What He Left Behind
The accident happened on a Thursday.
A drunk driver ran a red light on Garrison Avenue at four-seventeen in the afternoon, and what I remember most clearly about the moment of impact is not the sound, though the sound was enormous, but the strange suspension just before it, when I could see what was coming and understood with perfect clarity that I could not stop it. Then the glass and the spinning and the quiet afterward that turned out not to be quiet at all but my own ears adjusting to a new volume of the world.
I woke up in the hospital with a broken left leg, three fractured ribs, a laceration above my right eyebrow that would eventually leave a thin scar I would touch sometimes without thinking, and a headache that lived behind my eyes for three weeks like an uninvited tenant. The ER doctor, a tired woman with kind hands, told me I was lucky in the way that people say lucky when they mean alive.
I was thirty-four years old. My daughter Sophie was four. My husband David was at a work dinner when it happened and arrived at the hospital two hours later still wearing his blazer, which he never took off the entire time he sat beside my bed, as though he might need to leave quickly and didn’t want to be encumbered.
He held my hand. He said he was sorry this happened. He said I had given everyone quite a scare. I noticed he said everyone rather than me, and I noticed this the way you notice a small wrongness in a familiar room, something slightly out of place that you can’t immediately name.
I told myself I was reading too much into a pronoun. I had just been in a car accident. My ribs made breathing an act of concentration. I was not in a condition to analyze language.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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