At the Bottom of Everything(24)

That the woman hadn’t died was the thing I clung to, the fact I muttered thanks for when I was lying clammy in my bed at night, waiting to fall asleep. Thomas had had to hunt in the back pages of the Post for any mention of it (I’d pictured three-inch front-page headlines, global manhunts). We called what happened, when we talked about it, the “Occurrence at Owl Creek,” and we both understood that he was going to have to be the one who monitored the news; within an hour of the accident I’d realized that he wasn’t in as much danger of falling apart as I was, that his coldness or his detachment or whatever it was that made him him was going to be the vessel that got us through this.

The first story was on page A27:

PEDESTRIAN HIT BY CAR ON CONNECTICUT

A Cleveland Park woman is in critical condition at Sibley Memorial Hospital after being struck by a car close to midnight on Thursday. Charles Lowe, 41, was cited after his vehicle struck Mira Batra, 22, who was attempting to cross Connecticut Avenue near Macomb Street. Lt. Joseph La Porta of the Cleveland Park Police said that alcohol was not a factor in the accident.

So she hadn’t died. So we weren’t killers. These were like rosary beads that I never let out of my sweaty hands. (And finding out that she was twenty-two meant almost nothing to me, or nothing more than any other age would have. Twenty-two, when I was fifteen, seemed solidly adult.)

Another thing that kept me from collapsing completely was the idea, which didn’t seem quite so insane at the time, that maybe our car hadn’t had anything to do with the accident after all. Just a terrible coincidence. In middle school we’d read a short story in our dreary blue English class anthology called “The Necklace,” about a woman who borrows a diamond necklace from a rich friend for a party. She loses it, then spends the rest of her life miserably trying to earn enough money to buy a new one, only to find out on the last page that it was a fake diamond in the first place. (“But it was only a paste!” was the big, tragic reveal; the impact of this line in class was undercut by Mrs. Fleche’s monotone reading voice and the fact that none of us knew what “paste” meant.) Anyway, I kept thinking, and trying to convince Thomas to think, that we might be ruining our lives over something that really hadn’t been our fault: maybe the woman had been trying to kill herself; maybe the man driving the SUV had been falling asleep; maybe our car actually hadn’t rolled so far out into the road as it had seemed at the time. Who could really say?

Driver says second car cause of Connecticut pedestrian accident; police seek witnesses.

When you’re in a state of mind like I was for those couple of weeks, everything you hear takes on terrifying undertones. A few days after that second story ran we were eating dinner at Thomas’s when Sally said, “Admit it—were you out partying? You two look like you could just drop,” and I couldn’t answer right away because I couldn’t breathe. Police cars cried, A-dam, A-dam, A-dam. I saw a man on the street with a bald head like the SUV driver’s and the cable snapped on an elevator in my chest.

That Saturday morning we were driving with Thomas’s dad to the Potomac to watch a regatta, pulling the same car into the same intersection, and Richard seemed to stop for a full minute before he turned onto Connecticut, as if the car were whispering to him. And in fact he did horribly say, not then but on the way back, “You know somebody got hit crossing right around here? You be careful when you’re out walking around at night.”

“We are,” Thomas said. “Do we have any cream cheese at home?”

In one of the terrible dreams I had, starting that week and repeating for months afterward, I was standing in the middle of a highway knowing I was going to be run over and praying that the next car would be the one, that it would be done already.

“I don’t understand how you’re not more insane about this,” I said one afternoon when Thomas and I were sitting on stumps in the homeless encampment, where we hadn’t been for months. It was that part of the end of summer in D.C. when the gnats gather around your head, trying to be swallowed.

“I am, it’s bad. It’s really bad. But it’s just us who know, literally just the two of us. So if we don’t panic, I don’t think anything’s going to come of it.”

“But how do you have a choice about whether to panic?”

“What do you want me to do? Bite my nails? Punch something?”

“I don’t want you to do anything. But maybe you should acknowledge that because of you—”

“Because of us.”

“Because of you! You! I would never have been so fucking stupid!” By that age I’d learned how not to cry, but only by putting my face and voice through contortions that were every bit as weird looking as crying.