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There
was some comfort to be found in that car. It was brand new when I first met
Rebecca in our freshman year at college. It slowly aged, though, as all
things do, and it sat, undriven, as we leased new, more modern ones as the
years passed us by. It was nearly extinct when we bought the car that killed
her, killed our daughter. I was just a set of dinosaur bones in the back of
our driveway. And I was surprised as ever when that engine turned over and
roared again, a whole year after they died, when the lease on the last of my
new cars ran out. I had been driving it, the same ancient car, ever since
then.
I drove that car around a lot of nights after I lost the
two of them. It was an instrument I employed to help clear my head, a vehicle
that drove me toward some sense of clarity whenever I seemed lost, whenever I
woke up shaking, in a cold sweat, on those warm nights. It wasn’t a car that
I’d drive for three years and then trade in for something newer, something
better. It wasn’t a car I’d just forget about. And Rebecca, she wasn’t a wife
who would go and die on me, Konstantine, she wasn’t a daughter who would have
lost interest in her father as soon as she hit her teenage years, if she had
lived to see them.
I guess I just forgot that the car, too, had died, just
like everyone else in my life, just like everything sacred to me, because
when I put my jacket on over the t-shirt I had been sleeping in, when I put
that set of keys, with my wife’s key chains still present, in that jacket
pocket, when I went outside and slid into the driver’s seat, put that key
into the ignition, I really expected it to start. Maybe I thought I had just
dreamt the cars death, like I had dreamt so many other things, like I had
dreamt my own death, like I had replayed the car accident that took my family
over and over again in my dreams. The way I’d wake up, many mornings in those
first few months, the ones they say are the hardest but really aren’t because
they are all hard, because they never get any easier, and expect to see my
wife’s face on the other side of the bed, our daughter tight between us,
having come into our bedroom, situated next to hers, in the middle of the
night, having been frightened by lightning or darkness or the monster in her
closet. She held me, and my left hand stretched out above her head, and my
fingers intermingled with her mother’s. I would always expect to just wake up
to the realization that it had all been a nightmare in dreamscape. But I
never did wake up to the sight of their faces. No, I never did that.
The car didn’t start at four in the morning, just the
same as it hadn’t started at eight the day before.
It was the closest I came to losing control, in that dead
car, speeding along the dark highway of my mind, watching the white lines,
like spools of string, unravel on the road before me as I staggered along
its never-ending length, never reaching any destination, no exit signs along
my way. Just signs that said “Redemption: 1,000,000 Miles. Your Saving Grace:
Even Further Than That.’’ And how far, how long until I saw them again? Those
angels, from God, a gift, who had lived within my midst. Well, according to
every sign I saw, according to that harshest knot that, three years, has lived
in my gut, I was going in the wrong direction. The future was ahead and the
past was behind. But the future held none of my wants, the future was as void
of my girls as the present was. But I couldn’t change the path of my
trajectory. There wasn’t anywhere to make a U-turn.
continued
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