N
essa drifts in and out of sleep. Her body is exhausted, but her mind is wide awake and wild with racing thoughts. She is both here and not here. She is floating, moored only by this second heartbeat against her chest.
She thinks about the woman’s face, about that red jacket.
She lost her son.
Is it possible this is the same woman she saw that night? Or is she only seeing ghosts everywhere she turns? She’s come back here to find her, to tell her what happened that night. To give her an explanation for the unexplainable. But now, somehow, this woman has found
her
instead.
Nessa has been watching her whole life in reverse since the accident, every glance at her past a look through that rearview mirror. She remembers memorizing the details of the vehicle, of the bridge. Looking out of the window from the backseat like a child watching the world pass by. She remembers screaming at Declan to stop the car, to go back. But he just kept driving, his headlights gone out again as they raced away from town, across the other bridge, and then into the woods. She remembers he lit the joint that he dug out of the ashtray. That he used one hand to steer and the other to smoke. She remembers the way the smell of weed, the sweet scent of smoke, filled the cab. But she could think only of the car in the river, filling slowly with water.
She crawled back into the front seat, pounded the dash with her fists as he went faster and faster, turning onto the long dirt road that led to his barn. She remembers that he was sweating. She could see the beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead every time he took a hit off the joint and his face was illuminated, briefly, by the bright orange glow of the hissing burning paper.
“How can you do this?” she asked as he wiped at the sweat with the back of his wrist. “There were people in that car. They’re hurt. What if nobody finds them?” The words, the pleas come easily, steadily. They are like a string of hard beads making their way from her throat to her tongue. It is the most she has said to him in the last three months.
But somehow, he still couldn’t hear her. None of it registered. Her words were like this dark car in the night. Their syllables rushed through the darkness, but they were somehow
not there.
She looked at him, pushed her face as close to him as she could and screamed, “Why don’t you stop! What kind of person are you?”
And she realized she had no
idea
what kind of person he was. She knew the feeling of his tongue on her body, the urging of his hands and hips. She knew the smell of his skin, the taste of his sweat. She knew the words he chose to put down on paper. She thought of those useless words, those carefully chosen words. The lies. Because this is who he was: a man who could cause an accident, and instead of staying to help,
leave.
He was careless, thoughtless, selfish, and he apparently had no conscience, because now he took his hand from the wheel and hit her hard across the face.
“Shut the fuck up!” he growled.
And she did. As his fist made contact with the soft bone of her jaw, and she felt it come loose, just a door on a hinge, she was silenced.
He slowed the car to a stop, and reached across her for the door handle, pushing the door open and then shoving her out. The world spun beneath her. The air was cold, the ground was hard. Rocks and gravel pierced her skin, she could feel her flesh tearing each time it came in contact with the road. But then she landed in grass and mud, and she was grateful for the coldness, the stillness. The silence.
And by the time she was able to stand up again, to focus her eyes, regain her equilibrium, his car was gone. He was gone.
She headed back the way they had come, walking, stumbling down the long dirt road. Her jaw throbbed with each step. Her entire body felt pummeled. She didn’t know where she was going or what she would do when she get there. Should she go home? What was home anyway? Her mother sitting upright on a couch, eyes fixed on nothing. Drowsy and muttering in her Oxy haze. The crackle and hiss of bacon, of rolling papers, of Rusty’s breath in her ear when he got too close, when he crossed that invisible, that impossible, line.
Home,
the word in her broken mouth, suddenly no different than
Hole.
She barely remembers the walk back to the bridge. It must have taken her an hour or more. She had to keep stopping to sit down, to vomit. At one point she lost consciousness and then woke again, disoriented and weeping. She remembers one of her molars coming out, and she searched for it in the grass, desperate, for some reason, to keep it.
By the time she got back to the bridge, the ambulances had come. There was a lone police car parked cockeyed near the bridge, blockades with reflectors blocking the bridge. Three or four cars were parked at the edge of the road, a small huddled group of people stood at the edge of the river, staring at the bridge. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the shadowy faces of the man and the woman in the car, the silent terror on the other side of the glass. She wondered if they were dead. She wondered if she and Declan had killed them.
Nessa saw the woman before she heard her, standing at the edge of the water in her red coat, like a vessel burst and bleeding. And then she heard the low, aching howl. Like a wounded animal. The anguished cry of sorrow itself. The wordless moan. And she knew as the woman’s voice ruptured, the consonants abstracted, the vowels discarnate, that words were futile things. Deceptive and ineffectual.
And so instead of going to the officer like she should have, instead of trying to explain, to make sense of what happened, instead of falling to her knees, confessing, accusing, pleading, she ran. For miles, she ran until the pavement turned to dirt and then back again. Through the mud and tall grass, through the crush of fallen leaves until she arrived at the overpass, that concrete monolith. Then she climbed up and stuck out her thumb.
The station wagon was the first car to come. It looked like a hearse as it pulled up next to her, and she wondered if she had, somehow, died. If, perhaps, she was only a ghost. This is what she was thinking when the man reached across the seat and opened the door for her. That she was already dead.
