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I don’t know why I started with
that. They just always annoyed me, those damn shoes. They’re always there.
Every kid on the block, they always throw their old shoes up on those lines.
They’re one thing that I can be sure will be there every morning when I leave
for work, every evening when I return -- just one more thing in a life of
assurances. I kind of wish I had something left to wonder about.
Anyway, the car finally died yesterday morning. In the
driveway, thank God, and not when I was going 70 down the L.I.E. Granted, I
was already late for work when it refused to start but still, you have to
focus on the positive. Otherwise you go crazy.
When I got out of the car after it wouldn’t start, when I
went over and lifted the unlatched hood and looked inside at the engine and
all its other tributary parts, not really sure what I was looking for,
exactly, I noticed something. The sneakers, they were laughing at me. Just
really having a good time at my expense, twisting and turning, slapping each other
on their backs and just cracking up. Insults rolled off their white tongues.
I sit here, in the safety of suburbia, and I can only
watch every facet of my life turn to decline -- the dwindling of our middle
years, that which we cannot stop, or at least, that which I know not how to
stop.
I mean, it wasn’t always like this. It was different when she was around,
when they were both in this big house with me. Before everything just went
wrong.
I can still hear it all, the screeching tires and the
thundering steel, coming from the other end of the receiver. It might as well
have been her death rattle, the cell phone scuttling along the asphalt, tiny
bits of glass, like rain, falling around, pinging wherever they dropped, the
sounds of the brakes of all the other cars on the highway squealing to a
stop, trying to avoid making the accident any worse than it already was. All
of that, beamed up to a satellite and down to me, in the kitchen of our
house.
“We’ll be home in ten minutes, honey.’’ Those were her
very last words. And now, I’ve been waiting three years. And every newborn
sun has brought another day under the gun. And still, she is not home.
It was a Sunday. They were going to the grocery
store, running some other errands. I was putting together the new swing set
and slide we got for Konstantine. It had taken me a few days to really get
all of it together. That morning, I told her that it would be ready by the
time they got back. She was so excited that she shrieked and bunched up her
nose in the way she always did. It was something like “Yay!’’ that she cried
out before she came and hugged me. I kept up my end of the promise. I
finished the damn thing an hour or two after they left. They just didn’t keep
up theirs. They just didn’t come back. And that promise, it’s been a burden
that I just can’t bear.
It was a fine vehicle, the car she was
driving. You wouldn’t recognize it as such, of course, if you saw the
pictures in the police report. Just a hunk of formless scrap metal, not
something that Rebecca and I had put so much thought into, read Consumer
Reports and scoured the internet for months, just gathering information,
before we even stepped into the dealership. It could have been any car. Who
would have been able to tell, from those pictures, that it had been a luxury
sedan, one we bought, in part, because it was supposed to have one of the
best crash-test ratings out of any of the cars in its class? I guess they
don’t consider how they hold up in head-on collisions with speeding tanks,
those SUVs, when they make that sort of assessment, when they calculate those
statistics.
I couldn’t put down the kitchen phone after I
heard that cacophonic symphony. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. I just
listened. I heard everything. I heard people get out of their cars maybe a
minute or two later. “Oh my God!’’ “Somebody call an ambulance!’’ When I
heard that, I finally spoke.
“Rebecca?’’
Who knows why I said that, why I asked for her. I
knew what had happened. People don’t walk away from accidents that sound like
that. They don’t get up and say, “Hey, I need to go finish my phone call.’’
continued
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