But the tears don’t appear until I let myself look at the construction site. There are more trucks parked in the dirt now, and houses have started being built. Wooden skeletons waiting for walls and warmth and life. Edison will be buried somewhere along that dusty trail of tire treads. I’ll lay him down gently. I’ll kiss him goodbye and cover him with dirt.
“Our time will come to an end.” I make myself say it as the songloops back around for a second time. My cheeks are wet and I draw a shuddering breath. I sob and cup my hand over my mouth, startled by the ugliness of the sound. My voice cracks when I whisper the words again. “Our time will come to an end.”
I throw the car in reverse, speeding fifty yards back. Stop. Put it in drive. The average car can go zero to sixty in five seconds, and that’s more than enough. My vision is blurry and wet, and the starlight drips down all around me with the rain. I take a deep breath and slam on the gas. I feel the tire blow out when it hits the board. The car spins and I clutch at the wheel.Go slack,I remind myself. Limp bodies incur the least damage in accidents. That’s why drunks walk away from their own accidents unscathed while everyone else ends up injured or dead. But it’s over in the time it takes me to think the words.
I scream. Something slams into me and I’m blinded by the brightness of it. White and red. Rain pounding angrily on the metal roof.
The airbag.I make myself think the word.Focus, but I can’t. Tears all over my face. I touch my forehead and my palm comes away slick with deep, dark blood.
My hands are shaking so furiously that it takes too long for me to dig into my jeans for my phone. Before I left, I put it in my pocket, not my purse, because I knew that I might lose my purse in the impact. I have no idea if this is true because I can’t make myself see anything but what’s immediately in front of me. Numbness creeps at the edges of my mind. “Ave Maria” has stopped playing, and I realize that I turned the car off, or it shut itself off. I don’t know.
I call Edison. He will pick up by the second ring the way he always does. He’ll come and save me and I’ll tell him I love him, and he’ll say he loves me too. He has to. I am delivering myself right into his arms so that he can rescue me.
“Hey, you,” he says, and at the sound of his voice I start to cry again. He’s in his house with the light from his window glowing out onto the barren lawn. He’s waiting for the pizza to be delivered because I’m supposed to be coming over to watch the first season of a new show that’s got great reviews.
I try to say his name, but only a squeak comes out.
“Jade?” There was television noise in the background, but it’s gone now. He’s standing up, holding the phone closer to his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Edison,” I choke out. “There was an accident.”
“Where are you?” His voice is something I don’t recognize. Because I love him, I am giving him a gift: the chance to save me the way that he couldn’t save his wife.
When I tell Edison I’m at the ten-mile marker, I don’t realize how far I’ve spun out. I stumble out of the car and into the rain, and I can barely see the construction site from here. One lone crane reaches victorious toward the waxing moon. I collapse to my knees on the pavement. My vision roils, and I double over and vomit. I didn’t know that it would be like this, with so much blood, my mind so hazy.
“Jade!” When I look up, I see him. A silhouette cutting through the rain, backlit by his high beams. I try to crawl away from my vomit. I don’t want him to see it, but my limbs have gone rubbery and all I can do is moan.
His hands are under my arms. “What are you doing out on the road?” he’s asking me. “Why did you get out of the car?”
In my delirium I tell him the truth: “I was waiting for you.”
“Jade.” He lifts me into his arms. He peels the hair from my face. “I’ve got you. I’m right here, Jade.” In this moment, that’s my name. That’s who I am, because he’s willed me into being. I’m in this place for him. Only him.
He wraps me in the blanket that he keeps in his trunk. It’s a soft fleece, bright red, nothing like the shade of the blood I’m getting all over it.
“It’s going to be okay,” he tells me, buckling me into the passenger seat. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No,” I groan. It wasn’t supposed to be this ugly. There wasn’t supposed to be any blood. I was only supposed to blow out the tire and tell him I’d sprained my wrist. He would lift me by the hips and sit me up on the bathroom counter and patch me up with the brace he keeps for his construction injuries, and fuss over me, and bring me to bed and make love to me. And then, thankful I’m safe, he’s supposed to tell me that he loves me, that he doesn’t know what he would have done if anything had happened to me.
I don’t realize my eyes are closed until I feel him grab my chin, pulling me back to consciousness, back to him. He’s got that look about him. I saw it the night we drove to stake out his wife’s killer. Only, with me, he doesn’t seek to destroy. A weary smile rises on my lips.
“Don’t you dare close your eyes on me,” he demands. His voice is so strong that even if I were to die right here, his ferocity would be enough to bring me back. “You’re going to stay awake and I’m going to do the rest.” He grabs my shoulders, digging into my skin. “You aren’t going to leave me. Do you understand?”
I reach up and put my hand over his. “Yes,” I manage. I wouldn’t close my eyes again for the world; I’m too afraid that he isn’t real and that this beautiful bright desert town is all a dream.
He gets behind the wheel and I watch him. His jaw is tight. The construction site is behind him, encased by the window like a picture in a frame.
“Edison.”
He fumbles through the folds of the blanket and grabs my hand. He drives like hell, the engine of his ancient car straining noisily as we speed through the empty roads. He goes through stop signs, disregards the lights. I know, from being a passenger in Moody’s car when we were in high school, that we must be doing at least a hundred.
“It’s just two more miles,” he tells me. He’s laser focused. Like my sisters going for a kill. Like me dismembering the pieces and scouring for evidence. He clenches my hand, and the pain of his crushing embrace only heightens my desire for him. I can feel the rawness of his fear. If the doctors couldn’t save me, he’d park outside their houses, watch them move inside as he schemed. How would he kill them? Something efficient, I think, but violent. And as he straddled them in the debris of a frenzied struggle, he would demand to know why they couldn’t keep me alive. He couldn’t lose me, too. He never even got the chance to tell me he loved me, and it was all their fault, and he had to do it. For me.
He parks right in front of the emergency room in the loading zone. He’s going to get towed if he doesn’t move, but he doesn’t care. The car is still running when he comes around to the passenger side and lifts me, a cocoon in his red blanket. My forehead rests against his throat and I feel his heart beating wild.
I wince when the fluorescent lights inside the building meet my eyes. Everything is moving too fast, and then slow. The place is empty because this is the middle of nowhere. Someone brings a wheelchair and Edison sets me down. He jogs to keep up with the nurse who’s wheeling me down a hallway, telling her about the accident, how damaged the car was, how bad it seemed. I slammed into the mile marker sign and bent the post. Things I never bothered to look over my shoulder and check for myself because I was too busy looking to the horizon and waiting for him to come to me.
“There was something in the road,” he says. “There’s construction nearby.”
