How I Killed Someone

 

Rear-view mirrors in automobiles are merciless.

—John Updike, Self-Consciousness

 

I

“Open wide, let’s practice,” I say as I unwind Reed’s seat belt. He hates having to sit in a car seat in the back. He wants to be big like his sisters, sit next to mommy in the front, turn the knobs that make music. He’s been gifted with intensity: Mike Tyson tendencies. This could be bad for the dentist, so I’m preparing him for his first visit.

Maybe a little friendly competition will help. “Can you open wider than Mommy can?” He looks me in the eye and squeezes his lips together so tight they pucker.

“See? Mommy can open wide. Look at Mommy.”

Before I even get the sentence finished, his eyes are also closed. I didn’t know eyelids could pucker. Had he been my first, this power struggle might’ve been a big deal. But he’s my caboose. So his little streaked-with-chocolate-milk-and-Pop-Tarts face contorted in defiance amuses me. At least he got in his car seat without a fight.

The Montero’s back seat is a lot higher than my Maxima’s had been and it takes a while to find the buckle where the metal thing goes in. I find it, but it’s wedged down in the seat; pulling it out far enough so I can get the metal tip down and snapped is proving to be a pain in the ass. I didn’t know that a prerequisite for my new four-wheel-drive was elastic arms. Reed’s oblivious. And still all puckered. As the buckle snaps I kiss his arm because I can’t reach his mouth and make a pop sound with my lips. This doesn’t faze him. He keeps his eyes squeezed closed.

I know the appointment isn’t that big a deal, but since it will be an annual pilgrimage I want it to go better than the visit to Santa. Who, I heard, healed nicely after he got the stitches out. I didn’t read the Mr. Rogers Goes to the Dentist book to Reed or do any kind of prepping like I normally do because I completely forgot about the appointment. I blame CRS disease (can’t remember shit) on being OLD and a MOM. Bri, Reed’s eight-year-old sister, didn’t forget.

At 7:30 a.m., we were waiting for the school bus on our front porch instead of out in the cul-de-sac because of the rain. She unzipped her backpack and pulled out her sunglasses. They had zebra stripes and were specked with glitter. You couldn’t get any more cool or any more big kid in Reed’s eyes than his sister’s sunglasses.

She put them on and grinned her “I’m-a-badass” grin. “If you’re brave at the dentist,” she told Reed, “you can wear them home.”

I should’ve been impressed. She’d managed to mix memory and bribery while upping her cool factor. But my brain was too busy rescheduling the plumber. Bri held the glasses above Reed, just out of reach, and added, “But no putting them in the commode.”

The day before, Reed had flushed his Rugrats sunglasses down the toilet. “They were baby sunglasses,” he said, pointing his finger at me, fueled by thirty pounds of indignation. After fifteen minutes in the time-out corner, he’d dropped only the finger. Righteous indignation, even in the least of us, burns long and hard.

After calling the plumber, I called my sister. “About I’ll Love You Forever, that book with the toddler terrorist who decorates the front yard shrubbery with his mother’s underwear and flushes things that he doesn’t like down the toilet . . .”

“You are welcome,” she said, assuming I was grateful. At that moment, I was anything but.

After the plumber worked his magic, though, and no permanent harm had been done, the book became one of our favorites.

Bri handed me her sunglasses and kissed us both bye.

“Love you forever,” she said, taking off for the school bus.

“Like you for always!” Reed and I yelled back.

I tousled his hair and added the last line, “As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.”

With less than an hour to get us both dressed and across town, we needed to hurry. The Olympics ought to have just such an event for moms. Who else is able to weave through Legos, leap over tall trikes, spout Seuss, and apply mascara while getting wee ones and ourselves ready?

“Hustle,” I yelled at Reed. I grabbed a pair of panties off the nearest boxwood and ran inside.

 

 

II

It is the summer of 1969 and men have just walked on the moon. I am three and standing in the front seat of our Ford with enough headroom to jump up and down and not crack my skull, a constant worry of Mother’s. She’s at the wheel. Daddy is at Uncle Oco and Aunt Willodean’s house, painting their living room. Mother has pulled the car half in their yard, half in the street, and stopped.

Our house is a block over on Chestnut, a white with black trim two-bedroom one-bath that my parents built in the late ’40s, soon after they were married. Next door, not even thirty feet away, is Big Mama and Granddaddy’s house, where Mother was raised until at fourteen she married Daddy. Another uncle and his family also live down the street; the rest of the neighbors aren’t kin.

Our little neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, is mostly flat with a few slight hills that no matter what the street signs say—Elder, Bush, Redwood, Rosewood, Alpine, Shades—is not horticulturally diverse. The streets lack curbs but the yards, most of them anyway, have concrete sidewalks, poured to a straight edge, that lead, past metal-poled mailboxes with red flags that raise and lower, to driveways.

It is dusk, I remember, but not late. We have driven the car over for a different reason.

Pedestrian has never been Mother’s style.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” Daddy’d said on the phone. Cause and effect, after more than twenty years of marriage, had not evolved beyond call and response.

So there I was that evening, standing on the front seat, a skinny-legged, barefooted, preschool superhero cigarette-bringer.

Age can also account for holes in a memory.

My thin whiskery daddy painted in special clothes: a white, long-sleeved, two-pocket shirt—never just one pocket, that was heresy—and Dickie-ish pants speckled with colors, hardened confetti that could never be thrown. “What color are they painting with?” I asked mother. She didn’t know.

I have seen Daddy paint outside before, neatening up the black that trimmed our white house. Color, I thought, smelled good. But I had never seen painting done on the inside. I wondered if there were ladders, paint cans, long-handled brushes that formed a maze.

“I’ll be right back,” Mother said, putting the car in park.

“I want to go in.”

“No,” she said. It was not up for discussion. Mother was in one of her hurries. I don’t remember if I asked again. Possibly I whined. Probably not much; I never wanted to be a bother.

The radio was on. Maybe it was to keep me company. The car was running. Maybe it was to save time when she came back. Mother got out of the car, went in the yard through the gate in the chain link fence, and disappeared inside. Left out in the car, I was a small mass of curiosity wondering what was going on inside. Already I was a busybody.

I can’t say that it’s the lure of mystery or promise of magic that has always called to me. It’s not that complex. I’ve simply wanted to know.

Right then I wanted to see through the curtained windows. I wanted to hear what was being said. I wanted to watch what they were doing. But I couldn’t. Mother said no. “You have to stay put.” So I was stuck in the dumb old car.

What happened next was that the gearshift wound up in neutral.

Where Mother had parked the car was mostly flat. The hill didn’t start for a few more yards and even then it was nothing dramatic or menacing, just enough of a grade to form a gentle, rolling hill. Newton’s Law says an object at rest will remain at rest until acted on by an outside force. “But Newton,” according to Daddy, “didn’t drive a Ford.”

The car began to roll. I didn’t notice this, though, because a boy who lived in the house next door was running and yelling and waving his arms. “Jump! Jump!”

I don’t remember hearing him say that or feeling afraid. I don’t even remember jumping out the window. I guess I landed right; I didn’t hurt myself.

I stood on the side of the road and watched the car roll down the hill, no one at the wheel. It picked up speed. It picked up more speed. Was it on a mission? Apparently Mrs. Abercrombie’s mailbox was in the way. As was her fence. And her planters. And her porch. The car stopped inches from the screen door.

Daddy scooped me up and ran down the hill. “What happened?” got asked around. The boy told his version and everyone agreed he was a hero. Mrs. Abercrombie said, “Thank you, Jesus, sweet Jesus, that I brought Tommy in from the porch a few minutes ago.” All around, the air was charged with fear and relief, an adult mixture that comes from knowing the what-could-have-happeneds.

I was too young to be anything other than worried that Mother might be mad at me. I wanted her to be happy, and not only because I didn’t want to get in trouble. “When she is happy, things feel better,” I thought.

The brain is greedy. It loves glucose, won’t touch fat. Its large mammalian size didn’t evolve from, or for, memory storage, and the rapid increase in gray matter remains as yet unexplained.

I touched my first brain as a high-school intern selected to rotate through surgical departments at UAB hospital in Birmingham. The resident neurosurgeon showed me how to properly wash my hands before gloving up. I should be able to describe how it felt, say whether it was firm. I think maybe it was both but I’m not sure anymore.

I loved Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes but their mysteries ended in explanations. Not so with the human body. Its intrigue remains especially deep within the unfathomable brain.

I don’t know when her brain officially or unofficially died, or whether she was pronounced brain-dead on the interstate, in the ambulance, or sometime after arriving at the hospital.

This week I called my attorney to get information from my file.

“What do you need her mother’s name for?” he said. Twelve years before, I knew it. Since then it’s only one of the many things I’ve forgotten.

“I might want to ask her some questions.”

Without a command center, the body must rely on machines to pump oxygen, maintain blood flow, contract the heart muscle. This gray-matter area excites debate over the black-and-white lines of life and death. Thirty years before the giant step for mankind, an astronomer concluded that galaxies were held together by dark matter, not gravity. Dark matter attracts; dark energy, the yang to its yin, repulses. Together they account for about 95 percent of the universe’s composition but it is dark energy’s presence that breaks the link between cosmic geometry and destiny: shape and fate disconnected.

All the lights Mrs. Abercrombie had—inside and outside her house—are blazing. As are the neighbors’. The cicadas are humming at close range, the mall traffic’s hum is distant. I think I’m still in Daddy’s arms. The Ford looks like a dog waiting to be let in the house; it’s still running. Someone has to turn it off. Maybe mother cries; she did a lot. Daddy and I do not. He will grin and call me Lucky Teeter in the years to come, delighted with his accident-prone tomboy, and I’ll tell my first car accident story over and over, eventually adding the part about how the car got knocked into neutral. I don’t remember what happened to the car afterward. I don’t remember how we got home.

 

 

III

Cars were everywhere. Everything was damp. My feet were on the ground. Nothing was spinning. It was over. We were still. Cars were everywhere. The wreck was everywhere. Everything was damp. I was standing in mud. I was still standing. The wreck was everywhere. Cars were everywhere. Everything had stopped. Cars were backed up in both directions. We were all standing still. It was all over. Cars were everywhere.

The wreck was over.

It was already over before I knew it had begun.

I could see the lights of an ambulance. I could see sheets on a stretcher. It was a “her” they said.

“Go help over there,” I said to a police officer, pointing to what was left of the other car. The officer glanced over at me, walked around, and then looked me up and down.

“He’s done this before,” I thought.

“Why don’t you come sit down in my car, out of the rain?” He pointed at his car. The driver’s-side door was open. The lights were flashing but there was no siren.

I hadn’t realized it was raining; it was. Lightly. I could see it. And steady. Which was odd because I couldn’t feel it.

“Now, I know you’re fine, but how about your son?”

“No, thank you. We’re fine,” I told him. “Just fine.”

I raised my eyebrows as high as they would go and smiled at Reed to show him I was fine. Mommy’s fine. I nodded yes. Fine.

Reed got very still in my arms. It was one of the few times I ever remember him not moving. But he was breathing. I could feel his chest against my breast. Lightly. Breathing. Steady. Breathing. I couldn’t feel his heart beat, but he was breathing so it had to be beating.

“It might be safer for your son out of this traffic.” Cars. Everywhere cars. Headlights on cars. Everywhere. Stopped. Late to work. Cars.

“You can make a call from my phone.”

I get a phone call. Of course.

I couldn’t think of anyone to call.

“The dentist. The dentist needs to be called,” I said. “Let’s call the dentist.”

“Ma’am, I want you to go sit in my car. Okay? I’m gonna take you to my car now.”

I don’t think I opened the door, but I know I carried Reed to it. He crawled in and immediately reached for the shotgun that was sticking straight up, touching the roof of the patrol car. The officer climbed in, too.

“Is that loaded?” I asked.

He fiddled with something and then said it was okay, that it wouldn’t go off.

“Don’t you want to call someone?” he asked. “Isn’t there someone you want to call?”

But I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to call. I didn’t want to upset anyone.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

I had already told another officer outside.

“I was in the far right lane. I was slowing down,” and I recited what I could remember.

“Life Saver is on its way,” he said.

I knew he was trying to think of something to say. Or else he knew what he wanted to say, just not how he wanted to say it.

“I killed a man once,” he started, and other words followed, but I couldn’t hear them for nodding my head up and down.

In the police car that day, I have no recollection of how long the police officer’s story was of how he’d killed someone. Or how long he’d been finished telling the story when I felt his touch. I must’ve still been nodding when he put his hand on my arm and stared me in the eyes.

“Ma’am,” the officer was saying, “You really should call somebody.”

