8. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
The wheel wrenches.
William’s arm slams across my chest, pure instinct, and the world swings hard to the left.
Tires scream against the asphalt. The deer is there and then it isn’t, a brown blur across the windshield, and we’re not on the road anymore, we’re on the shoulder, we’re past the shoulder, and the guardrail comes up white and fast.
We hit it.
The sound is enormous, metal folding into metal, and then the car is rolling and everything I know about up and down stops being true.
The airbag punches me in the face. Glass comes apart all around me and hangs in the air for one strange, weightless second, and I have time for exactly one thought, that this can’t be happening, we were just laughing, his hand was just in my hand.
We hit again.
Black.
There’s no dream in it. No time in it. It’s just a hole in the world, and then the world starts again without asking me.
I come back slowly, in pieces.
Sound arrives first, before I remember what I am or where, before I remember there’s a body attached to the listening.
There’s a hissing somewhere near my feet.
A ticking, slow and even, like metal cooling.
And underneath it, absurdly, the wind moving through the leaves, the same gentle sound it was making when the sun was coming through the trees and everything was still fine.
Then the pain arrives, and it arrives everywhere at once.
It doesn’t build. It doesn’t announce itself.
One second I am a floating awareness in the dark and the next I am nailed into a body that is one single wall of hurt, and I have to learn it piece by piece, the way you’d map a country.
Chest. Ribs. Head. The arm I can’t feel at all, which frightens me more than the ones I can.
My chest is clamped in a vise. Every breath is a negotiation, shallow and careful, and even the careful ones drag a hot wire across the inside of my ribs.
My head pounds in a slow, massive rhythm, one beat for every heartbeat, and there’s a warm line running from my hairline down my temple, along my jaw.
I can feel it moving. I can’t do anything about it.
I try to move.
Nothing happens.
I try again. I put everything I have into it, every ounce of will, focused on one simple task, lifting my right hand off my lap. My fingers twitch against my thigh. That’s all. That’s everything I get.
I rest. I gather everything again. I try the left hand instead, and get nothing at all, not even the twitch. I try my head, just to turn it, just one inch toward his side of the car, and my neck answers with a bolt of white that ends the experiment before it starts.
The seatbelt has me pinned. The door has folded in against my shoulder.
My own body has stopped taking instructions, and understanding that, really understanding it, that I am awake and trapped inside a body that will not answer, brings a panic bigger than the pain.
I can feel my heart slamming. The panic has nowhere to go.
It just circles inside my chest with everything else.
I try to speak. To say his name.
My mouth opens. My lips move. What comes out is air, a thread of it, thinner than a whisper.
William.
I shape it again. William. My tongue moves. My throat clicks. The name stays inside me with everything else.
My eyes won’t open all the way. The best I can manage is a slit, a blurred band of the world: the windshield gone white with cracks, the dashboard shoved up at an angle that’s wrong, the hood crumpled toward the sky. Steam or smoke rising from somewhere, drifting sideways in the wind.
And to my left, movement.
William.
He’s moving. He’s groaning, and it’s the single best sound I have ever heard, because it means he’s alive.
Through the blur I watch him push himself back from the steering wheel.
I watch his hand come up to his head and come away dark.
I watch him fumble at his seatbelt, once, twice, until it gives.
He’s alive. He’s moving. Relief floods me so hard it drowns the pain for one entire second, and in that second I could cry from pure gratitude, and maybe I already am, it’s getting hard to tell what my face is doing.
He’s hurt, but he’s moving. That’s the equation. That’s the whole equation. If he’s moving, then in a moment he’ll be at my door, and this stops being a thing that is happening to me alone and becomes a thing that is happening to us.
He’s going to get me out. That’s what happens next. His hands on me, his voice saying my name, the two of us in this together the way we were finally, finally in everything together this morning. I hold on to that. I make it the whole world.
This morning he slid a plate of blueberry muffins across the counter to me without being asked.
This morning his phone lit up with her name and his fingers curled into a fist and he pulled his hand back.
This morning I sat at my own kitchen island and let myself believe him, and I am not wrong.
I refuse to be wrong. Four months of proof to the contrary, and I am still sitting in this crushed seat betting everything I have left on this morning.
I hear his door groan open.
I hear his weight leave the seat. Gravel crunches under his feet.
He’s coming around the car. He’s coming for me. Any second now his face will fill up my window and I won’t be alone in this broken thing anymore.
And then, from behind me, from the back seat I forgot existed, a voice.
“William! William, help me, please! William!”
Helen. Screaming his name.
