CHAPTER EIGHT
Alex
Now
I was sitting cross-legged in the corner of the garage with a bent three-iron across my knees when the crying started. It wasn’t for the cars. It was for how long I’d let myself believe in him.
I stood and made myself look at what was left.
The Porsche GT2 RS had been a gift. A four-hundred-thousand-dollar apology I’d handed him, hoping it might do what nothing else had. I understood now that there was nothing I could buy that would make him care about something he didn’t already care about.
Hours ago it had been beautiful. Now the carbon fiber trim lay in pieces across the concrete.
The windows, built thin to shave weight off a car that had once held a speed record, sat crushed into their frames where a driver had gone through them, one swing at a time.
The body panels were dimpled from the headlights to the spoiler, the same fine, even pockmarks you’d find on a golf ball, which struck me, distantly, as exactly the kind of joke Joshua himself would have made.
The Dino Ferrari was just back from a three-year, $1.2 million restoration. It hadn’t fared any better. A dozen strikes from a TaylorMade driver had done the rest.
There was nothing left to break. The things he loved were gone. The things he couldn’t love—me, this house, the life we’d built around his absence from it—would still be here in the morning. We’d made a promise in a church. I didn’t know how to want anything different and still keep it.
I sat down on the concrete and closed my eyes.
My cell phone rang first, close to midnight. I let it go. I didn’t have it in me to talk to a drunk, apologetic Joshua who wouldn’t remember any of it by morning anyway.
The house phone rang a few minutes later. It was line we kept for business only. Something about that got me up off the floor. RESTRICTED, the caller ID read. I pictured him calling from a holding cell, asking me to come bail him out.
I picked it up. “Hello?”
“Missus MacAfee?”
I didn’t know the voice. “Yes. This is Alex.”
“Alex, this is Sergeant Swift, Monterey County Sheriff’s Department. I’m calling to let you know your husband’s been in a serious accident.”
My hands were steady, which surprised me. I waited for him to go on.
“Missus MacAfee? Are you there?”
“Yes. I’m here.” I checked the clock. 1:20. “Is he alive?”
“He’s alive, ma’am, but you’ll need to get to the hospital as soon as you’re able. He’s in surgery now. Time matters here.”
None of it felt real yet. Some part of me wanted to say I’d come in the morning, and go back to bed instead. I didn’t know if that was shock, or just how numb I’d already gone where Joshua was concerned.
“Where was he?”
“Ma’am?”
“Where did it happen?”
“10th Street, just before it crosses 8th.”
I couldn’t place it. I thought instead about how many other cars might have been out on that road at that hour.
“Was anyone else hurt?”
“No, ma’am. Single vehicle.”
I let out a breath. “That’s one good thing, I guess.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A pause. “Would you like me to send a cruiser for you?”
“No,” I said, already walking toward the garage. “I’ll drive myself.”
Then I remembered the only car left to drive was Joshua’s Mercedes, and I had no idea where he kept the keys.
He never let anyone else near his cars. He hid the keys, or carried them on him.
I stood there a second, half frustrated that I’d need a ride now, half frustrated that in all that swinging, I’d left one of the cars I actually had access to untouched.
“Sergeant Swift. I take that back. I’ll need a ride.”
“I’ll have someone there shortly, ma’am.” He paused. “You should prepare yourself. Your husband hit a county light pole head-on, at approximately eighty miles an hour. Our preliminary read is that he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He went through the windshield.”
“Thank you for telling me straight,” I said. “I’ll be all right.”
“Cruiser will be there soon.”
I hung up and called Martina. She picked up on the fourth ring, her voice thick with sleep.
“Everything okay?”
“Joshua’s been in an accident.”
“A car wreck?”
“That’s what they’re calling it. They’re sending someone to drive me.”
“Is it bad?”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
“All right. What happened?”
“He hit a pole head-on. No seatbelt.”
“Those seatbelts in that car are a disaster. I could never figure them out. You should never have bought him that thing.”
“The Porsche? He wasn’t in it.”
