And now: I am alone and no one has found me. I have been dreaming about my wife for almost a day as I lay trapped in the car. Ruth is gone. She died in our bedroom a long time ago and she is not in the seat beside me. I miss her. I have missed her for nine years and spent much of that time wishing that I had been the one to die first. She would have been better at living alone, she would have been able to move on. She was always stronger and smarter and better at everything, and I think again that of the two of us, I made the better choice so long ago. I still don’t know why she chose me. While she was exceptional, I was average, a man whose major accomplishment in life was to love her without reservation, and that will never change. But I am tired and thirsty, and I can feel my strength draining away. It’s time to stop fighting. It’s time to join her, and I close my eyes, thinking that if I go to sleep, I will be with her forever —
“You are not dying,” Ruth suddenly interrupts my thoughts. Her voice is urgent and tense. “Ira. It is not your time yet. You wanted to go to Black Mountain, remember? There is still something you must do.”
“I remember,” I say, but even whispering the words is a challenge. My tongue feels too big for my mouth, and the blockage in my throat has grown larger. It is hard to draw a breath. I need water, moisture, anything to help me swallow, and I need to swallow now. It’s almost impossible to breathe. I try to draw a breath, but not enough air comes in and my heart suddenly hammers in my chest.
Dizziness begins to distort the sights and sounds around me. I am going, I think. My eyes are closed and I’m ready —
“Ira!” Ruth shouts, leaning toward me. She grabs my arm. “Ira! I am talking to you! Come back to me!” she demands.
Even from a distance, I hear her fear, though she is trying to hide it from me. I vaguely feel the shaking of my arm, but it stays frozen in place, another sign that this isn’t real.
“Water,” I croak.
“We will get water,” she says. “For now, you have to breathe, and to do that you must swallow. There is blood clotting in your throat from the accident. It is blocking your airway. It is choking you.”
Her voice sounds thin and distant, and I do not answer. I feel drunk, passing-out drunk. My mind is swimming and my head is on the steering wheel and all I want to do is sleep. To fade away —
Ruth shakes my arm again. “You must not think that you are trapped in this car!” she shouts.
“But I am,” I mumble. Even in my fogginess, I know my arm hasn’t moved at all and that her words are just another trick of my imagination.
“You are at the beach!” Her breath is in my ear, suddenly seductive, a new tack. Her face is so close, I imagine I can feel the brush of her long lashes, the heat of her breath. “It is 1946. Can you remember this? It is the morning after we first made love,” she says. “If you swallow, you will be there again. You will be at the beach with me. Do you remember when you came out of your room? I poured you a glass of orange juice and I handed it to you. I am handing it to you now…”
“You’re not here.”
“I am here and I am handing you the glass!” she insists. When I open my eyes, I see her holding it. “You need to drink right now.”
She moves the glass toward me and tilts it toward my lips. “Swallow!” she commands. “It does not matter if you spill some in the car!”
It’s crazy, but it’s the last comment – about spilling in the car – that gets to me most. More than anything, it reminds me of Ruth and the demanding tone she would use whenever she needed me to do something important. I try to swallow, feeling nothing but sandpaper at first and then… something else, something that stops my breathing altogether.
And for an instant, I feel nothing but panic.
The instinct to survive is powerful, and I can no more control what happens next than I can control my own heartbeat. At that moment, I swallow automatically, and after that I keep swallowing, the tender soreness giving way to a coppery, acidic taste, and I keep swallowing even after the taste finally passes to my stomach.
Throughout all this, my head remains pressed against the steering wheel, and I continue to pant like an overheated dog until finally my breathing returns to normal. And as my breath returns, so too do the memories.
Ruth and I had breakfast with her parents and then spent the rest of the morning at the beach while her parents read on the porch. Patches of clouds had begun to form on the horizon and the wind had picked up since the day before. As the afternoon wound down, Ruth’s parents strolled down to see whether we would like to join them on an expedition to Kitty Hawk, where Orville and Wilbur Wright made history by flying the first airplane. I had been there when I was young, and though I was willing to go again, Ruth shook her head. She’d rather relax on her last day, she told them.