When she's done, she caps the marker and moves to go.
Something in me reaches for her without my permission.
"Sadie."
She stops. She doesn't turn all the way around. Just her face, over her shoulder, fair and ordinary and completely extraordinary.
"Yes?"
I want to ask her a dozen things. Her last name. Where she lives. What she was doing on this freeway. Who taught her to move through a wreck with that kind of composure. Why she didn't scream when I put my hand on her. Whether she understood, in that second, exactly what I was, and if she did, why she stayed.
"Thank you," I say.
Her eyes move over my face and I realize I can't read her.
She nods once and climbs out of the sedan.
I watch her through the cracked window as she walks away. She doesn't look back. Her shoulders are set, her head is up, and she's already reaching into her back pocket for something I can’t see. I try to move, but my leg is trapped between the front seat and the door.
I push at the seat with my good arm, but it doesn’t move. I try to open the door, but it’s crushed in such a way that the latch must be jammed.
I look back in the direction she went and I file all of it away. The Sharpie on her hands. The way she favors her left knee slightly when she steps over debris. The make and model of theempty Corolla crumpled on the shoulder, dusty green, twelve years old, packed to capacity with boxes and a lamp. The corner of what looks like a mattress is pressed against the back window. She was moving. Alone.
The sirens are close now. I hear boots on asphalt; the hydraulic whine of machinery being pulled from a truck. My door is pinned. The roof is warped. They're going to have to cut me out.
I look down at my wrist.
BP 130/85. P 96.
Her handwriting is neat. Almost prim. Each number carefully placed, as if she knew someone would need to read it and wanted to make it easy for them.
I brush my thumb over the ink.
It doesn't smudge.
A paramedic's face appears at the window. He's saying something to me, asking me questions in the slow careful voice they use for head injuries, and I answer him in the slow careful voice I use when I don't want someone to know what I'm thinking. Yes, I can hear him. Yes, I know my name. I’m Nikolai Zhirinovsky. Yes, I know the date. No, I don't remember the impact. My arm is the worst of it and my leg is pinned. The driver, Yuri, is my priority, please see to him first.
He tells me they are on it. A woman at the scene already took care of the most urgent triage before they arrived.
"The blond?" I ask.
He looks at me oddly. "Yeah. You know her?"
"No." I lift my wrist to show the evidence of her on me.
He nods and starts working on the door.
I turn my head, slowly, because the ache in my skull is only just starting to fade. Through the shattered window I can seeher. She's being led to a patrol car with a foil blanket around her shoulders. She doesn't look at me.
But I can see the line of her throat when she tips her head back to swallow some juice, and I can see the place where my hand was, even though there’s no mark there. I didn't press hard enough to leave one.
The firemen arrive with the cutters. The noise when they start on the roof is a shriek of metal that I feel in my teeth. I close my eyes and let it happen. I think about the blond woman who helped strangers in a pile up.
When the roof is peeled back, I open my eyes.
She's standing now. The paramedic is gesturing toward the ambulance. She's shaking her head no. She points toward the Corolla and says something, and the paramedic says something back. Her shoulders tighten in a way that tells me she's being told something she doesn't want to hear.
The fireman tells me to put my head down. When I look up again through the collapsing metal, she is still there, at the edge of the scene. A curvy figure in a t-shirt covered in black and red smudges, a first aid kit at her feet, and a foil blanket around her shoulders. Her whole life totaled on the shoulder behind her.