But she realized then that the car was not a hearse. Instead, in the rain, it was a yellow submarine, just like in the song her mother used to sing when she gave her a bath at night. And she thought about her mother, about what leaving her would mean. This was the unbearable part. Because she knew that rather than terror, rather than anger even, there would be nothing but relief. That
Home
was the same as
Poem.
Just a word on a page of a book she once borrowed.
The man rolled down the passenger window and leaned toward her. “You okay, miss?” he asked. But she couldn’t speak to answer.
He motioned for her to get into the car and she obeyed. He looked like somebody’s grandfather. His eyes were kind.
He drove without asking another question, until he looked and saw that the side of her face was swollen. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”
She shook her head,
No, no.
He reached into the dashboard and handed her a crumpled up piece of paper and a pen.
She was shaking as she wrote, “Bus station?”
He nodded. “What is your name?” he asked then, and she wrote,
Nessa.
“My name is George Downs,” he said, smiling, an even exchange. “But you can call me Grover.”
The days she spent on the road are hazy now. George, the man in the car, had left her at the bus station, given her his phone number on a piece of paper, and she carefully tucked it into her pocket. He’d promised her that if she ever came back to Quimby, that if she ever needed anything, to find him. She couldn’t understand his generosity, his kindness. It seemed unconditional, without strings when there were always, always strings. He gave her money for a bus ticket. He kissed her on the forehead, and she could feel the wet press of his lips for days. She imagined that it was like a seal, closing that night inside a clean white envelope. Protecting her.
She took the bus to LA, as far as the ticket would take her, but then she was on her own again. She ate what she found and slept where she could. She felt ethereal, invisible, now that she no longer spoke. It was as though her voice had given her a body, and now, in this new silence, there was no body either. She had, finally, attained invisibility. If not for her hunger, she might have had no body at all.
She felt both aimless and purposeful. Each day was a matter of survival; but there was no greater objective than this. She learned to exist at the periphery of things, to be every face, rather than no face. This gave her freedom she had never had before. She was unnoticed. She disappeared. And this invisibility empowered her. Fear slipped away. She became undaunted.
But now, as she tries to recollect those days, those months, those years, they too are fading. It’s as though her memory is failing. She is seventeen years old, but it feels like she is seventy, and trying so hard to recollect the last two years of her life, a nearly impossible task.
It took her jaw nearly three months to heal. And by the time it was better, she was so accustomed to her own silence, she no longer felt compelled to speak. It was as though she’d left her voice, her words on the side of that road. As though she’d forgotten to pack it in her backpack.
The woman in the red coat sits with her now, stroking her hair as she slips in and out of time. In and out of places. Each time she wakes up, she believes for a few confused moments that she is in another bed. Another person’s arms. But it only takes that warm, breathing, heart-beating baby on her chest to bring her back.
Had she spoken? Had she really spoken to this woman?
Help. Help,
she thinks. The word so simple, yet so rife with need.
She knows the baby is not well. She knows that this breathing is not the steady inhalation and exhalation it should be. But what does she expect? She has been living off of whatever scraps she can find to eat. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. She hasn’t seen a doctor. She hasn’t taken care of herself. She has been careless. And now, she will be punished.
She looks up at the woman’s face, studies the fine angles of her nose and chin. She peers into her dark eyes. They’re the kind of eyes that keep secrets.
“I know you,” she says to the woman.
“What’s that?” the woman asks, caught up in her own quiet reverie.
“I was there.” It is too late now. The words have built up like water behind a dam. There is a flash flood coming. It is unstoppable.
The woman’s hands stop in her hair, and she can feel her fingertips go as cold as ice on her fiery skin.
“What?”
“I came back. And I saw you, standing at the river.”
“The flood?” the woman asks, her eyes wide. Terrified.
Nessa shakes her head. “His lights,” she says, trying to select the words that could possibly explain what he did. How he fled. “They didn’t work. You didn’t see us.”
The woman sits back on her heels as if she has, indeed, seen a ghost. That she is face-to-face with an apparition. She backs up, scurrying like a frightened animal toward the door. She scrambles to her feet.
Nessa searches for the words, but they swim before her, elusive like shiny fish beneath the surface of water. If she can just catch the right one, she thinks, it will be okay. She can make all of this better.
“What do you want?” the woman asks. “What do you want from me?”
The baby sputters and coughs, the sound coming from her chest like a terrible whistle. Like the storm is inside her. She presses the baby to her chest, harder, as though she can offer her own lungs. Her own heart.
And then the word comes; it rises to the surface, a dead fish floating on still water. It is flaccid and sick. “I’m sorry,” she offers and remembers that words are not enough. Words fail. Still, she tries. “I was so afraid.”
The woman looks at her in horror and then she is gone, disappearing out into the darkness, and Nessa is alone again. Only now, she is
not
alone. The baby’s chest whistles and it sounds like a scream for help.