“The Mercedes, then. I never liked that green.”
“The Mercedes is still in the garage.”
“Then what was he driving?”
Eighty miles an hour and a windshield hadn’t moved either of us much. The answer to that question did.
“My Jeep,” I said, and my voice broke apart on it. “He was driving my fucking Jeep.”
“Oh, Alex. I’m so sorry.”
“I have to go. The police are going to be here any minute.”
“Call me the second you know anything. I mean it, Alex. The second.”
I promised her I would and hung up before either of us had to find something else to say.
There wasn’t anything else. There was a phone in my hand, a garage full of wreckage behind me, and a husband somewhere on a table having his body opened up by strangers, and none of it fit into a sentence I knew how to finish.
I went upstairs and changed out of the sweatpants I’d worn to destroy two European sports cars and into something that wouldn’t look insane in a hospital waiting room.
I don’t know why that mattered to me. It shouldn’t have.
I stood in front of the closet for a full minute deciding between two identical black cardigans before I understood, distantly, that I was stalling.
There was some part of me did not want to arrive at that hospital at all.
I went anyway. I always went anyway. That was the entire architecture of my marriage.
The cruiser’s headlights swept the driveway at 1:47 by the clock on the microwave. I know because I stood in the kitchen and watched the numbers change three separate times, willing them to move faster and then, in the same breath, willing them to stop.
The officer who came to the door was young.
Younger than me, maybe, though it was hard to tell in the dark with his hat brim throwing a shadow over half his face.
He said my name like a question. I said yes.
He said he was very sorry to be picking me up under these circumstances, and I thanked him, and neither of us said anything else true for the rest of the ride.
The back of a police car smells like vinyl and something chemical underneath it, a cleaning product trying to erase whoever rode there last. I sat with my hands folded in my lap and watched Monterey’s dark, fog-hung streets slide past the window—shuttered storefronts, a diner sign missing its S, the black shapes of cypress trees standing sentry against a sky with too many stars in it for a night this bad.
I found myself doing math I had no business doing.
Eighty miles an hour. No seatbelt. A windshield.
I made myself stop before I got anywhere useful with those numbers.
“You holding up okay back there?” the officer asked, eyes finding mine in the rearview.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, which was the only honest thing I said to anyone that whole night.
The hospital’s emergency entrance came up too fast and not fast enough, sliding glass doors throwing yellow light across the pavement, a woman in scrubs jogging somewhere in my peripheral vision like every hospital in every movie I’d ever half-watched.
The officer walked me as far as the intake desk and then peeled off with the relief of a man handing a difficult thing back to someone whose job it actually was.
“MacAfee,” I told the woman at the desk. “My husband. Joshua MacAfee. Someone called me. He’s in surgery.”
She typed for a moment too long. “Take a seat, hon. Someone will come find you.”
I did not take a seat. I stood at the window that looked into a hallway I wasn’t allowed past, and I watched gurneys and clipboards and the backs of people’s heads, and I thought, with a clarity that frightened me more than the accident itself had, that I felt nothing that resembled love.
I felt afraid, the animal kind, the kind that doesn’t ask permission from your opinions about a person before it shows up.
I felt guilty for how little else there was underneath it.
A surgeon in green scrubs finally came through a set of double doors almost an hour later, pulling his mask down to his throat, looking for someone, and I understood before he found me that the someone was me.
“Missus MacAfee.”
“Yes.”
“He’s out of surgery. He’s alive.” He let that sit a moment, the way people do when they know the next sentence is the one that matters. “I won’t lie to you. It was close, and it isn’t over. We’ll know more once he’s settled upstairs. I can take you back in a few minutes.”
“Thank you,” I said, hating it a little that I’d had to search for those words before I found them.
I called Martina from a plastic chair bolted to the waiting room wall and told her he was alive, and she cried, actual tears, for a man who had never once given her a reason to.
I sat with the phone warm against my ear and watched the sliding doors open and close on people whose worst night this clearly wasn’t, and I waited to be taken back to whatever version of Joshua the surgeons had managed to save.