“Where the hell are you going?” I shouted after her, before screaming out a moment later when I saw the lights of an approaching car. She was still rushing toward the road, and then her feet hit pavement and she sprang back just as the car’s headlights set her ablaze, and in an instant the car swerved, screeching its tires, and crashed headfirst into the guardrail on the other side of the road.
Suzy stood there like she was lost. As I raced past her, she turned to me in horror, clarity returning to her eyes, and I knew she had come back to earth. I would confront that face many times again with both relief and anger, but at that moment I was much more concerned with whoever was in the car.
It looked like an older man, his body slumped over the deployed airbag, face turned inward under a mop of strewn white hair. He had not been wearing his seat belt. His car’s front end was embedded in the gnarled guardrail, headlights doused, but I saw no smoke or sign of leakage.
“Sir?” I called through the half-open window. “Can you hear me, sir? Are you okay? If you can hear me, don’t move. Do not move any part of your body! We’ll go get help!”
I ran to the passenger side, reached in, and took the key from the ignition. It was still too dark to see his face or any blood. I felt his neck and found a pulse. My hope was that the impact of the airbag had only knocked him out.
I remembered Suzy and looked up and she was standing on the other side of the car, peering in with frantic eyes. She said, “I killed them.”
“No, you didn’t. But I have to call for help. We passed a gas station down the road.” I rushed over to her. “Baby, I need you to stay here and watch him. Do not move him, understand? If he comes to, tell him he has to stay completely still. If the car starts smoking or anything, run away as fast as you can. Do you understand all that? Do you? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She was startled out of her trance and started shaking her head at me. “No, no, don’t leave me,” she pleaded quietly.
“Someone has to watch him in case he comes to. I’m coming back, all right?”
She took hold of my wrist and kept insisting I not leave, and finally I had to wrest my arm away. “Stay, goddamn it!” I thrust my finger at the motionless man. “I need you to stay! I will be right back!”
Her arms fell and she looked at once chastened and desperate. Before she could say anything else, I raced down the road.
When I got to the gas station, it was still open but no cars were out front and I couldn’t see the attendant at his counter. Instead of running inside to find him, I ran directly to the pay phone.
I gave the dispatcher the location of the accident, but when she asked for more details, I pretended to have been a passerby in my car. Maybe I already sensed then what Suzy would do. Maybe I was already acting out of shame. When the dispatcher asked me for a number and a name, I hung up and started racing back.
The driver’s body still had a pulse but had not yet moved. Suzy, on the other hand, was gone.
I started calling out her name, screaming it at one point despite knowing it would make her less likely to respond. She was probably as terrified of me now as she was of the accident she had caused. I’d never seen her look at me that way. She might still, I thought, be in the throes of whatever emotion had seized her and thrown her out onto the road. I knew I had to abandon the driver.
Up the road, the grassy cliff beyond the guardrail dipped and a rocky path revealed itself. I scrambled down the slope, out of breath at that point, until I landed on sand and began running across the beach and again yelling for her.
I soon heard sirens swarming in the distance, no doubt a fire engine, an ambulance, and the accompanying squad cars, all in case the accident was severe. They would probably block off the entire road. Unless we wanted to be questioned, we’d have to find another way back to the restaurant.
By the time I made it down the length of the beach, my shoes were filled with sand and grating my feet and I could see the glow of flashing emergency lights from above. I was hidden under a canopy of trees crowding the hillside, tramping through the sand in darkness. The beach was desolate. All I felt, more than worry or exhaustion, was this helpless rage at what Suzy had done to me that day. In our first months together, she’d shown glimmers of how emotional she could get, slamming doors and cabinets and crying even at our silliest arguments, but she had not yet revealed this side of herself.
I considered returning to the accident to explain everything and report Suzy’s disappearance, so perhaps then they could help me find her. But I’d also lied to the dispatcher, making the call anonymously, leaving the scene, and I wouldn’t be able to explain all that away, not as an officer of the law myself. Knowing this just made the rage worse.
My only option was to walk back in the direction of the restaurant and hope to find her on the way, and if not, I could go searching for her in my car.
It took me nearly half an hour to find my way up onto the road, far enough away from the accident to not be noticed, and then back to the restaurant. Only a few cars were left in the parking lot, my Chrysler one of them.
I saw a lone figure in the backseat. She was sitting still in the darkness, hugging her legs to her chest. She jumped when I opened the door.
“What the hell were you thinking!” I hissed at her.
She was peering up at me stark-eyed and shaking her head again like she was shivering. “Don’t let them arrest me! Don’t let them take me!”
“I told you to stay there, goddamn it. Why did you take off like that?”
“I killed them. I killed them!”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped at her.
She was tearing up again and trembling, pushing herself farther into the car.
I took a long breath and went down on a knee. I softened my voice. “No one’s going to arrest you. It was an accident, and you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sure that man will be fine. He was just knocked out, is all. Come here.”
I got into the backseat with her and closed the door. “Come on,” I whispered and put my arm around her. “Everything’s okay.”
Her hot face pressed against my chest, and she curled into that space that had already become hers, like she was wrapping herself into the folds of a coat. I felt then the dampness of her dress and hair, the bits of sand on her arms, strewn also over the car seat.
“You are sure?” she said, hugging me tightly now.
“Yeah, he’s fine.” At that point, I was convincing myself of that too. I could call the nearest hospital the next day and confirm it. “The police and the medics are there and they’ll take care of him. Let’s go to the hotel now and get some sleep, okay?”
“And the woman?”
“What do you mean?”
“The woman. In the back. She is okay?”
“The woman. . ” I repeated to myself. In the darkness, I could feel her staring into me, her breath warm against my chest.
“She look like she sleeping. But then she open her eyes and she look at me.”
The hair on my arms bristled, and the darkness felt stifling. Again I heard sirens wailing from afar, like she and I were in a cocoon and the world outside was burning.
Had she hallucinated some phantom woman in the car, or was I the one who’d gone crazy and somehow overlooked another human being in the backseat? But why would the woman sit in back and the man in front? Did I even once glance back there?
I said, “I’m sure she’ll be fine too. I promise you they’re both fine.”
After we finally got to the hotel that night and showered together and then lay our wet heads down on our pillows, Suzy fell instantly asleep and I lay there blinking at the ceiling, promising myself that I would call the hospitals in the morning.