Chapter 2
Dorian
I n only an instant, she ruined everything.
When I first pulled into the gas station, I ignored her. Yet, a woman crept up behind me, throwing me out of the path of danger and straight out of my throes of a mental breakdown. She crashed straight into me, throwing me onto the road.
I don’t see the impact of the car hitting her, only the aftermath of her body sprawled across the concrete. The black Mustang screeches straight into the parking lot, leaving tire marks in its wake. Her face is torn up and bloody, her brown overalls and yellow shirt beneath ripped from rolling over the asphalt.
A small backpack hangs loosely from her brush-burn-covered arm. Blood stains the corduroy of her overalls, and I know her head and her right arm have gotten the worst of it. Given the damage to the car, I can only guess she rolled up and over the hood and came crashing back onto the pavement.
Pockets of time pass where I feel like someone else is controlling me from afar, but the memories don’t feel like they belong to me. I remain knelt at the woman’s side—a stranger—ignoring the panicked screams of the driver pacing up and down the middle of the road and throwing insults in my direction. The gas station attendant, a young man with a squeaky, frantic voice, speaks with a dispatcher on his phone. All of this unfolds around me, feeling like an eternity. Yet I blink, and the paramedics arrive.
By the time they load the girl onto a stretcher, I realize I’m holding something in my hands. The ruined backpack. Numbly, I stare down at it, finding the face covered in pins and patches, most of which are chipped, scratched, or missing, given the broken plastic lining the road. One of the scuffed keychains hooked to the zipper features a muffin with arms and legs. It’s all or muffin is printed beneath it.
My hand runs over the torn fabric of the side pocket, and within, I notice a blue lanyard with a cardholder at the end. An ID is contained behind the little window. The photo is ruined, but I catch the girl’s place of employment. The Duffey Shop-N-Go grocery store logo survived, as did her name, printed across the bottom.
Katherine Marie Starling.
The police arrive on the scene shortly after the paramedics. One of the officers approaches me, cutting the mental line in my short list of priorities by unknowingly stopping me from handing the bag to the EMTs.
“Mr. Woods seems to think you stepped out into the road on purpose,” the officer—a middle-aged man in a pair of glasses— asks me. He taps a pen against his notebook. He eyes his partner, who’s walking around, documenting the scene.
I can only assume that Mr. Woods owns the Mustang. The driver certainly isn’t blind, nor is the officer an idiot, but I have no intention of being thrown into a psychiatric hospital if the officer’s suspicious eyes are anything to go by. Perhaps the intervention of some stranger was a wake-up call or divine punishment from above, but I’m not about to be carted off somewhere in the vain hope that it would help me.
“I was trying to cross the street,” I listlessly reply.
The officer lowers his pencil and gives me a stern look. Years of experience and intuition tell him that I’m lying, but his professionalism keeps him from calling out my bullshit. “So, just to be clear, the report will say that you—” he glances toward the other side of the road: a thin shoulder and guardrail, with hardly anywhere to stand off the road, “—were trying to cross the road. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I say, ignoring the disapproval in the man’s face. I search for Katherine just as they shove her stretcher into the back of the ambulance.
“And you weren’t hurt?”
“No.”
“You should still get yourself to a doctor. Just in case.”
I’m unsure if he’s referring to my mental or physical well-being, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Instead, my eyes remain on the ambulance. By now, Mr. Woods’s vitals have been checked, and he’s following the other officer as she draws a diagram of the accident. Ultimately, I’m not being detained, but that says nothing about how our respective insurance companies would hash out the situation later.
It’s not really on my mind.
“Where are they going?” I feel myself ask as the ambulance disappears over the hill.
“St. Ruth’s, I think,” the officer mumbles.
Once I’m free to leave, I walk like a ghost to my M5, numbly placing the ruined bag in the passenger seat. No thoughts come to me; my body turns to lead.
I mindlessly drive through the city, replaying the impact of the young woman’s body against the speeding car. From the corner of my mind, my mother’s death filters to the front.
“She hit her head,” my father told me as he clutched my mother’s limp body in the middle of the kitchen. A smatter of blood on the corner of the countertop indicated that he wasn’t lying. I numbly stared at him as he panicked and continued to scream, “Call an ambulance, Dorian, for the love of God!”
The squeal of children’s laughter brings me from a bottomless sea of images and memories. I drove to a park on autopilot on the fringe of New Birch. A mother corrals her young children from the monkey bars and walks them in front of the car, likely on their way home.
Because an orange glow has settled over the world, I realize the evening has stolen the day from me. I can’t tell how long I sat in my car, playing back the last thirty years in a grim slideshow of awful memories.
Sweating and disoriented, I turn the key in the ignition, and when I turn to gaze out the rearview to back out of the parking spot, my eyes spot the mangled bag in my passenger seat.
The decision to drive to St. Ruth’s feels less like an intentional choice and more like my subconsciousness dragging me from one place to the next, even if I have no idea what I’ll do when I get there. Yet, I don’t fight the pull.
“It was an accident,” the memory of my father’s voice taunts me. “Dear God, it was an accident.”
