They lugged their haul outside and jammed it in the car. They’d need to get a trailer or something for the drive out of the city, Claire realised.
Claire started to drive towards home. Both women were silent. Lisa stared out the window, while Claire concentrated on the road in front of her. It was starting to get icy and slippery. There was something up ahead. Claire squinted and then gasped. She slammed on the breaks and swore when the car started to skid, but they came to a stop. The small blue vehicle wrapped around the tree was almost unrecognisable as a car. The wreckage was smoking slightly, but there was no movement.
“Oh shit.” Lisa followed Claire out of the car. “Is there anyone?”
Claire stumbled towards the wreck, pulling out her phone to call 911. There was a woman in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were closed. Claire blinked rapidly and felt her breakfast almost come back up. A young child had been sitting in the passenger seat. His dead eyes stared out at Claire.
“Oh, god.” Claire stopped and bent down, trying to keep down a sob that was trying to escape. She felt her sister-in-law’s firm hand on her back, briefly, before Lisa stepped over towards the wreck and reached in to the woman.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Claire glanced back up at the scene. Lisa had reached in and was feeling for a pulse.
“Call 911, Claire. Quick. She’s got a faint pulse.”
“What about…” she gestured helplessly at the child. Lisa just shook her head.
“Your phone, Claire.” Claire looked down. Her phone was still in her hand. Breathing fast, and hand slightly shaky, she dialled 911 and pressed the phone to her ear. The phone made a strange beeping noise. Claire looked back at the phone to make sure she’d dialled the right number. She had.
“What’s the matter?” Lisa demanded.
“There’s… I think there’s a busy signal?”
“What? How can 911 be busy?” Lisa shook her head in disbelief, and then turned back to the woman who moaned softly. “Try again!”
Hands shaking even harder, Claire redialled. It was no use. There was no answer. They were on their own. Claire shook her head helplessly at Lisa.
Cursing, Lisa turned back to the woman. She’d worked as a nurse, years ago, Claire belatedly remembered.
“Can you help her?” Claire asked quietly. She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes away from the boy. He looked like he was only about six or seven. She wanted to close his eyes.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Lisa muttered, checking the woman over. She didn’t look good. Half of her face was covered in blood and there was a scary looking dark patch on her shirt. “Stay with me, please.”
Claire watched helplessly, gloved hands grasping her cheeks. The woman was stuck in the car, it looked like her legs were crushed. They’d need the jaws-of-life to get her out. Where was the fire department? Where were the ambulances?
Claire lost track of time. She didn’t know how long they’d been there, hours, minutes, when Lisa rocked back and stood up.
“She’s dead. She died. I couldn’t do anything. Where is everyone? Why didn’t anyone help?”
Claire stared at the woman. Who was she? Where was she going? She looked around, hoping in vain for some normalcy, to hear a siren, for a police car, or the fire brigade to turn up and to take over.
Claire took a shaky breath. “Can you see her wallet? We should… we should let her family know.”
Lisa nodded. “Right. Yes.” She peered through the shattered back window and pulled out a large black handbag. Lisa opened it and pulled out the dead woman’s wallet and flicked it open.
“Naomi Collins. Shit. She’s from Halifax…”
They both turned to stare at the wreck. Claire quickly looked away again. She’d never seen a dead body before in person, let alone a dead child.
“We can’t… her family won’t know…”
Claire reached over and led Lisa back to the car. It felt extremely wrong to just leave the dead woman and child, but Claire didn’t know what else to do. That was someone’s wife, someone’s son, someone’s sister. Someone out there was waiting for her to come home and she never would.
Claire blinked away her tears and started the car. Claire glanced over at Lisa, but she just stared numbly out the window at the wreck.
“That could be us. No one would help us.”
“Don’t think like that,” Claire said. She forced her overactive imagination away from an image of Tom and Mike in a similar situation. Truck wrapped around a tree, staring sightlessly out. No one to help them, no one to tell her what had happened to him.
Claire drove slowly back home. Lisa had pulled herself back together by the time she pulled into the driveway.
“Don’t tell Molly about that,” she said before they got out of the car.
“I won’t.”
“She doesn’t need to know how shit everything’s gone.”
Claire just nodded. She wished she didn’t know.
The kids were all sitting quietly in the lounge room watching a movie when they walked in. Claire poured herself and Lisa a hot cup of tea.
Lisa sat tapping her fingers on the table. “I’ve got to take Molly over to Elodie’s place soon.” Elodie was Guilliame’s sister. “Her grandparents will be there, they want to see Molly before we go.”
“What are they doing?”
Lisa shook her head. “They don’t want to leave. They’re going to stick it out here. Elodie thinks it will all work out soon, but… yeah. Not for me.”
“Did you offer for them to come with us?” Claire asked. She didn’t even know how big Guilliame’s family was.
“I did mention it, but they declined.”
Lisa drained her tea, and called out to Molly. Molly started to complain about missing the end of the movie, and then caught herself. They bundled up and left, Molly turning to give Claire a quiet wave on her way out.
Claire snuggled up on the couch, taking Molly’s place in between the two boys. She held them tightly, the image of the dead little boy still too fresh in her mind. He would haunt her dreams, she knew.
She put the boys down for a nap after the movie finished and took her laptop into their room. She sat watching them sleep for a while, and then started typing out an email to her old friend Lee. He’d always been her go-to person when she had problems or issues when she was younger.
I really don’t know what to think. Logically, I know this is ‘A Thing’, and it’s happening. Emotionally, I can’t even begin to process it. What in our thirty-odd years of life has prepared us for dealing with anything even remotely like this? Nothing.
Death of loved ones and acquaintances happens, and it’s horribly painful. I still remember so clearly getting the news that my friend Priya had been killed in a car crash when we were at uni. It was devastating, but… one of the things about grief is that ’life goes on’, and you’ve got to deal with it one day at a time, and eventually the good moments start to outweigh the dark moments. Life goes on isn’t really a comfort right now, because no one knows if it actually will.
I saw Death today. Lisa — Tom’s sister — and I were out driving and came across a car accident. There were two people in the car. One was a little boy, he only looked like he was about six years old. He was already gone. I couldn’t stop staring at him, but I didn’t want to look at him either. His mother died while we were there. We couldn’t do anything. It was horrible.
I’m sorry to dump this on you.