I might’ve still been nodding. Agreement isn’t always what it seems.

“You can’t drive your car home. It’s not drivable. Isn’t there someone who could come get you?”

At this, I stopped nodding. I didn’t want to be got.

“No, there’s no one,” I said.

“Then we’ll get someone to take you home. But when we get you there, we don’t want to leave you alone. It’s not a good idea.”

I started to nod in agreement. I’m a fan of good ideas. But my head wouldn’t move. It was becoming heavy. I wondered if it was going to flatten my neck.

“Can someone meet you? I think you need someone to be there.”

“I think my neighbor’s home. She’ll walk over.”

“Why don’t you use my phone to call her and see?” he said.

His radio had been on the entire time. I had been hearing but not listening. They were talking about a green Montero shooting across four lanes of traffic, across the median, and into oncoming traffic. All eight lanes were closed off. There was a child.

It was Kathryn’s voice. She lived next door; our children were about the same ages.

For the first time I felt strange inside. Sort of hot, rubbery, like a warm congealed salad. I’d heard of salad days. I like salad.

“Hello,” she repeated.

“Kathryn, this is Wendy. Are you home? I’ve had an accident but I’m fine. Really. And Reed’s fine, too. The officer just wanted me to make sure that someone would be home when I got there. Yes, I’m still at the scene. No. No. They’ll bring me home. Yes, we are lucky. Thanks. Me, too.”

I hung up. She was glad we were fine.

I felt fine. I did not feel lucky.

“Is she okay? Is the woman okay?” I asked the police officer. I hadn’t meant to ask any more than I had meant not to ask. Maybe it was a reflex but I didn’t feel all that curious. I wondered how many miles back the traffic was lined up but I didn’t ask. “She’s gonna be okay, isn’t she?”

He finished writing something and put the mechanical pencil into the slot at the top of the clipboard.

“She’s bad,” he said as he looked me directly in the eyes. It was as though we were in a cartoon and I could see the words. They were in the air coming at me and I felt like running to get away but I had nowhere to go. I could not escape them. “She’s in bad shape,” he said. I watched his words arc before they landed on top of me.

Outside the car, people were everywhere. A helicopter was coming down. Life Saver was landing on the other side of the freeway. In the middle of the freeway. By her car.

“Look, Mommy. A helicopter.”

“Why, yes, and look at the nice, bright red stripe on the side. Isn’t it pretty? And look at the bright lights flashing red on the fire engine. Aren’t they pretty? Pretty, pretty lights.”

Colors flashed in all directions. It was like being on a ride at an amusement park without the spinning. Or nausea.

“See how pretty the nice lights are,” I said.

He liked the lights but he was mesmerized by all the action. Things were happening fast. The helicopter’s rotors. The medics. Spinning. Running. Yet everything seemed slow. I could see across all the lanes. I could see an ambulance. I could see them loading a bundle of white sheets on a stretcher. It was a her, they had said.

The bundle was a her.

“Mommy?” Reed said. I looked at my son.

She might have a son. She could be a mother.

“Mrs. Bruce?” It was another officer. “We’ve talked to several witnesses and they seem to say the same thing you did. We really don’t need you anymore. Think about the hospital, though. It might not be a bad idea. Not many walk away from a wreck like this.”

“Honestly, if I thought we needed . . . if I doubted for a minute . . . but there’s just no reason.”

Reed climbed into the driver’s seat and took hold of the steering wheel. Steering wheels have always been one of his favorites. Actually anything round with, or like, wheels.

He steered furiously.

The officer opened the door but didn’t ask Reed to move. Instead he leaned in.

“Mrs. Bruce, we’re going to have to get you to call your husband. There are some practical matters about insurance and stuff we need to get settled.”

Someone opened my door and handed me a phone.

“Can you remember the number?” the officer asked. He was sliding in underneath Reed. “You’re fine, big guy. You just keep on driving.”

I stared at the numbers. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember my husband’s number. I could. It was something else.

“Ma’am,” the officer said, and I started dialing.

My voice sounded like insides that were rolling.

“Hello, honey, I’m fine, really I am. Reed, too, but there’s been an accident. We’re not hurt at all but the car is pretty messed up. I’m sorry . . . On I-65 . . . Just past the 31 exit . . . Right before 459 . . . No rush . . . No, I don’t think we can drive it home.”

I hung up and handed the phone to the officer. Reed climbed back into my lap. “Daddy’s on his way,” I told Reed.

The officer got out again.

People. Cars. Everywhere. Reed wanted out, too. He was tired of being still.

Sing, I thought. Distract him with a song. I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.

 

 

IV

Later that evening, the doorbell rang. It was two police officers who’d been at the wreck, Officer Bass and Officer York. “Are you alone?” they asked.

I nodded.

“Your husband’s not here?” one asked.

“He flew on to Arizona,” I said. “I insisted. There was no reason for him not to go. Reed and I are fine.”

I didn’t explain that my husband had offered to cancel his golf trip with his cousins, something he’d been planning for months. But I wouldn’t hear of it. His golf game had improved, boosting his chances to gloat. Plus he hadn’t seen them much since their mother, his aunt, had committed suicide. So I said go.

I’m not sure why I wanted my husband to go. The wreck was over and there wasn’t anything he or anyone else could do about it. Not a thing. The Montero was totaled, his work day was wasted, appointments were missed, my eye was scratchy—no need to add the loss of his golf trip to the Wendy Wreck Results list. I also thought it’d be a nice change of pace.

“We wanted to make sure you and your little boy were okay. Is he here?”

I nodded again and wiped my eye. It was kinda runny and starting to burn.

Reed appeared before I called him, curious about the ding-dong sound. I have an open-door policy so people rarely knock much less ring the doorbell. In fact, it might have been the first time he’d ever heard our doorbell. I was a little surprised that it worked.

“Hey, Big Guy,” one of the officers said. He was fireplug stocky, thick but gentle. He took off his hat and knelt down. His closely shorn hair lay obediently on his head, dented only slightly from the hat. He’d been at the wreck, I knew, but I never would have recognized him. Reed eyed him for a second before pouncing on him, and in one smooth motion the officer was up with Reed on his hip and the cutest teddy bear I’d ever seen appeared out of nowhere.

“Mom, is it okay if he has this?” the officer asked me like I might say no.

“Of course,” I said. “But what do you tell Officer uh . . .” I squinted to read his last name on his name tag but my eye thing was becoming more than an irritation.

“Bass,” he finished for me. “Officer Bass. And that’s Officer York.”

“I like it; thank you very much, sir; and please, it’s very much good to meet you,” Reed said. He already had the bear’s necktie half undone and was paying absolutely no attention to which polite phrase was called for at the moment. So he just ran through all the ones he could think of.

“You’re very welcome, Big Man,” Officer Bass said.

Reed squirmed and before his feet touched down he was off and running to his room where I figured the new teddy bear would be subjected to various experiments.

“Did you want to come in?” I asked.

I wasn’t remembering my manners all that well either.

“Oh no, ma’am,” Officer York said. “We just wanted to give him the teddy bear and make sure y’all were okay. That y’all walked away from a wreck like that almost never happens. You didn’t even go to a hospital, did you?”

Officer Bass kept talking. “I have a boy, too. ’Bout the same age.”

I nodded.

“By the time I get home, it’ll be his bath time,” he said.

Then Reed’s sisters flew out of the house next door, squealing about something as they headed home. They saw the police car parked in the cul-de-sac first and hushed when they saw the officers.

I think I introduced them and explained that the officers had helped mommy at the wreck. The girls knew the car was gone for good and that I’d been in a wreck but this was the first concrete evidence that something major had actually happened. They stood up straight and looked the officers in the eye as they’d been taught, shook their hands, and said they were glad to meet them.

Nice to meet you, too, the officers said.

The girls would have stood there awestruck had the phone not rung. When it did, the squealing commenced and the race to find the handset, which was almost never on its base, began.

“They’re eight and ten,” I said. “Going on sixteen.”

“Any more?” It was a fair question. I had been asked lots of questions at the scene. But not if I had any more children.

“Nope. Just three. I had three because I didn’t want four,” I said.

This usually got a laugh but Officer Bass only smiled. “Well, you have a beautiful family,” he said.

The look on his face was peculiar, not at all like that of someone passing out familial compliments.

Support systems mitigate the effects of trauma, often providing a buffer against negativity, blame. A healthy family serves as a security blanket, literally and figuratively, by embracing and shielding. When I dropped my husband off, I’m sure, as was our habit, I kissed him bye and said, “Love you.”

I cannot name yet all the reasons why I didn’t want to call my husband after the wreck. Bodies know truth, even if our minds don’t. Reed and I were still in the police car when my husband arrived at the scene. Before I saw him, I heard him. It was impossible not to.

“Daddy’s here,” I said.

Officer Bass’s job was to investigate wreck scenes, not deliver teddy bears, day and night. He cleared his throat. “We don’t usually do this,” he said. My eye burned. Something must have gotten in it. I held my hands and tried not to claw my eye. Earlier it had itched a little and I hadn’t noticed the pressure building. Now it felt like a toothpick might be lodged in it. I held my hands tighter. Clawing might make it worse. I couldn’t take worse. So I would not claw my eye. No matter the toothpick. I could feel the officers looking at me. I could feel the importance of their mission. Officer Bass’d paused, was waiting to see if I was getting the significance. I was trying to get it, I really was, but it was difficult with a toothpick in my eye.

I tilted my head like a dog when it listens. I could feel that what they were about to say mattered in ways that they couldn’t spell out.

“We believe in the thin blue line,” Officer York said, looking at Officer Bass.

I closed my eyes and tried to listen.

“You see, her cousin is a police officer at the precinct. He’s one of us.”

I clawed my eye.

“He’s already pulling reports, checking out the facts, trying to find out what happened.”

I don’t know which officer said what at that point or how many looks passed between them. Whatever, though, they were saying to each other was wordless and weighty, maybe a secret. It seemed they were checking and balancing against each other, an odd sort of teetering. Or maybe they were tired. It’d been a long day. Or maybe they just looked that way through eye pus.

Over and over that morning I’d repeated what happened. I saw it get written down with a blue pen. What more could anyone want to know, what did “one of us” mean anyway?

“Blue line or not, we don’t believe in being out for blood.” Something in his voice hardened when he said it, forming an undeniable edge.

I wondered if my eye was starting to bleed. Sharp pains were coming from nowhere and hitting my pupil. I clawed harder.

“Is your eye okay?” Officer Bass asked. “Maybe you should get it seen about.”

“I’m considering a trade,” I said. Mother’s words echoed out of my childhood when a Pick Up Sticks game had gone awry. “Careful. Those’ll put your eye out. You don’t want that, do you?” Well, who in their right mind did, I’d wondered. Now it seemed a viable option.

I knew it wasn’t my line of vision that concerned them. It had to do with a blue line, though I didn’t see how it related to blood. I did, however, agree that something needed to be done about my eye.

“Don’t hesitate to call if we can help,” one said.

“We mean that. Any help at all,” the other said.

 

 

V

The white of my eye had turned bright crimson—I looked like a walking photograph in need of red-eye correction. It watered like the glass was still in it.

“Just a corneal abrasion,” the ER doc said. “If it feels better in the morning, you don’t have to wear the patch, but use the drops through the weekend.”

“They fix my myopia?” I asked.

“It takes lasers to fix refractive defects,” he said.

It was Tuesday. I’d left home a Mom and returned a pirate, growling appropriately. When Reed’s bedtime prayers were finished I said Ahoy instead of Amen. Then I got myself ready for bed—the usual half-assed teeth brushing, a promise to wash my face the next night, fewer clothes.

I turned down the tapestry bedspread and crawled in beneath the sheets. I snuggled into the down comforter, a box-stitched, square-top bargain I’d gotten for $99. I’m sure I felt the coolness on my skin. I always let my body heat warm the sheets before switching off the bedside light. Cold and dark are too much for me at the same time.

Closing my eyes, I tried hard to pray. I still had my son. I was still alive for another day. I owed at least a prayer of thanksgiving, but no words came. Maybe, I thought, if I stilled my mind the words would come. But it wasn’t moving. My mind was as calm as my heartbeat. “Just wait,” I thought.

Prayer, by now, was almost a reflex. After years of nightly conversations with God, it was obligatory in nature, yet I had never been locked in to formulas, rhymes, or lofty words.

“Knock Knock!” I said in my earliest offerings, figuring a joke had to relieve the stress of being in charge of Everything. In this stillness, even figuring eluded me. I lay waiting for the familiar. Then started looking. What I saw were fragments from the morning, not flashes or startling images, just puzzle pieces, oddly edged and flat. I blamed it on the eye drops.

