The engine reached me before anybody’s voice did. I was halfway up my parents’ driveway in Dublin, Ohio, balancing two Kroger bags and a hot rotisserie chicken against my wrist, when my sister’s silver Lexus turned in too fast from the street. My six-year-old daughter, Chloe, was near the garage on both knees, drawing with sidewalk chalk like the world had never invented danger.
She had pink dust on her fingertips, blue on one shin, and a half-finished rainbow stretching across the concrete in front of her. The yellow stripe was still broken in the middle. For three seconds—three clean, ordinary seconds that have lived longer in me than entire years—I thought Briana would brake.
She slowed. Chloe looked up. Briana saw her.
Then the car jumped forward. The grocery bag tore out of my hand. A peach rolled loose and burst under the wheel.
A jar of pasta sauce hit the concrete by my sandal and shattered red. Chloe disappeared sideways in a blur of pale limbs and chalk dust, and the sound that came after was so wrong my body refused to understand it for a beat too long. Then I screamed.
“Chloe!”
I do not remember dropping the rest of the groceries. I remember my knees slamming into the hot driveway. I remember my daughter on the concrete in her white T-shirt and pink shorts, one curl stuck to the side of her face, her eyes closed like she had simply decided to nap in the August heat.
I remember the way one of her sneakers had come off. I remember thinking none of this could be real because the yellow stripe was still unfinished. My hands hovered over her, useless.
Afraid to touch her. Afraid not to. Behind me, a car door opened.
“Why was she sitting there?” Briana said. Not crying. Not gasping.
Annoyed. I turned so fast the driveway tilted beneath me. My sister stood beside the Lexus in linen pants and oversized sunglasses, one hand still on the door, as polished as if she had stepped out for brunch instead of out of the driver’s seat of a car that had just struck my child.
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