What you need to know:
After Rick forced a medical treatment on her daughter without parental knowledge or consent, Jennifer has had enough. He’s out and now it’s a matter of details. Is it a divorce or a separation? This is the cooling-off period, she tells herself…
Chapter Fourteen
The Moment of Impact
Ping goes my phone. Ping. Ping. Ping. It’s a hailstorm of texts.
“Please??? I’m begging you. Can’t we talk about this?” Rick writes from his end of the one-sided conversation. “I don’t want this,” he continues. “Give me another chance.”
I turn off the phone, shove it into my purse.
Fran gives me a sidelong look but I only respond with a tight shake of my head. I should have brought my knitting, but damn if I didn’t leave it in the car.
This is a couple of weeks after I shoved him away from the house, and now it is the tenth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers.
Fran and I are at a warehouse-type bookstore in the Hawthorne District. Side by side, we sit in folding wooden chairs. Around us, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. Underfoot, a concrete floor. At the front of a room, a rather rickety podium where a local writer shares his essay about his take on 9-11.
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Fran nudges me and lifts her chin.
“You’re up,” she says.
The reader at the podium bows to the clapping audience and strolls up the aisle.
Reaching into my purse, my fingers brush the dreaded phone, and I tug out a sheath of papers. Standing, I make my way to the front of the room, step behind the podium, head bowed with the gravity this day demands.
I read something I wrote ten years earlier along the lines of: Where were you when it happened? It’s not that good and I try to spice it up with a little “beat” tone in my voice, but who am I kidding? Changing your voice doesn’t improve weak sentence structure. Besides, what the heck do I know about 9-11? I wasn’t even in the country when it happened. I was on a book-tour in Holland, pregnant and eating a cone of fries.
My reading ends to a smattering of polite applause and I scurry back to my chair feeling a fraud. I want to go home, climb into bed, pull the covers over my head but oh, right, Rick is there and I can’t go back until he’s gone, I’m telling myself, lest I attack him again.
Settled in my chair, Fran pats my knee. “Good work,” she says, voice in a low whisper. She’s lying, but I love her just a little more in that moment.
Slouching lower in my chair, arms crossed, I pretend to listen to the next reader but am fixated on Rick, Rick, Rick. He and I have agreed, in theory, to take a three to six-month break. To think. To get clear about what we want. Of course, he’s changing the terms. Of course, he’s melting down. Bully-move-101.
The reading finally ends and Fran and I weave through the dusty, cramped bookstore, her in the lead and me stopping now and again to talk to this or that person. “Great story,” one woman says, shakes my hand. “I hear you’re teaching now? Can I get your number?”
“Would you sign my book?” another woman says and passes over a first edition hardcover of my first.
“Thanks for coming,” the bookstore manager says. “Let me know when that new book is ready to promote. We’ll book you on the calendar.”
Finally, we’re out and stand on the sidewalk. The slap of one-hundred-plus heat in our faces. The descending sun is an eerie orange orb. The color of danger. The color of doom.
Acclimating to the heat, we stand next to a row of newspaper dispensers stuffed with free periodicals, news, and a scandal paper of outrage and accusation. A homeless man sits before these boxes, cup lifted.
Fran unloads her change into it.
The man says, “God bless.”
Unable to ignore my own situation, I dig out my phone and turn it on.
“I won’t do it,” Rick now writes. And, “We need to talk again.” And, “I need more time. I can’t get everything packed today.”
“He’s still at the house,” I say to Fran, who shoves her wallet back into her purse. She wears strappy sandals, a pair of capris, a long white cotton top.
“He’s been there since ten?” she says, looking at her watch. “What’s his problem?”
I hold the phone up.
She leans in, reads, then rocks back on her heels. “Man. He’s losing it.”
I shove the phone back into my purse. “You have to time to get something to eat?” I ask, praying she’ll stall with me a little longer.
Fran chews at her lip, a momentary panic in her dark eyes.
She has a rule about being on the road in the morning or the evening. It has to do with the loss of a beloved, though it’s not my story to tell—so I won’t. Bottom line: Her rule is non-negotiable. No one in her life is allowed to drive at sunset, or sunrise.
“It’s only four,” I say, my voice a mix of confident sales-woman and desperate friend. “I’ll get you home easily by five. Five-thirty at the latest.”