I would like to say that I at least prayed for her, for her family. The truth is I don’t remember thinking much about her at all. I wanted to go to sleep and wished for a bottle of something that would bring relief with a swallow. I settled for the warmth of the sheets.

Gratitude never came.

I longed to roll over to someone who would listen and talk with me, who didn’t have a preconceived notion of who I should be. I wanted to be held and it not be foreplay. I wanted someone who understood. I also wanted a neck massage.

At some point my neck had started to hurt. Moving it, even the slightest bit, took careful effort.

Not many walk away.

Over the coming days, my body became sore and ached. Beneath my clothes, bruises from the seat belt and dashboard dissolved in and out, cycling through black and blue to green and yellow before they disappeared.

 

 

VI

I woke early Wednesday morning too sore to fall back asleep. Shifting and squirming trying to get comfortable, the instant replay started up again from yesterday with me dropping my husband off at his office to work a few hours before his plane left. Blocks were missing as I played through to when I got home after the wreck.

I tried to fill in with my eyes open, closed, open with my face down in my pillow. I couldn’t string it together. I remembered images—the red lever; words—I killed a man once; sounds—the helicopter landing. Even the smell of chocolate Pop-Tarts on Reed’s breath. But I couldn’t put them together. I kept coming back to the bundle of sheets.

I got up and got the phone book from underneath the bed.

“ICU.”

“I’m calling to check on . . .” I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know much of anything about her. “She was flown in from a car wreck yesterday morning.”

“Are you a family member?” she asked. “We can’t give information out unless you’re family.”

“I’m her cousin,” I said. It wasn’t a lie; it was a reflex. The nurse paused. My bedroom windows were covered with shutters instead of curtains and faced east. When the sun came up, light slipped through every available crack. My husband liked this. He was a morning person who relished rising early. I hate mornings and always have.

“Her condition is the same. No change,” she said.

I had to hand it to the nurse. She was good. She’d given me information without telling me a thing.

“Is any family there now?” I asked.

“Visitors aren’t allowed until 8:00. From 8:00 to 8:30. Somebody could be out in the waiting room, though. You can call that number.” She gave me the number and I said I would dial it, the second reflex of what would be many. “Could you also leave a note for someone to call me?” I left my first name and home phone number after she said she would, and we hung up.

 

 

VII

Today was the day after the wreck. The wreck was the day before. Before and after. Adverbs. Words that tell. Telling words.

My eye was better. I took off the patch and wore my glasses.

The next thing I remember is being at the girls’ elementary school. I’d finished the monthly issue of the Trace Crossings Tribune and had gotten it stuffed into the teachers’ boxes with thirty minutes left before the final bell. I didn’t want to wait, so I went to the front desk and asked to get my daughters from class a few minutes early.

Mother always said that I hurried just like Dad and that we both worked to get out of work.

I’ve never thought getting the job done was a character flaw.

As the secretary paged my daughters’ classrooms, the computer tech guy came through the school’s glass front doors. “Whose car’s that?” he asked the secretary, pointing at my husband’s black Cobra; I’d parked it on the curb out front. The secretary shot me a look. I knew better than to park in the bus lane.

“It’s mine. But I’m about to move it,” I said. He whistled the automotive version of a catcall and finished with, “Well, my goodness.” He paused, trying to decide what someone like me would need with a car like that. “Don’t see many of those around. I mean, with a ragtop and all.”

“The buses are ready to line up. You need to move your car,” the secretary said. She didn’t care if I drove a Rolls-Royce. I should not have parked there.

“It’s actually my husband’s,” I said as if that explained my illegal parking. It didn’t. But it explained things to the computer guy, who bent down and started fiddling with the back of a computer. “I figured you for a minivan,” he said. “Or maybe a Corolla.”

A Corolla?

“I drive an SUV,” I said. I could’ve stopped there and gone out to the Cobra to wait. I didn’t have to explain anything to them. But I didn’t stop, didn’t even pause to deliberate. “Until I totaled it yesterday.”

The secretary’s expression changed and the computer-tech guy popped up from behind the desk. “Was it one of those Isuzu Trooper-looking things? I saw one that’d been in a bad wreck yesterday morning. Remember?” he looked at the secretary. “I told you about it when I got here. It was why I was late.” The secretary nodded. “That wasn’t yours, was it, on I-65?” They were both looking at me.

“Was it green?” I asked.

“Yeah, come to think of it, it was. Dark green.”

“It wasn’t a Trooper. It was a Montero. It was mine.”

Neither one of them dramatically turned white or anything. They just looked at me sort of stunned. I think they didn’t know what to say.

“Reed and I are fine,” I said and shrugged.

“You had him with you?” the secretary said. Reed was usually with me when I was at the school, so he knew everyone, especially those who had candy. He always left with one of her Dum Dums from the bowl by the checkout sheet.

The computer guy looked at the secretary. “I said that if anyone lived, it was a miracle, didn’t I?” She nodded to me that he’d said it. “And you agreed,” he added.

She nodded again and said, “I am glad y’all are okay.” Her expression was hard to read.

“I can’t believe that was you,” the computer guy said. He was shaking his head in amazement. This was more amazing than thinking I drove a Cobra. “You’re a walking miracle, you know that?” Miracle or no miracle, I was still parked in the bus lane. The secretary cleared her throat to remind me of this fact. She was glad I was alive but she was not glad my car was in the buses’ way.

The girls rounded the corner, backpacks in tow and a collaborative scowl on their faces. I waved bye to the secretary and computer guy and prepared myself for what appeared to be an inevitable onslaught of grievance. It turned out that as soon as the bell rang, they were supposed to discuss something of utmost importance with someone on the bus ride home. But it was a secret so they couldn’t tell me what. Their lives were now ruined.

“Is Dad back?” Brittany asked when she saw the car.

“Duh, Brittany,” Brianne said. “Mom doesn’t have anything else to drive.”

“I promise, I don’t think your lives are over,” I said as we left the parking lot. But they were inconsolable. “Look, I’m sorry. I’d take you back but Kathryn has an appointment and we need to get home so I can get Reed.” At the stop sign I put it in neutral and pulled up the emergency brake. Letting the top down was easy. Push a button and the roof started folding back. But the button was on the passenger side of the dash and my short arms hardly reached. I scooted over far enough and pushed it. Spring had been wet and chilly so their dad had let the top down only a few times.

Having the sky for a roof can be a great distraction. It can even change a ruined life. Especially with ’80s music blaring. Though I’m tone-deaf I sang “Don’t Stop Believing” right along with Journey. The girls chimed in and put me to shame. We sang at the top of our lungs, the wind blowing our hair in every direction.

Until I saw the blue light behind me.

We quieted as I pulled over. We must’ve been holding our breath. It felt like we’d gotten the wind knocked out of us. I watched the lights flash and concentrated on breathing. I had been going 40 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone. Without my seat belt.

I know it was the same sky overhead as we drove the rest of the way home but it seemed the clouds hurried across the sun as if trying to get somewhere. The girls huddled in the back discussing something. Kansas told me to “carry on and not cry no more.” Our hair again blew in every direction but the wind didn’t feel the same.

“Tag. You’re it,” Kathryn said when I drove up. “They’re in your backyard.” She sped out of the cul-de-sac to try and make her son’s speech therapy appointment on time.

“Mommy, you’re still not buckled,” Brittany said.

I leaned over and pushed the button to raise the top back up. The motor let out a loud groan and started grinding. It hadn’t seemed this noisy going down.

“Don’t leave your backpacks on the stairs,” I said as they got out of the car. The way the motor was grinding I wondered if it was going to get the roof up. From the way the roof was shaking it didn’t look good. Plus it was moving awfully slowly. “Take them up to your rooms,” I yelled as they ran in the front door. If I didn’t yell this they would leave the backpacks beside the stairs. I could hear them now, “But you said don’t leave them on the stairs.”

The roof finally made it. When I got inside I could see through the bay window that the girls were with Kathryn’s daughter and Reed on the trampoline. The phone was ringing. I answered it in my bedroom.

“Is this Wendy?” the voice said. The voice wasn’t familiar. I climbed on my bed and sat cross-legged. My ears were still ringing some from the motor noise. The kids were laughing outside. “I got a note from this morning to call.”

Someone had gotten the message I’d left.

And she was on the other end of the line.

This part of the story is tricky. It was a telephone conversation so I didn’t see the woman—the set of her jaw if clenched, the shape of her eyes, the color of her blouse, the shine of jewelry. I lack images to jog my memory. I don’t know where she was standing—or sitting; if it was in the waiting room or even at the hospital. All I had was her invisible voice over the phone.

Voices vary; they sound shrill, harsh, quiet, loud, squeaky, deeply pitched, highly pitched, resonant, accented, excited, or flat. But the only thing I remember about her voice is how it made me feel: unsure I could find mine.

“Thank you for calling me,” I said. And I think I started explaining, or trying to anyway, that I’d called for an update and wasn’t told anything because I wasn’t family.

“Who are you, Wendy? How do you know Deidre?”

Deidre.

I hadn’t even wondered what her name was.

“I was in the wreck,” I said.

The silence that followed was long and it twisted between us until I thought it might break. I remember thinking she might hang up on me.

“What do you want?”

“To know how she’s doing.”

She asked why.

I couldn’t say. I wasn’t sure why. I just did.

I said I was glad she’d lived through the night and asked if I could call back to check on her later or if maybe somebody might call me back to give me an update.

I was not on the portable. I was on an old, square, push-button, plastic-coated, putty- colored phone that had a long, curly cord. I wound it around my forearm, clear up to my elbow until it turned red.

For whatever reason, she didn’t hang up. “She’s on a ventilator,” she said. “The earliest Mother could get here was today. Her plane was late landing but she left the airport about ten minutes ago. She should be here any minute. I don’t know how long or anything, but I think it’s up to Mother when they take her off.”

I wanted to help and said I might come to the hospital. She said that wasn’t such a good idea. It was then that it dawned on me: I was the bad guy. Doing the right thing couldn’t change me into the good guy.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I was. Though it might’ve been mostly for myself.

I wasn’t expecting any reply. Expectations, after all, mean cognizance, awareness, forethought. They imply relatedness. Maybe even relationship.

I was operating out of something closer to thoughtlessness.

 

 

VIII

On and off. Like a button. Like an appliance.

I put the receiver down and lay on top of the unmade bed, a small luxury of my husband’s absence. I curled my knees until they reached under my chin and closed my eyes.

At least she wasn’t dead and her mother was almost there. I tried using Deidre instead of “her” but it felt wrong, like I was trespassing on hallowed ground. Being on a first- name basis indicates something about two people. It suggests intimacy, equal footing, maybe familiarity, and I’d never so much as laid eyes on her.

We see with our eyes. A photon is reflected off a surface and ziplines through the pupil to the rods and cones. Then a neural message arrives at the brain to await interpretation.

The Montero had shot across four lanes into, and across, the median, coming to a stop on the wet asphalt. The traffic was heading northbound, downtown, into the workday traffic.

Did she see it? Did she see us coming?

I had time to realize we were still. And I remember thinking and feeling relieved we’d not been hit. I do not remember seeing anything, inside or outside, no traffic, not a single car.

Gravity is the most stable, predictable feature of the world. In combination with our inner ear, it keeps us plumb, locates kilter. But our brains don’t compensate for gravity very well. Astronauts experience space sickness in the absence of gravity; riders of the Tilt-A-Whirl remain disoriented even after the ride is over.

I knew the motion had stopped, we hadn’t been hit. We were fine.

And here’s the question: why didn’t I move—or try to—out of the way? I’ve been afraid of the answer. Webster’s defines “guilt” as “the feeling or fact of having done a wrong.” I’d like to add “. . . or failing to do a right.” Was my not trying to move the car a sin of omission? A sign of my laziness or some other character flaw?

I understand that my inner plumb line was still off kilter; my frame of reference didn’t have time to reset before her car crashed into mine, causing us to spin again. We could only have been stopped for a split second. Yet when reflexes work right, they work in the instant. Mine didn’t.

A review of To Cause a Death, an account of the author accidentally striking and killing a pedestrian, suggests the twenty-five years of guilt the author suffered in the aftermath could have stemmed from her not being “psychologically robust to begin with” rather than from the incident itself. How does anyone calculate such an incident? Is there a Bell Curve?

