I drive.
That memory makes my heart tremble, ache.
But I’m tired of crying, so I think about practical things—boxes, knives, whether the blankets in the living room are worth taking or if I should leave them, whether the fig tree will survive the summer without me—and I am not succeeding, because my brain is doing the thing it has been doing for three days, which is reviewing everything with the new information, holding every memory up to the light of him never loving me.
My eyes fill with tears, and I can’t stop it. I press the back of my hand to them, brief, a quick maintenance, the way you clear a fogged windshield—just enough to see.
I’m on the long curve before the turn onto Fox’s street, and I am working very hard not to think about the farmers market and the weight of his hand and the persimmons, and I am not, in this moment, fully here.
I am also crying.
Not a lot.
It’s just the low, persistent version, the one that has become ambient background noise over the last three days.
I reach for the visor to block the sun’s angle.
I don’t see the construction truck—the one that comes from the side street on the left, running the stop sign, heavy with equipment, doing forty in a twenty-five.
I feel it when it hits my car on the driver’s side.
Crash.
I feel the solid crunch of metal against metal, and then, abstractly, clinically, my body is thrown further into the car, the airbags snapping open, slapping against my face.
The world rotates in a way it’s not supposed to—mixing sky, asphalt, oak branches.
Then there is a heavy, loud noise—bang, and then again,bang.
And then there’s nothing.
7
IN A DREAM
LUCY
“She’s breathing.”
The voice arrives from somewhere above and to the right.
“Barely. BP’s low—seventy over fifty. Head lac, significant. Get me a line.”
“How long was she down?”
“Witness says four, five minutes before they called. She was unconscious on arrival.”
It’s like an episode ofGrey’s Anatomy—only, there are hands onmybody.
Many hands.
I cannot move, cannot open my eyes, cannot find the surface of myself.
I am somewhere just below the level of my own body, looking up at it through dark water with my eyes closed, so I can’t really see anything.
“She’s going to?—”
The voice drops out.
