occurred to her that maybe he was being truthful. Maybe somewhere inside him, he honestly felt something for her. He didn’t want to lose her. Not to another man. Not to death either.
“I love you, you know,” George added softly.
In response she simply clung tighter to Will, kissed the top of his head.
In her writers’ workshop they would’ve called this “deus ex machina.” Max had been suddenly and unexpectedly plucked away. And now this was to be her fate, spending the rest of her life with George, whether she loved him or not.
When she finally left the hospital, her leg still in a cast, Margery came to pick her up. As Margery rolled Mare out in a wheelchair, she handed Mare her purse, told Mare that she’d had it with her the night of the accident. And George, in the days first following the accident, had retrieved it from the hospital staff and asked Margery to keep it safe.
Once inside the passenger seat of Margery’s powder-blue Chevrolet, Mare searched the contents of her own bag, remnants of an old life, the former person she used to be. She found a familiar camera in the bottom. Max’s camera. And she asked Margery if they could stop by the one-hour MotoPhoto on the way home.
In the developed roll of film, she found the picture of her and Max together, at the pizza restaurant, right before the accident. But then, there was a photograph of a very pregnant Bess, too. And why in the world would that have been on Max’s camera, if he wasn’t still with her, if he wasn’t the father of her baby? Mare couldn’t fathom another reason. And that’s when she knew that she could never tell Bess the truth about what Max had been doing in Chicago, what Max had been doing with her. Their secret, their love, would die along with him.