As May turned to June, school vacation arrived and summer turned hot. Except for her name, Diedre, I didn’t learn much about her in those following weeks. In fact, I knew almost nothing. That didn’t stop me, especially when I was alone, from imagining details, whether I knew them or not:

A thin, hospital-grade, white blanket at the bottom of her bed is pulled up to just below her knees. I try to see if she has stitches. Is her head shaved? Are her eyelashes long, thick? What about her hands? Did she play piano? Did disciplined fingers turn notes into melodies, melodies into songs? I can almost see the shape of her face and her look of pained peace—the way resignation and faith settle up with fate when there’s no room left for questions.

Shape and Fate.

I’m forty-three now; she was thirty-four then, barely. I stare into her face. She looks younger than me.

The scene is in my head but it’s as if I can see her. Right there.

I can almost touch her.

Imagination is power.

This method for remembering may be unusual, but it’s the only way I can recall. That she’s smart is obvious. That she’s brilliant is palpable. The room’s antiseptic pallor warms from her glow; it’s why she has so many friends. I imagine that in the bottom of her closet, beside her tennis shoes and flip-flops, sits a pair of red strappy sandals she wears only to dance. I would like her. She would think me boring.

Until the wreck, we had nothing in common. We were going in opposite directions.

It was her mother, I think, who told me they’d taken her off the ventilator. Over the phone. I didn’t understand what she was saying. I was on the old push-button again, this time standing by the bed. Everywhere I looked I saw shadows because the sun had already set. I knew what pulling the plug meant. Of course that’s not what she said. Other things were said and finally I got the message:

She was dead and I had killed her.

I could make out the shape of my feet beneath me, so I knew I was still standing. I dug my bare toes down as far as they would go deep into the Berber carpet and curled them into a deep grip, so I know I stayed right there even as I turned to shadow and felt myself go somewhere else.

During Vacation Bible School, I wasn’t always content to memorize verses. Sometimes I’d memorize chapters, especially if I got more points for doing so. At the end of the week when all the points were tallied, I usually won. That’s partly why I’m frustrated. I always had a good memory.

My memory now isn’t foolproof; my recall of the accident may have holes that I will never fill. I should be able, though, to do better. It occurs to me that something else may be at work: I’m trying to remember, when what I really want is to forget.

 

 

IX

At what point her brain stopped, at what point they started life support, at what point she officially died do not matter anymore. The outcome was the same. Even though she’s been gone for fourteen years, I still find myself wondering whether her consciousness was killed instantly and how long she lingered.

Her body didn’t shut down immediately because a ventilator bathed her brain in oxygen. The brain couldn’t interpret, couldn’t command, couldn’t function, though; she was brain-dead. The oxygenated blood, however, fed the other organs. Our strongest and most vital, the heart, went right on despite her lack of consciousness, like a six-year-old boy playing in the street long after his mother has called him in to dinner. Science can claim this split between mind and body as something new, a benefit of modern technology. The poets have known it all along.

Her mother couldn’t get to the hospital right away, so the other family members had waited for her to arrive. They were all together when they said goodbye.

My insurance company recommended an attorney they’d used for several years with effective results. He was the one who told me that her sister, the one I’d spoken to on the phone, was an attorney for NASA.

I was sitting against a wall in an armless chair reading an assignment for my Bibliography and Research Methods class when I first met him. My kids were with me. It’s an important scene, one I should well remember. But it’s more the wake of memory, where desire churns dark waters of imagination, that I navigate.

He walked in reading from a manila folder.

“You’re a dream-come-true defendant, Mrs. Bruce. You’re a mother of three, you teach Sunday school. For crying out loud, you even work part-time for the Red Cross!”

I didn’t know anyone except Charlie Brown said “for crying out loud.”

“Wanna add that I rescued our dog from the pound?”

He looked back down at the folder that must’ve held the forms I’d just filled out. They had only enough room for one-, maybe two-sentence answers to their questions, one of which was “Why are you here?”

“I killed someone” didn’t seem an appropriately complete answer so I turned it over and wrote on the back. He tilted his head a little, scribbled a note with a fancy pen, and looked back at me.

“You rescued your dog from the pound?”

“I’m a regular Patron Saint of Curs.”

He looked back at the file without smiling. His mouth looked as though it’d had no experience whatsoever with mirth. We had yet to introduce ourselves but maybe that was an unnecessary formality. This was my first time to require legal representation. A speaker overhead paged a Mr. Looney.

“Humor’s not allowed?” I said.

He managed something like a smile but I think it pained him. He closed the folder and introduced himself with a nod.

“I’m going to be your counselor through this,” he said. “Should be a nice change of pace. I rarely get to represent sarcastics. Most judges aren’t fans.”

“I’ll bring an extra sock then,” I said.

He looked confused.

“To stuff in my mouth.”

“This way,” he said, turning to go back the way he’d come in.

I had learned my first lesson of litigation: wasting the attorney’s time is not funny.

In the Land of Litigation, insurance companies hire attorneys to play numbers games regardless of the toll it takes on the defendants or the good it bestows on the estates of the deceased. Paperwork is measured in inches and fees are billed by the hour. Courtroom uniform is Sunday dress, no nail polish or diamonds; courtroom language is purposefully dumbed down to middle-school vocabulary.

Smart-aleck is never the proper tone. Working with the Red Cross is highlighted; owning a business isn’t. Image is as important as fact; it even becomes fact as the days of litigation mount. The rules are set down in rigid fashion, hard but not fast. Nothing is fast here. Except maybe a buck. The boundaries are established so they will not change according to situations or whimsy. The law operates independent of emotion; remorse is relegated to somewhere else. In addition, sorrow is irrelevant to the linear process that ends in court, in front of a judge and a jury of the defendant’s peers.

I’m afraid of peer pressure. Sometimes I succumb.

And I smart-off a lot. Especially if I’m nervous.

Inside his office I tossed my empty Diet Coke can into a cardboard box of used copy paper next to a shredder.

“So I’m now a file number affixed to a label and stuck on a manila folder?” I said.

“Would you like something else to drink?” my attorney said.

“Another Diet Coke would be nice,” I said.

A can appeared as if by magic.

My legal guardian angel didn’t fly around on gossamer wings all caught up in salvation. He walked across shiny floors on the soles of black Italian leather wing tips, looking well-suited for success.

As did hers.

Both sides were hell-bent on winning.

Some kind of rule matrix, though, must’ve spawned the convoluted legal process; perhaps the same one that governs chess.

I’ve played chess. When I was twelve, Danny Phillips taught me. He was fourteen and had a mop of blond hair that fell over Wedgwood blue eyes. He also had biceps. I didn’t learn because I liked the game. I learned because it was the only way I could play.

I can still play chess but I’m not any good.

Litigation spins around the law and not on an axis of evil—or good. All the shine and spin can be dizzying. Makes it hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad.

“Now let’s get started,” he said.

We were on the clock.

 

 

X

I enjoy beating a dead horse deader. Ever since I can remember, it’s been my way to go after understanding. “Why” was my first word. “Why not?” was my second.

In legal land, though, fifteen minutes of questions can cost over a hundred dollars, depending on how long the answers are and how much time is billed. Hence I quieted down and tried to think like a pawn, meaning I let others think for me.

Because my attorney held my fate in his hands, I listened and did what he said. I’d like to say I had faith in the system, in my attorney, in myself when I left his office. But what I had was no choice.

In 1996, mediation was cutting-edge. From its inception, it aimed to resolve conflicts and keep them out of the court’s queue, thereby saving space and resources. When my claim landed on the desk of Charles Mann, an insurance adjuster team leader, he told my attorney to give the new process a try. Though my case was my attorney’s forty-eighth file, it was his first-ever pre-suit mediation. If the mediation succeeded, a lawsuit would never have to be filed.

I understood how mediation worked but I wasn’t sure what was being mediated. Until the money was explained. Then I understood what the officers had meant by “out for blood.” My liability insurance would pay up to $250,000, the policy limits. By playing that card on the mediation table first, it defined the boundaries for the settlement amount.

“Ninety-five percent of all mediations are settled,” my attorney said.

A date and time were agreed on. Even though I wanted to get it over, I didn’t look forward to meeting her family face-to-face. “What am I going to wear?” I asked Kathryn, who was wearing a drop cloth.

“Clothes,” she said, not even glancing my way.

“If I arrive naked, maybe I’ll get off on insanity.”

“Brilliant idea.” Kathryn dipped the plastic wrap in the paint. “Because being found insane is so much better than being found innocent.”

I lack the Martha Stewart gene, but I’m hell on wheels at emergency fetchings of mineral spirits, Goo Gone, and Liquid Nails. She dabbed the bathroom wall with the plastic wrap as if wiping away tears. Yesterday she had faux-finished the playroom. Tomorrow it was going to be the powder room. I teased her that she had enough paint chips to decorate all the starving kids in Africa.

“That doesn’t look textured. It looks like you couldn’t afford a brush,” I said.

Kathryn was more than my neighbor. When, after officers Bass and York left, I called and asked her to drive me to the emergency room, she was in my kitchen before I could put the handset back on the base.

“Car’s running,” she said. “You need me to carry your purse?”

Three hours and one eye patch later, she was carrying my purse and my prescriptions while guiding the wheelchair to the exit where she had the car, again running.

She put the plastic wrap down, picked up a feather and dipped it into the quart can of Ruby Royale.

She painted a “d.” I was impressed that she was going to add words to the texture. She followed the “d” with “u-m-b-a-s-s.”

 

 

XI

The legal world has its own clock, and scheduling time is parceled like holidays, as though waiting gives everyone something to look forward to. As the days dragged by, I tried not to think about mediation. I tried not to think about facing her family. I tried not to wonder what would happen, what would be said, what it would mean. I thought obsessively about not thinking.

Time dragged its fingernails down my spine.

When it comes to the memory of the mediation my memory is extra-skittish.

I got out of bed early a few months after the wreck, showered, and got dressed before waking the kids for school.

“You look nice,” Brittany said. “You going somewhere?”

Normally I wear jeans and a baseball cap, not proper attire for mediation. I had to make a good first impression, a right kind of good impression. For the mediation, I’d charged a new navy skirt with pink flowers. My sweater was a hand-me-down from my niece, a short-sleeved cashmere with a Peter Pan collar. It was soft pink.

“I thought you were supposed to look innocent,” my husband said. “You look like you’re going to teach kindergarten.”

“Thank you,” I said, practicing being neither a smart aleck nor a dumbass.

The session was held downtown in an attorney factory, with lots of plate glass and polished conference tables. I smelled hot coffee and disinfectant left over from the midnight cleaning service. The air was thin; some oxygen had been removed.

“We think it’s a good idea to meet for a minute, both sides, before we begin the actual process,” my attorney said.

We think.

So I wadded up my tissue and followed three suits down the hallway into a room with more plate glass and an even bigger, shinier conference table.

There they were. In their Sunday best. All standing. They didn’t look like the competition. They looked sad. Her mother was there. I remember a sister maybe and possibly her stepfather.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said when I was introduced to her mother. Instead of reaching across the table to shake her hand I went around to her and held out my hand.

She put her hand out and I cupped it with both of mine and squeezed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I could feel my attorney’s eyes on my back.

“Sorry implies guilt,” he’d said. “You’re not to blame.”

“Then who is?” I’d been asking without getting an answer. I was the one who had hydroplaned.

Her mother’s hand was warm, not clammy like mine. Even her rings felt warm. I wanted to hug her but couldn’t move. My whole body felt like a mold that someone had filled with cement. It was starting to set. She had on panty hose and pumps. She wore a watch and bracelet. I left my marquise diamond engagement ring and diamond-studded ring guard at home with my other jewelry and wore only a gold wedding band.

Maybe I was a dream-come-true defendant on paper, but in person I might not be dependable. I went to hug her as she sat down. That’s when the top of her head and the bottom of my chin met.

We eventually got the blood stopped with ice and Bounty.

But it was my attorney’s hand on my shoulder that I felt, not the new hole in my lip. His hand strongly suggested that I go back to my seat. I couldn’t move; the cement must’ve finished hardening because I could see myself standing there, looking more than ridiculous. An air of awkwardness wafted around. I could see it.

Someone coughed. Throats cleared. The oxygen was being sucked from this room, too. What was it about high-ceilinged conference rooms? I needed a mask to fall from the cabin overhead to rubber-band over my mouth and nose. I needed everyone to quit staring at me. I needed the spinning to stop. I wanted off.

My attorney did manage to get me turned around and into my seat. This room was hot. I could see dust particles floating in the streaks of sunlight coming in through the mini-blind slats. I wished I had my sunglasses to shade my eyes.

My attorney said some things. The mediator said some things. I don’t remember the attorney sister saying anything.

