“It was late.” I swallowed. “I called her to come get me. I could’ve walked home, but—” I wedged my thumbnail between my teeth. “It was so stupid. I’m seventeen. I’m not a child. But I was angry and all I wanted was my mom. I just wanted to go home.”
“So you asked her to come get you?”
“Made her.”
“And that one act makes this your fault?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because, I—” I looked over at the lake, at the ducks splashing about, without a care in the world. I wanted to be them; brown and ugly, but free.
“Keep talking,” David ordered softly.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I explained, using my hands as if to animate my words. “The memory has, like, faded or something. It all looks like it was filmed on some camera with this blue filter. I can’t see it all as clearly as I did before. I just…it’s like it happened to someone else.”
He sat down, his feet flat to the floor on either side of my legs, our faces almost touching. “But it didn’t. It happened to you, and I need you to talk to me about it, Ara.”
I nodded. “It feels silly—like, no matter how I paint the scene, you just won’t understand—you won’t get it.”
“Then don’t try to make me understand. Just tell me how you feel.”
“I feel…” I closed my eyes for a second. “Alone. Lost. So, so empty and so full of this incredibly strong…regret.”
“Regret for calling her or for what you’ve suffered?”
“For Harry.” My voice completely broke.
“Who’s Harry?”
“My baby brother. He…I got in the car—I shut the door and the first thing I did was look at Harry. He was pale. He’d been sick for a week or so, and he just smiled at me. Two teeth, all gums. So bright. So happy.”
“It made you feel lighter—to see him?”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s…exactly.”
“And now? How do you feel to look back on that memory?”
I closed my hands around my face. “Dark. Hollow. I can’t see his face anymore. It’s like…it’s just so dark. And a part of me still feels scared—like I’m gonna get in trouble from my mom when I get home, you know—for all the bad decisions I made that night. But, for that one moment, when I got in the car and she smiled at me like Harry did, I felt like I’d made one right choice. Just one. And then…” I couldn’t say it. I just couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud. It wasn’t until right then that I realised I’d never had to. My dad broke the news to everyone, while I stood, numb and silent.
“Keep talking,” David said, with the insistent tone of an adult.
“All I remember was pulling away from the stop sign, then feeling this incredible jolt. Mom’s hand grabbed mine for a second, but…everything shook—like the most violent roller coaster I’ve ever been on. My arms, my head, everything just…” I searched for the words. “I felt pain, but it was the rush—the speed of things I really remember. I heard Harry crying; heard glass; heard my mom’s scream get cut off suddenly, but that’s it. I shut my eyes, praying for it to end, and when I opened them again, we’d stopped. The crying had stopped. The noise, everything.
“I didn’t even know I was upside down until I tried to undo my seatbelt. But it was stuck. I was stuck, and all the blood was making my head tight, making it hard to breathe.”
“Breathe now,” David said, placing his palm firmly against my ribs.
I took a long breath, releasing it slowly. “I didn’t even realise I was holding it.”
“I know.” He smiled softly and pulled his hand away.
I focused on my breathing for a second until my head stopped spinning, then looked up at David’s incredible green eyes. “I haven’t really thought much about the accident. I…I forgot a lot of things—things I’m remembering now.”
“Like what?”
“The silence.” My eyes narrowed into the memory. “The way, after we stopped rolling, it was like the world stood, staring on, completely hushed for a moment, maybe waiting for our souls to leave the earth.”
“And Harry? What happened to him?”
My lips turned down tightly, quivering. “I didn’t want to hear him cry. I didn’t want him to be hurt—lost somewhere I couldn’t get to him. I was glad he was quiet. But I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know it meant…” My words flaked away as thoughts that rushed through my head when I looked into the backseat and saw nothing came flooding back.
“Where was he?” David asked.
“He was…gone.”
He sighed, his hand coming up on my shoulder as he pulled me in, cradling my face against his chest.
“His blue beanie—the one Mom knitted when we found out he was a boy—it was still there. It came right off his head. It…I wanted to grab it, but I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe that I’d see blood or…maybe worse.” My voice trailed down to a whisper on the end. “I didn't know what to do. I…no one came. I thought people would come running, but no one came. So…I just…I screamed. I knew it wouldn’t help, but I couldn't stop it. And something I learned that day—” I looked up into David’s eyes. “It doesn’t matter how loud you scream. There is no such thing as the worst things can get. There is no rock bottom. There is only a deep, endless pit of hell that you can fall through. You always imagine, like the movies, that you scream and someone comes—they come and they save you and they stop you from screaming. But…I stopped because my throat went dry. I screamed so long—I stopped because my body couldn't scream anymore.” My eyes filled with tears. “Where’s the humanity in that?”
“There is none,” he said, drawing me into him again.
I closed my eyes and pictured the eerie dimness of the streetlights outside the car window, how, in the cold, the glow seemed to settle on the footpath like fog; the endless silence broken only by the hollow ticking of an indicator lamp—distant and lonely in the dead of night. “If it had happened on another road—maybe where there were houses, we would’ve…someone would’ve come sooner. But—the drive home was down this freeway. If I’d walked, I could’ve cut through. I could've—”