The following story by Rachel Richardson '09 was awarded second place in the 2007 Hamilton Alumni Review writing contest by our judge, the novelist John Nichols '62. "This is a cleanly written story, rich in small details, and it also moved me deeply," Nichols said.
I feel as though I've been hugged too tight. The bruise around my stomach is a Technicolor masterpiece, blues and purples that will fade into browns, yellows and greens. I hold my shirt up so Mom can photograph the kaleidoscope, second only to hers, spreading across her own stomach and cutting across her pale surgical scar. The pictures are for the insurance company, a morbid kind of scrapbook. Against the tired beige of the Days Inn wallpaper, the colors look like they've been applied, instead of erupting from within. When I touch the bruise, it responds like rope; taut and corded, like the seatbelt that gave it to me.
The car wanted to keep us. It kept my parents, my mother pinned between steering wheel and door, my father's leg smashed between the front seats. They say never to move a victim, but I could only think of getting out, and the act of unbuckling and opening a door seemed too pedestrian and commonplace for what had just happened. I thought about the other absurdities when I stopped screaming; how, at last, I'd worn my retainer, how the prongs meant to keep my tongue from pushing my teeth back into their overbite had bit down in the impact, making my tongue bleed. How, even with the hood bent double like the roof of a tent and clouds of white pouring out of the engine like a volcano, the CD player still sang. How embarrassed I felt when the good-looking, smoky-smelling firemen of Rollo, Missouri, arrived in their helmets and yellow jackets and lifted me onto the stretcher. How I apologized for my weight to them, and again to the nurse in the ambulance when she couldn't get the IV needle into my arm because she couldn't find a vein. How I hadn't called my father Daddy in years and it was all I could say. How I'd always wondered what it was like to ride in an ambulance.
When they discharged us from the hospital four hours after the impact, they gave us terrycloth slippers, blue for Mom and me, gray for my father. As we stood outside the hospital in the drizzle, waiting for the taxi that would take us to the Days Inn, Mom kept looking at our feet, repeating, "We have no shoes. We have no shoes."
The accident was just that – an accident. A freak of traffic that I'd demonstrate to countless people when I finally arrived at Hamilton a week later than planned, using McEwen salt-shakers and forks to represent the cars involved. Here is eastbound traffic on I-44, and here is west. Here is the grassy median dividing the two. Here is the red pickup truck towing an empty U-Haul trailer, and here is when it crossed the median to go back east; maybe the driver forgot something at a gas station, maybe his wife called and something disastrous had happened back home. Here is where he sped up, and here is where his trailer flipped, some element of physics I didn't understand because I took chemistry instead. Here is the SUV traveling in the passing lane on the other side of the interstate, and where it swerved to avoid the trailer, into oncoming traffic, into us.
"You should've flipped." The police keep repeating that as we call them again from our motel room. "It's a miracle you didn't flip." It reminds me of a lyric in a song that makes no sense: don't you know that you could've died, you should've died. When I call Meredyth from the balcony of the Days Inn, she says she'd been listening to that, and another song I gave her, about the men who came to collect your Belgian things, useless now that you're gone. She said she'd been fantasizing, in the fictional way we always did during high school, about what it would be like if I died.
I saw Meredyth at dawn on the morning of the wreck. I'd been up all night, packing, cleaning, petting my dog for the last time until December. I drove my Oldsmobile to the Village Inn restaurant by the expressway, the one we always went to, though there were at least two others closer to my house. We haunted Village Inn whenever we could avoid curfew, solely because it was open all night and because it served Dino Fries, tater tots in the shape of dinosaurs. We knew the waiters, we knew the prices, we knew the exact capacity of the corner booth. We went there after both junior and senior prom, we had a farewell breakfast for Ariel when she went to India for a year; it was a ceremonious place under the brown and teal interior, something sacred in spite of the pathetic pies illuminated in the display under the register. I ordered cheesecake and coffee, and we split the Dino Fries.
Mom phoned at some point, curtly demanding I come home, because we needed to leave if we were going to drive from Oklahoma to New York in three solid days. I drove back, part-teary with the weight of my last morning in Tulsa, part-furious with her insincerity, part-elated that I'd never have to do anything at her bidding once I got to college.
That was at six a.m. Before noon, we were hospitalized.
I spent the morning in the car snuggled under the red blanket we'd bought especially for New York winters, flipping through the book of photos I'd spent the summer compiling and looking out the window at the gray morning, passing at seventy miles per hour. We entered Missouri, and I leaned my seat back to doze off, sleep away the awful feeling in my stomach, the anxiety of transition, the melancholy of farewells. When Mom started saying "Oh God," I opened my eyes; I couldn't see the road, I couldn't see the horizon. All I saw were headlights, the grill of another car as it collided into ours, the crash of metal on metal like two set of braces smashing together, like dentist's drills and jackhammers, and I kept wondering why no one was honking.
Mom said she knew I was all right from the way I was screaming. "Like when you were born," she said. It was horror movie, roller coaster screaming, and I couldn't stop it. I don't remember hearing it, and I can't stop remembering the four short moans from the backseat, where my father was sleeping, unbuckled and supine, or the lifeless feeling of his leg next to me. Mom sounding scared and small as she kept asking, "Jerry? Jerry?" and the sirens, my shrieking, "That's for us, that's for us." By then I was sobbing and I'd slumped against the open door, looking down at my bloody foot. I would pick at the scabs later, making pink, stretched scars, reminders, conversation pieces.
