When the noise stopped, it was so quiet. Like death. The wind brushed peacefully through the trees. There was a far-off swish of another car going by on a distant road. When I sat up, some of the window’s glass had shattered into the inside of the car. It was all over the seats, glittering in the moonlight.
I saw clearly, then. I realized I could defer the scholarship. I could go in a year or so. Kay and I could live in married students’ housing with the baby. Maybe she could even go to school there, too. My life wasn’t ending-it was just starting a little sooner than I’d planned.
I pushed out the car door. It crackled with more broken glass. I saw the deer lying on the ground, enormous and immobile. I turned back into the car and looked at Kay. I wanted to tell her. But then…
I told you this in a series of visits you made to my room. It was like I was a serial novel, or perhaps a soap opera. You were tuning in for the next episode of Richard Davis’s tragic, young denouement. You knew nothing about me except for this-and, ironically, doctors knew everything else about me except for this, in this kind of detail. By the time I got to this part in the story, your eyes were very wide. ‘But then…what?’ you asked.
I looked down. Kay was covered in blood. She wasn’t scrunched up or cockeyed or bent in an unnatural angle or anything, though-it seemed more like she was just sleeping. When the ambulance came, I grabbed an EMT’s arms and told him he should be very careful with Kay; she was pregnant. I heard a gasp behind me and turned-they had pulled Mark out of the car and laid him on the pavement. He had come to, and was staring right at me. In the back of my mind, I’d always wondered if he’d suspected what was going on between us. Maybe I’d hoped that, deep down, he had always known. But he hadn’t, that was obvious. He hadn’t known a thing. It was the last time Mark ever looked me in the eyes.
I told you about how, a few days after that, I had lain on the carpet in the living room, the TV blaring. I told my mother I wouldn’t be taking the scholarship for college. ‘But we worked so hard,’ she said, astonished. And it was true, it was we. She’d pushed me into taking the accelerated courses, she’d bought me the encyclopedias, she had filled out the paperwork for the scholarship and ridden me until I finished the essays. You need to get out of Cobalt, she always said. You’re destined for better things.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, sprawled out on the floor. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t go.’
My mother stood there for a long time. All I wanted was for her to lean down and tell me the right thing. She was so good at telling me the right thing, bolstering me up, making me feel like I was okay. But she just quivered at the edge of the room, her face growing redder and redder. ‘Fine,’ she said finally. ‘Stay here, then. Ruin your life.’
‘I really need to talk about this with someone,’ I said. ‘I feel like I’m coming apart.’
‘What’s there to talk about?’ she snapped, twisting a hand towel around in her fingers. ‘It was an accident. People hit deer all the time, there’s nothing you could’ve done. Think about your friend. Think about what he has to face now.’
‘Maybe he needs to talk to someone too,’ I moaned.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Get off the floor. Go get a goddamn job.’ Goddamn was razor-edged; she’d never used that tone with me.
The phone rang. My mother stomped over to get it. I knew right away it was my father. My mother’s voice drooped, a wrung-out washcloth. ‘Well, just come home,’ she said. She slammed the phone back into its cradle. She didn’t know I was watching when she put down the hand towel and glared at the portrait of Sinatra she kept by the telephone and stuck her thumb right in his smarmy face, as if blotting out his shiny, optimistic existence.
I saw her differently, then. How cornered she felt, how purposeless. My relationship with Kay was the only thing I’d ever kept from her. Perhaps that was why she didn’t come to me when I was lying on the floor in despair-because I’d concealed it, because she thought she’d been replaced.
‘I’m sorry,’ you whispered, when I finally finished.
I looked up at you then. Really looked at you. ‘Why are you an aide here?’ I asked.
You looked startled. First, you touched your throat, as if checking for your vocal cords. Then you turned the little silver chain you wore on your wrist around. ‘I like helping people,’ you said. ‘And I was here once, myself. A long time ago. When I was nineteen.’
‘Why?’
‘I used to do this.’ You pulled up your sleeve and showed me scars up and down the insides of your arm. Then you pulled up your shirt and showed me similar ones on your stomach. There were more on your calves, the insides of your thighs. ‘I used broken glass.’
‘Are you better?’ I asked.