Mediation got underway while I tried to get a grip on myself. Twice I thought I might have to get up to go be sick. The sunshine bounced off the table and caught people’s watches and rings. The reflected dots of light hit the wall like Morse code. I wasn’t wearing a watch. I couldn’t keep track of time. Suddenly it seemed that everyone’s eyes had narrowed and their shoulders had become cocked, ready to fire.

“We don’t want to punish you . . . Deidre volunteered at her church . . . Punishment’s not what this is about . . . Everybody loved her . . . You would have liked her . . . We’re not blaming you . . . Did you see her? Did you see her face? Why didn’t you go see her? . . . We had to see her . . . Her head swollen, the wires and tubes . . . We hardly recognized her . . . You didn’t even go over and check on her . . . We had to look her in the face to tell her goodbye . . .”

“I think of her every time I drive by there,” I said, my whisper coming choked and from somewhere deeper than my throat.

I’d also started thinking about her at random times: at a four-way stop, when unloading the dishwasher, when putting on mascara, at teas and showers and birthday parties. I thought about the thirty-four-year-old speech pathologist who never got to taste her own wedding cake. Or rock her own baby. I thought of how empty her seat would be at her family’s Thanksgiving dinner because I couldn’t get control of my car. Because I didn’t cancel Reed’s dental appointment. Because I got out of bed. Because I had a third baby.

Her future was left, jilted, its vacuum showing on her mother’s face. I put mine in my hands to keep from seeing that emptiness.

The attorneys kept hammering away toward negotiation. I only wanted it to be over. In a movie, I saw a man tied between two horses and when the horses bolted in opposite directions, he got pulled apart. I envied the man.

My attorney stood up and motioned for me to follow him. I think we went down the same hall but into a new room.

“Be right back,” he said. “Just sit tight.” His smile was always the same, whether he was offering a Coke, policy limits, paper towels, or his prompt return.

Then he was back, followed by a girl, then gone again.

She set down a cup of ice and another Diet Coke and left.

I tried to nap. I tried to stretch out in chairs, on the table, under the table but nothing was comfortable. I braided my hair. Twice. Then I looked for something to count. The shelves were bare except for some fake flowers and a pot of potpourri. I switched chairs to the one across the table. It felt the same: smooth and chintzy, high-backed with arms. I moved to the chair in the corner. It was a Queen Anne, covered in coordinating chintz. From it, I could see the traffic moving along the street. One car. Two cars. Three cars. Four. Five cars. Six cars. Seven cars. More.

“Sorry about that,” he said, closing the door behind him.

He did his smile. “Not a bad view, is it?” He laid some paperwork on the table. Probably forms. Nobody tells you the forms will be terminal. With his other hand he was jiggling something in his pocket that sounded like keys and change. Probably a pocket knife, Swiss Army.

He smiled the same smile that gave nothing away.

“They want State Farm to offer more. They think it’s because she was a young, black, single woman that she’s not valued higher on the settlement scale.”

I was not in the 95 percent.

“Are they discriminating?” I said.

He didn’t skip a beat. “No amount of money is going to bring her back, Wendy. It’s sad, but it’s true. People die every day and there has to be some way, some system to decide monetary compensation. But she had no spouse, no dependents.” He stopped but he wasn’t finished. He struck me as the sort of man who could wash down a Whopper and fries with organic milk.

“Wendy, this case is just not worth a million dollars. It’s just not.”

“What’s it worth then?” I said.

“Whatever a jury decides. They want to try it and see what a jury thinks.

Twelve people serve on a jury. My father was called regularly and was voted foreman the time he was sequestered for several days. I’d voted in every election since I was eighteen but I’d never been called.

“Wendy,” he said. When he said my name it could be for emphasis, for connection or to signal he was about to disseminate information. “The State of Alabama doesn’t award compensatory damages. The state only awards punitive damages. That’s the only way they’ll get more money than what State Farm just offered.”

Someone would have to be punished.

Someone else was out for blood.

 

 

XII

“I’m afraid they can’t charge the insurance company, so . . .” My attorney’s voice thinned out but I caught “so they charge you.”

I charge things sometimes. I use a credit card to get things now and pay later. I’d charged my skirt. It’s the American way. Cash or charge? isn’t even asked anymore. Everybody charges things. I’d charged our spring break vacation to Asheville on a credit card. I’d already been billed and we hadn’t even gone yet. It was going to be the first one-parent vacation in our little family’s history because I was taking the kids alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We had to give mediation a try. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

So he was sorry, too.

Lesson two in Litigation Land: sorry doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change anything.

“Can we try mediation again?” I said.

“For what? They had their chance,” my attorney said. It was as though he’d changed personalities when he changed strategies.

I wanted to ask him another question but I didn’t. I was afraid of the answer.

Could I go to jail?

 

 

XIII

Junkyards are gardens of damage. Pick a peck of wrecks. Shiny shorn bumpers. Blossoms of salvage. Petals of coated metal and sandblast. Hubcaps. Floor mats. Rearview mirrors. Parts awaiting transplant. A chorus of collision, a metallic hymn of the deductible. My insurance company had contracted with Pro-Tow. The tow truck had hooked my Montero like a fish, reeled it onto its trailer, and hauled it to their company’s yard where it joined other vehicles in various states of distress. They were lined neatly into long rows with plenty of room left in between.

“That one yours?” the junkyard man said. He pointed to mine but it wasn’t the one I remembered buying the week before the accident. I’d bought a forest green, four-door, four-wheel-drive SUV. It had glass in its windshield. Its frame had been intact.

“Looks like it took the brunt right here,” he pointed below the side mirror near the passenger-door hinges. “Yep. You caught a break. Sure did. That must’ve been some doozy. A frame’ll take a blow can’t no other part take.”

He might’ve been looking at her car instead of mine when he said this. State Farm had also insured her vehicle so it was there, too, somewhere. For some reason I couldn’t look at him. I looked at the clouds scraping the edge of the junkyard’s fence.

“Do you need any help?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine.” He disappeared down a very long row that reminded me of the bent-and-dent aisle where canned goods were discounted.

Days had passed since the wreck and I’d come to look for my Big Chill CD. I went to lift the door handle—that was all—yet it acted like a trigger: I was floating again. I saw the mud, felt the spinning, heard the crash. And underneath it all my heart beat out an insistent staccato score.

As suddenly as the feeling started, it quit. My heart was left racing alone. I found myself staring at tons, literally, of crumpled cars. Each had its own story. I wondered what they were. I ran my fingers across the metal ripples of the Montero like they were Braille. I read backward. The frame. Snapped in two. Impact. Force. Hurling. Her. The right front tire had been knocked off, all four threaded lug nuts ripped off and scattered. That tire had bounced, then landed several feet away. I can see it on the shoulder; maybe it’s in the grass. Reed’s car seat had been in the back on the passenger side, buckled next to the door. I spread my fingers, pushing my palm into the warm metal. I didn’t press hard at all. Yet in the center of his door, the metal gave.

I judged the distance from where Reed was in his car seat to where her car smashed into the frame. It was maybe five hands. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think how close, couldn’t move. In that moment I was not moving, breathing, living. I was nowhere. Was this what Lot’s wife felt?

Time and direction warped through a portal that defies logic.

I am not a pillar of salt or cement. Mommy, Mommy, my son calls. In his voice I hear fear. I’m in the median, I’m pushing the red lever, it releases. I’m unbuckling my son. Mommy, Mommy, he keeps repeating, scared. I smell his breath. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. It’s the only thing he says.

I can’t remember how I got to him. A river of glass runs between the front seats and pools in the back. He wraps his arms around my neck, his legs around my waist. I press him into me, molding his body as tightly to mine as I can. When I carried him in my womb, my body was his shield, a natural barrier. But that was then. I shift his weight to my hip. There’s motion, commotion. He’s now whispering, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.

We shared a heartbeat once. I feel his now strong against mine. “You’re fine,” I say. “We’re fine. It’s okay; everything’s fine.” I am his frame of reference. I am his gravity. I will make kilter.

“We’re fine,” I say.

We do not move left to right. We’re in the median. I’m standing in mud. This is not the end; but it’s not the beginning Something whirls around us, in us.

We hold on for dear life.

We do not let go.

Here’s the thing: when I unbuckled him, I couldn’t have been standing in the median. After the vehicles collided, the accident report notes, the Montero spun counterclockwise before coming to a stop, facing south. It was not in the median. It straddled two of the four northbound lanes. I had to have unbuckled my son in the middle of the freeway, facing the oncoming traffic. I got to the median only after I crossed those lanes.

Standing in the junkyard, I had a visceral reaction, a primal sense of knowing. Though book smarts may have gotten me a full scholarship to college, it wasn’t book smarts that got Reed and me out of the middle of the interstate to safety. Something else kicked in over which I had no control.

While our society creates hierarchies based on higher-level thinking and test scores, and hierarchies of our individual value to insurance companies, that’s not what has kept us alive through the ages. I didn’t “think” as I got Reed out of the Montero. I can’t even recall what I did in those moments because they don’t exist in my consciousness; those actions came from somewhere deeper. They were reflexive, thought at its most rudimentary beginning.

I don’t remember “thinking” when I started hydroplaning. Or in that split second of stillness before the crash. My reflexes may have gotten Reed unbuckled and into the safety of the median, but we were there in the first place because they had failed me twice.

As I stood amidst the automobile carnage, I was struck by the Montero’s appearance. Except for the mud, the back looked pretty normal, almost like nothing had happened. I stepped around to the back of the driver’s side, my side. If I didn’t look toward the front or at the windshield it didn’t look so bad. The amount of visible damage depended on where I stood, the angle of my view. Now you see it; now you don’t.

I don’t know how many times I walked around the car but I stopped and stared for a while. Maybe I was looking for God—judgment and/or grace—in the details. Maybe I was analyzing how it had happened so I could make it un-happen. Rewind. Or maybe I was just letting it sink in.

I was almost home before I realized I’d not gotten the Big Chill. I’d forgotten to look.

 

 

XIV

In seventh grade only Nathaniel Rutledge could outrun me.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Daddy told me, “because blacks have an extra muscle.” Google didn’t exist yet and our Encyclopedia Britannicas didn’t confirm or discredit my dad. When I finally got up the nerve to ask a teacher she said it wasn’t true. I told this to my dad. He kinda smiled and said, “Well, his legs are longer. You’d win if they were the same.”

Although I was quick, I never played running back. I doubt I’ll ever hawk rental cars on television, either. I’m not even wild about orange juice. But Orenthal James Simpson and I have something in common: Wrongful Death charges.

Summer 1996 had passed, as had fall; spring was around the corner. I didn’t have to try to keep busy—I was busy. I took a full load of classes and taught in the English Department, not at the Red Cross or Baptist church anymore. I’d also been planning Brittany’s tenth birthday party—a horseback-riding shindig at a local state park.

Without my permission, the weather threatened to turn miserably cold and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it but wait and see, torture worse for me than waterboarding. So I channeled my fretting into the snack menu. Large or small marshmallows, generic or name-brand graham crackers, milk or dark chocolate. Before long, I’d elevated roasted weenies to Last-Supper importance. My civil charges floated somewhere out in the cosmos, light years away, dissociated. If I was ignoring my own Wrongful Death charges, I certainly wasn’t interested in anyone else’s—even if he was famous.

The nation, however, was interested. For almost a year in 1995–1996, the country, courtesy of Judge Lance Ito’s allowing cameras in his courtroom, watched O. J Simpson get tried for murder. There were two counts, one for Ron Goldman’s death and one for Nicole Brown Simpson’s. The trial of the century made Kato Kaelin, Mark Furman, and Marcia Clark household names. As Clark prosecuted Simpson on behalf of the State of California, every move she made was subject to scrutiny and analysis.

The nation split in half over O. J.’s guilt as evidence came and went. Discussions around water coolers touched on justice-for-sale and societal isms—racism, chauvinism, sexism, cronyism. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran directed the jury to acquit Simpson if the glove did not fit. It didn’t and Simpson walked.

Days later, Ron Goldman’s father filed a civil suit. Civil or tort cases rarely draw crowds because they lack panache. People were suddenly curious about this type of law, though, because many thought criminal law had let a killer go free.

Most agreed on one thing: justice shouldn’t be for sale. For those who thought Simpson was guilty, the civil court was a second chance for justice. Even without a low-speed car chase or throngs of paparazzi, people watched. A jury was assembled. The trial proceeded.

In civil cases, verdicts involve damages, not jail sentences; O. J.’s case involved compensatory and punitive damages that totaled $33.5 million after the jury’s assessment. I still think he got off easy.

