After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away Read Free Page A

to leave.
    Sometimes I just shut my eyes. Tuned them out. A guy from my English class, we were kind of friends, not boyfriend/girlfriend, but I guess I had a crush on him, there he was visiting me in the hospital nervous and not knowing what to say, and I wasn’t going to help him, I shut my eyes, suddenly seeing the snow geese high in the sky disappearing into the blue and I was desperate to join them.
    When I opened my eyes, it was later. A nurse’s aide was informing me: time to draw blood.
     
    In the blue was my happiest time. In the blue was waiting when I shut my eyes.
    “…try to stay awake, honey? Dr. Currin says…”

    Aunt Caroline was Mom’s good friend. Not just her sister. The two of them laughing together saying how, growing up, they’d had to form an alliance against their oldest sister, Katie: The Bossy One.
    I was confused, not remembering clearly where my aunt lived. Mom and I had visited her…. In New Hampshire, a hilly drive. Rivers, bridges. Lakes. A long skinny lake that on maps looks vertical. She was staying in our house now, she said. So that she could visit me in the hospital every day. So that she could “oversee” things. Sitting beside my bed, sometimes just holding my hand, and we didn’t talk and there was a feeling of Mom coming into the room breathless and surprised-smiling, seeing Aunt Caroline and me together, saying to my aunt, Oh, Carrie, how’d you get here before me!
    Uncle Dwight came to see me. My little cousins Becky and Mikey.
    Aunt Caroline held my hand. Aunt Caroline wiped mucus from my nose.
    “We’ll take care of you, Jenna. If you really don’t want to live with your father.”
    In the blue there wasn’t Dad.
    In the blue there wasn’t Aunt Caroline either.

11
    Tell us what you remember, Jenna.
    What happened on the Tappan Zee Bridge, Jenna?
    Jenna, try. There are no other witnesses…
    (No other witnesses! In this way I learned that the driver of the truck had not survived.)
    There were skid marks from your mother’s car in both lanes. Before the car struck the right-lane railing, then careened over into the left lane and that railing. And…
    The truck’s tires were skidding for at least thirty feet before impact. We estimate that the driver was over the speed limit by approximately fifteen miles an hour when he began to brake….
    (What kind of truck was it? I wonder. One of those big ugly rigs or something small like a delivery truck? I hadn’t seen the truck coming. I don’t think so. Hadn’t seen the driver through the windshield. I was not going to ask his name, anything about him.)

    …any of it? Any information you can provide, Jenna. To aid us in our investigation. The question is why…
    …why the car driven by your mother suddenly swerved into the railing to the right. Why did your mother suddenly lose control of her vehicle at the approximate midpoint of the bridge…?
    (Lose control! Mom did not lose control! Fuck you, I hate you both.)
    We don’t want to upset you further, Jenna. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal and you’ve been a very brave girl, but until the investigation is satisfactorily completed the insurance claims can’t be processed. The medical examiner has theorized…
    If you could remember, Jenna! You are the only surviving witness to this terrible accident.
    (No. There is no witness. No witness who survived.)

12
    But I saw it. It was there. I saw.
    I would not ask the investigators. I would not ask the investigators a single question. A pale chill mist like a fog had entered my brain. I was so exhausted, I was a raggedy old thrown-away cloth doll. I was not to blame, I had already forgotten why it might have been that I was to blame. I would not think of it. My head ached too much to think of it. My eyes ached from the blinding sun. My skin ached from the lacerations, the stitches. I had already forgotten the baby deer. Or had it been a dog? I don’t remember, maybe it had been a dog. A shadow shape like a deer,