Fran squints toward the sun, as if measuring the amount of day that is left to us.
“Sure,” she finally says, “but let’s make it quick.”
A beer for me and tea for Fran. Then a salad. Then the check.
There’s no reason to dredge up what’s happened between Rick and I; the therapy, the methodical revelations of his troubled history, how me and my kids have been hurt, but I do talk about it. All of it. Again. And again. Through our entire meal, kind, indulgent and generous Fran listens.
“I should have seen it from the beginning,” I say, paying the bill because it’s the least I can do. “I should have known. What was I thinking? What is wrong with me?”
“You’re human. People make mistakes,” Fran says.
We walk the couple blocks to where I’ve parked the SUV and I cannot shut up about Rick. Talk, talk, talking, I slide into the driver’s seat, fasten my belt.
Fran hoists herself into the passenger side and eyes the horizon line where the edge of the sun now hovers over the West Hills.
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Pulling into the flow of traffic, I disregard the tight set of her jaw.
“I’m such an idiot,” I say.
“Come on. Go easy on yourself,” Fran says.
But I can’t. I’m a martyr to my own failures while navigating a one-way corridor toward the bridge that leads to where Fran lives on the other side of town.
The sun is lower still. So bright, I squint to see the stoplights at each of the intersections ahead.
“Fran, I’ve been in therapy for years,” I’m saying, hands nearly strangling the steering wheel, my failings as tight as a snare drum in my chest. “Honestly, I think something is seriously off about me.”
Fran shifts in her seat to face me, about to say another kind thing but then screams and points toward my side window.
It’s that sound, the piercing sharpness of it, that finally snaps me out of my bubble of self-hatred.
I press down on the gas, check my right blind spot simultaneously, then change lanes. I can outrun whatever is coming, I think. I can. I will.
The back corner of the SUV is hit hard. The SUV an arrow shot from a bow that surges toward the vacuum cleaner store on the corner. Starks, it’s called.
I wrestle the steering wheel and try to course correct into my lane. Pump at the brake at the same time. “I can get out of this,” I’m yelling now. “I can get out of this.” But can I? Can I really?
The wheel jerks free of my hold. The SUV tilts and then rocks onto two tires.
“We’re tipping,” Fran yells. “We going over.” She reaches to the ceiling of the SUV as if to brace herself.
The front passenger tire hits the curb, and the SUV drops to all four tires again.
I crank the steering wheel hard to the left and steer us into a stand of freeway signs. Screeching metal against metal, the crash of those signs into the windshield, the shattering of glass.
Amazingly, the SUV stops short like some giant hand grabbed it.
The two of us are thrown forward.
Our seatbelts catch and force us back.
I expect airbags but no. Instead, Fran and I sit in a ticking quiet that seems of another world.
The SUV is hit again on Fran’s side. The impact rocks and shutters the frame.
I look at what it could be but the glass of Fran’s passenger window is spiderwebbed. My imagination tells me that we’ve set off some terrible chain reaction. That cars and trucks are now air born.
I unbuckle my seatbelt, kick open my door, grab our purses, my bag of knitting and pull Fran out with me.
“Run,” I yell. “Run.”
Half a block down, we stop at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and NE Couch. Breathless. Scared.
Behind us, the SUV is half on the sidewalk, half on the street. Traffic, amazingly, reroutes around the wreckage that, from where we stand, is just my rig. No cartwheeling disaster. No collective carnage.
“Was it me?” I ask Fran, in a panic of confusion. “Because I had that beer?”
Fran grips her side and gestures up the road. “We were hit!” she says, voice high and near frantic. “A car hit us.”
I stare at her, trying to understand what she says. We were hit? By who? When? Then I notice she bleeds from razor-thin cuts on her shins, teeny-tiny flags of brilliant red drying to a dark color on her tanned skin.
I dig into my purse. “Here,” I say, passing her a pack of travel tissues. “Your legs.”
Fran takes the tissues, looks down at her legs, then stumbles back. “I’m going to be sick,” she says. She bends forward and spits on the dusty sidewalk but doesn’t throw up.
I rub circles on her back as if she is one of my kids.
“What can I do?” I ask. “How can I help?”
“Call Frank,” she manages to say through the curtain of her hair that’s fallen over her face.