I was standing with other housewives in my cul-de-sac waiting for the school bus to bring our darlings back to us so we could tell them to run in and do their chores and not bother us. It was and still is an upper-crust neighborhood, the kind with buried power lines and nature trails. My husband and I had purchased the lot and custom-built our 4 BR, 2.5 BA with glazed tile in the kitchen and a garden tub in the master bath. The dirt had cost us more than my parents’ and grandparents’ houses had cost combined.

The mail truck, not the bus, came around the curve and stopped mid cul-de-sac. The driver motioned us to come over.

“Three-forty-one,” she called.

“Here,” Kathryn said. The mail carrier handed her some mail.

“Three-forty-five,” she said.

“That’s me,” I said.

She handed me a single letter with her rubber-gloved hand and a blue ballpoint with her bare hand.

“I’m gonna need you to sign for that,” she said.

The envelope had a green frame with white lines like hash marks, reminding me of a football field. I ripped open the envelope and pulled out a thin piece of paper. It was the official notification of my charges: five counts of Wrongful Death. I stared. Negligence. Wantonness. Recklessness. I remembering thinking there couldn’t be five; she only died once.

 

 

XV

Among the states, Alabama courts award the largest and most unexpected punitive-damages verdicts. Some think Alabama also has a lottery-like judicial system. The same year as my wreck an Alabama jury awarded $4 million to Dr. Ira Gore, who had sued BMW after he purchased a new car that he did not know had been repainted. The case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was one reason Senators John McCain, Jay Rockefeller, and John Ashcroft, among others, sought caps in our uncertain tort litigation system when the 105th Congress convened.

I knew almost nothing about Alabama’s judicial system and had never heard of Alabama’s Wrongful Death Statue (Homicide Act). I thought all juries operated under the “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” notion, but I was wrong. “Clear and convincing proof” aka “probably correct” is all that’s necessary in Wrongful Death cases. In California, O. J.’s jury could combine punitive and compensatory damages. Not so in Alabama. The only way to make up the $750,000 difference between my policy limit and the $1,000,000 her estate sought would be to go to court, and because Alabama doesn’t award compensatory damages, they would have to seek punitive damages.

In Alabama, a plaintiff recovers money by punishing the defendant. Supposedly this deters the defendant and others from committing the wrong again, thereby protecting the public. It’s up to the jury to decide how much the damages should total, an amount that should directly relate to the culpability of the defendant without “sympathy, prejudice, passion or bias.”

At the accident scene I confessed that the last thing I remembered before I hydroplaned was taking my eyes off the road to glance at my new car’s windshield-wiper intermittent speed control. I also confessed that this was the first time I’d put my vehicle into four-wheel drive. I claimed to have been driving the speed limit, though, and the experts corroborated this in their scene analysis. At least one of the most damning elements in Wrongful Death cases could not be used against me as they tried to prove me “probably culpable.”

“Can they go after the business?” my husband wanted to know. My husband was business-minded, good at bottom lines, balance sheets, economics. He recently expanded his business and relocated into a historic building that he restored, so he still is. I’m the type who prays every month that the bank doesn’t call before payday. I don’t like numbers because they don’t arrange like words and I find them much harder to read. The family business wasn’t mine, in the sense that my name didn’t appear on any proprietary documents. It did, however, appear on some paychecks. And Alabama is a joint-property state.

The answer to my husband’s question was not simple. We did come to understand, though, that when it came down to the dollar amount, a defendant’s financial position mattered. Although not meant to be leech-like, juries assessed during their calculation how much blood-letting a defendant could stand. In reference to Dr. Gore’s case, BMW was not a turnip. Neither were we. But we weren’t BMW.

In other words, an astronomical verdict could bankrupt us.

 

 

XVI

My trial was set to begin on November 3, 1997. Seventeen months, six days after the wreck. Seventeen months, five days after Diedre died. Two days before Brianne’s tenth birthday. A Monday. It would start with opening statements and jury selection. Jury. Verdict disciples. Twelve. Boxed in to judge my guilt.

Guilt, my sisters and I joke, was in Mother’s milk. This was of course not deliberate; she wasn’t even conscious of its flow. She was passing on what she’d been passed. As with all families, how we expect, ask, and get is part of our family inheritance, and for us the crown jewel is “should”: “You should be polite. You should be sweet. You should help me. You should be glad. You should not wear that. You should wear this. You should pretend it doesn’t itch. You should be quiet. You should not talk that way. You should go outside. You should go outside anyway. You should not make me say it again. You should stop all this nonsense and be a good girl.” The “shoulds” were our compass by which to navigate Mother’s biggest area of concern: what the neighbors thought.

For those not raised in the religious realm, the “We are all fallen/We’ve all fallen short” quilt must seem strange. Sin, however, sets in the brain, forming ruts that run as deep as the brain’s organic mysteries. I’d fallen; how far didn’t matter. Once up on the witness stand, guilt, engendered by nature and nurture, would ooze out of my pores. And I would also be afraid of what the strangers thought.

Every so often I would receive information about the development, or lack of, thus far in the case. The Plaintiff could take our offer any time over the next months. “Lots of time for things to settle,” my attorney said. “Lots of time for us to get prepared if they don’t.”

Time for us, however, was also time for them. It’d been one year since I’d hydroplaned, lost control of my car, shot across the median into oncoming traffic, and cut off Deidre’s future. Because I’m numbers-challenged, forgetting the actual date of the wreck wasn’t difficult. But that made me hyper-aware for the whole month of May. I tried to drive extra normal. I had successfully gotten back on the horse afterward, and had no intention of becoming one of those paranoid drivers, the kind my dad said caused more wrecks than confident drivers.

“It’s gonna settle. They don’t really want to try this case,” my attorney said. “You’re too good of a defendant.”

So I was a dream come true.

He told me that ninety-something percent settle in the weeks before trial, after depositions are taken, because during a witness’s sworn testimony, it becomes obvious what the witness would do in court. And in deposition testimony, attorneys decide how useful the witness might be.

“They’re also hoping to discover new information that’ll help their case,” he said.

“New information?” I said.

“They’re hoping to find out things to support their charges.”

“Like what?”

“Basically anything that shows you’re not perfect.”

“How?”

“The usual ways,” my attorney said.

Oh. The usual.

“Public records, interviews, investigators,” he said.

“Investigators? I’m being followed?” I said.

“Well not all the time,” he said.

Not all?

“How much of the time?” I said.

“I don’t know. I doubt much, if any. That’s the least of our worries. It’s not like you go around doing wrong.”

No, I’m a regular Polly-pissing-anna. I go around doing right. No worries about me letting Reed bike helmetlessly, running red lights, or speeding. No worries about girls’ night out, girls’ weekend at the beach, a crumbling marriage. No worries anywhere. Dream come true.

I had been honest about the wreck. Some say to a fault. But since the wreck, things had started happening. But they had nothing to do with the wreck, so I kept them carefully separated.

Five years earlier, I had designed our home with an open floor plan. I didn’t want us walled off from each other. The two-story den, nine-foot ceilings, and sunroom evolved to accentuate the free flow of my family’s rhythms. I liked seeing the strewn backpacks; the tricycles, bicycles, and unicycles; the beads, Barbies, and Beanie Babies. To me this evidenced acceptance and a visible, unconditional love. Lately, though, what free-flowed was my bitching. It ricocheted off the ceiling, into the wheeled things, across the strewn matter, and back.

Normally, I wasn’t a yeller. Daddy had yelled because Mother was nerve-deaf, and when I moved out to get married, I had to reset all my volume levels. Now I could barely stand concerts.

Brittany was on the landing. I was below her in the den. I’d asked her to do something for the umpteenth time and she, in her eleven-year-old way, hadn’t. My rant started strong but sane. It didn’t stop, though, because although I hadn’t thrown anything this time, I’d lost control.

“I’ve about fucking had it,” I heard myself scream.

Our eyes widened. Using “inside voices” may have gone the way of the dinosaurs in our home but cussing was still very much taboo. And use of the “F” word was synonymous with going to hell. I knew I should apologize. I did not know she would cry for so long or be upset for so many days. I would tell her repeatedly that it was just a word. That words had no power. That by themselves they meant nothing. That it was people who gave words their power. We could then take the power away. None of that did any good. It wasn’t what she needed to hear.

Maybe she wanted to hear me promise that I wouldn’t say it again. Maybe she wanted to hear me apologize. Maybe she wanted to hear me say that nothing had changed in that instant, even though she knew things could never again be the same.

I said nothing in that moment, though. I just looked back at her as she stared down at me.

 

 

XVII

I was in my attorney’s parking lot. I had come to wake him from the perfect-Wendy dream. Across the parking lot pavement the sunfall cast shadows, dark shapes of stretched cars that paid no attention to the white parking-place lines. I got out of my replacement Montero and tried the door handle to make sure I’d locked it. My Montero was taller than most of the other cars in the lot, its teal color not nearly as subdued as the sedans. The model, I thought, had saved Reed’s life and mine because of its size.

But what if it’d been a little smaller? Could we all have lived? Even if we had healed, could I take the pain? How much hurt could I, would I endure? How much would I have let Reed suffer? How much would I change, if I could, to bring her back?

A year after the crash, then, I was heavy into another kind of “inside voices,” the ones that continually deposed me and also attempted to re-negotiate the effects of what I’d thought, decided, neglected to decide, felt, and, worst of all, done on the way to the dentist’s. I could not get it into my head that you don’t renegotiate with time, tide, rain, concrete, metal, or even with Diedre. They all had moved on, leaving me in the median, cars of all sizes whizzing by in both directions. It was dizzifying, this inner drama. I leaned my body against the door, my forehead into the window and closed my eyes. What would I tell my attorney?

My mind’s eye lit up the darkness. I imagined he would be wearing his usual nonplussed smile. And was surprised when he wasn’t. We didn’t even go to his office. We went to an empty back room. He unfolded two metal chairs beside a stack of boxes and we sat down. He used the top of the box like a desk.

“About that dream-come-true defendant,” I said. “She doesn’t exactly exist.”

He was taking notes this time with a mechanical pencil instead of a Mont Blanc.

“I may be getting separated soon.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. He put his pencil down. “You two look so happy.”

“That’s the funny thing about looks, isn’t it?” For effect I put on my best Vivien Leigh accent. “They can be eveh so deceiving.”

He rolled his eyes. I didn’t know he knew how. “I’m just surprised’s all.” He picked his pencil back up.

“When?”

“When what?” I said.

“When do you expect to separate?”

“We don’t have a date or anything. Nothing’s definite. I just didn’t want them to get the information before you.”

He cocked his pencil and asked, “Worth it?”

“My piece-of-shit husband’s not worth shit,” I said.

My attorney laughed. It was a whole body laugh that shook everything down to his pencil. Just watching him spasm made me smile. He looked so incredibly goofy laughing. People normally look ecstatic and relieved when they laugh so hard. He just looked out of control. He let out a sigh when he’d finished, cleared his throat, and said, “I do wish you could learn to be blunt.”

He wasn’t serious. I didn’t think.

“I am making a note about that extra sock since depositions will be coming up next. Come to think of it . . .” He put his pencil down, leaned down, untied his wingtip, slipped his foot out, waved it in the air at me, removed his dark, gold-toe sock, put it across his leg, slipped his bare foot back into his shoe, tied the laces back, then put the sock in my file.

“Don’t do anything strange,” he said. “They could be watching.”

“Can I ask you something?” He glanced at his watch and stood up. After a year of meetings, I was used to his not-so-subtle hints. I still didn’t ask very many questions, though—at least not many for me.

“Why are we back here in this room?”

He grinned again. It was unsettling. I preferred him mirthless. “My office is being debugged.” He went out into the hall and didn’t look back. I went outside to check and make sure the apocalypse hadn’t happened.

Maybe it had. The world was still spinning. At the equator our planet was still going around at about a thousand miles an hour. The sunlight was still casting shadows. And I was still leaning against the door, my face pressed to the window. I hadn’t actually moved. I tilted so I could see the side mirror. I leaned in close to get a good look at my reflection. The dark circles underneath my eyes showed through the concealer and I had a wide red spot on my forehead from where I’d been pressing it into the window. I couldn’t do it. That’s all there was to it. I could not go inside and face him. I got back in my Montero and instead called him on my cell phone.

“I thought you should know I might be getting separated,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Your husband already called. He told me everything. He was wanting to know how bad it would look if he filed now. I told him it’d be best to try and keep things together until this thing was over.”

 

 

XVIII

I can’t remember if my attorney told me about the firm they chose to represent her estate on the same day he told me he himself was an actor.

“You’re an actor?” I know I must’ve sounded incredulous. I hadn’t meant to but it was too late.

Another nod with his same smile. His teeth were perfect. If they were his teeth. Could be caps.

