Sadie
I've been following the moving van's tail lights for ninety miles.
Red, steady, pulling me forward like a tether. I haven't let myself look at anything else. Just those two red squares and the promise of a new apartment on the other end of them.
My hands ache from gripping the wheel. I make myself loosen them, one finger at a time.
"You can do this," I say out loud, because the car is too quiet. The radio's been off since I pulled out of the storage unit at dawn. I didn't want anything to drown out my own thinking. I wanted to hear myself.
I'm twenty-six years old. My parents are dead. My boyfriend is behind me. Everything I own fits in the back of a ten-year-old Corolla and a rented moving truck, and the rental agreement for my new place is folded in the glove compartment along with two granola bars, a bottle of water, and a prescription receipt I haven't thrown away yet.
I'm free.
I keep telling myself that word like it's a spell. Free. Free. Free.
The van's brake lights flare.
I tap mine in response, slowing, and my eyes flick up to the overpass ahead. Something is wrong. The way the cars in the far lane are drifting sideways, the way one of them is already turning, already wrong, already—
A sedan clips the median and spins.
I have time to think oh God and nothing else.
The sedan hits the SUV two lanes over. The SUV spins wildly. Metal screams, and the sound is worse than anything I've ever heard, high and shearing and alive. The moving van ahead of me swerves right, cuts across a lane, and speeds through a gap that closes too fast for me to follow. A pickup in front of me has already slammed its brakes and I'm too close, I'm too close, and my foot is on the brake but the road is—
Impact.
Something hits me from the left and the whole world rotates ninety degrees, then the airbag is in my face, and my ears are full of a sound that isn't sound, it's just pressure, and bright white.
I don't know how long I sit there resting against the airbag.
Maybe seconds. Maybe a minute. My brain is trying to catalog my body the way I've been trained to catalog other people's; airway, breathing, circulation, and everything seems to be working. I can breathe. I can move my hands. My left ear is ringing but I can hear a car horn somewhere, a long continuous note that means someone has slumped forward onto their wheel and isn't moving.
That sound gets me out of the seat.
I shove the airbag aside. My door is dented but it opens when I throw my shoulder against it. I stumble onto asphalt and the world rights itself in pieces. Blue sky, black smoke rising from somewhere ahead, glass glittering in daylight like someone spilled a jewelry box across four lanes.
My hands are shaking. My knee hurts enough that I'm limping, but it's tolerable and holding my weight.
I open the back door of the Corolla and drag out the first aid kit, the real one, the good one, the one I spent money on whenI had none because I needed to know I could take care of myself in an emergency. The blood pressure cuff, rolls of gauze, trauma shears, a pack of tourniquet straps, a sharpie and saline pods.
Candy. I grab the candy too, out of habit, and shove a pack of glucose tabs in my back pocket because I can already feel my hands trembling in a way that isn't just shock.
I chew one, breathing slowly through my nose.
Then I walk into the wreckage.
The first car is the SUV. There's a woman in the driver's seat unconscious against her seatbelt. Her face is slack. In the back, strapped into a car seat, a little girl is crying, a small wet sound that's somehow worse than if she was screaming.
"Hey," I say, crouching by the window. "Hey, sweetheart. Can you look at me?"
She lifts her big brown eyes to me. There's a cut on her forehead that's bleeding into her eyebrow but isn't deep.
"I'm going to help your mom," I tell her. "What's your name?"
"Emma."
"Hi, Emma. I'm Sadie. You are so brave. I'm going to put a band aid on your head, okay?"