His name, over and over, high and ragged and filling the whole wreck.
Not my name.
Never my name.
For half a second, nothing happens. Half a second where the footsteps stop, where the whole world holds still, where whatever is about to be decided hasn’t been decided yet.
The footsteps outside change direction.
Through the slit of my vision I track his shape moving along the outside of the car. Past the crumpled hood. Along the side. My side. His body is right there, close enough that if my arm worked I could reach through the broken window and touch him.
He passes my window.
He passes my window, and the back door wrenches open behind my shoulder, and I hear Helen sobbing, gasping his name, and I hear his voice, low and urgent, saying words I can’t put together, and then the whole frame of the car shifts as her weight leaves it.
And through the shattered side glass, in the blurred band of world I’m allowed, I see him.
My husband. Upright. Whole. Moving away from the car with Helen in his arms, carrying her away from the wreck, away from the road.
Away from me.
I scream.
Nothing comes out.
My chest seizes around the attempt and white fire tears through my ribs and the scream stays locked inside my body where he will never hear it, where nobody will ever hear it, and my eyes do the only thing left to them.
The tears come, sliding hot down my face, mixing with the blood at my temple, and I can’t lift a hand to wipe either one away.
He’s coming back.
I tell myself that. I build it and hold it up and make myself believe it.
He got her clear of the car because the car might burn, that’s all, that’s smart, that’s William being William, handling the immediate problem first. He set her down somewhere safe and now he’s turning around. Now he’s running back. Now.
I stare at the empty piece of world where he disappeared.
The hissing goes on. The engine ticks, slower now. The wind moves the leaves, and the leaves don’t care, and the sun keeps coming down through the branches in the same long stripes it was painting across the road when I was smiling.
He doesn’t come back.
I make deals. If I count to twenty, he’ll be here.
I count to twenty. If I count to fifty. I lose my place in the thirties, because counting takes breath and breath costs too much, and I start over, and somewhere in the second attempt I stop pretending the numbers are anything but a place to put my mind so it doesn’t go where it’s going anyway.
Seconds pass, or minutes. Time has gone strange and thick, and I can’t trust it. I count my careful breaths to hold on to it and lose count at nine, or nineteen, and start again.
My hand is lying in my lap where my eyes can reach it.
My wedding ring catches the light through the ruined windshield.
It glints. It keeps glinting, this tiny bright thing on a hand I cannot lift, on a finger I cannot feel, and I stare at it and think about a cold terrace three years ago.
A jacket settling warm over my shoulders.
A low voice, steadier than anything in my life had ever been, saying I’ll treat you well.
I believed him.
That ring went onto this finger in front of hundreds of people, in a ceremony neither of our families bothered to make warm, and I stood there in white and thought, we’ll make it warm ourselves.
He said honesty and I said try, and that was our whole foundation, two words, and I built a marriage on it. I built three years on it.
That’s the part I keep snagging on, lying here broken in the passenger seat of our marriage. This morning, with the muffins and the phone face-down and his fingers laced through mine on the gearshift, I believed him all over again.
Sounds outside change. Voices, maybe, far away, or not far away.
I can’t tell anymore. A car door, or a branch falling, or nothing.
Everything arrives from the same great distance now, and everything is going soft at the edges, the pain included, which some cold little part of me understands is not mercy but a very bad sign.
I can’t bring myself to care.
That’s the part that scares the cold little watcher in the back of my head, the not caring.
It notes, from very far away, that the pain is stepping back like a tide going out, that my careful breaths are getting shallower and further apart, that the panic that was circling my chest has lain down somewhere and gone quiet.
It files all of this under bad, very bad, and the rest of me hears the report and lets it drift past.
Sirens, thin as thread, so faint they might be an invention of my pounding head. They get closer, or they don’t. They’re real, or they aren’t. I’ve stopped being able to tell the difference, and it has stopped mattering to me, and both of those facts arrive with the same soft gray weight.
Somewhere out there, on some patch of safe grass I can’t see, my husband is holding another woman, and I am in here alone with the ticking metal and the wind, like I’m not even here at all.
The world narrows down. The ring glints.
Hands reach in through the broken window, and they are not William’s hands, they belong to a stranger, someone in a uniform, someone saying ma’am, can you hear me, stay with us, we’re going to get you out, and I try to answer and my body has given up entirely, and all I can do is let them work while the dark comes up underneath me like deep water.
The last thing I see is my wedding ring, still glinting, still catching the light.
The last thing I think is this:
Four times he didn’t choose me. The anniversary. The office. The dinner. The auction.
This time it almost killed me.