“Before law school, I gave Broadway a try,” he said. “Did a few shows, just bit parts, though. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. But it ran its course. And I wanted something solid so . . .” He gestured with open arms. “Here . . . am . . . I.”

I knew he was Southern and had been raised in a small town. Now I gathered he’d been raised in church because he could speak King James.

Although “Here am I” occurs more than once in the Bible, to me it echoes the prophet Samuel. In 1 Samuel, a very young Samuel is living the cloistered religious life when one night he hears his name. He gets out of bed and goes to his mentor priest, Eli, and says, “Here am I.” Eli says, “I called not.” Samuel goes back to bed and it happens again. The third time Eli says that it must be the Lord calling Samuel and tells him that he should respond, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.” And that’s the Reader’s Digest King James Version account of how Samuel was called to be a prophet of the Lord. In my Sunday School it was a lesson: listen carefully and obey God’s call.

Did my attorney think he was a prophet? Did he think he was doing God’s work? Or was he just being dramatic? If so, he was good. Not over the top, just confident, radiating that he was indeed a servant on a mission.

“They’ve selected a firm,” he’d said. Antecedents, I’d quickly learned, weren’t necessary. It was Us against Them. This was the mission. Them had acquired not one or two attorneys to represent Her, they’d acquired an entire firm. I waited for my attorney to launch into a David and Goliath allusion but he didn’t.

“They’ve got quite the reputation,” he’d said. Act or no act, it was obvious he was choosing his words carefully, and not just to get them right. He was trying to be gentle, to spare me. And it obviously pained him. I recalled the moment in the police car when the officer was stumbling over his words trying to tell me he’d killed a man.

I’d sat up a little straighter, held on tighter to the clipboard, and braced for his prediction that we’d lose the case, that we didn’t stand a chance, that I was a lost cause. “Look, just say it,” I’d said, waiting for him to look at me. “I don’t know what you think, but you don’t have to wear kid gloves with me. I’m not completely clueless, either, you know. Whatever it is you’re trying to say, just say it already. I can take a punch much better than I can take this hemming and hawing.” But I hadn’t stopped and given him a chance to say anything. I had kept going without even taking a breath. “We’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we? They picked a winner which means somebody’s gotta be a loser.” I was on a roll. “You think we’re gonna lose, don’t you? Don’t you? I don’t stand a chance, do I?”

We both waited for me to catch my breath. Then he waited to see if I was finished. My throat felt tight and thick. I pushed the sharp edges of the clipboard deeper into my fingers. Inside I felt odd. My heart wasn’t racing but I could feel it all throughout my body, not just in my chest, like it was pushing against things. I could feel it against my shoulders, against my spine, against my ankles, against my eyeballs. And it was pushing hard. I tried to take a slow, deep breath but there wasn’t room inside for one. My heart pushed harder. It even felt funny in my knees. Something was about to blow. Don’t let it be a kneecap. I’d just started running. I needed my knees to run.

“I like my kneecaps,” I’d said. I blurted it out loud. I knew I had because I heard myself. And it sounded bizarre even to me. I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I’d just told my attorney, after a manifesto on loss that triggered a near-miss panic attack, that I liked my kneecaps. Trying to explain might make things worse; besides, my heart had settled down and wasn’t surging against my skin anymore. I certainly didn’t want to get it riled up again.

So I just looked him straight in the eye and blinked an “I-believe-it’s-your-turn-to-speak now” blink. He’d already looked at my bare knees right when I’d said I liked them. My denim miniskirt didn’t cover an inch of knee but he hadn’t stared at my legs. That was one thing about him: there wasn’t ever any boy-girl tension. I was glad for that.

Somewhere along the way, he’d informed me that the firm selected to represent Deidre’s estate had a reputation for getting precedent-setting verdicts in race cases. They not only won, they won big. The anchor partner had once been our governor.

“But it’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said. “Currently they’re under investigation for questionable practices.”

“Even for them, making this into a race case won’t be easy.”

Her race had been irrelevant. People had hinted that her color might have an impact on the way things were handled but I didn’t see how. For me, growing up in Birmingham, or Bombingham, as it’s been called, was never as black and white as people thought. Not that the color line didn’t exist. It did. But it was a line of barriers and injustices, seen and unseen, related to life, not to death. One of the last and most stubbornly segregated places is the funeral home. But after the grave’s covered and the family’s invoiced, race seems a moot point. The former mayor’s ex-wife, who owns a funeral home, told me that no matter the body’s skin color, all blood drains out the same color red.

 

 

XIX

Deposition time came. The first two witnesses lived an hour away. “Can I ride with you?” my attorney asked. “I’ve got a lot of work I can do in the car.”

“Sure,” I said. “Just don’t bug me about my seatbelt.”

“What’s wrong with your seatbelt?”

“I gave it up for Lent.”

He, of course buckled up immediately, then wrote stuff and read things the entire time while I drove and listened to classic rock.

The Cullman courthouse was old but its worn look seemed wise rather than decayed. The court reporter was already in the room. It turned out she had gone to high school with my cousin and had had a crush on him. No one from Deidre’s family came, just an attorney. He looked like an irregular version of my attorney, all the way down to the shoes. Except for his dark hair.

The witnesses arrived, a mother and her daughter. Both wore jeans and were sharing a half of a Hardee’s biscuit. They were not worried about image. They were here to record their statements; impressing anyone was the last thing on their minds.

“Need y’all to sign this,” my attorney said. He handed them the written oath and a pen. “It says you’ll tell the truth as best as you can remember it,” he said. The mother signed. The daughter took the paper and began reading it. In that moment I knew that they’d been on their way to the Galleria to shop that day.

The daughter signed and the opposing counsel took the paper, signed, and handed it to my attorney, who had already signed it.

“Can you tell us what you remember?” my attorney said.

The mother started in with her testimony.

Her daughter was picking up biscuit crumbs with her finger by pressing the tip onto each crumb and seeing if it would stick long enough to make the trip to her mouth. I had the feeling she was watching me in her peripheral vision.

“At first I thought yousa trying to change lanes,” the mother said. “Then I thought Lordy mighty, she’s trying to change sides of the highway. So what was you trying to do?”

That’s when I saw the pictures wedged in one of three expanding file folders, each labeled with my file number. I hadn’t seen them yet. I wasn’t sure when they’d been brought in. Full-color pictures. My car. Her car. The light blue Camry. The roof cut away. The driver’s-side fender sticking up through the window over the steering wheel. Then inside. Glass. Metal. Severed seat belt. A book wedged between the console and the emergency brake. I thought I could make out “Maya Angelou” in white letters on the black cover. Above it, blood. A large pool and then several splatters all around. I’ve read Maya Angelou. I love her work.

The mother continued her testimony. She didn’t think I should be punished.

“Maybe she shoulda been going slower, what with the rain and all . . .” Moments started popping into my memory out of nowhere. I remembered the radio being on. We’d just sung the Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog song and I switched from the Big Chill CD to the classic rock station. I remembered the lights and I remembered looking down at my wipers so I could switch them to intermittent. I remembered that motion. That feeling of floating fast. I waited for my heart to start bullying my insides. Instead, what I felt was heat running up my neck. Tiny sweat drops were forming.

The daughter was looking at me. Her mother was still talking and the court reporter was typing like a maniac and both attorneys were jotting things down. My neck felt so hot that I half-expected to smell singed flesh. The daughter’s look had become a stare.

When it was the daughter’s turn, she folded the paper wrapper and dabbed at her mouth before starting.

I wondered if she saw her. I wanted to ask if she went over to help her.

Then it was break time. We’d resume depositions after lunch. My neck had cooled down. The mother and daughter were leaving when the mother turned around and waved bye. “Take care now,” she said.

The room smelled like greasy biscuit and hair spray. I needed to go to the bathroom but I didn’t want to get up. Images kept popping into my brain from that day: Officer Bass was making notes. I couldn’t see because my hair was in my eyes. I felt glass when I tried to wipe my hair from my eyes. The wipers were not working fast enough. I reached to turn the knob and speed them up. It had been raining. I had not wanted to get out of bed. I had wanted fifteen more minutes. I had wanted a four-wheel drive. Where had the badass big-sister sunglasses gone? Why hadn’t we missed them? I had not wanted to kill someone.

The attorneys were talking. The witnesses had been there. They didn’t think I drove negligently or wantonly. Why did she have to die? What should I have done differently? Would it have mattered? I hadn’t rescheduled the dentist.

I was glad to find the bathroom until I went in. Two of the three commodes were stopped up. The other one hadn’t been flushed. I flushed it then knelt down beside and stuck my finger as far down my throat as I could get it.

The drive back was just like the drive up, only south.

“Lent’s actually over,” he said when we first got in and I didn’t buckle up.

“The rule of the taxi is no bugging me. Feel free to hitch.”

He took his work back out and I turned the radio back on. He would never understand the thing about my seat belt. So I wouldn’t try to explain. Most people want to live through a wreck; hearing that I didn’t would sound crazy.

“We’re about to be there,” I said.

My attorney looked up from his paper to see where we were about to be.

“This is where it happened,” I said. “And this is exactly what I did. I merged into this lane. Checked and then merged to this one.” He wasn’t looking at the road; he was looking at me.

“Only it wasn’t sunshiny like today and it was early. I was about here when my windshield got splattered with some water and the wipers were on intermittent. I waited a second but they didn’t come on so I looked down at the wiper control and when I looked back up, I thought don’t hit your brakes, it’ll make things worse.”

“Did you hit your brakes?” he asked.

“I remember seeing the lanes coming fast. And right there,” I pointed as we went by, “was where I went into the median.”

 

 

XX

It was a night much like the one before. And the one before that. And the one before that. They were different only in which book was chosen, what story we imagined together, what body part Reed had skinned. The chronology was the same; and time, like my patience, was in short supply. I could get by on five or six hours of sleep as long as I had my afternoon power nap. I’d missed that afternoon’s.

“Mommy,” Reed said.

“Hmm?” I said. I’d dozed off while he was pretend-reading to me.

“I said ‘the end.’ ”

“Okay, buddy, let’s say prayers.”

He took a deep breath because once he started he didn’t stop until he finished: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”

I kissed him. “Love you forever, like you for always,” I said.

“Forever ever ever ever,” Reed said. I turned out his light and closed his door.

The kids were in bed. My husband would be soon. I’d been summoned for a cup of coffee.

“I’ve got to run out for a few minutes,” I said, grabbing my keys.

“Where are you going?”

“I have my cell. Won’t be too long.”

I couldn’t remember having ever left the house by myself after 9 p.m. And it was a school night.

Inside the coffee shop, I didn’t see him at first. But he waved and when I got to the table he stood up.

“So glad you could come.” He kissed the air as if it was my right cheek first and then my left cheek. “I’m not surprised in the least. Not the least.”

He was drinking the house blend, black. I’d never been inside this coffee shop but I’d seen it plenty of times from the outside. It was bigger than it looked. Or at least it had more tables than I would’ve expected. And only one was empty. I ordered a café au lait and took a big sip, swallowed even though it was too hot, and said, “Well, what couldn’t wait?” It burned all the way down my throat.

“You doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Actually, I could use a cup of water.”

It wasn’t because of his near-British accent or the way it appeared that he flung clothes into the air every morning and walked out the door wearing whatever landed on him. These traits were quirky enough, but it was his facial expressions that created the overall oddness. And the Einstein-ate-Bozo hair didn’t help any.

The water felt good to my throat. “Thank you,” I said. I took another sip.

“Want to do a piece for Redbook with me?”

I almost spit the water.

“On what?” I said. I filled my mouth with more water and let my tongue soak in the coolness. The excitement in his voice made his accent less British.

“There’s a story about a doctor who used to sell babies. It’s all a big secret still.”

My cell phone vibrated. It was my husband. I didn’t answer. It vibrated again. I didn’t answer again.

“Well?” He took a breath and waited for my answer. My tongue was still soaking. I swallowed. The phone vibrated again.

“Excuse me,” I said and stepped into the bathroom.

“I thought you weren’t going to be long,” my husband said.

“I’m not. I haven’t been gone thirty minutes yet.”

“Where are you?”

“Getting coffee.”

“By yourself?”

“Of course not.”

“Who with?”

“I’ll be home soon.”

“I’m fixing to go to bed.”

“All right. Then good night.”

“Are you coming to bed when you get home?” It’d been almost a week since we’d had sex. What he was really wanting to know was if we could have sex tonight.

“I’ve got work to do,” I said.

“No, you’ve got school to do. People get paid for doing work. I work; I get paid. You go to school; I pay. Difference.”

