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.
"Wrecked"
Rachel Richardson '09
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.