I study all of the enamel pins on Katherine’s bag as I stand in the lobby of the intensive care unit.
What right does this woman have to insert herself into my life and decide my fate? Am I supposed to feel grateful? Her meddling made things much more complicated than they needed to be.I’m not sure if I wanted to die—but all she did was close the option to me.
How noble.
A woman is crying in the hall. I don’t peg her as Katherine’s mother, considering they look so different. Katherine’s body is lankier, her thin hair long, a few shades darker than auburn. Her mother, by contrast, is much shorter than her daughter with an apple-shaped frame, her hair cut to her shoulders with streaks of blonde highlights. If not for the charge nurse pointing her out, I would never have guessed her identity.
Ms. Starling sniffles loudly. It feels as if my legs bring me to the sobbing woman of their own accord. She stares at me, waiting. Gray circles line her brown eyes.
Are her daughter’s eyes brown?
The moment I have that thought, nausea rolls through me. Who cares about her damn eye color?
“Is she alright?” I croak, then I want to kick myself for the stupid question.
Instead of lashing out, like I expect, and telling me that her daughter is certainly not alright, she blows her nose. With a tissue to her face, she speaks in a brittle voice, “They got the swelling of her brain down.”
I’m not sure if I should feel relieved or not. Relieved that Katherine seems to be out of the woods for now, and I don’t have to foot the bill for a pricey casket? Sure. But how expensive could all of this be? Or a lifetime on a ventilator? I cringe to think.
I curse the girl but look upon the woman cordially.
When silence creeps between us, Ms. Starling sniffs and looks up at me again. Her face is red, marked with age, and I note a few sunspots along her forehead. “Are you a co-worker?”
“Ah, no,” I say and hand over the backpack, keychains jangling softly. When she hesitantly takes it, I explain, “I don’t know if anyone told you how this happened. She knocked someone out of the way.”
“Yes,” she sighs, and then a spark of anger ignites across her face. “My stupid daughter would launch herself onto a grenade, even if no one was around, I swear.”
I hesitate. The grief-adjacent anger should be a sufficient warning that Mrs. Starling will assault me with her daughter’s backpack, but I can’t help myself. “ I’m that someone.”
“Oh.”
For a long time, she gawks at me, maybe trying to process what my words mean. The silence is so heavy that I’m suddenly aware of the sound of sneakers against the floor, the faint beeping of monitors, and whispers of conversation. It smells like alcohol and bleach and reminds me of when my mother died. I do not want to be here.
Eventually, she says, “The woman on the phone told me a man stepped out in front of a car. That was you?”
I have no idea who the woman on the phone was, but I assume she was a receptionist or nurse who had been filled in by the EMTs. Either way, I pick up on the implication. I recycle the flimsy lie I gave the police: “I was trying to cross the road.”
Despite the blatant lie, she strangely seems to believe me. She lets out another frustrated sigh. “Please tell me she didn’t put you in danger because she thought you were going to hurt yourself.”
“No, she saved my life.”
These words feel like acid on my tongue. I hate saying them, but I can’t get them back now.
The woman begins to fish for another, less abused tissue from her pocket as another wave of sobs threatens to take her, warping her face and tightening her voice. “Everything’s all messed up now. What am I supposed to do?”
Just as I sense a breakdown on the horizon—that I’m in no way equipped to handle—I pivot in another direction. “Can I see her? I was told she’d just left surgery.”
Ms. Starling nods toward the room on my left. “Go right ahead, but she’s not awake. They said that she’s in a chemically-induced coma.” Her voice breaks on the word, and tears flood her eyes again. “Honestly, I can’t look at her like that anymore. All those tubes and wires. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m on my own.”
There are no words to make her feel better, and with the anger swirling around in my chest, I don’t know if I even care to find them. “Doctors can often opt for a medical coma,” I offer, “especially with bad head injuries.”
Ms. Starling blows her nose again, a sob escaping her throat. Clearly, that line of thinking offers no comfort.
I don’t say anything else and step into the room. The curtains are partially drawn around the bed closest to the door; there’s another patient in a similar state. Katherine’s bed is near the window. A sickly orange light from the early evening pours into the room from the open shades.
Katherine is intubated, her pulse steady.I round the bed to get a better look at her. Scrapes and abrasions line the left side of her face, as well as her left arm draped over her blanket. Mild swelling has formed on her cheeks, split lip, and face. Her hand, with an IV, had been torn up from the road. Although the side of her head is patched up, I can tell some of it has been shaved.
I survey her injuries. I should feel guilty or responsible. If I hadn’t been there, she’d be at home right now, and her mother wouldn’t be sobbing outside of her hospital room. When she wakes from her coma, will Katherine expect an apology for the trouble? For me to pay for all of her pain and suffering? Will she expect my gratitude?
I didn’t ask her to do anything. I was ready to die…or, at least, I thought I was. And now, thanks to her self-righteous meddling, I have my doubts. She undid everything.
“ I hate you, ” I murmur to her. “I truly loathe you.”
I lift a hand and delicately brush a strand of hair from her injured face. Eventually, I pull a seat toward the bed and sit at her side, listening to the soft rhythm of her heart monitor.