“Are you through?” I asked. He didn’t say anything. “You know my fellowship pays for most of my tuition.” He hung up. Some days I wished I’d never been accepted into graduate school. And when the man walked in and whipped out his penis, I wished I’d walked into the ladies’ room instead of the men’s.

“Wonder about warming your cup?” my professor asked, when I got back to the table. “How much would I get paid if I accepted your offer?”

“A thousand to each of us. The kill fee’s $500.”

I said I needed to go tend a fire at home but first I raised my cup.

“To secrets,” he toasted.

“To paychecks!” I added.

 

 

XXI

“Here, it’s coffee.” In spite of sleep deprivation, I recognized my husband’s voice and could smell the strong aroma.

“What time did you get in?” he said. I was face down on my keyboard, too dehydrated to drool. I thought I’d finished the op-ed for the newspaper. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I wanted a sip of the coffee but I couldn’t make my head move. I couldn’t even manage a mumble. The next thing I heard was the garage door opening then closing. He was off to work. That meant it wasn’t 6:00 yet. I tried to think what day it was. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I ran. It was Thursday. I could sleep another forty-five minutes.

“Mommy.” Reed’s morning voice was always quiet. Normally he slept until after his sisters had left on the bus. “My bed is wet,” he said, as if it were an odd thing and unrelated to him.

I attempted to raise my head and regretted it. My neck had a crick that felt permanent. For the piece to appear in Sunday’s paper, it had to be in the editor’s e-mail when he checked it first thing this morning. For all I knew that could’ve been at 5 a.m. sharp. I had a fuzzy recollection of hitting send.

“What’d you do with your big boy pants?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “I asked you where they are,” I said, my voice sharp, almost shrieking, surprising both of us. He was standing at the foot of the bed in a T-shirt that didn’t even cover his belly. “’on’t know,” he sniffled, pushing his finger into his belly button. A sigh escaped through my nose as I got my head off the desk. I felt like a mostly deflated balloon. Reed was looking at me like I might pop.

“Grab a pair of underwear out of Daddy’s closet,” I said. He looked like a little drunk person wobbling into the closet. I couldn’t move much less go change his sheets. I’d get to it later. When he came out, he was trying to hold a pair of whitey tighties up and failing. I had somehow made my way to the bed. “C’mere, you,” I said. He climbed up, settled against me and immediately fell back asleep. I closed my eyes, fully expecting to fall asleep, too. But I had her mother on my mind. When this happened, I would try to distract myself as though I were a two-year-old. I lay still and tried to imagine my byline in Redbook and then what kissing Sam Elliott would taste like. I imagined being nine again and in Candy Cooper’s front yard, playing freeze tag between the pecan trees.

Reed’s breath was warm and regular. Asleep, he really did look like an angel. I kissed his forehead.

I can’t imagine what I would do to someone who hurt one of my children.

I wanted to hang one of Reed’s fellow preschoolers by her earlobes when I found out she had hit him with a hammer. How many nights had her mother lain awake fantasizing about running over me with her car, pushing me in front of an eighteen-wheeler, knocking me off a bridge into the Grand Canyon? Would she always? I couldn’t blame her. I’d want me dead, too.

Reed shifted and snuggled into my neck. “Mommy, you’re warm,” he said.

 

 

XXII

In the weeks before the trial, negotiations heated up. They raised their amount almost half a million dollars. My attorney called and told me himself.

“They’re asking for $1.4 million,” he said.

“Do you think they have something on me?” I said. Maybe they had been watching me.

“They’re playing games,” he said.

“How fun,” I said. “What’s their strategy?”

He admitted he didn’t know.

“Surely you have an idea,” I said.

“Could be intimidation,” he said. The trial was set to begin on Monday, November 3, 1997. The Friday before would be spent all day at my attorney’s office preparing.

“Nine o’clock,” he’d said.

Nine o’clock came. Nine-thirty came. Still no attorney. Ten o’clock. Another attorney came in.

“Let’s go ahead and go over your deposition so you can remember what’s in it.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He cleared his throat and grinned. “Your attorney has the kids this week while his wife is out of town. She’s in Vegas.”

My attorney arrived slightly sheepish and apologetic. “We think you will be the first witness called. It’s known as an adverse witness. They call you so they can set the tone and pace of the questioning. There shouldn’t be any surprises. That probably won’t happen until Tuesday, though, because we have to select the jury and present opening statements first. I want you with me when we are selecting the jurors from the pool. Naturally, we want a predominantly white jury.”

Naturally.

For two hours he and a couple of his staff asked me questions. They asked the same question in different ways. They coached me how to say the same thing differently. I practiced sounding sure. I also tried to sound remorseful. I focused on the questions, and tried not to think about the faces I’d see in the courtroom: the jury, her attorney, the judge, her family, her mother. I thought I was doing a decent job. I was trying. Maybe too hard. They decided I needed a break even though we weren’t close to being finished.

Lunch was brought in—Philly steak sandwiches, extra mayo. Everybody was chewing when the voice on the intercom announced a call.

“They said you’d probably want to be interrupted.”

My attorney lifted the receiver and dabbed at the mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth. “Well, I’d be a lot better if you’d just take our offer now and not on the courthouse steps,” he said into the black receiver.

In the pause, I could not get my bite of sandwich to go down. Everybody in the room was staring as though they could see through the phone. I knew what the offer stood at—$300,000, far below the $1.4 million they now wanted.

My attorney’s smile spread from one dimple to the other, but his voice never betrayed any emotion. “Well, I’ll see about getting the paperwork to you sometime later this afternoon.”

He laid the phone down but missed the receiver.

There was a stunned silence.

Then I screamed and people were hugging me and just like that it was settled.

Just this one thing, not everything, but it seemed like enough.

When I was leaving, my attorney said, “You and the kids have a Happy Halloween.”

“You taking yours trick-or-treating?” I said.

A few more hours of daylight remained before it turned into All Hallow’s Eve.

 

 

XXIII

March 21, 2009.

I never got a copy of my file, but after leaving several messages and making one unannounced visit to his office, I finally got to speak to my attorney. He called my cell phone as I was driving out of his parking lot.

“I’ll never forget that day,” he said. “We weren’t even halfway through the cross-examination prep when her attorney called. He was going hunting and called on his way out of town. I could hear the dogs in the background.”

The law doesn’t require files be kept more than five years so he didn’t think my file was still in the warehouse. He said he would check and let me know. He was happy to tell me what he could remember, though, and would call me back after he gave it some more thought.

Currently my attorney ranks among the state’s top trial attorneys. “That’s a good thing,” he told me. He prefers not to settle and likes getting his cases in front of a jury. His files number over two thousand. “Maybe two hundred have been Wrongful Death suits,” he said. “Currently I’ve got twelve.”

We talked long enough for him to tell me the depositions had been held in Huntsville. “Not Cullman?” I said.

“I don’t think so. Her sister wanted to attend so I said we’d do them in Huntsville. You know she worked there. For NASA.”

That I couldn’t forget.

“I don’t remember her sister being there. I just remember her during mediation.”

He didn’t remember her being at mediation. He didn’t remember us riding together, either, though he did remember discussing with another attorney how good-looking a defendant I was. He also remembered something I said about him and State Farm’s team leader. “You said that he was the brains and I was the salesman.”

Nor did he remember her mother’s name and wanted to know why I asked.

“I was thinking I might call her.”

Dumb or not, I wanted to tell her I’m sorry still. And regardless of how the conversation might turn out, what it might or might not lead to, I’d planned on including it in the last chapter. I couldn’t imagine this story ending any other way.

For a second I didn’t hear anything and thought I’d lost him.

“Charles’ll know.”

“I already called State Farm and asked. They can’t tell me.”

“I’ll call Charles. He should be able to tell you that.”

I’ve yet to hear from either one of them.

 

 

XXIV

For five bucks, you can obtain a copy of your accident report.

I walked into Hoover, Alabama’s shiny new municipal building, went to the police records section, and slid the piece of paper with the case number under the thick glass toward a young woman in glasses. She disappeared briefly and returned with the report, made copies of the four pages, took my five-dollar bill and disappeared again. Unlike legal files, accident reports don’t have a five-year shelf life.

At the top of the report in bold black letters it says: Alabama Uniform Traffic Accident Report. Four boxes separate the information; the one at the bottom is much smaller than the others and contains the Contributing Circumstances codes. The first block lists location and time. It was May 28, 1996, at 0853 MT (military time), a Tuesday, on I-65 between the Wisteria and Rocky Ridge bridges. The milepost is listed as 251.7. Prime contributing circumstance: code #27—driver not in control.

The next box details information for Unit 1, my vehicle: a 1994 Mitsubishi Montero, body type P/U, with liability insurance through State Farm. I am listed as the driver, along with my address and telephone, Social Security, and driver’s license numbers, and place of employment—Red Cross. For the Driver condition, “1” is circled—“no defect.” Other choices are “asleep,” “fatigued,” “ill,” “other or unknown.” Next to “officer’s opinion” for alcohol or drugs, “no” is circled. Estimated speed is 55 mph, the same as the speed limit. Travel direction—south. Number of passengers: 2. There’s also a diagram to show vehicle damage and a place for point of impact: 2—right front. No numbers are circled for damage; handwritten instead over the entire box is the word “totalled” [sic] underlined twice. A “yes” is circled for “Is residence less than 25 miles?”

Below that is Unit 2’s box. Her vehicle, a 1988 four-door Camry, body type car, also “totalled,” and underlined twice, but the point of impact is 1—the front of the vehicle. State Farm is listed as her insurance carrier. “No defect” and no alcohol or drugs were detected. Estimated speed: 55 mph and direction: north. Driver’s residence is also less than 25 miles.

Her address stops me. She’d lived two streets away from me. If I’d driven straight out of the neighborhood I lived in then, I would’ve driven straight into her apartment complex.

It takes me a minute before I realize that she’d celebrated her birthday just six days earlier. On May 22, Wednesday, she’d turned thirty-four.

I turn the sheet over. The back looks like the front minus the heading. The boxes have different labels: Seating, Investigation and Victims, Roadway Environment, and Narrative and Diagram.

The Seating section reports for Unit 1: driver position, code #42—seat belt used, air bag not deployed; rear seat, code #81—child restraint used. Unit 2: code #99—unknown.

The Investigation box notes the light: daylight; the weather: rain; the locale: open country. Police were notified at 0853 MT and arrived at 0859 MT. The EMS arrived at 0900 MT. The photographer is Officer Canady.

The Roadway Environment section lists no contributing road defects (no holes or bumps, no high or low shoulders), no material in the roadway (rocks, trees, gravel, oil, or other), no road construction, and a straight level character. Vision is marked as not obscured. There are six lanes or more. An unpaved surface separates the north and southbound lanes. The road’s construction is concrete; its condition wet.

In the Narrative and Diagram box the officers state their opinion: “The current weather was heavily overcast with light rain. The traffic consisted of normal, for the area, heavy rush hour vehicles. Driver stated that she’d recently purchased her vehicle and was unfamiliar with the windshield wiper control. . . . rain was being thrown from the roadway obscuring the windshield. Driver stated looking down away from the roadway to adjust windshield wipers, and while looking down, felt vehicle begin to ‘fishtail.’ Driver of unit #1 then lost control and travelled out of control from the far right southbound lane across all southbound lanes and through the unpaved median. (Median was thoroughly soaked from heavy rain, causing it to be extremely muddy.) Unit #1 then entered the northbound traffic lanes, still out of control and rotating in a yawing motion, collided with unit #2. Upon impact of units 1 and 2, #2 then rotated and collided with unit #3 as #3 attempted to avoid the collision by changing lanes to the right. The driver of #3 had to leave the right shoulder in his attempt to avoid the collision. No injuries were sustained by drivers or occupants of 1 and 3. Police, Fire and Emergency were notified immediately by means of 911 calls. Weather previous to the accident was a heavy thunderstorm, to include heavy rain. The roadway was wet from the rain. The accident occurred as the rain was changing from its extremely heavy state to a light rain.”

Dispatch notified at 0853 hrs. Police and fire units dispatched two minutes later. First officer on the scene 4 minutes later. Engine 4 arrived one minute later at 0900 hrs. Life Saver was called at 0904 hrs.

Witness statements were noted to be “very similar in all aspects.”

The box for Victim information notes: victim not ejected, first aid administered by paramedic, and taken to Carraway Hospital by Life Saver. In the box below “Injury type” is the letter “K.” K is code for killed.

There was a third car.

I stare at the name of Unit #3’s driver and his phone number. State Farm is also the insurance carrier for his 1989 2D Dodge Colt. The information is brief: he wasn’t hurt and his car was deemed drivable.

I wonder what he remembers. Maybe I should call him.