Into my purse again, I pull up my phone and call Fran’s house.
Instead of Frank, it’s her son from her first marriage. Simon.
I almost burst into tears because I know how scared Simon will be when he hears this news, but clear my throat and force out an explanation.
“Wait,” Simon says. “You’re joking, right? This is a joke?”
Fran backs up against a blonde brick building, one of those abandoned places with signs in the window: For Sale or Rent. She spits again, wipes her mouth with the tissues.
“I wish it was,” I say. “Your mom is okay but wants Frank.”
“Why isn’t she calling?”
“She’s shaken,” I say, “is Frank there?”
The sound of moving on the other side of the line.
“Oh my goodness,” Frank says, voice booming. “Tell Fran we’re getting into the car. Be there in ten minutes. Are you okay?”
Am I okay? I don’t know. I can only look at Fran, can only think about how I’ve broken her rule about driving in the evening with the worst possible result. This is it, I’m thinking. Fran’s never going to forgive this.
“I’m fine,” I say to Frank.
Fran pushes off the building and holds out her hand.
“Here she is. She wants to talk to you.”
Fran takes my phone, then tosses her hair back and holds the phone to her ear. “Hi, Honey,” she says and walks away from me.
That’s it, I think again. We’re done. A crippling thought. And not fair. She’s good. She’s loyal. What’s wrong with me that I would think such a thing?
A police cruiser pulls up and parks behind the wreckage. A policeman steps out, tugs a cap on his head. Another cruiser pulls up. A policewoman this time, her cap under her arm.
The policeman gets busy setting out cones. The policewoman—pad and pen in hand—talks to a cluster of kids in their early twenties who wear matching blue polo shirts and tan khaki shorts. They look like guides for a children’s summer camp or attendees of a Young Adult Christian Jamboree.
An ambulance screams onto the scene. Lights flashing. Siren blaring.
“Yes. I will. Okay,” Fran says into the phone, having walked back to where I stand. “See you soon. Be careful. Love you, too.” She clicks the phone closed, hands it back. “They are on Burnside already,” she says, a sound of defeat in her voice. “Simon’s driving.”
What she means is that they are driving…after sunset. “Fran,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Fran says, but her voice is tight in the way she gets when pissed. She motions like she wants the phone back. Confused, I hold it out to her.
“No,” she says. “My purse.”
“Oh,” I say, and look around where we stand as if her purse might be on the sidewalk.
“Jeez! You’re more out of it than I am,” Fran says. “On your shoulder.”
I shrug off my own purse, the bag of knitting. Separating her purse from my stuff, pass it over.
“Come on,” she says, slings the purse on her own shoulder and leads the way to the corner, pressing the signal button. A minute ago, Fran was nearly sick but now is fully back to her fabulous confident self. “Frank wants me to see the EMTs,” she says over her shoulder.
“Are you hurt?” I ask.
“No. He’s being paranoid, but I’ll let them check me. You should, too.”
The light changes. We cross, then continue up the sidewalk to see the wreck from the opposite side of the street
“The police are going to ask if I’ve been drinking,” I say.
“You had one beer like an hour ago,” she says.
“But what if I’m asked?”
“Don’t say anything. It will only muddy the situation.”
We stop. Look.
My SUV is a crushed can, the asphalt around it shimmers with aqua shards of shattered glass.
A black sports car I hadn’t seen before is jammed against the passenger side. License plate: MSDQ.
The driver and her passenger stand on the sidewalk behind the little car. They are young girls in lace tops, short skirts, net stockings, and high heels. They seem okay. Intact.
“Ms. DQ?” Fran asks, one of her well-manicured brows raised, expression amused. “Is that like Dairy Queen?”
“I don’t know,” I say, laughing despite myself. “I suppose.”
One of the young people being interviewed by the policewoman breaks away, jogs over to us. Her high ponytail swings side to side.
“We saw the whole thing,” she says, breathless. “We were right behind you. That woman over there, the shorter one, was about to T-bone you. Like seriously. Head on. But then you sped up and she hit the back instead. The whole thing was nuts.”
“See,” Fran says to me and then to the girl, “I’m Fran.”
They shake hands.
“Thanks for staying and giving a statement,” Fran says. “We appreciate it.”
“Of course,” the girl says. “It could have been us.”
