That shattering glass, not a windshield but a doorway of shock and awe, into another place. As though she had left a place for the sole reason of arriving at another place. No wandering in between. She had never been good at telling a story, not like Daddy could be around a fire, but if she had survived then perhaps, she would have been able to say out loud those moments in a way that would capture the sheer impossibility of a human body in flight. Not falling but flying, the propulsion of her skeleton, all bone projectile, into the headlight lit darkness. The impact of her head with the windscreen was the killing blow, of course it was, yet she traveled onward still alive, through the glass, over the crumpled hood and into the forever night. Leaving both sneakers behind as she went. Did she see the stars in their firmament? In this strange leave-taking she lingered on a while, the air above and surround her insubstantial, the pavement solid beneath her, the summer scorched heat of it a small comfort to her cooling body, the bloody halo of her long blonde hair creating a vision of such suffering, such loss, hers a miraculous martyred death. Our Teenaged Lady of the Automobile Collision. The shattered shoulder bones, the leaking skull. The impossible sense of soaring passing through her nerve endings, dissipating through her pores. Simultaneous departure and arrival and departure. The touch and go of her short life.
The afternoon of the day had grown hot. Morning spent working in Daddy’s garden. It was time for the leafy branches to be snipped off close to the stem to allow the lengthening buds all the sunlight. He didn’t pay her out, they had nothing extra for allowances, but after the harvest late in the fall, just before winter, he could be generous with the crumpled bills that began to stuff his pockets. She’d walk her brothers to the store, cold winds blowing through them, and buy the boys candy bars and herself a fashion magazine.
Daddy had two other daughters before she was born. One lived up in Alaska with her own momma and the other one of them lived in an old camp trailer on Daddy’s property with her baby. She was her momma’s oldest, after her came four more, all boys and of course Daddy was partial to them on account that they were boys, but he was good to all his children and just the day before this day Momma said she was expecting another one come springtime. She whisper prayed that it would be a girl, a sister, another sister.
Now the day was bending open the bars that held her prisoner, soon she would be freed. It was just gone noon. She had made sandwiches for her brothers, cleaned the kitchen and Momma told her she was allowed to walk down the road to the swimming hole. She longed to go on her own and Momma said that was fine, too, but only on account that two of her brothers seemed to be suffering from the heat and Momma wanted to keep a closer eye on them. It was hot and had been hot for going on a week. They’d taken to sleeping out of doors on the wood slatted porch, but the night before a bear had woken them up pawing through garbage and the compost and Daddy said they had to be back inside the house until he either could get a decent shot off or someone else on the hill got him first. Dressed bear in the chest freezer would be a treat.
She was fourteen years old that summer day. Highschool in the fall and she couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Tried and failed. Thought she might be more than what she was, if such a thing was possible and even then, couldn’t tell you accurately what that more looked like. Knew that somewhere out there more was waiting to be had, one just needed to get to where it was at. Arrive with eyes wide opened and announce themselves with attention.
Cut off shorts and a bikini top, knock off Converse low tops, and her waist-length hair swinging over her shoulders, near white it was so light colored, and she swung it back and forth with a practiced toss of her head. Girl we known it was you from way down the road, he said to her when he pulled over. Driving his uncle’s truck leaning out the window at her diesel exhaust smelling so dangerously sweet and another boy she didn’t know jumped out and opened the passenger side door for her like they’d been expecting her and no one but her, and she climbed up into the cab and knew her daddy wouldn’t be at all happy because he said Levi’s family was one to steer clear of whenever mannerly possible. But Levi had his hair shorn short dagger sideburns delineating his jaw line and a swagger in his long-legged stride. On the bus, he sat way at the back while she had to sit in the front with her younger brothers, sometimes holding Caden’s hand to keep him from crying, which he was prone to doing because the only thing he wanted in the wide world was to be home in the kitchen with Momma. The high schoolers got off the bus first stop and when it came springtime, Levi started tapping her on the shoulder as he walked past and then that last week of school he sat himself down right behind her on the way home every day and caught the ends of her hair in his loose-fisted palms. Sometimes his fingers, dirty and sticky with cannabis oil would tap tap the knobs of her spine. You’re real skinny, he would tell her in a voice so quiet and low it could only be meant as a secret of some kind. And the nerves would explode across her shoulders and at night in her bed she would think about the heat of his fingers and roll over onto her stomach believing that wings could be coaxed out of the two thin blades in her back. Those shoulder bones were a storehouse inside her body for all that tingling sensation caused by his fingers on her flesh.
Now she was sitting on the bench seat right up next to him. Don’t be shy girl he laughed. Bet you ain’t brave enough to jump off that high rock. The other boy had his window rolled down open too and he craned his body out of it and whooped loud. Levi gunned the big truck and black exhaust rolled out of the dual pipes and he fishtailed a bit and she gasped but the boys laughed. And soon she was laughing too.
They raced one another down to the swimming hole but the boys veered up the narrow path to the high rock. She kept on down to the rocky beach, looking up. Can you see me from there? He called down to her and she nodded. What? He yelled. I can, I can see you! She visored both hands over her eyes and watched him watching her as he leaped off the rock.
There was no way not to be alive that afternoon.
She felt no pain outside the hurt of leaving. She couldn’t close her eyes as though to sleep; her soul was exiting through her vision itself. What’s the time, she asked. Her world spinning now, the dizziness of the calling fade. No more thought everything a retinal remembering.
That day in the rain when I was almost turned sixteen telling him I had missed that month and he began to speed down and down the winding dirt roads? Or later while we raised up three young’uns and he had a bad spell with liquor and somehow it all came to a screaming head that afternoon in the truck? Or was it only the two of us again, that morning of such sadness, driving in the snow back from the hospital? Or before all that, the first sweltered day of summer when he drove us down to the swimming hole, before ditching his friend because he said he had something he wanted to show me, just him and me, and I knew without knowing how that this was my arriving.
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