She was in her usual state of morning messiness, with sleep-flattened reddish brown, shoulder-length curls flying every which way and her cheeks slightly blotchy before she made it to her vanity mirror and her tray full of makeup. I always wished that I had inherited her pretty hair and Dad’s flawless complexion, but instead, it was the other way around. I had Dad’s stick-straight dirty blond hair that always looked stringy if I didn’t use a curling iron on the ends (which I hardly ever had time to do considering I shared a bathroom with two boys) and Mom’s acne-prone skin. Thank goodness for Clearasil, but most of the time my face was sporting at least one major zit, usually in a totally unflattering location like the middle of my forehead or smack in the center of my chin.
“You’re taking my family and leaving me?” Mom asked dramatically, clutching her hands over her heart. “Whatever will I do?”
Mom said the same thing every Saturday when Dad took the three of us out to breakfast. He called it “Dad time,” and while we were out scarfing down pancakes at the Plymouth Diner, Mom was having her weekly “Mom time,” which apparently included sitting around in her robe, sipping a cup of coffee, and putting on a facial mask while she fast-forwarded through TiVoed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI and whatever else she’d dozed off watching during the previous week.
“Your mom thinks we’re giving her time alone,” Dad would whisper to us while she pretended she couldn’t hear, “but really, it’s just a good excuse for the four of us to hang out and eat greasy bacon and hash browns, right?”
It had been our Saturday-morning routine for as long as I could remember. And it was the highlight of every week. Dad, Logan, Tanner, and I would sit at breakfast and talk about school and our friends and stuff, and Tanner, who wanted to be a comedian when he grew up, would always tell some silly joke he had just learned from his friends or the Internet that week, and when we’d get home, the house would always be a little cleaner, and Mom was always in a good mood. If we didn’t have anything big to do, we’d all go out for a hike or a bike ride or to play tennis at the local country club, where Mom had insisted we needed a membership, against Dad’s halfhearted protests.
Mom and Dad kissed goodbye, then she gave each of us a peck on the top of our heads, and we were off.
“Everyone have their seat belts on?” Dad asked as he started the car. Logan climbed in beside him.
“Yes!” the three of us answered in unison. Dad turned and grinned at Tanner and me in the back, buckled his own seat belt, and put the car in reverse. As we pulled out of the driveway, he beeped the horn at Mom and blew her a kiss.
“Cheesy!” Logan and I chorused. Tanner laughed.
Mom smiled, waved from the doorway, and went inside.
It took three minutes for us to get out of our neighborhood, Plymouth Heights, and onto a main street. It’s weird how normal everything still was in those final minutes. We saw Mrs. Daniels walking down her driveway to pick up the newspaper, and she waved at us as we passed. Dad and Logan waved back. I noticed Jay Cash and Anne Franklin, two kids from Tanner’s grade, playing basketball in the Cashes’ driveway. Anne tripped on her shoelace just before we passed, and I turned my head slightly to see if she’d start crying. She didn’t. Logan was absorbed in flipping through the radio stations, finally settling on the classic-rock station, which was playing the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” one of Dad’s favorite songs. He started to sing along, and when the chorus ended and a guitar solo began, Dad glanced at Tanner and me in the rearview mirror and grinned.
“You guys would love California,” he said. “Maybe we’ll go there someday and surf.”
“I want to surf!” Tanner exclaimed. At age eleven, he had just discovered skateboarding, and he had announced more than once at dinner that when he turned eighteen, he was going to move west, bleach his hair blond, and learn to catch waves. I had to admit, it was a fun fantasy to have in the middle of a Massachusetts winter.
“I know!” Dad laughed as the light on Mayflower Avenue turned green and he eased his foot off the brake and onto the gas. He put on a fake surfer accent. “Hang ten, dudes!”
It was the last thing Dad ever said.
I think I saw it an instant before it happened, but my throat closed up, and there wasn’t time to open my mouth or even to scream before the Suburban plowed into the driver’s side of the car, hitting us with such force that the whole side crumpled, pinning me up against Dad’s seat. It was like everything was suddenly compressed into a much smaller space than it had been a second ago. I felt a terrible pain along the left side of my body, shooting from my upper leg, up my side, and down my shoulder into my arm. I screamed and felt Tanner grope for my right arm.
The world felt dark and hazy. I couldn’t see anything, just shapes, and everything sounded muffled. I wondered for a second if I was dying. Far away, I could hear Logan yelling and Tanner crying. But I couldn’t hear Dad. Why couldn’t I hear Dad?
My throat felt like I’d swallowed cotton balls, and my mouth wasn’t responding when I tried to make it work. I opened and closed it a few times, but I was only gurgling, not talking. I remember being terrified, and when I look back now, I think it was pure fear that kept me from being able to speak. When I finally did, there was only one thing that came out of my mouth.
“Daddy?” I whispered weakly. I hadn’t called him that since I was twelve.
It was the last thing I remember saying before everything went black.
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