Prologue #2
And my dad. Eleven years, like the count on a watch. In the rain.
I got eleven years to work with and I want to tell you what I did with them, because it's instructive.
Year one through four: I said nothing, because my mother had told me not to.
Year five: I tried again, sideways. I was seventeen and I told him he should get his heart checked, and he said, "My heart's great," and it was, it was in wonderful shape right up until a Buick came through an intersection in February.
Year six through nine: I became a person who called her father a great deal. Sunday afternoons, mostly. He'd talk about the shop and I'd hold the phone against my shoulder and do nothing at all, and he'd say, "You don't have to call every week, bud," and I'd say, "I know," and call the next week.
Year ten: I stopped sleeping properly and started keeping a calendar I didn't tell anybody about.
Year eleven: I drove three hours in the rain to a town I had no business being in and sat in a parking lot outside a hardware store for six hours because I could not for the life of me remember whether the rain in the vision was falling on a road or a lot, and at eight-forty that evening my mother called and I answered it in a parking lot and knew before she said a word.
He was forty miles from where I was sitting.
So that's my record. Eleven years of advance notice, one hundred percent accuracy, zero interventions. I am the world's most reliable warning system attached to absolutely nothing.
That's the thing my family will never understand about me and the thing I have stopped trying to explain, which is that I'm not haunted by the deaths. I'm haunted by the parking lot.
Everybody I've ever loved has been a countdown I could read and not stop, and after a while you stop trying to stop them and you just start being the person who's already grieving at the barbecue. Which is a great personality. That's a really fun person to have at a barbecue.
So: no eye contact. No exceptions. Eighteen years.
I want to be clear that this was working.
That's important. I'm not telling you this as a woman whose system had failed her.
I had a job, an apartment with one chair in it, a standing Thursday call with my mother where we both faced our respective windows, and a map on my wall that I had never once explained to another human being.
The map is the thing that matters. Everything else is just how I got old enough to make it.
It's a State of Nevada road map, the paper kind you can't buy anymore, and it's got a strip of road on it that I've marked in red between two dots, and the dots say 61 and 74.
Thirteen miles. And pinned around it in a fan are thirty-one accident reports I was not supposed to have, and thirty-one names, and thirty-one dates, and one of the names is my aunt.
Eleven years. Thirty-one single-car accidents.
Nobody swerving for anything, according to the reports.
No skid marks worth a damn. Clear nights, mostly.
Good drivers, mostly. Thirteen miles of straight, boring, ugly road that has killed more people than any thirteen miles of road has any business killing, and every single file says the same thing at the bottom in the same flat little sentence, and the sentence is driver error.
Which — okay. Fine. Once.
Thirty-one times, it's not error. Thirty-one times, it's an appetite.
I built the map by accident, which is how I've built everything.
Two years ago I was covering a double and I took a call off Route 9 at ten past one in the morning, a woman with a flat, and I did the thing I do, which is keep them talking until the truck gets there.
Her name was Renata. She sold insurance.
She had a son at UNR studying something with fish in it.
She was extremely funny about her ex-husband.
And forty minutes in she stopped mid-sentence and said, in a completely different voice, "There's somebody in the road."
I said, "Ma'am?"
And she said, "He's just standing there," and then the line did the thing where it doesn't hang up but nobody's on it, and I sat in a cinderblock room with a headset on saying Renata for six minutes.
Petra got there at 2:10 and found a Corolla on a flat, driver's door open, nobody in it, nobody on the road, no footprints, hazards still going.
They found Renata eleven hours later in a wash two hundred yards north.
Exposure, the report said. Confusion, disorientation, subject appears to have left the vehicle on foot.
And at the bottom, in the little box, in the same flat little sentence: driver error.
I put her file on my wall the following Tuesday, alone, with a thumbtack, in an apartment with one chair, and I did not know at the time that I was starting anything. I thought I was putting up a piece of paper so that one person in the state of Nevada would have it somewhere other than a drawer.
There are thirty-one now.
I've read every one so many times I can do them from memory in the shower.
Aged nineteen to seventy-four. Fourteen women, seventeen men.
A retired schoolteacher, a mud-logger, a woman driving home from her own bachelorette party, a man who had gotten sober eleven weeks earlier and had the chip in his pocket, which somebody wrote down and which has never once left me.
And out on the shoulder, one at a time, on my nights off, with a bag of fence pine and a hammer in the trunk, I put up thirty-one crosses in the dirt.
I never told a soul. Not Hollis, not Petra, not my mother on a Thursday. There's no version of that sentence that doesn't end with somebody looking at me a certain way, and I have spent my entire life arranging not to be looked at a certain way.
I've been logging it for two years. Not doing anything about it, understand. Logging. There's a difference, and the difference is cowardice, and I was extremely comfortable there.
Because here's the thing about being twelve years old in a dark room with a cake in front of you and twenty-two endings pressing in on all sides.
You learn, very fast, that you can't save anybody.
And then you spend eighteen years finding out whether you believe it.
I put my finger on Mile 61 and left it there a while.
"Okay," I said, out loud, to nobody, in an apartment with one chair in it.
I did not know, that night, that I had eleven days left of my life being small.