Fran asks the girl where she attended school and what year she graduated. Fran knows everyone in this town, especially young people like this girl who is the same age as Fran’s grown kids.
I stare, once more, at the SUV and just like the time with the lug nuts, I think only of Steve.
“PSU has a great music program,” Fran is saying to the girl who apparently goes to that school. “I know the advisor. Her kids played soccer with mine.”
“Wow,” the girl says. “Small world.”
I nudge into Fran’s arm. “I’m going to make a call,” I say.
“Rick?” Fran asks, but I wave her off, step over a concrete border and cut through some spiky bushes to an abandoned parking lot. Fran continues chatting with the PSU girl.
“Yel-low,” Steve says even before his line rings.
“That’s weird,” I say. “Your phone didn’t ring.”
“Where are you?” he asks. “Sounds like the freeway.”
“Where are the kids?” I ask.
“Um. Jo’s across the street. Spencer’s in the backyard. What’s up?”
I tell him what happened, and he curses under his breath. “Are you hurt?”
“Shaky more than anything.”
“You’ll be sore tomorrow.”
Across the way, the two young women from the other car are now being interviewed by the policewoman. The shorter one, the driver, gestures toward her totaled car, then mine, then bursts into tears. Her friend hugs her. The policewoman shifts her weight to her back foot, and waits patiently.
“I don’t get why I tipped,” I say to Steve, not because I care but because I need the confident normalcy of his voice. “And why did the other driver spin a one-eighty and hit us a second time?”
“The first part is easy,” Steve says. “Your rig has a truck platform. Doesn’t take much to push it over. She probably jammed her brakes. That’s what happens with the disc system on those Acuras. Plus, people don’t know how to drive anymore. You did right to gun it. We wouldn't be talking if she hit your door.”
I press into my forehead. First, the lug-nut incident that could have killed me and the kids, now this driver who could have killed me. Is my life about to come to a close? Is this it for me? How much time do any of us get?
“You want me to come get you?” Steve asks, breaking into this dark musing. “I’ll wrangle up the kids.”
Tears swamp my eyes. Yes. Yes. Please, take me home.
“No,” I say, cough into my fist and tick away the tears. “You guys stay put. It’s a mess down here. I’ll call when I know what comes next. Don’t tell the kids what happened. It will only scare them. I’ll tell them when I check in later.”
“Fair enough,” he says.
Two tow trucks pull up.
The policeman stops the traffic.
The trucks maneuver around and back up to my rig and MSDQ.
The policewoman strides toward Fran, pad in hand, and Fran now motions me to come back.
I say goodbye to Steve, close the phone, and cut through the bushes. Fran looks at me, about to ask who I talked to, but then Simon pulls into the abandoned lot, parks. He and Frank step out of the car.
“That’s my family,” Fran says to the policewoman. “I’ll be right back.”
“Sure,” the policewoman says, lifting her chin at me. “You the driver of the Element?”
Blond hair tugged into a tight bun. Pocked, rough skin. No makeup other than a bit of mascara.
“That’s me,” I say, grab my wallet from my purse, snap it open, and pass over my license and insurance. “My registration is still in the glove compartment.”
“No worries,” she says, studying my license. “How do you pronounce that? Luck?”
“Au,” I said “Long vowel sound.”
She attaches my license to her pad, clicks the action on her pen. “I’d say you’re lucky today, Ms. Lauck,” she says, smiles at her own joke, which changes her jaded countenance into something almost sweet. “So? Were you drinking?”
I am about to say yes but look over at Fran wrapped in the arms of her family. She’s the lucky one, I think. She is so loved. And I'm…so alone.
“Ma’am?”
The policewoman hovers her pen over the notepad.
I look at her again for a long moment. I should say yes, I want to say yes, but Fran said it will only muddy things. She said that, right? I am so sure Fran said that to me that day but when I write this years later, I cannot be a hundred percent sure. What I do remember, very clearly, is that I lied to that policewoman.
“No,” I say. “I wasn’t.”
Next:
Chapter Fifteen: Sleep Over
Rick, melting down over the details of their separation, refuses to pack up and leave. Instead he squats at the house while sending a barrage of charged texts. Jennifer, who has left the house and is waiting for him to go, gets into a car wreck. She and Fran are okay, but now Jennifer has nowhere to go. A hotel? Steve’s?