I could see the people on the side of the interstate, figures in the tall grass. A man named Doug, a paramedic who happened to be driving past, who coaxed my parents through the shattered driver's window, and another man, nameless, faceless in my memory, who crouched beside me and simply talked. I don't know who he was or where he came from or how he managed to approach a smoking car and the 18-year-old girl in hysterics beside it, but he did. He asked me my name, where we were going, what I wanted to be.
"A writer," I snuffled, still panicked, but words kept me from screaming. "I'm on my way to college."
"Oh yeah? Who's your favorite author?"
"John Updike."
"Really? Can't say I've heard of him."
And I managed to smile. I asked him to turn off the CD player inside the car, crooning Nickel Creek, and he did.
In high school, I often drove home during rush hour, after sticking around past 3:30 for club meetings, rehearsals, the occasional detention. My Oldsmobile was notorious for running out of gas; once, in the rain, I'd sat on a hill for an hour with a cop car behind me, lights blinking, waiting for my parents to rescue me. Another time, I stalled in the middle of a furious intersection at exactly five o'clock. I got out of my car and tried to shrug my condolences to the traffic around me, but everyone was honking, glaring, and I began to choke up. A luridly purple, enormous SUV pulled up behind me, and an equally enormous woman in scrubs emerged from the car.
"You havin' problems, hon? Here's what we're gonna do—"
And she nosed my Oldsmobile out of the intersection and into a parking lot with her giant SUV. I thanked her and she drove off forever, leaving me in the sweltering Oklahoma sun until my scowling father arrived.
There were other small, miraculous coincidences: our taxi driver's wife was the Wal-Mart pharmacist who filled our prescriptions for pain medicine, and the receptionist left his post at the Days Inn to carry our bags to the second floor. Friends kept calling, offering to drive up and take me to an airport, fly me to New York. When I finally did make it to Hamilton, I met kids who knew me already, who would have been my Adirondack Adventure trip mates, who hugged me and asked me how I was, saying they knew all about it already. Everyone listened; the waiter at the Bennigan's we walked to from the motel, the rental car salesman who gave us the minivan when we decided to grit our teeth and finish the trip. My roommates, their parents, the other bewildered freshmen during Orientation Week, kept asking the same question.
"But are you okay?"
My father's eye was blackened and a few ribs broken. Mom wore a neck brace for a while from the whiplash. I had scabs on my foot and a bruise across my stomach, soreness when I woke up in a foreign bed in a foreign state, sweaty palms anytime I was in a car.
The Saturday before classes started, I stood outside of ELS with the few kids I'd had lunch with consistently, who'd shared the same taste in music with me and shared their bad boxed wine. We were waiting on the Jitney, driving to town solely for the novelty of it, to wander around Target buying shampoo, toothbrushes, little necessities we'd forgotten to pack. We piled into the van, slammed the door shut; there weren't enough seatbelts, let alone enough seats, and I found myself on the lap of one of the boys I'd just met. As the van accelerated, so did my pulse, and I closed my eyes, hoping the panic would abate, but it wouldn't, and it didn't.
"This is going to seem strange," I said to the boy I was sitting on, "but I need you to hold my hand."
So he hooked his fingers into mine, the way my father's fingers laced into mine as we rode in the ambulance on parallel stretchers.
In my dorm room in Dunham, I notice a lump in my shin, on the same leg with the scarred foot. At the Health Center, I am amicable, unconcerned, telling my story like the anecdote it had become. The doctor prods it, pokes it, notes the discoloration and how the hair grows darker, and then asks me if I'd like to call a friend to go with me to the hospital.
"This is going to seem strange," I say into the phone, "but are you busy right now?"
The lump diminished, though there's still a patch in my leg that's numb. My father's black eye faded and his ribs healed. The day I arrived at Hamilton, Mom and I fought outside my dorm room, exhausted and overwrought, about whatever petty thing mothers and daughters are always shouting about. I was sobbing and furious, but kept repeating, "We're alive, Mom, and we shouldn't be." I remembered that throughout the semester, when I felt out of place, when I questioned, the way every freshman questions and doubts and worries. I looked at all my possessions in my corner of the common room, remembering them packed so carefully in the back of the car, perfectly arranged, and the front of the car mangled, unrecognizable, a face scarred with burns. Occasionally I recalled the feel of the impact, the crash. I lifted my shirt and watched the pretty progress of my bruise in the full-length mirror on the door.
Over another bad box of wine, we wasted time, listened to music, gradually knew one another and shifted from strangers to friends. I'd kicked my shoes off, and someone asked about the scars. I told the story, loudly, slurring, but sober somewhere, knowing what I was reliving, feeling it all again, voicing what I hadn't been able to voice, telling what hadn't been told. Afterwards, I stood up, crying like I hadn't cried since the Days Inn motel.
"Come here," I was told. The same sensation of impact came again as arms encircled me, wanting to keep me, hugging me too tight.
